Vadgets™ and Bumballs™

Yeah, I haven’t been posting enough.  Well, I’ve gotten really busy with a project that has nothing at all to do with this blog.  And, aside from that, it’s the summer.  You may be so old that summer doesn’t mean you spend a lot more time outdoors, but I’m not.

So, my big project ends at the end of August, then I go away for a week.  And summer will be all over then.  Normal posting schedules will resume.

Anyways, I have an awesome new invention to share with you.

What better way to propose than to stick a ring up your ass and let her dig it out, huh?  How could she say no?

That’s all I have to say about Vadgets™ and Bumballs™ except that, until Vadgets™ and Bumballs™ are widely available, feel free to stick things up your ass the old fashioned way.

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Vote With Your Ass!

Some people have asked me why I write this blog.  I want to explain. 

I write this blog for the same reason that I have done amateur stand-up for much of my adult life.  I write this blog for the same reason that I have gotten up early every morning to write my thoughts and ideas for years.  I write this blog for the same reason I have quietly studied illustrating for the past several years.  I write this blog for the same reason that I have dabbled in Flash and Maya 3D software to explore their usefulness in making good comics.  In short, I write this blog for the very same reason I breathe.  Because I am insane.

This brings us to an important point.  In addition to my other whorish behaviors that are far too numerous to list, I am an attention whore.

I think that all people who write blogs are attention whores.  All writers are attention whores.  All artists and actors and newscasters and weathermen and talk-show hosts and poets: attention whores.  Okay, maybe not the poets.  They are something else.

Some bloggers also have delusional ideas that they will make a shitload of money off their website.  Now, I know that a few people who write very popular blogs make money with their blogs.  According to some sources, Dooce generates $40,000 a month.  $40,000!  A month!  And dooce.com fucking sucks ass!  That is one expensive goddamn rim job.  You’re pissed because Elliot Spitzer got laid for $5,000 when Dooce’s Heather Armstrong is getting forty grand a month serving up her kid to baby junkies?

But I digress.  This blog, and just about every other blog out there, will never turn a real profit.  Even if they do generate a profit, they will never get anywhere near that Dooce level of cash.  Why?  Well, maybe because we suck even more than Dooce.  Or maybe because we lack the skills required to profitably whore ourselves and our children for more than mere attention.  Whatever.

Anyway, I want to whore myself to all of you and do whatever it takes to bring people to this blog, but I’m also lazy and disinterested.  Mostly lazy. 

But did I mention that I also want your money?  Well, yes, I want your money.  All of it.  I am willing to kill you to get your money, but wouldn’t it be more pleasant for everyone concerned if you just sent it to me?  Of course it would.

So, I have been looking into what it takes to get your money without killing you. 

Step one, no matter what, is to attract more readers.  I need to attract readers so that I can have you give me all your money, or so that I can kill you and steal all your money.  Just so you understand how this works, I am also working on a plan that might have you all commit suicide, and then I somehow get your money.  I haven’t worked out all the kinks in that plan yet, though.

Anyway, I have read a lot of shit on the internet about attracting more readers, but it all takes too much work.  For instance, one piece of advice is that I should write things that you want to read.  What kind of advice is that?  If you people don’t want to read about the things that I like to write about, then fuck you!  I want to write about feet with pussies in the soles, and dickmail, and fucking cars.  If that’s not what you feel like reading about, what the fuck is wrong with you?  Who are you people?

If you don’t think this is awesome, there is nothing I can do for you.

Now, a friend told me that I should make up a banner ad for MySpace and other social networking sites.  So, with a little help, I did.

Making that banner ad took a few days but it was a ton of fucking fun.  If you want to put my banner ad on your website to help get this whole thing going, email me and I will send you the secret code.  In exchange, I don’t mind helping you to make a similar banner ad for your website, but you will need to supply me with a naked chick.

That’s it for marketing the site.  I’m done.  I don’t have time for this bullshit.

As far as making money from all of you, people have a lot of ideas about that.  First there are ads.  You will notice that I have two underutilized highly profitable sidebars to the right.  Make me an offer.

Some people instead ask readers to donate money to the website.  What the fuck is that all about?  What am I, the March of Fucking Dimes?  I ain’t no stinking charity. 

Another idea is that, instead of asking you to donate cash, I should ask you to buy me something, like a beer or a cup of coffee.  Here is one of these coffee appeals that I stole from another website.

