A bag of crumpled up wrapping paper

Giving loaves of bread to everyone's children

To stop them from mauling nearby children, many grownups attach leashes to their dogs when they take them out on walks about town. Dogs, who are aware that they are the dominant party in the relationship, will take most opportunities to screw around with their human owners.

I recently saw a man walking his dog and his dog did a move where he wrapped his leash around a tree in such a way that the man had to nearly walk into the road and then hug the tree in order to not get hit by traffic but also in order to de-tangle the leash. I feel like if the dog makes you hug a tree, the dog wins. This man, an adult human, was defeated by his dog, using nothing more than a pretty small tree to assist. Hmm.

Bonus points for hitting it right in the center

I fully expect that some day soon an adult version of my daughter will time travel back from the future to warn me about the impending Machines War, or some similar calamity. I think most people would be utterly shocked with this interaction and would waste a whole lot of time on small talk and trying to convince themselves the interaction is real, and then catching up on minor family details.

I'd jump right into action, as I'm sure the training that I'm imparting right now on my daughter will have paid off in spades and the confidence and certain with wish she administers the secret time travelers fist bump upon the return of her future self will be executed sufficiently well to prove the urgency of her mission.

Party in the city where the heat is on

If popular accounts are to be believed, the Millenials spent almost every waking hour sending naughty pictures on the internet and "sexting" each other. This has led to some speculation that a Millenial can never be president, because they'll be too much digital evidence of them having been in their 20s, in ways that previous generations have not had to deal with.

I think a real power move for a Millenial right now who is on the verge of constant sexting but not quite in yet would be to adapt a "close ups only" policy. And by that I don't just mean that they use their phone camera digital zoom and hold their devices close to their hee-hoos and hoo-has, but what I mean is that they purchase an expensive traditional zoom lens, or maybe like an electron microscope, and get really really close pictures that way, and use those instead.

In a future presidential run, that will hardly be damning evidence, and it might just be seen as a sign of creativity, or being ahead of the game.

They would hunt rats and consume their corpses for energy

I was over a bridge recently and I saw a group of 8 or 9 men and women out there scraping paint off of a metal fence near a train track. They had a whole lot of fence in front of them, but the day was young, so I assume this was going to be the entirety of their task for at least that day if not for a few days. Presumably when they finished the scraping job there's going to be a re-painting job that has to be done.

My reaction to this situation is a sort of disgust that we don't have an army of robots that can climb all over the fence and use lasers to scrape off the bits that need scraping, and then a second army of robots that can come in and re-paint the parts that need painting. Other people in our society look at this situation and see a really healthy set of jobs and believe it's worth yelling about to keep those jobs around.

I think that "my side" is going to win this argument eventually, but not quickly or swiftly. I'd rather have those people doing something more interesting (or sitting on the beach!) while the robots manage the metal fences; and apparently the other side of the argument really likes it when these people get to do stuff with fences.

What if we invented a new technique?

There's a memorial plaque near my house that I walk by frequently and am distracted and bothered by basically every time I walk past it. For our purposes here it doesn't really matter what the memorial is for, but you should know that it has a list of six or so people on it, and it includes their full names and the year that they died in service of this thing that's being memorialized.

The problem for me is that they chose to list the names in chronological order using the year of death ... but then they must have realized they forgot someone, or unearthed some new records or something, because the very last name at the bottom of the list is not in chronological order, and is in fact very much out of chronological order.

I feel bad for the stone engraver who did this work. Imagine spending the time to put a list of names in order, engraving them into a rock, only to have some political official call you up and be like "yeah so we were looking through some papers and uh, turns out there's another guy for your list ... who died 80 years ago". I'm assuming this happened after the memorial had already been publicly installed and had to be added after the fact, because if it happened while it was still being made I'd like to think they would have started over and scrapped the old one and made a new one with the names in the right order.

I sort of want to go into the building where this thing is displayed and ask someone about this, but it's full of law enforcement types and I suspect that my name might be added to a new list if I did this. Maybe I could volunteer to pay the replacement cost of re-ordering the names on the thing, but that's sort of a slippery slope for me and could have wide-ranging budget implications if I'm going to start fixing everything I see that has a problem like this. This is especially true because I would probably try to upgrade the thing while I was at it, and introduce more technology to what had previously just been a rock sitting on some dirt.

I think the right move would have been to put the list of people in what could only be viewed as a random order -- don't order them by first name, last name or year of death. That way any passers by would not detect any pattern, and would focus instead on the presumably worthwhile lives led by this group of people who are listed on the thing there.