The Unbearable Bobness of Being

Ethical Dilemma: Saving Carmen Ollapi

We had landed safely in Orchid Zone - Alpha Zulu on Jungle Planet z-890.89 in the Gemmy Belt of Outer Horatio. Me and my crew disembarked and stood panting on the steamy, humid surface of Jungle Planet z-890.89. 

As Captain, or as I liked to call myself, "Admiral Bucky Top Dog of the Seven Heavens," I was responsible first and foremost for the safety of the landing crew. Unfortunately, in almost no time flat after setting down, a giant cattleya lueddemannniana maximus jungle orchid, displaying behavior very unorchid like, swept its flower head down and gobbled up my Weight Transfer Management Engineer IV (i.e. Maynard Sandak) just like that. We all started screaming as nobody expected these peaceful jungle flowers which had been seeded on all the Jungle Planets in the Gemmy Belt of Outer Horatio as they were steamy carbon dioxide rich planets with suitable soils for massive fertilizer bomb attacks as well as favorable gravitational dynamics and hydrological metrics, to be quite so, unruly.

Upon rapidly reembarking in the landing craft and wondering out loud what hellish monstrosities had we awakened in our highly paid career trajectories working for the giant florists of Alpha Centauri Florists and Gifts Inc. trying to determine the most suitable extraction technologies for all the now mature and, as we were quite suddenly made aware, robust specimens of former gorgeous earth flowerosities, I realized to my sudden horror that not all of us had reentered the craft and that our Soil Density and Hydrological Surveyer Trainee, Carmen Ollapi, was still in the jungle in Orchid Zone - Alpha Zulu. I attempted to summon Carmen on my radio but heard nothing. Then there was banging on the door of the craft, banging with a tool,  likely metallic, I guessed a Soil Density Probing Auger by the ring of it, and before we could open the door to bring Trainee Ollapi in, the ship began to shake and shimmy as huge orchids and bougainvilleas and vines and many other kinds of plants encircled and attacked the landing craft!

I had a command level decision to make in that very moment, do I risk all of our lives, in the few seconds we had to restart the craft and blast out of there before we were ingested by insanely evil mutant jungle foliage, to save Trainee Ollapi who, I must now confess (although the crew knew it all along, the bastards) was my space squeeze, my interstellar love thing, and who was, at that very moment, tugging and stretching my heartstrings as though they were strings on a Zorakian Skin-Lute, as she pounded desperately, furiously, maniacally with her Soil Density Probing Auger against the only door in or out of the landing craft if you don't count the escape pod bay release hatches below, easily opened from the outside or in. There was, according to the post-incident administrative investigation exactly a 32.98% chance of successfully retrieving Trainee Carmen AND taking off.

What would you do? What do you think I did? 

Ethical Dilemmas: Chocolate Sky Monster Pudding

You remember when you were eight years old and that boring gray cloudy Sunday afternoon you invented Chocolate Sky Monster Pudding. Going outside with a big mixing bowl full of chocolate pudding mix and reaching up and grabbing some sky to mix in it and before you know it you had a bowl burbling with Chocolate Sky pudding and you thought how cool was this and you didn't even know about the monsters yet. 

But the next time you made Chocolate Sky Pudding, a couple of weeks later, you discovered in a most shocking way that your special pudding was irresistible to monsters.

Irresistible.

As you stood there dumbfounded with your big blue plastic bowl of Chocolate Sky Pudding, dozens of monsters lumbered, flew, crawled, hopped and galloped to you. Hideous things. Loathsome things. Scary as hell things. Scaly, slimy, horned, beaked, winged, tailed, clawed. Fire breathing.

Remarkably enough you had the wits about you to set your bowl full of irresistible Chocolate Sky (and now Monster) pudding down and run like hell.

They didn't chase you.

They ate the pudding. They loved the pudding.

Over time you ventured out more and more with your pudding mix and bowl and sky above. You grew to be fascinated with the monsters that arrived from places you didn't even want to imagine. You'd set the pudding down and just watch and listen. What sights and what sounds. And how they would sleep for hours in ecstasy after their pudding, waking up and slinking away quietly to wherever monsters slink away to.