That’s really just asking a different way for you to donate, except that I would ask you to donate two bucks.  But you know what?  I can buy my own fucking coffee.  I mean, if I could get a million people to come to this site and buy me a cup a coffee, I would get $2 million, and that’s sweet enough.  But what are the fucking chances?

Instead of the stupid coffee thing, I have considered this:

Let me know whether you would donate to buy me a whore.  That would work for me.  If so, I will put up a permanent ad.  A very nasty whore is going to cost a fucking bundle, but I would give you all the disgusting details.

The problem is that people don’t want to buy someone else anything.  People don’t mind buying themselves something, but why the fuck would you buy anything for me?  So I need to sell something that you want.

Well, being the creative, inventive dude that I am, I came upon what I think is the perfect plan.  This is my brilliant invention number two, and it just so happens that it has a lot to do with number two.

It occurred to me that a lot of you buy buttplugs, as demonstrated by the Pigtail and Baby Jesus buttplugs about which I have already written.  The question was, how could I capitalize on the fact that you like to stick things up your ass while also being topical?  My answer: electoral buttplugs!

These buttplugs speak for themselves.  My work here is done.  Now send me your money.

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Bad Ideas Number 1

This is not one of those touchy-feely blogs where I write about me and what I eat and that funny thing my cat does.  But sometimes I can’t help but write about me.  When I do write about myself, you can pretty much expect for it to be a lot like this blog entry.

This morning I took one of those shits that really, really smelled bad.  It smelled like a homeless person had crawled up my ass in the middle of the night, vomited a couple of times, then died and started to rot.  A French homeless person!  And it had the consistency of play-doh.  You know, one of those shits where you feel so like you’re squeezing a tube of toothpaste that you try to bend your neck a lot to get the last bit out of your ass.

I am somewhat comforted by the fact that many men take bad, stinky shits every now and then.  I know because I go to public restrooms on occasion.  And public men’s rooms stink.  This morning, my bad crap was in my own bathroom.  But more than once, I have been forced to take bad shits in public restrooms.  I apologize to you all.

What I don’t understand are the guys who have no problem using public toilets just like they are at home.  They grunt and fart and moan as they take the smelliest crap ever, and then when they have finished and stand at the sink next to you, they say something to themselves like, “But, damn, that was a good burrito.”  I used to work in an office with a guy who brought the newspaper with him every morning.  Then, sometime after lunch, he would grab his newspaper and head for the toilet.  It was shittin’ time!  As he headed down the hall, New York Post under his arm, every man in the office would take note of the time.  We all knew to avoid the bathroom for at least a half-hour, but preferably for an hour.  I don’t know what Mr. Shittin’ Time ate, but he regularly took shits that smelled like the fucking morgue.  The Paris morgue!

I, for one, do not like taking shits in public restrooms.  It’s just not my thing.  But when I do have to shit in public, I try to make it quick and quiet and I prefer that nobody else is in the restroom.  And I do not use one of those paper seat covers.  First of all, they add precious time.  If I am alone, I have to hurry before someone walks in.  Second, do you really think those paper things do anything?  Let’s get this clear: it is next to impossible to get herpes from a dry toilet seat.  And, if you are plopping your ass onto wet toilet seats, do you think a piece of tissue paper will save you?  (I’m sorry, but this dude who talks about how he got herpes from a toilet seat forgot to mention the sound ass-fucking he got right before he used the toilet, and now he needs to spread and perpetuate his fucking lie so that his wife believes his bullshit.  Those are the people who get herpes from toilet seats.)  Must I disabuse you of all your myths?  Even if you’re afraid of herpes because you don’t consider stoogepie’s well-researched medical advice trustworthy, your little flimsy tissue seat cover will not save you.  Here is why: splash-back.

Every now and then, when you take a dump, the turd falls from your sphincter with a delightful confirmatory splash only to send water from the toilet bowl shooting right into your exposed asshole.  And then, toilet seat cover or not, you are left wondering what dreaded species of gonorrhea or flesh-eating virus has just begun to multiply up your ass.  At those moments, herpes doesn’t seem so bad.  Toilets don’t need seat covers.  Toilets need splashguards.  Splash-back scares even me.

