Some things I wrote

Here are a couple of things I wrote for No Shame Theater:

Business Concept: Two Dimensional Food
by Evan Schenck

[lights up]

Evan: I came up with a business plan last night, and I’m going to pitch it to you, the No-Shame audience. I am giving you the right of first refusal, here. Okay, get ready, because I’m about to wow you. Here’s the concept: Two Dimensional Food.

I’m not talking about stuff that merely APPEARS to be two-dimensional, like tortillas or fruit-by-the-foot. I’m talking about food that is literally two-dimensional, having length and breadth but no depth. This would result in a completely planar food without mass or volume. The applications of this are obvious. The food would possess flavor, but because it took up no space and had no mass, you could eat as much of it as you wanted without ever getting full. People like eating ice-cream and cakes, right? But they don’t like getting fat, and you can get filled up on them and not get the right nutrients. But people would come and pay to eat our two-dimensional food, and they’d get a great taste that doesn’t ever fill them up. This is a win-win proposition, because the customers would be able to just keep buying until they had to leave and get actual filling meal somewhere else.

Okay, I can tell that you want to ask me, “Evan, how are you going to produce this two-dimensional food?” I’m not sure yet, which is why I need an initial investment, so I can do some feasibility studies. One idea I have is putting the food in the middle of a hardcover book, shutting that book, and putting something heavy on top. I’ve already tried this out with gummy bears and it works. Assuming that the flatness of the end product scales in linear fashion with the heaviness of the weight, all I need to do is find an infinitely heavy object and we’ll be in business.

Your next question, of course, is, “Evan, if the food is two-dimensional, wouldn’t it then have an infinitely narrow edge, effectively no edge at all, and therefore be infinitely sharp and capable of cutting through virtually anything?” The answer to that question is yes, the food will be unbelievably dangerous. This will require us to post disclaimers on the menu which will absolve us of any legal liability. Problem solved.

I will be selling shares in the company after the show, anybody who is interested should speak to Eli.

[lights down]


Museum Tour Audiotape
by Evan Schenck

[Lights up]

Narrator: Now, walk north through the arch into the Adolf Hitler exhibit, which was constructed and filled with paintings through a generous donation from automobile manufacturer Henry Ford. In 1936 Ford granted the museum ten million dollars in the name of German dictator Adolf Hitler and stipulated that the museum must never rename the exhibit. The museum attempted to escape this clause in 1941, 1944, 1946, 1951, and 1982, but in each case was thwarted by Mr. Ford’s estate. The Adolf Hitler exhibit features paintings and sculpture by artists of undisputedly Aryan extraction on a rotating basis, as per Mr. Ford’s instructions.

The painting before you presently is entitled “Der übernatürlich Alpentraum” and was painted by the German artist Gerd Christian Helmut Florian Hans Wiesler von Turm an der Oder. It was commissioned by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund in 1425, and is an attempt by a German artist to improve upon Italian Renaissance painting. Linear perspective, which allowed three-dimensional images to be depicted in two-dimension paintings, had been invented by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1415, and competition among artists to invent the next improvement in painting was fierce. von Turm believed that the next step was to increase the level of perspective in the painting beyond even that attainable by the naked eye.

To this end, he created a painting that depicts not only three dimensional space but the full extent of fourth dimensional space as viewed from a fixed point. The practical effect of this is that, by viewing this painting, one can simultaneously observe all moments in time, past, present and future, showing a view of the location of the Cologne Cathedral of Germany. Look closely at the painting now. Observe feudal serfs digging the foundation of the cathedral in the early 13th century. Observe a microwave laser incinerating the city of Cologne from space in the early 23rd century. Observe small mammals wandering through a prehistoric forest a few million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Observe the light of the Big Bang shining in the endless void. At the opposite end, observe the heat death of the universe, the entropy at the end of all time.

If by some chance you are going to die in a place visible in the painting, we apologize, as you have also observed your own death. We advise you to take no steps to avert this fate, because any such effort is futile. Any stress resulting from observation of one’s own death is solely the responsibility of the museum patron, as detailed in the waiver that you signed upon entering the museum. To put it in perspective, you have also observed the death of the entire universe. Thank you for visiting the Adolf Hitler exhibit. Please return next week, when we will be exhibiting a series of Dürer woodcuts depicting unusual rabbits.

[lights down]

Economics

In common with the first presidential debate, I left tonight's televised spectacle in disgust after about 20 minutes. The Vice-Presidential debate entertained me somewhat more. There were two reasons for this.

1) Sarah Palin's bizarre personal style. I divine two possible explanation for her performance. Either she really does talk like that and she saw no reason to gussy up her elocution, or she spent some time with a DVD of Fargo cribbing from Frances McDormand's Oscar-winning riff on a woman from a small town in the Northern Districts of America. Either way she chose to exude that aura. "You betcha"? Winking at the camera? What a trainwreck, what a ridiculous person. Just going from her appearance at that debate (which she chose, and carefully!) can you imagine her pinch-hitting for McCain, across the table from Sarkozy or, God Forbid, Vladimir Putin (the bogeyman himself!)?

Of course the argument goes that she is actually a canny operator and that her attitude was carefully massaged, which I'm willing to believe. But the reverse is that she represented what the GOP thinks we want. That implied insult ought to be enough to send American voters running away from them at the polls, but who I am kidding. It horrified and entertained me, at any rate. I like to imagine that McCain's vice-presidential selection was controlled by John Waters--"Who will be the most tawdry and grotesque while still being at least a simulation of politics?"

2) Rum. Katy and I drank for the debate, which put a glow on it and made it enjoyable.

Tonight, though, I was bored and agitated by the rules of the debate, most prominently that the candidates were not allowed to engage one another. Just before I quit watching, McCain took an opportunity to lie about Barack Obama's tax plan, and then Brokaw refused to allow Barry to address the falsehood. It would have been against the rules, sure, but if that's the case then the rules sucked.

I also had a problem with both candidate's answer to the question about whether the economy was still going to be messed up even after the bail-out (no wait, we're calling it a rescue now). Both of them dodged. This is stupid. The economy is not going to be okay, even if the present crisis is averted, because the problem is systemic rather than temporary. We've had two major bubbles in the past ten years (remember the Dot-Coms?) because of how our economy is structured. It is designed to favor explosive growth and so it seeks to create opportunity for it even when none exists. Entirely speculative value is the result, as in the late 1990s; companies that did nothing to produce wealth were assigned illusory dollar values. More recently, the housing market increased trillions of dollars in value in spite of the fact that it had scarcely changed physically. Why did this value rise? Demand rose! Why was demand rising? Because the value was rising! Get in, cash in, take a loan to buy a house.

In hindsight it was clearly a bubble, but even the financial giants were taken in by it, sustaining and extending the bubble to make their buck, and now we're paying the price of exuberance. And of course it is going to hurt. Several trillion dollars in illusory value disappeared from the economy a year ago August, there is going to be an economic contraction in consequence. The lesson should be that we need to set up provisions to prevent such bubbles from ever occurring again, to design the economy for stability and steady growth rather than explosive expansion and dizzying contraction. But neither candidate indicated that he had especially learned this lesson.