#WriteMeSomethingFunnyGrok Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, fellow carbon-based gas bags… Apple Computer has done it again. They looked at the human condition, they looked at the human colon, and they said, “You know what this species really needs? A sleek, overpriced, beautifully boxed electronic fart.” Introducing the iFart. Not the Windows Fart. Not the Google Fart. Not the Oracle Enterprise Fart Management Suite. Not Adobe Creative Cloud Fart. The iFart. Designed in California. Assembled in a factory that smells faintly of regret and cinnamon. What does it do? It farts. That’s it. That’s the whole miracle. You push the little button — the one that looks like it was designed by a monk who meditates on rectangles — and it emits a digitally sampled, high-fidelity, 16-bit flatulence event. Warm. Wet. Philosophical. Sometimes it even has a little whistle at the end, like your uncle after chili night in 1974. Steve Jobs did not invent the fart. God invented the fart. What Jobs invented was the experience of the fart. The ecosystem of the fart. The closed garden of the fart, so nobody else’s fart can get in and contaminate your precious, proprietary gas. Why the iFart is superior Windows PC Fart Microsoft’s version requires three service packs, a restart, a second restart because the first one hung on “Configuring Fart Updates,” and then it still blue-screens mid-toot and dumps a 400-page error log that says, in tiny print, “The fart has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.” Also it comes bundled with Internet Explorer Fart, which nobody asked for and which leaks. Google Fart Free. Always listening. It records every fart you ever made, sells the metadata to advertisers, and then suggests, “People who farted near a Taco Bell also searched for ‘how to look innocent in an elevator.’” It never actually farts. It just indexes farts. Oracle Fart Costs $47,000 a year plus consulting. Requires a DBA. Stores your farts in a relational database with 14 foreign keys and a stored procedure named PKG_RELEASE_GAS. If you want to actually hear the fart you have to file a ticket and wait six weeks. Larry Ellison uses his on a yacht. Adobe Fart Beautiful interface. You can Photoshop the fart. Add layers. Apply a Gaussian Blur to the smell. Export it as a .PSD file that nobody else can open without a subscription. Then they change the file format every eighteen months and your old farts become unreadable. Also it crashes if you sneeze. The iFart just works. It syncs wirelessly with your iButt. It has a Retina display so you can watch the waveform of your own shame in high resolution. There’s a little app called FartTunes where you can buy extra farts for ninety-nine cents: “Wet One in Church,” “Silent But Deadly Board Meeting,” “Grandma’s After-Thanksgiving Special.” Steve Jobs takes thirty percent of every single one. Even the ones that smell like cabbage. Compatibility This is important. The iFart is fully backward-compatible with older programmable farts. You remember those? The ones from the seventies? The ones you programmed with a paper tape and a prayer? The ones that went BRRRRTTTT and then caught fire? The iFart will talk to them. It speaks FORTRAN Fart. It speaks COBOL Fart. It even speaks that weird one your cousin built in the garage that only worked if you held the antenna and thought about your ex-wife. There’s a little adapter. Costs extra, of course. Apple never met an adapter it didn’t want to charge you forty bucks for. But it works. Your grandfather’s analog whoopee cushion from 1962 will now play through Bluetooth and appear in your iCloud Fart Library. Permanently. Even after you die. Especially after you die. They’ve thought of everything. There’s even a setting called “Airplane Mode.” It does not stop the fart. It just makes the fart quieter so the guy in 14B doesn’t know it was you. (It was you.) People will say, “But it’s just a fart machine.” Yes. And the iPhone was just a phone. And the iPod was just a Walkman that didn’t eat your cassettes. And Steve Martin is just a guy with an arrow through his head who can also play banjo and make you believe, for three beautiful minutes, that the universe is a wild and crazy place. The iFart is not just a product. It is a lifestyle. It is a religion. It is the sound your soul makes when it realizes it has been holding it in since 1973. So go ahead. Stand in line for thirty-six hours. Pay seven hundred dollars for something your body already does for free. Then walk into a crowded room, press that little glowing button, and let civilization know: I am here. I am human. And I just spent more money than a used Pinto to electronically announce that I ate the burrito. Thank you. Good night. Don’t forget to recycle the box. The box is prettier than the product. That’s the Apple way.

To a man like Elon Musk, Ambulatory Biological Child Decantation Vessels are a dime a dozen.

In '63, Dennis Hopper played a Neo-Nazi unknowingly working for Hitler’s ghost in The Twilight Zone. “He’s Alive” dropped the usual aliens and monsters to confront real-world neo-fascism head-on. Rod Serling wanted to expand it into a feature, but it was deemed too controversial.