When I was getting off my flight in Newark, we passed a bunch of other planes arriving, one of which was proudly emblazoned with the Hooters logo. Needless to say, from here on out I’ll be making my own plane reservations rather than letting my sister do it for me.

Why is it that they always have shoe shine guys at airports? I mean, if there’s one thing in the world that won’t scuff up your shoes, it’s being on a plane. The whole notion really, is about as useful as selling lawn mowers on the deck of a cruise ship. Now, if they had a chainsaw kiosk at the airport, that would totally rule, because when I get off of a plane, what I really want to do is go deforest something or kills some zombies, and then maybe get a duty-free burrito.

Okay, this whole thing with sticking a lower-case I in front of things and pretending that makes them magically cool has got to stop before it goes too far. It was cute for a while when Apple started doing it, but now it’s starting to give boy bands a run for their money in the Dumblympics (which aren’t really an officially sanctioned sporting event so much as a thing I just made up to be the metaphorical embodiment of dumbness). What’s next, a vacuum called the iSuck? A new line of caskets call the iContain A Dead Guy? How about something called the iCan’t Think of an Original Name for My Lame Product?

You know astronaut pens? Those ones they always sell at science museums that write upside down and all that? Why does anyone who isn’t an astronaut need one of those? And don’t go and say that science museums are just marketing to astronauts but eight-year-olds are buying them instead, because astronauts already get them free from businesses that cater to astronauts only, like Big Ed’s Space Shuttle Transmission Shop or Neil Stretch Armstrong’s Cold Stone Astronaut Ice Creamery.

You know how all toilets North of the Equator turn one way and the ones South of it go the other? Well, what would happen were you to flush a perfectly equatorial toilet (The Equatorial Toilets, of course, being a perfectly awesome name for a band)? Would it even work? Would it open up a rift in the space time continuum like it does when you tie a piece of buttered toast to a cat or when you go back in time and give Hitler a wedgie? I hope so, and that’s why I am presently in search of massive government funding for a fact-finding voyage to carry out this experiment.

When you go to China, they make you sign off on a list of things that you’re not supposed to be bringing into the country. Opium is still #1, well above wildcats, the black plague, and Far Side calendars (which the government rightly believes would undermine their soulless communist regime with cow-based humor). I’m kind of surprised that they’re still bitter about the whole opium thing. It’s not like when people come to America from Japan and we make them fill out a "What is the purpose of your visit?" card, the number one reason is "To Attack Pearl Harbor". C’mon China, move on, it’s been way too long already.

Did you ever really think about Jolly Ranchers? I mean, it’s all well and good if he wants to be jolly, but what does being a rancher have to do with making brightly colored candies that melt in your bookbag and stay there forever in a perpetual semi-molten gloplike state? Ranches are for just three things, cows, salad dressing, and monkeys, and unless I’m horribly mistaken, none of those things go into making candy, unless it’s some kind of hideous salad dressing beef monkey flavored candy, which they probably would eat in China anyway because they’re weird like that here.

In Beijing, all the phone booths are shaped like Pac Man, and to use the phone you have to put your head inside his mouth, and that’s all nice and whimsical and whatnot, but what about for me, because I’ve always been afraid of having my head bitten off by Pac Man? Perhaps I was a piece of fruit, or a ghost in a past life (can you even be a ghost in a past life?), but next time I’m in China, I’m just going to take a cell phone, or a tin can on a really long string.