It’s about time that we, as a society, had a frank discussion about cutting boards. Everybody’s got a theory. I’ve heard people say to use one board dedicated for meat and one for vegetables. Someone else gave me some story about how chopping onions will make everything else taste like onions. And then you’re supposed to find one that doesn’t slide around, something that’s big enough to chop lots of stuff but compact enough to tuck away into a cupboard.

How about, enough with cutting boards all together? Am I the only one thinking that we, as a species, we’re supposed to have been evolved past the need to slice everything up on some stupid flat surface? When I was a little kid, I watched all of these old cartoons, like the Jetsons, stuff that imagined how the future would make everything easy, especially all of the housework, the cooking, the cleaning, the cutting and chopping.

Never mind the fact that I don’t have a robot housekeeper to make my bed and prepare my meals, shouldn’t I at least have some sort of a futuristic appliance that slices my vegetables and meats without the need of a cutting board? I always thought I’d have maybe like a light saber knife, or I don’t know, foods that come pre-sliced, everything should grow pre-sliced, man, it’s the future already, at least, from the time I was watching stupid future cartoons, shows that were already dated by the time I was watching them, whatever, twenty years later, now, this is the future. Why is everything basically the same?

Another frank discussion, this time about cotton swabs. I remember one time like five years ago I had this really bad earache, so bad that I finally had to go to the doctor. I’m not going to get into the gross details, but I left his office with some very explicit instructions: nothing in your ear smaller than your elbow.

And I was like, what kind of medial advice is that? It was some sort of a joke, his way of telling me to stop using Q-Tips, that it was pushing everything deep inside, making it easier for ear problems to develop. Well how about we just come up with some safer Q-Tips, cotton swabs that, instead of having cotton at the end, they have maybe like a hundred tiny little claws, and they’re robotic, so they keep opening and closing?

But yeah, it’s probably a little more complicated than just having a robot arm open and close at random intervals inside your ear. No, you’re going to need someone to pilot the futuristic Q-Tips. Again, it’s simple. The technology is available. You get one of those very small cameras, that goes at the end. Then you have one of your friends pilot the robot arms, collect the earwax, deposit it outside. If you’re on really good terms with whoever you’re living with, and you guys get in a good groove, it really shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, fifteen, tops. But you live by yourself? No problem. You could go on the Internet and find another loner to help you out. And you’d help them out. It’s a win-win.

It’s like shampoo. Let’s do it, let’s have that frank discussion about shampoo. Why does it sting your eyes? Do we really need it? Why do we still have hair anyway? If you ever look at that drawing, that illustration of the monkey that turns into a caveman that turns into a human being, there’s a definite progression, a loss of hair. You go from monkey, he’s covered in hair, and then caveman is only kind of covered in hair. As humans we might think, we’ve arrived, finally, we have hair only on our heads and on certain parts of our body.

But we should be even further evolved to have no hair at all. And that way if you walked into CVS and asked someone, “Hey man, where’s the shampoo?” they’d look at you like you were crazy, like what are you talking about? Shampoo? You mean that stuff that we use to clean the hair off of our less evolved animal cousins? I don’t know, maybe you can find some over in aisle eight, right next to ear care, right by those mechanical non-cotton swabs. And hey man, are you single? Like, I’m not trying to ask you out, it’s just that, would you pilot my Q-Tips? My Internet’s out and I’m having trouble finding someone to man the controls. What do you say, it shouldn’t take more than fifteen, twenty minutes, tops. Cool?