Then one day it all went to hell for you. More and more monsters had shown up each time until that one day you didn't make enough pudding. That one day a huge green warty tunnel troll who'd arrived late to the pudding feast when it was all gone. That huge troll that stomped over to you and in a grinding horrid voice demanded more. You told him you didn't have any more. He slapped you across the backyard. You hit a tree and broke your arm. He lumbered over and spit a big vile spitball of troll spit right in your eyes. They burned like nothing you'd ever known. You were lucky you kept your eyesight.

That was the very last time you made Chocolate Sky Monster Pudding. Ever. You swore you would never mix it up again.

You lied to your folks and said you fell out of the tree and bees stung your eyes. They would never understand. 

Now it's been 40 years and all hell's broke loose on earth. Monsters have burst forth from deep tectonic faults and from high snowcapped volcanoes and everything in between. Monsters full of avarice, bile and hunger. Monsters eating everything - people, dogs, cats, cars, boats, barbecue pits. They were unstoppable.

But maybe not.

You knew of their drug. Their heroin. You know how to stop these monsters. You know how to mix chocolate pudding mix with the sky and create a slimy, chunky, silky, yummy, chocolaty dessert that stuns monsters into deep sleep.

You can save humanity. You can fill up empty swimming pools with your pudding. You can teach others how to make it. You can stop this monster apocalypse.

But you know if you do you will break an oath you made to yourself. You are not an oath breaker. You would have to make a choice - individual pride vs collective salvation.

But it's not that simple.

You've developed a deadly allergy to chocolate. Perhaps it is a hysterical neurosis. Perhaps it is something else. But you know if you make the Chocolate Sky Monster Pudding it will kill you. You also know that for you to teach humanity to create this magical mushy dessert you have to actually mix and blend it. There is no other way.

But you can save humanity. Including your six children and four grandchildren and spouse that you love more than life itself.

Once the monsters are tranquilized on your pudding then the military and police and angry citizens armed with high caliber weaponry can fucking kill them in their sleep.

What do you do? Do you break your oath and die in a cerulean- toned state of anaphylactic shock? To save the world? To save your kids and spouse? What choice do you make?

Ethical Dilemmas: The Found Mouse that Vomits Diamonds

One day you are cleaning out your garage and you move this big old cardboard box of stuff, let's say it's just junky stuff like old tupperware or sewing machine parts, and there against the wall is a shivering mouse huddling in his mouse nest of shredded old socks and washcloths. Your first reaction is one of severe instantaneous squickiness and you even let out a breathy shriek as you are infused with DNA hard-wired to provide verminophobic response patterns.  In the Ice Age, when many humans lived in caves, mice were as big as Great Danes and twice as mean.

So, after the initial shock, you are surprised that this little mouse doesn't do the typical mouse thing - flash away in a little brown blur - he just stares at you with his big (they are so big!) brown eyes and trembles.

Maybe he is sick you think.

But then the most remarkable thing happens, an event of such unexpected occurrence and provenance that you scarcely know what to think, yet alone what to do - your little mouse heaves a great vomitous heave and pukes a diamond onto your oil stained garage floor. A diamond!

A big one too. Faceted and stunning.

After tossing the diamond, the mouse falls over on his back and starts shaking really bad while emitting a high pitched whine that sounds all the world to you like a severe pain cry.

Poor mouse.

Puking diamonds must hurt like a bitch.

You, of course, stop cleaning the garage and watch this little mouse. After about 10 minutes he vomits up another diamond. And it hurts him even worse.

After some experimentation you realize that your little mouse will only puke diamonds when you watch him and the pain grows exponentially with each diamond the little guy upchucks.

So what do you do? You've now got a pocketful of unspeakably beautiful and expensive diamonds. You are set for life but your mouse is dying. The diamonds are coming up tinged with mouse blood now. He emits a constant high pitched cry of agony.

If you leave him he may scurry off and you've lost him forever. If you keep him he will die.  You can't keep him in captivity to do your bidding periodically in a cage where he cannot escape and where you can isolate him to allow him to recover from the carat spewing.