If I did use toilet seat covers, I would only use these awesome Dora the Explorer toilet seat covers by Neat Solutions.  Not only do they have a plastic barrier on the bottom, they also have adhesive tabs to keep them in place.  Best of all, you get to sit on Dora’s face while you take a dump!  Explore this, Dora!  ¡Explore esto, Dora!  Splash!

Dora still can’t protect you from splash-back. 

What I really love about Dora, though, is that she encourages kids to use toilet seat covers.  I’m betting that adults have generally clean asses and thighs.  But kids are walking germ factories!  They touch everything and put their mouths on everything, and they do this after they crawl around on the floor, stick their fingers up their assholes, and lick and taste everything.  (By the way, if you are of legal age in your particular jurisdiction and this description fits you even remotely, please email me.)  This is perfectly healthy for kids.  In fact, according to Science Daily, all those germs may be good for kids because children are an entirely separate and superior species.  But it’s great that kids use toilet seat covers because we adults need protection from them.  So, I’m glad that Dora is there for us.  She’s got our asses covered.  ¡Explore esto, Dora!  Splash!

But, as long as kids use Dora, I will keep not using toilet seat covers.  I mean, if I were worried about germs, I might use toilet seat covers in my own bathroom.  I have lived in my apartment for several years and have had many guests, and I don’t think I have ever cleaned the toilet bowl seat.  Or the bathroom.

Anyway, I did not intend to write this much shit about shit.  This post was supposed to be about my bad ideas.  But my bad ideas have to do with shit.

See, I did not explain the background before.  The day before yesterday, I bought a $7 steak for dinner.  In New York City, in Manhattan, I bought an entire steak with steak fries and a shitty salad for $7!  I was proud of myself.  So, anyway, I ate half the steak, then I went to bed.  When I woke up yesterday morning, I took a normally stinky shit.  Not abnormally stinky.  Everything was fine.  But I also realized that I had left the steak sitting on my coffee table overnight.  I had forgotten to put it in the fridge.  So, I did what most people would do.  I carefully closed the container the steak had come in (which I had eaten out of — why waste a dish?) and threw it in the trash.

Then yesterday, while I was at work, instead of my usual daydreaming and work avoidance, I found myself thinking about the steak.  Why had I thrown it out?  I mean, it was only exposed to the living room elements for a few hours.  I probably could have thrown it in the fridge and eaten the rest of it for dinner.  That would have saved me from having to buy dinner that night.  And, slowly, this thinking turned into wondering whether, since I was by then convinced that the steak would have been fine in the morning having been left uncovered, it would be okay to fish the leftovers out of the garbage and eat them without refrigeration.  After all, the leftovers were covered.  And besides, I would microwave the steak before eating it, and microwaving kills germs, right?  And, although it was impressive enough that I could get dinner for one night for $7, how fucking awesome is it that I could eat for two nights for only $7?

After a full day of thinking this while pretending to be a hard worker and a good noodle, I went home and fished the $7 steak out of the garbage, nuked it for a while, then ate it.  What came out of me the next morning was the putrefied shit about which I have already written at length.

So, bad idea number one was pulling the $7 steak out of the garbage and eating it.  A rule, for those of you into such things, is that it is a wonderful thing to find a $7 steak that is palatable and does not make you sick.  It is another thing entirely to fish half of a $7 steak out of the garbage and eat it.

That was lesson number one.

Now, as you can see, I believed that there was a connection between what I had eaten the day before and how my shit smelled.  This connection may seem obvious to you.  If so, good for you.  I had to look it up on the internet because I have an inquisitive mind.  If I eat a t-bone, why wouldn’t my shit smell like steak, maybe with some bacon and a baked potato on the side?  So I googled it to see whether, in fact, there were certain foods you ate that made your shit stink.  The google search contained the words, “shit,” “stink,” and “eat.”

It’s that last word, I now realize, that got me into trouble.

In case you have not already figured it out, I do not have any filters on my computer.  If I did, I would not be able to surf the web for porn.  You don’t have any filters on your computer either, or you probably would never have made it to this website.

I also want to say, for the record, that I am all about fetishes.  Fetishes are just fine with me.  I have tried some fetishes and they are good.  For instance, BDSM?  Good!  Rough sex is better than Hello Kitty sex any day.  In fact, often when I masturbate, just to keep things interesting, I punch myself in the face a few times.

