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.

An Open Letter to The Airborne Toxic Event

I don't think you guys really thought things through when you christened your band. When I first heard the name, I assumed you were some sort of hippie jam band, like The String Cheese Incident, or Uncle Jethro's Psychedelic Flapjack (a name I just made up but you can't even tell, because hippies name themselves things like that). I saw you guys on Conan the other night and discovered that you not only are not a hippie jam band, but that you seem to be a legitimate band and not just a bunch of goofball jokers who you would expect to name themselves The Airborne Toxic Event.

There's no way to put this delicately, so I'm just going to say it: the name of your band sounds like a euphemism for a fart. Was that the plan? Naming your band after a bodily function might work fine when you're a bunch of slackers killing time in college after class, but you guys are releasing singles and going on talk shows now, and the name of your group still sounds like a description of a particularly lethal dose of hot & spicy curry flatulence. Do you realize that if you are successful, you could be recording for years under that name? You guys are all in your 20's now, I assume, but if things go good for you, you could realistically find yourself in your late 40's and playing in a band seemingly named after a fart.

In your 40's. In a band named after a fart.

Pretty short-sighted of you, The Airborne Toxic Event. With any luck, you guys will all go mad with fame, wind up hating eachother and break up, so you can bury this idiotic band name and we can all agree to never speak of it again.