You know this because you've found a weird little piece of yellowed parchment with a strange Elven fonted script that you only know how to read because a shovel fell off a wall hook earlier and hit you on the head and now everything smells like vanilla and you can read Elvenish.

The mouse spell described on the parchment says that the mouse will die in captivity and must be left free.

Free.

And that the mouse is actually the Elven Messiah trapped inside a mouse's body by the last curse of a dying race of Stick Witches.  The Elven Messiah put on earth to save us from killing each other with endless warfare, hatred and carbon loading.

And you must take no more than 12 diamonds from the Elven Messiah-Mouse or he will remain forever captive inside the body of a scruffy little mouse.

You've got 12 already and he's starting to shake like he's gonna fire another up.

What do you do? Do you leave the Elven Messiah-Mouse so he can survive and eventually free himself from the Stick Witches curse? Do you let him continue to ralph diamonds so you can be so rich you can't even believe it? Do you put him in a cage?

Something else? How do you respond to this timely and realistic ethical dilemma for these modern times?

Ethical Dilemmas: Johnny the Dog Boy and the Weeping Blister of God

You are hosting a big Fourth of July fun-o-rama at your lake place.  You and your friends and family have been swimming and boating all day, the weather's been perfect, everyone's having a blast. You've grilled some absolutely awesome steaks and corn-0n-the-cob and other grill-worthy foods and feasted and now dusk drapes its darkening backdrop for the mighty fury of the fireworks display you've so carefully arranged. Every item purchased from a local indian reservation and taken illegally off the sovereign property of the rez to be lovingly stored in cardboard boxes until this moment. You've arranged the firing sequence from less to more, each item of ordinance ordered to lead to a bigger one and a bigger one until the exciting crescendo of sparks and fire and eardrum rattling booms culminates in the biggest one of all, the biggest you've ever purchased, the one you had to ride 3 miles on a bumpy and dusty road in a pickup with a big indian named Rex to a little storage shed tucked deep into the ponderosa pine and aspen forest to buy an item SO illegal and So dangerous that the tribe will not risk a raid by a black suited squad of federal agents dropped from hovering combat helicopters. Rex sells you the Holy Grail of unsafe and insane deadly home fireworks items: The Weeping Blister of God Sun Flower Rain Fire!

OMG.

You've only heard of this one from the muttering of other guys who like to blow shit up. After the usual lamentations over the difficulty in procuring hand amputating M-80s and cherry bombs someone will invariably mention The Weeping Blister of God Sun Flower Rain Fire and everyone will hush and gasp audibly sucking in air out of excitement and fear. All of you guys know of it, nobody's actually ever seen it although it's not uncommon to spread stories, suburban myths if you will, of what this incredible firework can do.  A forest was started on fire in Northern California!  One tipped over on a raft and blew up a 30 foot Chris Craft, blew a hole through it like a torpedo! Some dude lit the fuse wrong and went to check and it went off and they found his head and upper tors0 THREE MILES AWAY and his flesh was burned CLEAN OFF.

Now you possess the legend.  The neighbors blowing crap up on their docks on each side of you have no idea what you have in store this year. Although they've learned that in the unspoken competition for best dock displays you are a man hard to beat. But they've stepped up their game over the years, they definitely are bringing it.

Your display proceeds as always, great mortars and canister shells blowing up in the sky, flaming balls shooting out of a variety of roman candles and ground launchers. The kids and friends and family all oohing and ahhing. The neighbors politely applauding some of your better ones. You and yours returning the golf clapping. Then finally, the explosive denouement arrives.

It is time. All the ordinance is spent except for the granddaddy of them all, the Terminator storming through the police station with the Predator on his shoulders and Godzilla following closely behind, the thermonuclear celebration of America's power and might - The Weeping Blister of God Sun Flower Rain Fire!

You excuse yourself to go up to your truck. Everyone is wondering what is going on. You can not help but smirk as you walk up the pathway to the drive. This is gonna be so damn cool.

As you carry your atomic firework down to the dock you see everyone shudder and gasp and then like slowly rising fat rainbow trouts miraculously imbued with the brains of a table full of boat salesmen at a strip club - hooting and hollering with pure lust for a visual display of pyrotechnic sensory fulfillment.

