Free Idea #16: Gum Saver

So, you’re on the bus on the way back to school from a field trip, chewing a tasty piece of gum. You know when you get to school you’ll have to ditch the gum, but it still has a lot of good chewing capacity left. You could take a cue from teenie boppers of the 1950s and stick it behind your ear, but you already have dozens of pieces of gum back there, so old that you have to go to a dermatologist to get them surgically removed: an in-house procedure that is none-the-less not covered by most insurance policies.

I suggest that an entrepreneur reading this create a small, sanitary, air-tight gum holding box. Ideally, it could slip on to a wrist band, so the gum would be ready for you to resume chewing at a moment’s notice.

Save the Earth: save your gum, and get all the gum chewing pleasure that little piece of whatever they make gum out of now is capable of providing!

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Touch this flower for more million dollar ideas:

I am a Four Leaf Clover: Haiku of Alienation and Futility

I am Spiderman

I am a four leaf clover

I am all alone

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Put me in a box

To love me is to kill me

Preserve me for now

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I can do this job

Just turn off part of my brain

I can function well

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I look around me

They would burn me as a witch

If they only knew

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Alienation

All is just futility

Monotony rules

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It’s lonely on top

Of course, I’m at the bottom

It’s lonely here, too

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I went to college

I learned other people’s words

I was such a fool

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I don’t say the Pledge

I don’t owe an allegiance

to the flag or you

•(-<|:

You know the Ramones song “I’m Against It“? No? Well this daisy leads to a poem that’s kind of like that song. Only devoid of the song’s lightness, humor, good nature & fun teenage aesthetic:

possession

When we are friends with someone, we don’t say, “This person is a friend to me.” We say, ‘This is my friend.” My friend, my wife, my husband, my child, my cat. My, my, my. Ownership is big in our culture. Someone who lives on the Earth for a few dozen years can take a piece of land that’s been in existence for billions of years, plant a flag and say, “I own this land.” And if the owner lives here in the U.S., he or she can then shoot someone who wonders on to that land – land that previously was just part of the planet and will sit there for billions of years after its new owner has turned to dust and recycled back into the land.

Who’s idea was this, anyway?

It’s really important to us that people know when something is our idea. That’s my idea! They stole my idea! We have laws to stop intellectual property theft. “I patented that idea.” What you own is a sign of your economic class. It may be a sign of your cultural background. It’s definitely part of your identity that you want to project to people. Some people take pride in how little they own, others in how much, or some quality of the items in their domain. It seems like it’s only when people suddenly lose all of their belongings that they take stock of who they really are underneath it all.

Some people make a distinction between owning private property and owning personal property*. These people are called Marxists. We don’t see many of them today, but their idea was that it was fine to own personal items, like your watch and the shirt on your back. Marxists have an aversion, though, to individuals amassing wealth in the form of private property, like land and buildings. They argue that these things should be owned collectively. These ideas have largely been abandoned in much of the world. It appears that we are in an era that values the unobstructed pursuit of individual wealth. People even buy completely abstract things like futures of entire stock markets. This creates wealth essentially out of nothing. But all perceived wealth is an illusion, since every last person, no matter how much she or he owns, will in time cease to exist, to be reabsobed into that which is real: the Earth. The creepy epilogue: The deceased’s estate continues to own their things and their patented ideas.

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*In the US state of Maryland, wives are still legally defined as the personal property of their husbands.

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The post beneath this flower will lead you to of video of me further pontificating on life:

New Things Not True Post

For reasons that I shall not delve into here, I recently attended a long lecture on driving safety. In front of what could be described as a captive audience, the instructor wove a number of highly unlikely personal stories into his lessons. Some of these involved preposterous tales of his alleged superhuman driving abilities and daring-do, some were made ups stories about his supposed time as a Navy Seal in Vietnam (the details of which he may have lifted from a popular war novel and various urban myths). By the way, if anyone ever tells you that he was a Navy Seal in Vietnam, you should be extremely skeptical, as the Seals only numbered about 500 at the time.

Because the egomaniacal driving lecturer (employed by AAA, by the way) was so obviously lying about his personal exploits, I found it difficult to believe anything he told us about driving, let alone all the seemingly random bits of information he sprinkled into his talk. I took a few notes and did some research. Sure enough, he was full of crap.

Because you may run across some of these myths in your internet or worldly travels, I present them here, all conveniently debunked for you:

Lies My Driving Safety Instructor Told Me

• “60% of women would be more willing to give up sex than their mobile phone.”
  • This is an online myth that is based on a misreading of survey results. Often, 3rd or 4th-hand accounts claim the number to be 70%. The survey, commissioned by TeleNav, Inc., actually revealed that 1/3 of respondents said they would rather give up sex than their cell phones. Of those, 70% were women. Therefore, 23% of women claimed to be so inclined.

And Here is a Poem

compulsion

I’m on the wrong side of the road

Oncoming Traffic

I gotta get back to the right side.

But I can’t, not yet.

And then, Bam!

Words and Such

 

Without your innate ability to urinate, you’re in urine trouble.

Which leads us to this list of dreadfully important new words:

• Urinatability: Your innate ability to urinate.

10 step secret to enlightenment

1. If you don’t already have one, change your name to an Indian name. This can be either from the country of India or from Native America. Or both: Running Ashwaganda