I read an article recently about a man who invented a phone that you wear on your wrist, like a watch or a "What Will Jesus Do" bracelet. The interesting thing about this new device is that you listen to it by sticking your finger into your ear! The wrist-o-phone, as I call it, vibrates your hand slightly, and those vibrations climb their way up your hand, through your ear canal and into your brain! As if this wasn't amazing enough, the inventor is also working on a wearable television. The receiver is made out of metal foil and is worn like a hat, and the video is viewed by pushing hard on both eyes with your thumbs. Truly, at no time in the history of humanity have we been closer to living in the future!

And yet, with all these advances, from computers to animatronic fish to wrist-o-phones, some answers continue to elude us. For instance: scientists still do not know what the square root of seven is. The square root of two was known to the ancient Egyptians, and Sir Isaac Newton invented the square root of three more than a century ago. These days, even social scientists know what the square root of four is. However, ask the tallest physicists in all the land for the square root of seven, and you're likely to get a blank stare, or at best a computer-generated "estimate" that runs to thousands of digits and still isn't correct. What you won't get is a straight answer, and we're no closer to finding one today than we were the day before yesterday. Congressional funding is non-existent, and the fickle public eye is trained on more glamorous sciences, like pornology and sub-atomic sandwiches. Until we as a nation get our priorities straight, the square root of seven will likely remain out of our reach.

When faced with a seemingly senseless mystery such as this, most people respond with cliched confusion. "If we can put pizza on a bagel," they say, "why can't we figure out one simple square root?" Old people (and Brendan Frasier) who don't know that we modern humans can eat pizza any time, are likely to reference the analogous feat of their out-dated era: "If we can put a man on the moon," they begin, and that's all the incentive I need to start ignoring them, if I wasn't already. Why? Because the moon landing is a joke. You know those fake prize giveaways that police departments run to catch dangerous criminals? The moon landing was just such an event, designed specifically to fool the kooks and crackpots across the country. Whether it really happened or not is meaningless, as long as all of us normal folk know the truth. Every time a new Geocities web page reveals "the truth," a buzzer goes off deep inside the fake mountain that houses our REAL government, and another sucker is added to The List.

To close out this high-tech essay, I'd like to list off some ridiculous inventions that by all rights we should have in this crazy modern world, but do not. Most of you are hoping that I'll include the one about creating anti-gravity with a cat and a piece of buttered toast, which is one of your 'favorites.' A few of you were thinking of something else, but now you too are hoping for the Amazing Cat-Toastamatron. Unfortunately, you are all about to be disappointed, because I categorically refuse to include even the slightest mention of such an old joke. No, were I to make such a list, it would consist entirely of clever new witticisms, the likes of which the world will never see. In a hundred years, when you're being downloaded into your new electronic brain, you'll consider all the advances of the past century and the things that never came to be, and then you'll think of my list. Then you will think of the toast-cat, and you'll chuckle to yourself with a cold rasping laugh that echoes through the empty place where your soul once was. Then you will say, "Does not compute!" or "What is this 'crying'?", and then some kid will teach you how to love.