You carry this massive and heavy firework out to the dock. You set it down. The neighbors are staring. My God what has this man brought out? Oh dear Lord. Get me another beer hon!

As you position the The Weeping Blister of God Sun Flower Rain Fire in its final firing place you hear someone walking quickly down the dock ramp towards you.  What is this? Who dares interrupt the Bomb-Master?

It is your youngest son's friend, Johnny the Dog Boy. Poor Johnny, he was born with a furry tail and a long dog like nose and erect pointed ears. His skin is covered in dog like fur. When excited he is known to emit a barking like noise. He is sort of a pet to the family, ever since your son made friends with him in daycare. Now why is Johnny the Dog Boy interrupting at this critical juncture in the most massive display of dock fireworks ever to be seen?

"Can I lights it arf!" 

What? Johnny the Dog Boy wants to light this the most expressive, deadly, and massively impressive firework ever known to man? The item that if caught in your possession means 10 years hard time in a federal Supermax prison in Colorado? What the hell?

Johnny stands before you in rapt anticipation. His tail is wagging like a chopper rotor. Round and round. How does he do that you wonder? You are dissociating and your mind is drifting. NOT NOW DON'T GO TO YOUR HAPPY ISLAND PLACE NOW! you scream in your head.

You glance at everyone on the beach.  The looks on their faces. OMG. They all want you to let Johnny the Dog Boy torch this sucker off.  You can't believe it. Johnny's hands are half paws! He'll burn himself and probably mis-light the fuse, the scarily short fuse as a matter of fact. And will he be able to get away in time, what if when you and Johnny are racing down the dock to get some space from this behemoth of bombage you trip on his tail and he yelps and you both fall down and get ignited in the detonation? So many things to go wrong. Plus, this is YOUR moment, your house mortgage payment spent on a single massive memory, a moment in the chemistry of a million suns lighting up the lake night sky. The Fourth of Fucking July! Yet everyone nods silently and sends a thousand nonverbal messages to give the cherry red tipped punk to Johnny.

"Yeah dad, let Johnny!" your son exclaims. Heads nod.

What do you do? Do you let Johnny the Dog Boy steal your thunder? Even though he can't really safely grip a burning punk? Or a lighter or a match? You can make this dog boy's sad life happier by a power of eleventy gabillion. Can you do it?

Ethical Dilemmas: Nun Poker

You and a tour busload of nuns have been stranded deep in the forest for weeks following a tragic slide off a road covered in mud and rocks. Nothing to eat. No way out. Only each others urine to drink but fortunately you, as an intrepid well prepared trekker on a tour bus, who nonetheless forgot candy bars and peanuts, happens to have a water purifier which helps with the urine you have to admit. But the starvation is setting in and you all know you will soon start dying. You also know, because you heard it on the radio right before the radio died, that search parties were looking for all of you, even employing helicopters and specially imported  Austrian Nonnenjagdhunde (Nun Hounds). You know, if you all can keep going, it's just a matter of time.

These nuns run an orphanage for children with cleft palates and other birth defects in Central America and are truly the most saintly people you've ever met. You're nothing like them, really. Every one of them seems to glow with an otherworldly beatific glow. But you are so hungry now they are beginning to look like they are glowing with a sweet-hot mustard glaze!

After a long discussion you and the nuns agree to play poker and the first one busted as they say becomes supper for all the rest.  You ask the nuns if cannibalism is a venial or mortal sin. They answer by asking you if it meets the three criteria for a venial sin, which are, in effect, the criteria for a mortal sin stated negatively:

1. It does not concern a "grave matter",
2. It is not committed with full knowledge, or
3. It is not committed with both deliberate and complete consent.

So you say "well we're pretty much fucked then either way" and they simply smile and again ask you to put down your Ruger Super Redhawk Alaskan bear gun in the powerful yet wrist snapping .454. Casull caliber. A gun that is easily backpackable and one that you don't exactly wile away the hours plinking beer cans with unless they are in the slavering and angry jaws of a charging grizzly bear!

