Life was good today. I was able to spend the morning with my two young daughters at Forest Park, where we smacked around racket balls and had a lot of laughs.  From there I went to work, where I felt like progress was being made on difficult cases (this is not always the case). I had to stay late, but had a nice bike ride home (about 5 miles in the cool night air).

While I was riding home, it struck me how absurd life can sometimes seem.  We worry about all kinds of little things, putting aside the fact that in 100 years we will all be dead. We spend much of our energy trying to convince ourselves that we are ethereal beings with eternal life when even a simple glance at our naked bodies will show that we are animals-complicated animals, yes. But animals nonetheless. We are eating, breathing, pooping animals just like so many of the others. And we live on a big spinning orb that cycles around a star so bright that we can’t even look at it and so hot that we would die if we got anywhere near it.  We can trace our bones back about 5 million years at which point they clearly converge with the bones of the other primates. Using high-tech biology, if we trace our heritage back really far, we would see that the lowly sponge is our long-lost cousin.

We are the cousins with the big brains. Yet we find that our rationality must be infused with emotion in order to work at all, and we find that we are often tricked astray by heuristics on which we depend most of the time for life and limb. Life is cognitively precarious. These fantastic brains of ours are actually a big bag of tricks, once we look at them closely, and we can do that nowadays to a degree never before dreamed of. Yet even though all of this incredible scientific information is available to us, so many of us would much rather grow fat in front of blaring televisions or let other people tell us what to think.  Those people to whom many of us often listen claim to take their marching orders from fantasy beings, invisible, powerful, childlike and often violent.  Really, sometimes when you stop and think about it, it’s hard to believe the things that we know, for a fact, that are true.

Life is good, though. When I got home, I peeked in my daughters’ bedroom to see them sleeping soundly. My wife is also fast asleep, so I am one of only two awake animals in the house, the other being Holly-the-Collie, our dog. She doesn’t worry about things much. When I arrived home, she insisted that I throw her toy out into the yard a few times for her to retrieve, but then she seemed to be perfectly content.

Tonight I’m as content as a dog.  I do know why things seem so peaceful tonight. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am concerned about the way the world is going, but all the bad stuff seems far away tonight, and that is good once in a while.

With that as the context, I sat down to look at my e-mail, and saw that I had received a e-mail from Prankplace.com, an Internet novelty shop.  Forty years ago I used to closely read the novelty shop advertisements that I found in my superhero comic books (Flash and Green Lantern were my favorites).  Those novelty company as had things like whoopee cushions, Chinese handcuffs and magic tricks. I now find it quite enjoyable to sit down and look at the merchandise offered by the modern version of novelty shops, Prank Place being one of the big ones. In place of the whoopee cushion, you can find an entire line of merchandise featuring farting.  Said find things such as fake parking tickets, fake ATM receipts and twirling spaghetti forks.

You can read the clever T-shirts and bumper stickers (“We’re born cold, wet and hungry. Then things get worse”). You can pick out your favorite Darwin Fish plaque .

I’m not saying that you need to buy anything in order to enjoy a novelty company website, but there’s always that thought that maybe something would be worth buying because it is so very clever or rude or funny.  Clever did I say? How about that Mini-Universal-TV-Remote? It is so small you can put in your pocket. What can you do with it? Supposedly, you can turn OFF television sets that drone on and on in public places.  I’m not placing my order tonight, but I am tempted.