So. If you ate Nuts 'n' Bolts and threw up, would you be throwing up Bolts 'n' Nuts? I'm assuming here that every time you eat a meal, each bite is physically stored in sequence, with the most recently swallowed bite immediately available for disgorgement. The only possible exception I can envision is the stomach's emergency food poisoning contigency plan, in which the earliest bites (and most likely the corrupted or poisoned ones) are retrieved and stored in an adjacent high-priority line for immediate expectoration. I suspect that this is a representative sample of how the body works. If it isn't, then we are clearly doing something wrong, and we should jump into robot bodies immediately. Some of you may balk at the perceived limitations of robot "cases": pincer hands, slits for eyes, exposed brain in a dome of liquid, etcetera. Don't fear. With the choices afforded to us by our unbeatable technology and the laissez faire attitudes fostered by our fathers of industry, you will certainly find yourself ensconced in an infinitely customizable robot body. You may, for example, decide that your right hand should be a set of powerful cast-iron semi-articulated pincers, while your left hand could serve as a kind of spatula or tray. And I can assure you that your brain would not be exposed in a glass dome perched atop your primary sensory "head" apparatus - the glass would likely be frosted in order to minimize the harmful effects of the sun's rays, whether you're walking on the surface of the Earth or jetting through hard vacuum past the frozen moons of Saturn. And crude slits for eyes? You've been watching too much cheap science fiction, which is full of demeaning and stereotypical portrayals of robots. They wouldn't be slits. They'd be lateral incisions.Life isn't all skittles and beer for robot-bodied humans, though. In fact, it's all fusion core and glucose.

AT THE MOVIE

You can go out to movies, but really, in these days of strict quality control, the word "movies" is starting to sound quaint. On any given evening the screens may all be occupied, but there's only one movie playing. All the rest are more like the get-rich-quick daydreams of film producers. On Christmas night, while Santa wept in his Arctic fastness, I went to see the only movie in town - Lord of the Rings: Big Elephants Gone Wild. I have to say that I was taken aback. For three and a half hours of screentime, I expect at least two and a half hours of Big Elehpants stomping around and tolerating the enemy non-combatants on their backs, with fifty two minutes reserved for plot twists and eight minutes for character developments and elf-related business. Instead I watched twenty minutes or so of elepahnts, several hours of hobbits gazing fondly at each other and leaping on beds, and a wretched eternity of people talking about battles and evil and destiny and honour and things that the heart tells you (why is it that you never hear phrases like "What does your mouth tell you?"). I'll tell you this: every moment spent on the brain-numbingly uninteresting troubles of elves, humans, and hobbits (with the exception of the daring hobbit-on-hobbit scene that opens the film) could profitably be spent on those angry elephants with more tusk and hoof than they know what to do with. In fact, I would have been happy to have watched a film about big elephants preparing to do battle with a bunch of pretentious quasi-Celts who spend their days looking doughty and decorating their breastplates. We could follow the story of an idealistic young Mumakil who joins in the fight and learns that Heroism and Glory are not at all what he thought they'd be, and that you have to watch out for those pesky elves.

parode - exode