But, people, there is no way that shit tastes good.  There.  I said it.  Shit cannot taste good.  Notice that I did not say, “Shit does not taste good.”  I did not say that because I have never, in fact, tasted shit.  I never intend to eat shit.  Shit-eating is not on my bucket list.  But, come on.  I can state some things without having tried them personally.  For instance, being scalped does not feel good.  Having your testicles bitten off by a weasel does not make you feel happy.  Oprah’s feet stink.  And shit cannot taste good.

Lesson number two: never, ever follow a bunch of links that are about eating and shit.  All shit stinks, so that was a throwaway search term.

Folks, please stop eating shit.  If you are not going to stop eating shit, then have the self-respect not to post pictures of yourself eating shit on the internet.  I mean, fucking is fine and is perfectly normal behavior.  You need not be ashamed of posting pictures of yourself fucking on the internet.  Nor should you be ashamed of any of the fucking spin-offs in which you engage: blowjobs, ass-fucking, DP, girl-girl action, you wearing pig tails in your hair and up your ass, baby Jesus buttplugs, whatever.  Post away!  I am happy to see your pictures.

But you shit-eaters need to stop.  This is not the first time that I have come upon your nasty shit-eating in my innocent searches for porn and other knowledge.  I often have my porn with cake, and you ruin both for me.

That’s all I have to say about that.

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Tamponimals™

Are there any patent attorneys out there?  You know, every now and then here in the stoogepen, I have a great idea.  I have a lot of them.  Ideas, I mean.  And I had a lot of time on planes recently.  And on one plane, there was a crying baby.

So, I thought, hey, you know, there is first class, business class, and coach.  There should also be a baby class on planes somewhere behind coach over the engines.  If you have a baby, you should not be able to upgrade to coach or to business or first class.

I know that if you have a baby, you sometimes need to travel with your baby.  All that I’m saying is that I do not need to travel with your baby.  I should not have to lie and say I am a registered sex offender just so you will keep your baby away from me.

Listen, you fucked and you had a baby.  Your baby is your fuck souvenir.  I did not fuck you or I might be able to appreciate your fuck souvenir a little more.  But it’s your souvenir, not mine.  You don’t give a flying fuck about the pink marble elephant I picked up in Miami, whether I paid cash for it or fucked for it.  You couldn’t care less.  And I don’t care about your fuck souvenir.  If my pink marble elephant could cry and did so the entire time we flew from Miami to New York, you would tell me to shove it up my ass.  I am politely asking you to tell airlines to give you your own third-class section over the engines somewhere near or in the cargo hold so that I can get some rest and maybe watch the shitty movie.  (The movie on this flight, by the way, was Martian Child with John Cusack.  Maybe I’ll write more on that in some other entry.  This movie sucked so much that I almost came in its mouth, but meanwhile it has almost seven stars at IMDB.  One person comments, “Sensational Movie!  Cusacks [sic] finest performance….”  Is John Cusack that bad?)  Is that too much to ask?

The baby section of airlines is not my brilliant idea (though it is a very good idea).  See, thinking about the baby on the flight made me wish that the mommy had opted to menstruate instead of getting the fuck souvenir.  Menstruating may not be fun but I can sleep on the plane while you menstruate, even if you’re sitting in the seat right next to me menstruating as loudly as you can.  The gushing sounds might even be soothing.

I was thinking about menstruation, and it occurred to me that there are not a lot of menstrual innovations.  I did not know it at the time, but commercial menstrual pads have been around since at least the 19th century and commercial tampons were invented in 1931, though women have used both tampons and pads for thousands of years.  (You can read way too goddamn much about pads and tampons here at the website of The Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health.  I shit you not.)  The most recent menstraul innovation — correct me if I’m wrong about this because I am no expert — is the menstrual cup, and that was invented in the 1930s.  See, now that’s a great invention!  It’s a cup that goes inside your cunt and catches all the blood.  One can last for ten years so it is very environmentally friendly.  Unfortunately, menstrual cups like the DivaCup® and the SoftCup® have never become popular in the US.  I think this may be in part because they come in only two sizes.  This is an issue no matter how you look at it.  First, women don’t want to think about the inner width of their pussies.  But if they do, they want to discover that they are the tiniest size.  Second, I am a dude and I can positively tell you that there are more than two sizes out there.  If I were marketing this device, it would be available in three sizes: virgin, teensy, and tiny.  But this is truly a serious, twentieth-century menstrual innovation that is now more than seventy years old.

