Habitrails for all...

The other day, as I drove down the road in my sweatmobile, I was thinking about how Americans tend not to adapt to their environments. For example, here in Tucson, some people turn on their air conditioners in March and turn them off in October. But for a chunk of that time, it cools off at night, so you could open the windows after sundown and close them the next morning, and it would be very comfortable in the house. And when you finally need air conditioning, is it really necessary to have it on freezer burn cold?

But people would rather go from their air conditioned houses to their air conditioned cars to the air conditioned buildings and their only exposure to the heat is those short trips between buildings and cars.

So I thought "there should be a way to avoid having to go outside at all!" And of course that would be hamster balls. No, not little tiny testicles. But big round plastic air conditioned balls that airlock to your house and other buildings, so you just hop in it and start running.

Just think! It would drastically cut pollution. The population of fat people would decrease markedly. Accidents would be no big deal. You just bounce off each other.

Hills could be a problem -- I don't think this would work in San Francisco, for example -- you would have people having heart attacks trying to climb hills, and people getting spun to death going back down those hills. It could get bad, like my friend's hamster suicide: one day they forgot to close the basement door when the hamster was happily rolling around. Of course the ball headed directly to the top of the basement stairs, where it promptly went over the edge. The ball bounced on a couple of stairs, hit the concrete floor, cracked in two, and flung the hamster to its sad little death...

So maybe my giant hamster ball scenerio needs work. Eh. At least it kept me from noticing that I was becoming one giant sweat slick.