1. Our airplanes are designed by people who read Dilbert and Far Side.

2. Life forms never devolve or evolve during a flight.

3. We don't have to worry about warp-core breaches every other flight.

4. We only get shot at by Russians, not Klingons.

5. We have seatbelts for the flight crew.

My friend Linda went to Arkansas last week to visit her in-laws, and while she was there she went to the store. She parked the car in the parking lot, next to a car with a woman sitting in it with her eyes closed and her hands behind her head. This woman looked odd to Linda, but she figured she must be sleeping. When Linda came out a little while later, she saw the same woman in her car, with her eyes open, but her hands still behind her head. The woman looked very strange, so Linda tapped on the window and said, "Are you okay?" and the woman said, "I have been shot in the head, and I am holding my brains in."

Linda didn't know what to do, so she ran into the store and the supermarket called the paramedics. They had to break into the car because the door was locked. When they got in the car, they found that she had bread dough on the back of her head, in her hands.

Apparently, a Pillsbury biscuit canister had exploded in the heat of the car and hit her in the back of the head, making a loud explosion like that of a gun shot. When she went back to feel what it was, she felt the dough and thought it was her brains. She passed out from fear at first, and then attempted to keep her brains in.

I went to the fridge and removed the six-month-old food embalmed in the tupperware that had stuck to the fridge racks.

Actually, it was more of a geological timeline, going back further in time the further back I looked in the fridge. First, the smal white beans that I'd left in there without eating because every time I tried to I'd fart up a storm for the next day and a half. That was put in there about a month ago. Not usually fast enough to spoil, but unpreserved cooked beans seem to have a pretty fast half-life, so it smelled like pre-fart when I pushed the contents down the drain.

Next came the four-month-old beef curry stew. That fared surprisingly well; I imagine it had to do a little with the vacuum seal and a little with the fact that some of the contents were frozen. Down the drain, no offensive smell.

Last came the six-month-old chinese fried rice. The top of the contents was frozen, so I said, "no sweat, this'll be easy." At which point I opened it up and this giant puff of gas, who identified Himself as "Chiang-Sha, God of Six-Month-Old Chinese Fried Rice Gone Bad (copyright and trademark of Chiang-Sha, patent on 'Nth-Month-Old Chinese Fried Rice Gone Bad, where N is a number between Five and Three-Hundred Seventeen' pending)", was suddenly released.

I destroyed His abode, and in doing so, invoked the curse of Chiang-Sha, which is, that He shall drain me of every nasal fiber of my being as long as He has the strength to do so, He shall. While classical diffusion will no doubt defeat Him in the long term, His local concentration is such that he could quite conceivably kill me in the short term.

I am in the bedroom. The permeating stench making its way through indicates that He is coming this way. The only way out is through the window. To give you an idea of how bad the smell is, allow me to remind you that I'm on the second story, and that escape means that one or both of my legs are very likely going to be inconvenienced.

It will be worth it.