You holster your hand cannon and exhort "let's play some poker, sisters!" and the game commences. You are using pieces of broken window safety glass for "chips" and a deck of Northern Quest Casino playing cards you got as swag at a conference at the casino on "Renewing Mother Earth through Building Emotionally Intelligent Bridges Across Cross Disciplinary Stakeholder Groups."

Hours go by. These nuns can play some damn poker.  Finally you think you're going to bust one of em out, she's all in with her glass chips. So are you. The nuns have been kicking your ass for hours. It's do or die time.

The other nuns glance nervously at her as she holds her hand of cards tightly and quiveringly. You draw one card. Oh.my.God. It's the Ace of Spades. The toughest damn card in the deck. The outlaw motorcycle gang leader of cards. You're now holding a Royal Flush the most impossibly difficult poker hand and the one that cannot be beat. You lick just the corner of your lip even though you've been spittle-less for days but deep inside your cerebral wiring your appetite center is firing off signals "SOUP'S ON!"

But then it hits you like a ton of tomatoes, these nuns are actually making lives better for little kids, for Central America, and for the whole damn world. What are you doing? What? If you munch this nun to keep alive until you're saved what's that mean? You don't really believe in heaven or hell so it's not like that's a big issue but you do believe that each of us should do our best to leave the big global campsite cleaner when we leave it than when we found it. These nuns are making a difference and you go to conferences and blog and stuff.

Do you fold your hand and lose and become sustenance for all of them? Keep them alive to do their good works? Or do you call the hand and win and start a cook fire with bus seat covers and broken branches that slammed through the roof and windows of the trapped and lost bus?

What do you do? Pick one of the above or nun of the above. Defend your choice.

Ethical Dilemma: The Driveway Basketball Game

You are playing hoops in your driveway and it's a gorgeous October day, preternaturally warm and sunny and the sky like a cobalt dream. You are playing against two boys, one is your son and one is his friend. They are both five (5) years old and pretty short in stature and not particularly possessive of advanced basketball skill settages.

At first you are just having fun, you know, helping the little tykes pass and shoot the ball. Even with the hoop about six (6) feet high they don't make many shots. But, well, it's not really about winning and losing. At least, not at first.

With the score at 16 to 2, you suggest to your son that he pass the ball to his buddy "hey Skipper! pass it to Lewis, he's completely open!" and just as you finish, your son starts crying and tells you to "shut up! it's no fun when you is bossy!" His friend Lewis replies "it's stupid, you're stupid, stupid, stupid."

You are shocked. What the hell? You have been trying so hard to teach these young lads some fundamentals of hoops and also expose them to the awesome role model of yourselfage, as you smoke the net with mid range jumpers and sweet silky moves to the rack.

You take the ball out, two quick steps and you fire a nasty rainbow in. All net. 18-2. The ball rips through and bounces once off the concrete and smacks Skipper in the nose. He starts screaming.

Up to this point you've been playing "make it - take it" which means you keep the ball as long as you're making shots, so you get the ball again since you just ripped a jumper. One more basket and the game is over. Your opponents are crying and wanting to leave the driveway and go play video games or ride trikes or something. Fuck that.

You dribble up and have to make a decision - they've left the lane open and aren't exactly "d'ing up" and you could easily pounce on that and tomahawk a jam through the plastic rim that would knock their stupid Fisher-Price basketball hoop to the ground and school these youngsters on what happens when they bitch up on the court and quit trying. Or you could set the ball down and high five them for doing their best and go buy them ice cream or something at the Dairy Queen.

What do you do?

The Uncle Jed and John McCain POW Tapes Ethical Dilemma

You are a lifelong Democrat who has suffered miserably through 8 years of Bush the Barking Hate Monkey and Cheney the Devil's Armpit Masseuse and now you finally see a glimmer of sparkling hopelight on the horizon. Barack Hussein Obama. - the soon to be next President if all goes as it seems to be going with his robust lead in the polls. America wants change. America is about to have it. Unless. Unless the damn Republicans and their cheating Diebold machines steal it all away again. Oh God. You can't even imagine that, it's just so mind rippingly depressing.

