Children: scourge of your western empire or "marry me and have my babies"?
As the classic SAT question reminds us, children are to unprotected sex as hangovers are to drinking. And just like F-ing up the SAT's, accidentally popping out a kid or two can really screw up your afternoon.Yet, surprisingly, children do have some admirable qualities. As their school performances attest, they often delight us with their poorly performed song and dance. Children also make great domestic servants, and, as most parents are aware, they’re adept at annoying the shit out of complete strangers, in a way that would get you, as an adult, quickly punched in the face.
A typical Chuck E. Cheese's in the 1880’s. The device shown is the precursor to the modern ski-ball game.
...Oh and they’re also that essential thing about propagating our species and stuff.Besides the aforementioned, one of the things that children appear to be universally gifted with is the ability to fantasize. The average child is able to come up with imaginary worlds and scenarios that are only matched, in adult terms, by an ex-SNL star on a speedball.
To put it more scientifically, clinical experiments have long documented that as we age our reservoir of imagination shrivels and dries up proportional to our fading youth and ebbing, idealistic dreams of ever achieving happiness. Concordantly, this leads the very principle difference between a children’s store and an adult store. Whereas a fun noodle, for example, simply augments a child’s broken tree branch/imaginary sword of bad-guy slaying, the adult’s ball-gag and rubber gimp suit can make the critical difference between an unforgettable night or another uncontrollable session of post-coitus sobbing.
Props can make anything sexy. See above.
That said, women and eunuchs are right to remind us that adult imagination is not used solely for deviant fetishes. Over the millennia, there have been a myriad of works that great minds have put their imagination to, such as civilization-changing inventions, awe-inspiring creative works, and of course, ungodly deviant sexual fetishes.
Wait...no, again I meant something other then deviant fetishes. :\
To that end, perhaps the most culturally ubiquitous, higher-minded adult fantasy would be the notion that this life is not the end, that we can perhaps maintain some semblance of ourselves after death. In short, that we might achieve some measure of immortality.
As most of us know, immortality is the conditional threat behind most organized religion. In Christianity, for example, pious Christians can expect the reward of Heaven, an afterlife where one lives eternally with one’s religiously conservative relatives and other saintly buzzkills. Such a state would also seem to preclude any need to indulge in biological necessities, such as eating, sleeping, and sex, so you can pretty much kiss those goodbye too (I’m not exactly sure how this applies to the 72 virgins of Islam however).
While religion and a never-ending family reunion obviously makes eternity sound wildly fun, our more worldly fiction writers have typically viewed immortality in a more negative light. The Wikipedia article Immortality in fiction lists off banal plotlines involving immortality ad nauseam. Even worse, many of the current routes to biological immortality involve unpleasant things, such as having your head removed from your kind-of-but-not-really dead body and preserved in a deep freeze until such time that technology is sufficiently advanced enough to restore you, culminating in the worst morning of your re-life. There’s also the option of having your personality digitally uploaded to a computer, resulting in a program accessed less often then Super 3D Noah's Ark.
Dinosaurs not included.
Well, that is, everything that’s not notable enough for a Wikipedia article...
Besides being immortal herself, Wikipedia now bares listing of an animal that is, in fact, biologically immortal. I’d explain this seemingly impossible abomination further, as was the ultimate purpose of this entry, but I wasted all of my time in the laying my long-winded introduction. Whatev.
Awesomeness tip: If you check out the article, you'll quickly note the missing section describing how this discovery has brought scientists one step closer toward creating unstoppable race of vampiric super-predators, as this has long been a goal of modern science. You can help fill this void by visiting the Hydra wikilink for another suspected immortal monster that has actually garnered some pictures.
