cymbaljack

When I am, finally and inevitably, swept into power as emperor of this dreary world, among my mandates shall be these:

• The consumption, by humans, of celery shall be strictly prohibited. Attempts to cause humans to consume celery, such as by including it in soups or fried rice, shall be subject to even more severe penalties. I remain convinced that God continually watches us, saying, "I can't believe they're eating celery." Yes, celery is edible. So is paper, but to date, no one has tried to list it as an ingredient in a canned soup.
• Musac will be banned for any kind of "broadcast." Stores that want to provide a musac experience, and especially one involving Christmas songs, will have to offer headsets for those patrons who actually want to hear the stuff. (These patrons will be noted and watched for other signs of mental illness.)
• Any member of the Kansas City Chiefs defensive squad who blows a tackle will be sentenced to two months' service as valet and errand-boy for my father, who deserves some kind of payment for being a loyal fan.
• Naturally, the landscape of television will be changed quite radically. For starters, Joss Whedon will be given his own network to do with as he wishes. Any broadcast hours he cannot personally fill will be assigned by him to someone he trusts who has a good idea.
• If Whedon gets tired of TV, he will be instructed to join forces with Peter Jackson in order to create the Ultimate Movie Of All Time.
• Everyone involved in the creation of all the non-Spiderman Marvel movies will be charged with crimes against humanity.

Now it may seem at first glance like I would not make a very good dictator. In fact, some might argue that I would obviously be just another power-mad tyrant driven by my whims. And that is probably true. But for the record, if I decided to spy on the people I ruled, I would just declare that spying would henceforth be happening. I would not attempt to justify it based on some kind of self-contradictory claim of "defending" the people I was spying on from "enemies of liberty."

And I would never make any claim that I was always right and my detractors were always wrong, or were disloyal or unpatriotic. My position would be, "Of course I am wrong, but you cannot stop me." That is the only reasonable and honest position the emperor of the world can take.

I am counting on that refreshing honesty to keep the public off-balance for at least a year or two, giving me plenty of time to prepare to put down the inevitable uprisings.

Everybody always talks about getting 3 wishes granted. Often this fantasy involves a genie who grants the wishes. Well, I have recently made a very important discovery. Brace yourself (hold on to your monitor, if necessary), here it is:

There really are wish-granting genies.

Do not get too excited. I have a friend who recently encountered one of them, and her summary of the experience was, quote, "I hate your damn genie!"

She has good reason to feel this way. What the genie had done to her was to make her quite sick twice within about a three-week period. She had made the mistake of wishing not to work a full week for the last five or so weeks of the semester. She thought she would accomplish this by a combination of holidays and perhaps taking some personal time, or maybe one "mental health" sick day.

But her wish was granted, in classic, overly-literal fashion, by a genie who was hanging around. It turns out that everybody gets three wishes granted, at some point in their lives.

Unfortunately, it also turns out the genies are just as lazy and malicious as the rest of us, and they get to pick which three wishes to grant. So they ignore all the "million dollar" wishes, and the ones involving movie stars, sports cars, and careers that don't actually involve doing any work. (All of this is probably for the best, really, but that's the subject for another blog.) But when we come up with a relatively small wish that they can grant merely by screwing up our lives, then they're johnny-on-the-spot.

So as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for--a genie might be listening.