If I Ruled the World ...

... I would feed the children and fix global warming and kill all Republicans and blah blah blah. But then I'd get to the real work, which would be:

Making Public Restrooms Less Ambiguous: If there's one thing I hate about public restrooms, it's ambiguity. Ya know? If it's a one-person restroom, I try the knob. It seems to be locked. So I stand and wait. But wait, maybe I didn't try hard enough? I mean, I encountered a little resistance, but maybe it needs a bit more? I really gotta use the restroom here -- this is no time for half-measures!

So maybe I should try again. But then, I don't want to be that jackass who yanks at a locked door furiously, incredulous that a public restroom could be occupied with another human being. So I stifle the growing urgency in my bowels and wait a bit more.

Has this happened to you? Probably. I don't know, who gives a shit about you? This is me we're talking about. And I don't like not knowing for sure whether or not a bathroom is occupied. So that's why, if I ruled the world, all bathrooms would be like the ones on planes.

Except, not in almost every way. Bathrooms on planes are tiny and harsh, and like all things on planes, they transform what should be a glorious adventure (We're flying, goddamn it! A thousand million feet the air!) into a horrorscape of cramped, sanitized, polite agony.

But the one and only thing they do right on planes is the little light on the very top of the bathroom door that indicates whether or not it's occupied. And there's really no way that thing could lie. You slide the lock firmly into place, and the light goes on. Simple. Unambiguous.

And it spells comfort on the other side of the door as well. There are too many public restroom locking systems that are way too unreliable. I'm at the point where, if I encounter one of those locks where you press button inside the knob, I assume it's broken. It scoff at locks in knobs. I spit on them and curse them to El Diablo Chupacabra Hombre, the twisted demon child of Satan and the Chupacabra who is also a hombre, whatever that is exactly.

But a nice latch -- that's a different story. A big, solid latch that fits firmly into place, that is. Not one of these puny-ass little pencil-sized rods that casually slide into a shaky latch that hangs onto a door frame for dear life. I once went to the bathroom at Robert Frost's ancestral home in Vermont, "locked" one of those pathetic little wangles, and then had two people, in quick succession, burst through that flimsy facade straight into the bathroom. Each time I shouted "Someone's in here, SOMEONE'S IN HERE, SOMEONE'S IN HERE!!!!" until the fucking morons realized that someone indeed might be in here. This is the kind of emotionally scarring personal tragedy that I'm trying to avoid, people. To this day I still can't read Robert Frost without wanting to shit on his head. (I don't know if that's exactly related. Something about Robert Frost's head seems very shit-on-able. Maybe that's just me.)

Anyway, point is -- when I rule the world, all public bathrooms meant for one person will have massive deadbolts. And closing the deadbolt will trigger a massive light taking up the entire door that flashes the words "SOMEONE'S IN HERE!!!!!" If it breaks, you better fix it immediately, or I throw you in the pit of lava with the Republicans.

Banning the "Two Words: Blah Blah" Thing: You know this. People think they're hilarious and sassy when they say, "OK, two words: Less makeup" or "Three words: Shit on Robert Frost's head." I don't know why, but I hate it. So it's out.

OK, that one wasn't that great. So I'm going to switch tracks and talk about the English language. It's awesome, you know that? Through thousands of years of evolution, this marvelous language's glorious history of artistic achievement has culminated into a blog post about shitting on Robert Frost's head! Isn't that marvelous? And Awesome?

But it really is a very unique language. It's a language made up of a whole bunch of other languages smooshed together, like a turtle in a vat of peanut butter. That made no sense at all, but I'm going with it. Not sure why.

So we start our story with the Saxons. They were minding their own business up there in England, worshiping Baal, eating mint chutney, and playing the mezuzah, a traditional Jewish fife that is very small and is attached to doors. Then along came the Romans, who conquered them for no reason besides that they just liked to do that sort of thing.

The Romans eventually went away, and ended up not having a lot of lasting effect on the language. So I'm not sure why I mentioned them. But I'm on a roll, so here we go.

Then just dumb stuff happened until England was conquered by the Normans in 1066. The Normans were French, and they brought over a whole bunch of Frenchies to rule everything. And of course, because they were French, they preferred to continue to speak French and to be real dicks about it. Their words eventually got smooshed into the turtle/peanut butter pie like so much mayonnaise. Words like "rapport" and "pistol" and another 30% of all English words, according to this Wikipedia article I just found, are of French origin.

So now you have Saxon and French words living in the same language. But wait, there's still the Catholic Church. It was really into speaking Latin, because Jesus spoke Latin, seeing as how He was such a fan of the Roman Empire and all. Latin became the language of all written texts. And even though the few cognoscenti who could read Latin also spoke English, they couldn't bear to utter many of those low-class, insufficiently syllabled Saxon words. So they had to shift Latin words into English, words like "cognoscenti."

They ended up creating loads of synonyms. They would say "feline" instead of "cat." They would say "timorous" instead of "weak." They coined thousands of words that meant exactly the same thing as existing words, but you know what, those Latin-based words just sounded better, more sophisticated, more ... what's the word I'm looking for ... elitist. No other language has this sort of parallel construction, in which there's a "high" and "low" way to say almost everything.

Hence, business-speak. Listen to a businessperson talk and all those ten-dollar words where a one-dollar one would do are of Latin origin. That "professional" air he/she's trying to cultivate is just the elitism of the medieval nobility in a modern guise. It's a time-honored way of saying "Hey, I'm a one of you superior types. Not one of THOSE people. We will now get along famously and wear polo shirts and play golf and laugh loudly and shit on Robert Frost's head!"

Oh, I'm sorry. I meant to say "defecate on Robert Frost's cranium." Now you're with me, right, fellow elite! A-shitting we go!