It is the Saturday before the elections and you are at your recently deceased uncle Jed's home. He was a decorated Vietnam Vet. A former POW held in the Hanoi Hilton like John McCain. Rumor has it, he was even there at the same time as McCain, but you don't know for sure if he knew McCain as your very private uncle refused to speak of the Nam.

As you go through some boxes in his garage, you discover some old tapes in a dusty box in the rafters. They are labeled "POW Confidential" and have a CIA stamp on them. WTF?

You clean them up and watch them. They are horrifying, these tapes made by the brutal captors in the Hanoi Hilton. You recognize your uncle in some and even John McCain. Yes! They were there together. You are excited by this but know your very private uncle would never have approved of you viewing them and would have refused you revealing them to anyone else.

On the third tape you see what is perhaps the most disturbing and horrid images ever revealed on a POW tape in any war anywhere. It is a tape of guards taunting the prisoners, including your uncle and McCain, on Christmas. The POWs are stoic, which only angers the guards more. There are some beatings but nothing worse than the many you've already watched. Then an officer shows up and yells at the guards and points them out of the room. He sits down with the prisoners and smiles and sets up a record player. He puts on a record which plays Christmas songs, even though the audio is scratchy it sounds like Andy Williams. The officer yells something, then a few moments later the guards return.

They are bringing large woven bamboo baskets to the prisoners. They set the baskets down in front of the prisoners and hand them chopsticks. This appears to be their Christmas dinner. When the starving POWs open the baskets, you are horrified by what they remove. Babies. Dozens of fat little grilled South Vietnamese babies kidnapped from villages that were friendly to American soldiers.

You watch in horror as the POWs tear into these baby dinners with their bare hands, chopsticks, and their broken and decayed teeth. The ensuing nightmarish meal is something out of the Grand Guignol. You stare in a stunned silence at the violent repast as your uncle Jed and John McCain and all the others maniacally devour these babies. God!

When the tape ends you sit in a nearly comatose state. Your mind can barely absorb what you've just witnessed. It was hellish. You want to crush the tape beneath your birkenstock clad size 13s. Smash this loathsome rectangle of black plastic into dust. But you can't, you can't because you wonder if you should send this on to someone in the media. My God, this could guarantee an Obama victory! Senator John McCain eating babies! Even if he was a starving and tortured POW, it doesn't make eating babies right, even on Christmas!

But you know memories of your late Uncle Jed would be forever damaged and discolored by this nauseatingly evil display of madness. Even though he never married and had no children and died penniless and alone and even though you are the last living relative and nobody really knew him that much as he was a bit of a hermit, even when he worked as a freelance commercial diver who was an expert underwater welder, but really didn't ever interact with much of anyone, even though he was a Democrat who despised Republicans with every fiber, molecule and atom of his being, and held the personal belief that the ends always justified the means, even then you know it would be wrong to expose him this way to the world.

Diebold. Dead babies. What do you do? Do you send the tape on and guarantee the crushing defeat of the scaly John McCain? Or do you protect your dear uncle's privacy?

What do you do?

Ethical Dilemma: The Lifejacket on a Sinking Privatized Ferry

You have been elected "lifejacket guy" during the stupid "emergency evacuation drill" on the new Kingston to Edmonds ferry the SS Ayn Rand. Washington state has recently privatized all of its Puget Sound crossing ferries and the new carriers, to cut the overhead, ask the riders to perform many of the duties the state ferries paid employees to perform.

So, you are sitting drinkin a mocha forgetting everything you just learned from some brightly colored emergency evacuation posters stuck up on the walls of the ferry and you're just trying to relax because you have a long drive ahead of you once you get across, when the Ayn Rand hits a huge log raft AND a pod of killer whales cavortin around the log raft and starts taking on huge amounts of icy cold Puget Sound saltwater. It lists. It's sinking. You run to the lifejacket locker. First, you put one on yourself because the poster says to do that because if you drown who hands em out? They'll just float away! Now you start slinging them out to folks as fast as you can. Uh oh. You hand them all out except one and you got three people standing in front of you begging for lifejackets to save their lives.

