This is another in a series of ideas I’ve had that would take too long to explain in a tweet but aren’t long enough to merit the full-out blog treatment.
1) My family has been instructed that at the moment of my demise, they are to immediately dress my body up in a complete Superman costume accurate to the last detail. They are then to take my body and with the utmost secrecy drop it from a great height onto the outskirts of the large metropolitan city. That is really the trickiest part. I mean, just think about it for a moment. How would you pull that off without being caught? Renting a plane or a helicopter wouldn’t work because the pilot would obviously find out. The best bet, near as I can figure, would be with the help of a hot air balloon and the cover of darkness. Once you iron out that wrinkle, the last step for my descendants is to simply sit back and wait for the proper authorities to discover my cape-bedecked corpse. My dream is that the evening news will report that (1) Superman was real. (2) Not only was he real, but he evidently suddenly succumbed to a heart attack and died while flying, and (3) you will never believe who his secret identity was instead of Clark Kent. All-in-all, not a bad way to be remembered.
2) As a young man, whenever I stayed home from school due to sickness, I would watch the original Price is Right with Bob Barker. On several occasions, the last person bidding to get on the stage would simply add one dollar to the next highest offer, thusly virtually destroying any chance the now second-highest bidder had of being on the show. I wonder if thirty years later that person who got screwed out of their chance to be on TV still holds a grudge against the one who beat him/her. I know I would. And it probably would continue to be brought up at every family gathering.
3) If you were to take a fully-grown lowland mountain gorilla, strap an automatic parachute to his back, put him into an airplane, then throw him out at say, ten thousand feet, would he be scared or just confused? Obviously, he would have absolutely no concept of what was going on because no gorilla had ever been that high up before and told the tale to others of his ilk. Now, what if you dropped him so that he landed among the members of his own tribe. One minute ol’ Ed the Silverback has disappeared, the next he’s dropping out of the sky like some kind of god. I bet that experience would give him a lot of cachet at the next ape tribal council meeting.
4) I just found out recently that one thing every mammal has in common is a susceptibility to being infected with rabies. Dogs, cats, squirrels, hamsters, no one is safe. This susceptibility also includes sea mammals like seals, porpoises and… killer whales, which got me to thinking. I can imagine a scenario where a rabies-infected dog falls carelessly off a bridge and into an ocean inlet. Along comes an unsuspecting killer whale and boom!; it gets rabies. Now you have a real problem on your hands cause there’s a five ton version of Cujo roaming the seas. Here comes the Minnow II full of unsuspecting sightseers enjoying a beautiful calm afternoon. “Hey, Martha, lookit at that big fish! He’s just swimming in circles. How cute. See! He’s getting closer. Put out your hand and see if you can touch him, and I’ll get a picture.” Crunch! Smash! Flop! After leaving Martha a designated leftie for life, the diseased orca is now slamming holes the size of imports into the side of the boat. Glub, glub down go the tourists. I bet the SyFy channel would pay big money for that script.
5) Somethings I’ve always wondered about deaf people who use American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate. Do they get overwhelmed by large groups of people if everyone is signing a different conversation? Like, at a deaf person’s convention of something? What if a high school for the deaf played another one in basketball or football, do they have cheerleaders starting ASL chants that the crowds echo in unison through signing?I have another question: Is it easier or harder to eavesdrop on someone if they’re using sign language? Since ASL is not an universal language, when American deaf people travel overseas, how do they communicate with the native sign language speakers? Are there sign language translators readily available?
6) Over the Christmas holidays, I really started to miss my kids. Oh, don’t worry. There’s nothing wrong with them, and they haven’t moved away. It’s just they went and grew up on me. Of course, I expected that to happen. I just didn’t anticipate all the negative side-effects of it. For example, I really can’t buy them little kid toys anymore like Tonka trucks, Playmobils or GI Joes. Those things just have too short a window of opportunity because, let’s be honest, I liked playing with them, too. It was a great opportunity for me to act their age.
7) Here’s a question no one seems to know the answer to: if Care Bears were real, how tall would they be? Would they tower over a normal human, or would they be a more manageable foot-and-a-half from paw to ear top? If the answer is the former, I bet they would still be pretty scary – even with the big icons on their chests. I know I wouldn’t want one in my campsite.