Kids for Rent

Here's my idea for a very lucrative business. With all the dreams of social activities and errands that parents wish they could do without having to hire a babysitter and all the guys that need help picking up chicks, why not KidsForRent inc.

It is a social network where a some single chap in need of a date can take your kids for the afternoon to go to the park/mall/bar - whatever - to meet ladies that will coo over his adorable child.

Single (dads) are just so cute to women that carting around adorable Jr. for the afternoon opens up a whole smorgasbord of topics of conversation with the ladies. Things like:

"Why is your kid screaming for his "real" parents."

"You do know that the diaper is not supposed to go on the outside of his pants right?"

"Ummm...so what do you mean he's not really your kid and you don't really know him or his parents...?"


While you're living it up parents, sucking down margaritas at noon, just relax and know that your kid is enriching the lives of others and that eligible bachelors are pretending they had 1/10 of the parenting mojo power that you have...



Reverend Rick

Readers Questions: Inefficient Pregnancy / Don't hate the player, the game or the manufaturer!

Joy oh joy of joys! - I've got another reader question.

How did God decide that sex would be the way people procreate? It seems a little…inefficient to me, especially the whole nine month pregnancy thing.

Sincerely,

Curious Christine

Well Curious Christine,

Fortunately for every weird question there is an equally weird answer. Even better, this is a damn good question and not weird at all. As we all know God created earth and man and all earths good creatures, and man created everything awkward, stupid, and strange.

However, what most don't know is that the primary technological copyright for man, plants, and animals is held by the Xerox corporation. That dumb machine that we now know today in every Kinko's is a stripped down version of god's original plan.

He first made man in his own image and then wanted to duplicate him so man could have some friends to hang out with. "His own image" is just legal copyright jargon and in no way indicates Gods actual likeness as God more closely resembles my Uncle Carl who actually looks more like a platypus than a human.

The problem with the "Xerox" method was, as anyone who's messed with copies knows, that at some point the original gets lost. (i.e. for God: the first man was dead and gone). So when you make a copy from a copy from a copy the quality gets worse and worse. Sooner or later Adam's descendants would be as sexually defined as a Ken Doll. (The most important details are lost along the way).

So to avoid losing the most important toy man ever had, he created woman, the best play partner with some kick ass toys of her own.



While the "Xerox" method was instant and created fully formed humans quickly, the ease of use had it's flaws as I've mentioned and God "went back to the kitchen" with a bowl of baby batter to find out how to preserve all the subtle nuances and flavor combinations that are mankind.

God realized he had to break mankind down to his most basic ingredients and give half the recipe to Adam and half to Eve. While Adam and Eve may be too stupid not to eat stuff that isn't theirs, they are never too stupid to procreate. The reason being is that God includes some powerful incentive for swirlin' up some baby batter and baking up a batch of cookies.

What would happen if making cookies were more fun and more filling than taking them out of the oven feeding and clothing them? After all, cookies don't take long to bake and if you had your fun making them you'd be quite disgusted if in 20 minutes you had a batch of cookies that started crying and needed milk.

This would be the Xerox scenario all over again but with the joy of sex. How strange would it be to have a wonderful session of sex with your partner and then standing there in your bedroom was a fully formed man introducing himself as your son?



Efficient as this may be, it would be extremely creepy and uncalled for. A 9 month waiting period doesn't seem so bad now does it?

This is why that God allows people to "live it up" having wild unprotected sex not knowing whether or not they will have a small obligation to fulfill 9 months later. This is the same as the no interest, no payments for 9 months thing. The sex contract could have a small rider that results in rather large balloon payments when the loan gets closer to maturity.

In short, while pregnancy is not literally efficient, true efficiency would be strange and most babies, if conceived as fully formed adults, would be shot by the father thinking they were an intruder.

So, since we want sex and we don't want a huge obligation every time we play the game, God makes it a little like gambling. We can belly up to the table and lay our money down with a chance to win big and get more than what we came in with, but you gotta know when to pull yourself out of the game or you'll bust.

Just like always, we can play all we want, we can even borrow from the house to gamble with, but the house always wins. But in this case, imagine after having a blast at the casino, Harrah's drops a bill in the mail 9 months later showing you actually lost and that you'll be paying on the interest forever - and you still want to go back and do it again!



That sounds pretty sneaky but really effective. The baby making industry will never suffer because of it. God was smart with the buy now pay later incentive - especially when you don't even realize you bought the farm. Talk about great salesmanship!

As for the Xerox baby making device, rumor has it God's got it locked in a storehouse somewhere, along with about a million seedless Adams with less definition around his Tigris and Euphrates than Eve.



Reverend Rick

Chinese Typewriter

Well Everyone, here is the moment I've all been waiting for: The Chinese Typewriter!

This is a small educational lesson today. Most likely I will cover this subject with more jokes in the future.

As we all know the Chinese language has tens of thousands of characters. The history and development of the typewriter and the system for mechanically or electronically creating text in Chinese has undergone many frustrating changes.

Throughout the years other, less sympathetic countries, have made fun of the very idea of a Chinese Typewriter. We will not cover all jokes about the device, but I'll give you a little educational lift today.



Below is an example of a Chinese typewriter from about 1970. The tray at the bottom has a few thousand characters to use and that type case can be traded out for other sets if more characters are needed. The typist lines up a grabber for the character than hits a switch to imprint it on the paper. A good typist could average 20 characters per minute.

It seems to me like it would be just as fast to set lines of type by hand then print the whole page at once, but then again you'd have multiple charcacters on a page and so the 1,000's of characters needed would increase 10 fold or more.

There was another design that never was produced commercially called the "Ming Kwai" which means "Clear and Quick". The typewriter could create 7000 distinct characters. It could type additional "words" using combinations of characters, attaining a theoretical total of 90,000 words.

According to the daughter of inventor Lin Yutang the day she was to demonstrate the machine to executives of the Remington Typewriter Company, they could not make it work. The machine was fixed the next day, but Ming Kwai's obituary was already written.

In the digital world the computer can do thinking that a mechanical device can't. While the most widespread method of inputting Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard (standard keyboard) is the Cangjie input method inwhich the typist "builds" the characters. Each letter on the keyboard stands for a different basic construct.

The computer is much more versatile in its abilities to modify your characters, or use alternate input methods like drawing with a mouse or even voice recognition. Other methods are used, but the Cangjie input method took off due to not putting a price on the software that translates/modifies your keystrokes. It is available as freeware and is installed on most (Chinese) computers standard.

Thinking about this too much often gives me a headache. That's why Reverend Rick has to stop every so often to get my groove on. So here is a recipe to rock out. Remember M.C. Hammer? Apparently in "U Can't Touch This" when hammer is breakin' it down, his dance is called the "Chinese Typewriter".

The gist is that he's so fast he's navigating an enormous set of keys on a typewriter with his quick moving feet. Brilliant. Ya got me Hammy. Maybe he was writing a letter to the chinese people. If so, we can guess the words....oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Stop. Hammer Time.