When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway—might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.

Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren’t afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations.

–Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

Since Trump hit the scene, I’ve come to believe that everything that can happen has had a 50/50 chance of being either normal or absolutely batshit insane. And, really, that’s much too high a ratio of insane. If the insane thing happened one time out of a hundred or a thousand or so, that would be the right amount of insane outcomes. But fifty fifty is completely intolerable.

A: This is an ad.

B: Fuck it, I want that knife. Anyone know where I can get one?

Edit: Okay, here it is.

We’d have to ask /u/dual_sport_dork if it’s even worth it’s relatively cheap price tag. I’d lay even odds that it’s not.

Well, the only way we can know for sure is through experiment. We should clone a bunch of Hitler babies and see if any of them come out with micro-penises. Of course, we couldn’t do it in Germany for obvious reasons, and the chance of them recognized in America is still a little too high. Maybe somewhere in South America… like Peru… or Chile… or somewhere in that neighborhood…

We need a constitutional amendment forbidding members of one’s immediate family from running for office once one is above a certain level of success. President is right out. Include the VP, of course. I’d say that Speaker of the House is well within the power tier at which your family should no longer be able to maintain a multi-generational grip on power.

I can think of “penny for your thoughts,” and “I don’t give a red cent,” and arguably the very concept of “penny loafers,” but all of those are already fairly archaic. What are some others?

An Andrew Cuomo-era nursing home.

SMB2 is the best Mario game on the NES.

This is like people who prefer Star Trek IV over II or VI, and I respect the off-kilter energy.

SMB3 has better powerups, though.

Map the tonal range of the human voice from 00000, the lowest-pitched, to 99999, the highest-pitched. Sing a note into your microphone that corresponds to your postal code.

EDIT: Make it a Base-36 range so as to allow letters A-Z when they are used in postal codes.

Weaponization or dangerous rays are not among the challenges facing space-based solar.

Contrary to appearances in fiction, most designs propose beam energy densities that are not harmful if human beings were to be inadvertently exposed, such as if a transmitting satellite’s beam were to wander off-course. But the necessarily vast size of the receiving antennas would still require large blocks of land near the end users. The service life of space-based collectors in the face of long-term exposure to the space environment, including degradation from radiation and micrometeoroid damage, could also become a concern for SBSP.

Makes for a good bar trivia question.

I was going to say that I kind of wish The Devil existed, because then we would know that truly horrible people would eventually face damnation, and in a way it’s nice to imagine that cosmic justice could exist.

“No, no, no! Do not come to Texas! Texas is full!”

Meanwhile, Texas:

It’d be worse than that. We don’t share a border with North Korea. We will not like what happens if we initiate endless blood feuds with our next door neighbors.

Star Trek would have been very different under Harlan Ellison.

So we went to the commissary and shoved in around the Writers’ Table.

What I did not know was that the Writers’ Table was right behind the Producers’ Banquette. That was my first big mistake. As it turned out, it was also my last big mistake.

Oh, what fun, sitting there with intellectual companions, cutting up touches and laughing at the drolleries! Born again: the Algonquin round table. Wit beyond compare. And, naturally, as the youngest member of the group, striving to make my mark as worthy of their camaraderie, their respect, I suggested a droll, witty lunchtime conceit . . .

Two things you must know. First, I do a terrific Mickey Mouse imitation. Absolutely phonographically perfect. If the publishers of this book had the money, they ought to bind in a record, one of those little plastic jobbies, so you could hear my spectacular Mickey imitation. When I tell this anecdote in person, it really enhances a lot. But just pretend you can hear it, okay?

The second thing you need to know is that the Producers’ Banquette had filled up with Roy Disney and the other heads of the studio, behind me; a fact of which I was unaware; a fact no one bothered to impart.

At the top of my voice I suggested, “Hey, listen, what a kick! Why don’t we do a porn Disney flick?”

Everyone smiled. “It’ll be terrific,” I said. Loudly. “I mean, everyone knows, for instance, that Tinker Bell does it . . . what they don’t know is how she Does It.” They all looked at me expectantly. “She flies up the head of the penis and flaps her wings like crazy,” I said, proud as hell of myself at this bit of fantasy. Everyone chuckled.

I went on, oblivious to the sudden hush all around me in the commissary. “I’ll be Mickey, and I’ll be the director; John, you do a good Donald, so you can be the male porn lead, sort of a duck-style Harry Reems; Mary, you can be Minnie, the female lead; and Albert, you can be Goofy . . . and Goofy, of course, is the producer.”

Their smiles were frozen; the way the smiles of bit players get frozen when they see the monster creeping up behind the hero in a horror flick.

“Hey, gang!” I squeaked in my terrifically accurate Mickey voice. “Everybody ready to shoot the ultimate Disney flick? The film that rips the lid off the goody two-shoes hypocrisy that lies sweltering beneath the surface of G-rated true-life adventures? Okay, you guys, let’s get that hand-held Arriflex right down there between Minnie’s legs! I wanna see closeups of quivering labia!”

A silence as deep as that at the bottom of the Cayman Trench.

I went on, oblivious, carried along by my enthusiasm. In Donald’s quack I said, “Goddam sonofabitch! Pluto, get outta there, you’re steaming up the lens!”

As Goofy, in the dumbest voice possible, I said, “Yuck, yuck, yuck . . . hey, fellahs, I’m a highly-paid, extremely-inept producer person . . . c’n I play, too?”

As Mickey: “Fuck off, Goofy, fuck off! Get those Seven Dwarfs in here . . . I don’t care ff they don’t wanna gang-bang a mouse, tell 'em they’re under contract . . . and fer chrissakes, Minnie, will you take off those damned shoes?!”

The meal came. Everyone addressed their plates like inmates of the Gulag Archipelago. When lunch was over, everyone vanished very quickly. I was confused, but felt good. What a nice little shtick I’d invented. Wished they’d joined in. Oh well.

Went back to my office. Noticed first that my name had been whited-out in the parking slot. Upstairs, the secretary and her paperback were gone. On my desk: twelve sharpened #2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencils and a pink slip.

I had been fired after working for the Disney empire for a total of four hours, including lunch.

The lessons here cannot be avoided.

Big business is humorless.

And . . .

At Disney, nobody fucks with The Mouse.