The Sanctity of Life Is a Sliding Scale

The other day, there was a spider in the shower, and it was black and a little larger than normal. I panicked and washed it down the drain, after which I felt sort of guilty about it. The spider was just chilling in the shower, after all. It wasn't waiting there with malevolent intent. Odds are it had wandered in there and didn't even know how to wander out; therefore, it couldn't really be faulted for being in there at all. Most times, I try to escort spiders outside when I discover them, but I was naked and feeling vulnerable, so this one had to die. I know it's just a spider, but I don't really like what that incident says about me, necessarily. It says that when it's inconvenient for me to do the right thing, my emotional reaction will reign supreme and I will act selfishly. Nobody likes having ugly aspects of themselves revealed by an act as seemingly trivial as killing a spider, least of all me.

Today, I get into the shower again, only to find four ants crawling around in there. Without a second thought, or even one thought, for that matter, it was, "Time for you sonsabitches to take a swim!" and I spend a good two-three minutes dutifully sending them all to their watery graves. I don't feel the least bit sorry for those three-segmented jerks.

So, if you want were curious about where my basic respect for life ended, it's with ants. If ants come into my house, they die. No amnesty, no second chance: one strike and you are out, ants.

Also: spiders who are larger than, say, a hamburger. Death is certain, my giant eight-legged chums.

Upon His Deathbed, He Whispered the Single Word, "Hormel," and Slipped into Merciful Oblivion

If I ever had occasion to show a Victorian time-traveler around the 21st century, I wouldn't try to blow his mind with iPods, personal computers, smartphones and the like. As an educated, tech-savvy gentleman of the 19th century, nothing of that nature would be outside of his ability to extrapolate from existing technology.

I would instead escort him straight to a supermarket and show him this:

Precooked-bacon2
Packaged, pre-cooked bacon.

"My God, sir!" he would exclaim. "Such wonders your world contains!"

He would then return to his own time and destroy the infernal time machine with an axe so that no other man would be stricken with the knowledge of such future miracles. "'Twould have been preferable to have never tasted Hormel Precooked Bacon," he would write in his diay, "than to be forever haunted by its memory."

Truer Words Were Never Printed on an Image of a Bust of Plato

Platoquote
Sometimes, man...sometimes, you come across some wisdom, and you're like, "Damn! That's some serious wisdom! I'd better slap those words on an image of the person who said them and put it on the Internets, like, stat!" (I assume that you are a retarded medical doctor in this hypothetical situation.)

Anyway, since I am incapable of coming up with wise words of my own, obviously, I present these words to you, spoken ages ago by an old Greek guy. Let them guide you in times of darkness, like a bottle of magical Elvish sunshine.