if you're smart and you know it, clap your hand

you know when you go to frye's or a mailing store and see those laminated pages that give you the 101 on a particular subject? it's like i want to buy every single one. for five dollars, i could become well-versed in any topic at hand. it's literally knowledge at your fingertips as you wait for the cashier. i wonder why they choose an electronics giant and mailing stores to prominently display these things. bookstores, sure, that's logical. but where's the obvious logic in placing a rack of them in mailbox etc? it's not a gift item, that's for sure. "thought you needed some brushing up on meiosis and mitosis, and here's the mix cd i promised you. love, jon."

if the baseline logic is that people in these stores would be enticed into an easy education, why not put them in fast food joints? who needs it more? the guy waiting in line with a $300 hard drive, or a guy eating $1 sandwiches every day? do you think your experience at mcdonald's could be enhanced with a few sparkcharts doubling as placemats? hell yes.

put the damn charts where the common folk go. cheap restaurants, grocery stores, starbucks, jamba juice, the gap. i don't need to see tabloids as i check out, i need to learn something about european history. actually, they should just cut to the chase and give the charts out as book covers for schools; but that would be too obvious a statement and ruin the whole idea that schooling leads to knowledge.

then again, say you knew everything there was to know on these cards, what good would that be? has anyone's life ever been (positively) irrevocably changed by a sparkchart? these "five minutes and you're smart" gimmicks are targeted toward the lazy people who won't actually want to study a subject in detail. the same people who think that a few pages of summaries can make them seem intelligent. no wonder i'm deathly attracted to these things. i'm exactly their target demographic.

my (not so) brilliant idea would be to combine sparkcharts with cigarettes. the packaging, the matches, the actual cigarette would be wrapped in information. then smoking would be destroying your body but enriching your mind. wouldn't that be worth five dollars (and a few less years lived)?

ps - while i'm here. did you know that the word "decimation" is derived from the latin word meaning "removal of a tenth." "it was a form of extreme military discipline used by officers in the roman army to punish mutinous or cowardly soldiers." read all about it. i hope to use this word correctly in a sentence this week. dude, you totally decimated that turkey!