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Discuss Amongst Yourselves - January 23, 2006

Let's pretend for a second that the time machine from Napoleon Dynamite actually worked--his problem being that he didn't endure the pain for long enough. You've purchased this device off the Internet and it will work, but only twice: once to bring you back or forward in time, and once to return you to the present. As evidenced in the movie, however, the device causes 'significant groin trauma.' Would you be brave enough to use this device and where would you go with it?

Comments

Anonymous said…
I would use it to go forward in time to get the plans for building a time machine that would work without causing groin trauma.

I would be able to suffer the first bout of trauma by using my considerable mental powers to channel all of my pain into your groin.
Anonymous said…
'Significant groin injury' - no way, man.

I already gave birth to achieve that.

I don't need anymore.

Even if I could go forward in time to seduce the offspring of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Regardless of gender.

That kid is going to be smokin' HOT.
Anonymous said…
I would cock it up, because I wouldn't take the machine seriously, and I'd have to live with the lingering disappointment of having wasted my wish being flippant. You know, I'd probably go back in time and marry my grandfather, or slur out the basic principles of the Teller-Ulam design at a soirée with Adolf and Eva, or just lose the device somewhere in the eighteenth century and spend the remaining fifteen years of my life being exhibited to the curious and the jaded in a straw-lined cell in Moorfields.

I don't know. It's asinine to think of stealing a great deal of money, or checking out a stack of technical manuals from the library, or some such chicanery, and escaping to the past; the past is a foreign country, and one would be a suspicious and half-cracked stranger, at best, and, at worst, a dangerous lunatic providing food and lodging for a gaggle of devils. And the future is worse, because you can't take anything of value with you (or, if you can, it's only because things didn't go as planned and the men of tomorrow have gone back to throwing their ordure out the second-storey window facing the street), and in any case you don't even get a Baedeker when you go forward.

All that having been said, however, I'm still not wooden enough to decide to visit my younger self and deliver the pearls of invaluable wisdom I have stored up over the long years, guaranteeing myself a serene adolescence and a willingness to stop and smell the horseshit along the long and winding...

Fuck it. I'd liquidate everything and buy a rifle and a few bars of silver, learn by rote early gunpowder-manufacturing techniques, grab a few books on basic steam engine design, distilling, papermaking, and chemical engineering, together with a copy of Plutarch and a Wheelock's Latin and head back to central Italy around 55 BC, turn myself into an industrial magnate, not omitting to remind Caesar about the Ides of March, get myself posted to the governorship of Syria, drive south-east into Mesopotamia, and strike oil. Following the development of which resource, I would retire to a villa in Campania, staffed by a few dozen young and slender slaves.

Or something.
Anonymous said…
That being said...
I'd have to go back in time to stop you, Bill.
Jay said…
I'm thinking...no.
And my groin thanks me.

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