So why aren’t there more menstrual innovations?  I mean, sure, there are wings and I bet that, compared to whatever women were wearing in ancient Egypt or wherever, today’s tampons are so absorbent that they can suck as much blood out of you as Martian Child.  But why isn’t there anything new in the field of menstruation?  A lot of women have periods.  Practically all of them.  So there is a big market out there waiting to be exploited by technology.

Why not even stupid menstrual innovations?  I mean, for instance, why not colostomy-style bags in designer fashions.  Nothing to dispose of like with pads or tampons, and nothing to clean like with menstrual cups.  Just put your bag on in the morning and bleed all you like.  And all that blood can be useful!  Why waste it?  As an added bonus, you might be able to pee into the fashionable colostomy-style blood bag, saving you trips to the bathroom.  See how easy it is to innovate?

Well, I came up with lots of other menstrual technological innovations.  I won’t share them all with you because you’re not ready for it.  You just couldn’t handle it.  Really.  Also, I don’t have a patent attorney yet.  But I will share one idea.

Women don’t like having their periods.  I suspect this is in part because it sucks to be leaky.  If you had a choice, you would not leak.  This is why Olestra never caught on.  And, yeah, cramps and PMS and everything else.  What women need is a little excitement to go along with having their periods.  A little menstrual exhilaration might just make the whole experience a lot more bearable.

Here is my idea.  Have you ever seen those little toy capsules that, when immersed in water, grow up to 600% of their original size and take on animal shapes?  (Here are some examples but, just in case that link goes dead, you can find plenty by just googling.)  Well, why couldn’t we do this with tampons?  I call these Tamponimals™.  Here is how they work.

Assuming you’re a woman, you stick a normal looking tampon into your cunt when you have your period.  It does what all tampons do: it fills with blood and grows in size.  When you pull your normal tampon out of your pussy, it is normally just a blood-soaked wad of cotton.  Who wants to deal with that?  That’s where Tamponimals™ are different.  Like the little toy capsules, Tamponimals™ take on a fun shape as they fill with blood.  Imagine how exciting it will now be to pull your tampon out!  You will think, “Last time, there was a bunny up my cunt.  What will it be this time?  (You pull out the Tamponimals™ brand tampon.)  Wow!  It was a monkey up my cunt!  Awesome!”

Tamponimals™ are not limited to animals, either.  Spaceships, buildings, clowns, vehicles, whatever!  Who knows what the limits of what we can put into your mentruating vagina are?  You want wings?  How about a butterfly or a chicken or a bumblebee in your twat?  Now, that’s a technological innovation!

Well, that’s the whole idea.  Someone is going to make a gajillion dollars off this idea.  This will, after all, likely be the only technological breakthrough in menstraution in the twenty-first century, and only the second menstrual innovation in thousands of years.  And it will, I’m sure, sweep the nation.  And after someone takes Tamponimals™ and makes it a reality by pouring sweat and labor and, yes, blood into the idea, I can’t wait to sue his ass off.

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Humane Capital Punishment

I’ve spent the last week in Miami on business.  I may write more about my trip some other time, but I was unable to post while away because I couldn’t install Photoshop on my work laptop.  I’ll have the IT people at work buy me a brand new copy next week and install it.

Anyway, Florida made me think of the death penalty because they used to do a lot of that down there.  For a while, Florida and Texas were fighting for the number one spot.  Right now Florida is waiting to see what the Supreme Court says before the state can kill anyone else, but Florida is hoping to get started again real soon.  Florida used to use Old Sparky, the electric chair, until enough people caught on fire and cooked alive that they decided to switch to lethal injection.  Lethal injection just doesn’t seem that much better to me.

I worked with death-row inmates for a while and I don’t think the death penalty is humane for a number of reasons.  Among these are the facts that (1) it’s not very nice for people to live knowing that someone will eventually kill them and (2) in practice, the death penalty is neither quick nor painless.  But, after a great deal of thought, I have devised solutions to both of these problems so that we can move a few steps closer to butchering criminals with utterly clean consciences.

