Category: My stories

Just as space travel opened up the asteroid belt for mining operations, faster-than-light travel opened up the galaxy.
Hundreds of billions of worlds out there, waiting.
The inhabitable ones became colonies.
The uninhabitable ones could be harvested for resources.
Or used for massive, bizarre art projects.
Release enough Von Neumann self-replicating robots, and you can make anything on a planetary scale.
Some purists call it cheating, because robots make the art, but others said they’re as much a tool as a paintbrush or a hammer and chisel.
Nothing’s worse than a critic who drops a meteor on your canvas.

The owner of the company told the executives that there needed to be more fun in the office.
“How much fun?” the executives asked.
“More,” said the owner.
So, the executives told the managers that there needed to be more fun.
They worked up a set of forms to track the fun, and metrics to measure whether individual and departmental fun goals were being met.
Every floor had a Fun Enforcement Officer, who went around shouting at staff to have more fun.
The staff responded by putting fun designs on their cardboard boxes as they packed their shit and left.

The Metric System is evil.
Probably the work of The Devil, if you ask me.
In fact, we named our son Miles because we hate The Metric System.
The same reason why we named our next son Stone. Stone’s a measurement of weight.
Then came the triplets: Rod, Cord, and Peck. Look those up.
We loved to watch them play in the yard with their dogs Furlong, Fathom, and Fluid Ounce.
Because that’s what life’s about, right?
Enjoying your time with your family.
And when we’re not busy denouncing The Metric System, we, the Van Meters, are all about family.

The Olympics are supposed to be about good sportsmanship, fairness, and competition.
But the Russians dope up their athletes with performance-enhancing drugs.
And many Muslim athletes refuse to compete against Israeli Jews.
So, the Mossad came up with a new medal: The Big Concrete Block Medal.
They pick up the unsportsmanlike asshole or cheater, and they give them the medal.
Then they take them out on a boat, and drop them in the water.
And click a stopwatch.
They struggle, splash around, but eventually, they all go under.
And don’t come back up.
*click*
“A new record,” they say, laughing.

You used to have to make cheese and macaroni with your own cheese and macaroni.
Then, Kraft came out with that blue box kit.
You know, the one with the orange powder.
Add your own milk and butter.
Now, if you don’t have your own milk and butter handy, you could use a Velveeta or Cracker Barrel kit.
Or one of those special Kraft kits.
Those have orange cheese goop in them.
Better yet, just get the Stouffer’s or other premade frozen macaroni and cheese.
Or go to a restaurant and order it.
That’s what kids menus are for, right?

A fishmonger trades in fish.
A slaver trades in people.
So, who trades in mermaids? A fishmonger or a slaver?
They’re half-fish, half-people.
But then, are you trading in mermaids as a commodity, or are you representing them as an agent or employment facilitator?
The rates are nearly the same, but the results are somewhat different.
After all, you don’t drag your new VP of Sales out of her saline tank and eat her.
Unless, of course, your sales are down for the budget year.
Then, go ahead. Eat them.
Beats firing them and paying out a large severance package.

I never liked the idea that if Life hands you lemons, you should make lemonade.
You shouldn’t wait for Life to hand you lemons.
Nobody goes around handing out lemons.
Instead, you’ll probably get handed some handbill for a protest, or some guy dressed up like a hot dog will hand you coupons outside of the James Coney Island.
Or, if you’re in Vegas, a hooker’s kid will hand you an ad for his mother.
The sidewalk’s littered with those ads.
Me, I never wait for lemons. Life’s too short, man.
I go to the grocery store and shoplift them.

Okay, so your team threw you under the bus.
At least they threw you under a bus.
I mean, that’s public transportation, right?
Was that bus running on clean-burning diesel or compressed natural gas, or some other lower-carbon footprint power source?
It would have been better for the environment if they had thrown you under an electric vehicle.
Or, I suppose, a human-powered vehicle, such as a bicycle.
Under a bunch of jogging humans would have worked, too.
Although if a bicycle or joggers had run you over, you might have gotten someone else hurt.
We couldn’t have that happening.

The problem with coming up with a cool schtick for a conference exhibit is that you end up having to do it a few hundred times.
Over. And over. And over.
Yeah, I know. It’s funny. For you.
For me, it was funny the first few times, when I was coming up with the routine, but now that I’ve done it a few hundred times, I’m sick to death of it.
So, here’s the bottle. Here’s a jelly bean in it. One jellybean. Because we don’t play guessing games with your business hosting.
Ha ha. Funny, right?
Now go away.

SkyNet kept sending back terminator robots in human biological casings, and various members of the Connor family kept destroying them.
“It got smart,” was what Kyle Reece had said, but how smart is a musclebound terminator robot speaking in an Austrian accent?
So, after a while (which is a strange phrase to use when you’re dealing with time travel and paradoxes), SkyNet really did get smart. It stuffed a dog with Von Neumann nanobots and bangs it into the past.
The nanobots spilled out of the dog, built quintillions of copies of themselves, and took over the world.
The end.