Off At Tangents: Tip Bin Shuffle

I sold my thoughts for a penny. Now I have no more thoughts, but I'm going to melt the penny down for the copper and buy back even more thoughts than I had before.

w**king to the national anthem? Call 1-800-418-3391 and you can be selected for a free set of earrings!

Someone stitch THAT on a pillow!

Badgers bite, windmills plow.

Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in about a million years.

Regular rakes aren't needed.

*Phew*

After my last book, Blood and Borderless, my editors all but demanded a second set in the present time. My writing style does not permit this. In Blood and Borderless, enough European nations united to influence, over time, the world. I will call them a 'worldwide cult' for lack of a better term. This cult believed in the selective breeding of humans to accomplish tasks necessary to advance humanity. They would not force you to take a job you may have been bred for. It was all merely a suggestion, which, who wouldn't want to work at something that suited them perfectly? You, the reader, would not? Fair enough. There are many other jobs available around the globe. Which would you like? This worldwide cult believed in letting one choose who one lived with, where one lived and how one got around. Sure you can take the hovercar on Sundays and the bullet train the rest of the week. Absolutely you can drown away the painful (but manageable and well-compensated) work-week on Saturday (but no drunk driving in the hovercars, bub. Autopilot's got you covered). In short, it was a utopia. And it was, to me, believable. Why would writing a book in the present day be unbelievable to me, then? At present, can you imagine your life ending happily? Do you think your kids' will be any happier? Their kids? I'll assume you said yes and pretend to ignore you. No! You can't. Exactly! That's why I can't write a book set in the world we live in today. One simply can't imagine it improving in a way that some groups don't hold considerable grudges. We're fighting over things that we could be shaking hands on. We compete for who can leak the least news on wasting resources during the Olympics. We have our armed forces watching new leaders be elected, eyeing both the crowd and the new head of office with the same suspicion. We leave other countries to their own devices because they can figure it out themselves. No. This is going nowhere. It's not something I can finish with a happy ending. In fact, I don't think it will ever end. And that is why I live in the present but I will always write in the past.

I would suggest you get a can of compressed air.

Yellow rings appear when I close my eyes. Should I produce high end cable shows again?