The Sentencing White Lie

When you see animal-rights videos of cows or sheep headed to slaughter, they always point out that the poor, reluctant, delicious animals are aware that they are headed to their deaths.  They point this out because, in our hearts, we know that it is wrong to make any creature use its own legs to walk to its inevitable doom, no matter how succulent and delicious that particular creature might be pan-roasted to buttery tenderness and served with truffled polenta.

This is true of people, too, however nasty they taste.  It is wrong to tell someone, “We are going to kill you.  It might take a decade or so for us to get around to it, but then we will whack you good.”  It’s like that episode of the Twilight Zone where the aliens come down with their book, “To Serve Man,” and, just as the dude is about to get into the spaceship for what he believes will be a delightful vacation, that woman yells at him, “It’s a cookbook!”  What a bitch!  He could have had a nice, pleasant flight to the new planet, but she had to ruin it for him.

The solution to this problem is so straightforward that I don’t know why nobody has proposed it before.  We must lie.

It’s okay to sentence people to death as long as we don’t tell them about it.  So, we should devise codes that judges will use when pronouncing a death sentence so that criminals think that they were sentenced only to life imprisonment.  It could be very simple, like giving them a strange sentence: “Mr. Criminal, the jury has recommended death, but I sentence you to 27¼ years plus two weeks of community service at the Manhattan Center for Especially Attractive Homeless People.”  That would really be a death sentence.  Everyone but the prisoner could know.

In theory, since it is inhumane to tell someone that he is going to die, nobody should want to ruin his blissful ignorance for him by letting him in on the secret.  But you know that there will be assholes ready to fuck things up for everyone by revealing the sentence of death.  You know this because those same assholes sat behind you in the theatre the last time you went to see a horror movie.  So, we will need a law that says that, if you reveal a death sentence to an unwitting death row inmate, you get the death sentence yourself.  And we won’t even treat you to the lie.  You will know we are going to kill you and we’ll see how you like it, you fucker who ruined Saw IV for me.

Now, some of you are probably reluctant to have the courts lie to even the worst of criminals.  Maybe you think that, while it is inhumane to force someone to live in death’s shadow, it is also unfair to give them no clue whatsoever that they will die.  Fine.  I propose then that we tell them a white lie.  We don’t let them know that we will kill them, because that is simply cruel.  But we give them a clue that they will die, because that’s considerate.  So, the judge actually giving a death sentence might say something like, “I sentence you to 48 years and a half hour, both sentences to run consecutively.  Oh, and your arteries are really clogged.”

The final impediment to this brilliant system of mine is the appeals system.  We can’t just go killing people.  We need to give them the opportunity to appeal their sentences just in case, for some crazy reason, maybe we should not kill them.  Well, the solution is just that we can appeal their death sentences without them.

Listen, like I said, I used to work with death-row inmates.  The only ones who are actually helpful during their appeals process are the innocent ones.  The rest of them were so drugged up or crazy or mentally retarded or desperate or scarred by years of abuse or whatever when they committed their crime that they thought they were at home beneath the overpass on I-94 waiting for cable to be installed when they were actually sawing some old lady’s head off.  Your average guilty person will think he got off easy with his sentence of 22¾ years plus two years of imprisonment in Second Life, but the innocent ones will still be helpful during their appeals because they will want to appeal even that sentence and will want to see a cardiologist besides.  So the whole appeal thing is nothing to worry about.  Lawyers can appeal on behalf of the guilty ones without their help and can appeal with the help of the innocent ones just as they do now, and we can butcher them all when the time comes with spotless consciences.

So, we have solved the problem of the cruelty of forcing someone to live in the shadow of death.  But how do you humanely kill them?

The Cruelty-Free Slaughter of People

Let’s face it: we all know that injecting someone with toxins or electrocuting them or gassing them or hanging them or blindfolding them before shooting them is simply not humane.  Ask yourself, “how would I like to die?”  Or ask yourself, “How would I like for my significant other to die, assuming I have not been through a bitter, humiliating, prolonged divorce?”  I bet that none of the above choices comes to mind.  Those are not cool ways to die.  Imagine that, in a terrible screw-up, your mom was forcibly strapped to a gurney and injected with lethal doses of anesthetic and paralyzing agents, and maybe a toxin.  Do you hear yourself saying, “Well at least she died peacefully?”

We can do better than that.

