Wednesday, August 22, 2001

Kafkaesque's great idea #1: The Self-Mashing Potato

With the wonders of genetic tampering breaking new ground and giving scientists new ways to humiliate god's creatures, the time has come for a bold new product which will enable you to make mashed potatoes with almost zero effort: The Self-Mashing Potato. Right now in Kafkaesque Labs (hidden deep within a pile of bok choy that has lain untouched in the Safeway produce aisle for over a year), tiny elves are at work isolating the mashed potato genome. Once the DNA strand for "wanting to mash yourself" has been isolated, I am confident we will have produced a potato that will be capable of self-mashing. Many design factors have to be considered in the project of course. Namely:

1 How to make a potato grow an arm with which to perform the mashing.
2 How to stop the potato from mashing itself in the grocery store, in the car on the way home, or even en route to the boiling water.
3 How to make a potato which can survive the boiling and still be able to mash itself.

and of course, the biggie:
4 Wouldn't you be left with a tiny little unmashed potato arm?

Well, here's how I foresee the progression of the Self-Mashing Potato (or SMP if you will): eventually I envision a potato which not only mashes itself, but is genetically enhanced to include butter, salt, pepper and perhaps a pinch of garlic powder as part of its very internal structure. Maybe a central nervous system composed of these ingredients? Also, since the potato would have to grow an arm, it could even be set to work its way out of the pantry, pull itself up the stove and into the pan and calmly wait, possibly tapping its masher against the side of the pan until twenty minutes has gone by and the time for self-mashing is at hand. All you would have to do is put the water on to boil, saving you hundreds of man-hours per year and freeing up that much more time to watch Celebrity Skeet Shooting.

And we all want that, right?

Just picture it! A beautiful Yukon Gold crushing itself to death silently and inspirationally on your burner nightly, teaching your children a valuable lesson about dharma and the existential battle against cruel fate.

Have to work on the arm thing though.

Pages

Blog Archive