Dc Stewart

"Children are the only thing that we remove from a human body... and then keep."

-Jim Gaffigan

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

-Cory Doctorow, explaining his newly-coined term  “enshittification”

"let me pay"
"I brought beer"
"charges are dismissed"
"test results negative"
"that was close"
"reimbursement claim approved"
"emergency shutdown completed"
"witness has recanted"

if I got to keep my knowledge, I'd consider some kind of do-over

I fear that having prescient knowledge and wisdom would cause me to screw things up even worse trying to get a better life-deal than the first time around. What if I botch things so badly that I never meet my beloved soulmate in 1987?

I would, however, keep an eye out for Microsoft stock in the mid-80s.

This event has created five marriages in five years

Will ticket purchasers receive a full-value $2650 partner or the $450 discounted model? And, if 24 tickets are sold, will already-married people who paid full price receive a $2200 upgrade to their current partner?

National Lampoon solved this riddle back in the 1970s. And it worked for me.

"The sun is going down. Soon it will be dark." he said obviously.
(timeless wisdom from a Louis Lamour novel)

Didn't Monty Python once do a skit about this?


Customer: Morning.

Waitress: Morning.

Customer: What have you got?

Waitress:
Well, there's egg and bacon,
Egg sausage and bacon,
Egg and facts,
Egg, bacon and truth,
Egg, bacon, sausage and facts,
Facts, bacon, sausage and truth,
Truth, egg, facts, facts, bacon and truth,
Facts, sausage, truth, truth, facts, bacon, truth tomato and facts.

(... etc ...)

Choir sings: Facts, facts, facts, facts! Lovely facts! Wonderful facts!

Wife: Have you got anything without facts?

Waitress: Well, there's facts, eggs, sausage and truth. That's not got much facts in it.

Wife: I don't want any facts!

(... all Python fans know how it ends ...)

The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. (...) as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, but I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the State had in mind for me.

-Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

Wikipedia: Labours Of Hercules

Granted, Hercules could not have provided the video documentation necessary for badge approval. I'm confident that the approval board would waive this requirement, especially given Hercules's known habit of killing most anyone who got between him and his goals.

However, there are two badges that Hercules would clearly fail to obtain. The Augean Stables were cleaned by bringing in off-site materials (the rivers Alpheus and Peneus), thus violating the Local Materials requirement. Part of capturing the man-eating Mares Of Diomedes involved feeding them the flesh of their owner, King Diomedes. As Hercules did not show that Diomedes's flesh was Organic Or Better, the badge would be refused.

It is interesting to note that Hercules was not able to do SKIP work on the property owned by his parents. Luckily, his Labor Taskmaster (King Eurystheus) provided a number of SKIP properties for Hercules to use. Six of these were nearby, as shown on the map below.