In order for death to be painless and humane, it has to be instant.  It’s fine when someone dies in their sleep, but I’m not convinced that they are not always having a horrible nightmare about dying.  I mean, I have had dreams about dying and I did not even wake up later to discover that I really was dead.  People who think it’s peaceful to die while asleep must mean that it’s peaceful for them, because the dead dude may have been having a three-hour-long dream about being eaten by ants as he died.

No, in order to be humane, death has to be so quick that the person dying can’t see it coming and doesn’t have time to feel it at all.  As it turns out, this kind of quick death is pretty damned hard to plan.  I suspect that this happens in real life on occasion.  Bam!  Lights out!  But planning death that way is pretty tough.  For instance, after people have their heads sliced off by guillotine, they still blink and think and stuff.  (See Does the head remain briefly conscious after decapitation? and Dr. Beaurieux’s Report from 1905.)  Now, maybe they merely blink because they have something in their eye.  But still, don’t go blinking at me after you’re dead unless you want for me to assume that you’re still thinking and feeling pain and wondering whether headless is a good look for you.

In order to be sure there can be no pain whatsoever, you need to eliminate the possibility of any neural activity after death.  So, that means you can’t really have a brain.  As it so happens, this is also a good way to ensure that you never come back as a zombie.

This painless death is, as I said, pretty damned hard to ensure, but we have all known how to achieve this sort of demise since before puberty.  The answer is all in cartoons.

In cartoons, they really know how to kill people.  (Well, actually, they know how to kill animals like incredibly well funded coyotes and roosters with southern accents and ingenious cats, but applying those lessons to people is easy.)

What we need is a method of killing people that conforms to our white lie.  So, our death row inmate can’t know that he is about to die or all those years of having everyone lie to him about his strange sentence and his ovarian cancer will have been in vain.  This is another good reason not to use the guillotine.  Not only do we want to avoid that annoying blinking, but it is also hard to get someone to stick his head under an enormous sliding blade designed to chop heads off without him thinking it’s a dangerous and stupid thing to do.  Only the very stupidest of prisoners would fall for the old “Look, somebody dropped a quarter on the other side of that guillotine!” trick.

From cartoons, we learn that flattening somebody completely is one of the most humane way to dispose of them.  There are many ways to achieve this.  We will have to immediately eliminate the slow ones: rolling over someone with a steamroller or squeezing someone through a printing press.  Those methods may work fine in cartoons, but they are too slow and torturous for real-world use.  Even if you run over the prisoner’s head first, he has got to see it coming. 

Similarly, although it has a great deal of promise, we will need to eliminate the method whereby you slam someone into a large object at great speed, usually by means of a cannon or an enormous slingshot.  There are a lot of problems with this method.  Getting an inmate to unwittingly climb into a cannon or stand in the pocket of a tremendous slingshot facing a sheer rock wall is probably even harder than getting him to stick his head voluntarily into a guillotine.  Also, there would be a few seconds of sheer terror while he is headed toward that rock wall. 

This is, incidentally, why we should not even consider death by falling from a great height.  Everyone who has seen any cartoon knows that a person who unwittingly walks over the edge of a cliff takes a few steps in the air past the cliff, but won’t fall until he realizes that he has just walked over the edge of a cliff.  And then he is terrified.  In addition, all too often the person’s body falls but his neck stretches so that his head remains at the height of the top of the cliff for a few seconds longer than his body.  That has got to sting.  It’s the same with propelling someone into a large object.  We want to avoid that terror.

We could always come up with an elaborate ruse, like designing a roller coaster that shoots toward the cliff and, at the last instant, the inmate’s chair ejects into the rock face.  But that’s just mechanically so difficult that there has to be an easier way.  Besides, some people just don’t like roller coasters and I’m sure that holds true for some condemned inmates, too.  After spending years and millions of dollars designing this ingenious deathtrap, it would be very disappointing to tell the inmate, “Johnny, you can ride the roller coaster today!” only to have him roll his eyes in disinterest.

But the slingshot and cannon idea brings us to the next great murderous cartoon innovation: if you can’t shoot Mohammad into the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammad!  Dropping heavy objects onto people is a fast and painless way to flatten them.  Boulders, safes, anvils, and grand pianos are favorites in cartoons.  And you can be pretty sure that if you drop a bank vault on someone’s head, his flattened eyes will not blink at you.

