the life sausage

2012.04.17
From this touching tale of adopting Banana, a once feral cat
I call it "The Life Sausage", and it's not height or width but total area that you want to maximize (or volume, if you're going the 3-axis route). You can live a hundred years if you never leave your home, never eat fatty foods, never risk love or sex for fear of failure and STDs - and your life sausage will be one long, emaciated pepperoni-stick of misery, hyperextended along one axis but barely registering on the others. You can fuck everything that moves, snort every synthetic that makes it past the blood-brain barrier, dive with sharks and wrestle 'gators and check out when your chute fails to open during the skydiving party on your sweet sixteenth. Your life sausage will be short but thick, like a hockey puck on-edge, and the sum total of the happiness contained therein will put to shame any number of miserable incontinent centenarians wasting away in the rest home. More typically the sausage will be a lumpy thing, a limbless balloon-animal lurching through time with fat parts and skinny parts and, more often than not, a sad tapering atrophy into loneliness and misery near the end. But in all these cases, the value of your life is summed up not by lifespan nor by happiness but by the product of these, the total space contained within the sausage skin.
An interesting way of looking at things! Link from Bill the Splut.
Boingboing asks What will stop Conservative America's progeny from having so much hot, wild, bareback sex?
At 120 calories Cracker Jack is a nice treat, but a paper "pencil topper" as the "secret toy surprise"?? Puh-leeze. At least do a sticker or something!