So, dropping really, really heavy things onto people is a very humane way to kill them.  There are only two problems with this idea.  First, what if he looks up just as we release the anvil?  He could jump out of the way.  Second, it is hard to get someone to stand under a grand piano or a boulder suspended by a piece of string.  For both of these reasons, you would probably need to confine the person under the piano because you really only have one shot and you do not want to miss.  But confining someone under an anvil undermines our whole idea that people should not know they are in mortal danger even up to their very last breath.  Moreover, I think we should try to confine our prisoners as little as possible.

I do not want to go into it in this particular blog entry because it is something of a tangent but, if we seek to be humane, we should strive for free-range prisons.  Inmates should be able to wander freely about the confines of the prison without constraint.  To the extent humanly possible, inmates should have unlimited access to the nurturing outdoors, and should be fed natural, simple, additive-free foods without the routine use of chemicals, steroids, or antibiotics.  That’s all I’ll say about that for now.

Unfortunately, tying people up so we can drop extremely heavy objects in order to squish them conflicts with our free-range principle.  We need our inmates humanely pulverized the first time without fail, but it’s hard to achieve that if they are free to dash out of the way at the very last moment, or not to stand under the grand piano in the first place.  So, although this idea holds the most promise of all the ideas so far for implementing humane carnage on behalf of justice, we should utilize it only if we cannot find a better one.

Fortunately, cartoons do offer a better idea: blasting inmates’ heads off.  In a lot of cartoons, cartoon characters will unwittingly accept a cigar that is really a stick of dynamite, only to have their heads blown right off their shoulders.  For some reason, cartoon characters love cigars, even though it is hard for me to recall even one instance in which a cartoon character ever smoked a cigar that was not a stick of dynamite.  In any case, this is a great idea.  If your head has been instantly liquefied by means of explosives, you will not blink at me.

And we needn’t use only cigars because, unlike cartoon characters, some people do not like cigars.  We can use food, too.  Hot dogs and candy bars, for instance, that are really sticks of dynamite.  And if we used C-4 plastic explosives instead of TNT, the possibilities are truly endless!  You could mold it to look like anything!  Think marzipan!  This could give a whole new meaning to the term, “mushroom cloud,” and we could dispense with the last meal at the same time we carried out the death sentence. All we would need to do is detonate the food just as the prisoner bit into it, either manually or automatically through some mechanism that triggers when the explosive is bitten into.  We could also fortify the explosives with essential nutrients.

The only problem we now face is that we would need to isolate a prisoner in order to blow his head off.  Other convicts might get skittish if they see another prisoner’s head explode when he bites into a Charleston Chew.  So, we would need to move our condemned inmate into some confined space away from the other prisoners to blast his skull off, preferably a blast-proof room of some sort.  We could do this through any ruse.  This could simply be done by means of an invitation to a private feast in some isolated area, or we could always have the inmates retire to eat separately for the duration of their incarceration.  Really, I think, “Pssst!  I saw a candy bar in room 412!” would probably work most of the time.  But I also think it’s fine to tell one more white lie in the interest of avoiding cruelty.  “Mr. Inmate, your appeals have paid off and you will soon be free.  We’re just waiting for the final preparations to be completed.  In the meantime, we would like to move you to the presidential suite so you are ready to go when the time comes.  Not only is the presidential suite spacious and comfortable, but there are cigars there filled with both tobacco and marijuana.  For dinner, you can have hot dogs, candy bars, foot-long subs, and all the marzipan you can eat.  It’s our way of saying, ‘goodbye’”  And the best thing about telling this lie is that when the prisoner goes to collect his stuff, he will tell other inmates that he is about to be released so they won’t miss him after we puree his head.

This is a simple, cheap, and cruelty-free method of butchery that requires no elaborate planning.  Just for good measure, we could always have a few dozen anvils strung to the ceiling of our blast-proof room that we release as soon as we hear the explosion, but I hardly think this is necessary.  After the execution, all that would be left to do is clean up the room and prepare it for the next condemned inmate.

There you have it: an essentially foolproof, simple, cost-effective system for humanely butchering condemned inmates.  Lie to them, and then painlessly convert their heads into jam.  This is not rocket science, so I do not know why nobody has thought of it before.  Maybe, for some unknown reason, people like killing other people inhumanely rather than taking the time to implement a compassionate system such as mine.  Whatever the reason, it’s high time we did away with the old system and implemented a more merciful means of exterminating people.  It’s the only civilized thing to do.

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