You know only one will get a lifejacket. Which one! You are completely flummoxed and you don't know what to do, they are all middle-aged adults so they don't have much to live for anymore unlike kids or pregnant women. Two men and a lady. They seem polite even if they are screaming. You are desperate for a selection criteria and since your favorite thing to do when you're killin time is to leave witty and acerbic comments on left wing political blogs you blurt out "Are any of you Hillary supporters who're gonna vote for McCain instead of Obama now that she's dropped out?"

They stop screaming and look at you like you're nuts. The lady says "yes, exactly!"

So you cross her off in your mind and ask "OK, one lifejacket two presidential candidates, who do you give it to, McCain or Obama?"

"McCain!" the heavy guy in a suit shouts. "Obama!" the skinny guy in the nice REI rain jacket yells.

Who do you give it to? The McCain supporter or the Obama one? Explain your answer. Is there another solution? Explain.

Ethical Dilemma: Organ Donation

You are a major romance novelist. You have lucked upon a formula for the genre that has made you a gabillionaire - all of your romance novels are set in trailer courts and feature innocent beautiful trailer women trapped in lower SEC-status lives through no fault of their own (although the careful and cynical reader may detect a certain lack of ambition combined with an overabundant attitude of victimization by a greedy and uncaring society in these dewy eyed and glistening beauties) until a deeply tanned, gorgeously handsome and eventually shirtless objet du désir just happens to move into the Pine Vu or Morning Glory trailer park. Then blah blah blah.

You have written a dozen of your stunningly successful trailer romances. You are filthy rich. You are so rich you have decided to retire at an obscenely young age and see the world from an aircraft carrier converted into a yacht equipped with personal jets and choppers. 

So one morning you are sitting on your veranda having a cup of coffee. You gaze out upon your mountain kingdom, an actual kingdom you had built to exactly replicate some Elven kingdom from the Silmarillion and you've angrily dismissed one of your servants, who are required to undergo massive facial reconstruction surgery to physically appear as orcs because you can never get enough of orcs serving you stuff, except this morning when for some odd reason you have no stomach for it. Maybe it's the impending aircraft carrier voyage or maybe it's something else. Well, you don't know but it's odd that teasing the help isn't making you chortle and smirk.

Then it hits you. You have not resolved the deeply felt loss when your beloved pet Andean Condor, Mr. Poopyfeathers*, died tragically while soaring high on a thermal when he suddenly collided with a Twin-Otter floatplane while you and he were on a quick salmon fishing getaway on some pristine river teeming with giant Chinook salmon on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska.

God how you miss Mr. Poopyfeathers. The way he would perch on your Kevlar clad arm and eat pieces of rotten carrion you would hand feed him. How he loved big chunks of decaying Wildebeest specially imported on container ships with Liberian manifests. God how you loved taking him to local schools to teach kids about vultures. "OK, kids, how many of you think that instead of eating a bologna sandwich your mom made you for lunch it would be way funner to peck the eyeballs out of a dead deer!"

Maybe the whole tour the world from the USS MeMeMe was just a desperate and crazy way to forget Mr. Poopyfeathers. Maybe retirement is just the easy way out. You don't know anymore - all this money and you just don't know the right answers.

So what do you do? Do you donate your kidney so your ex girlfriend Maryssa's  baby will live, knowing that even though you are the best match in the world (at 3.7 gatrillion to one odds) and aren't even genetically related to the baby (she had the state test you for paternity) and she's your ex because she cheated on you with Roman Rock the incredibly handsome new guy who just moved into the Green Branches Trailerpark - Roman Rock who is the new guy who hides his past from others, who  mysteriously receives calls on his cellphone and disappears for hours - do you give her baby your kidney and live a life with only one knowing that one sharp blow from a golf club armed mugger could end it all for you?

What do you do?

*New World Condors engage in urohydrosis which is the behavior of releasing  feces onto their legs as a cooling mechanism.

The Walrus and the Carpenter Ethical Dilemma

You're walking down the beach on a rare sunny night and you spot something. Something weird. Sitting on rocks are a walrus and a carpenter and they are eating oysters.  You are starving as you haven't eaten for days on your seaside vision quest which ended just moments before when you saw your totem animal, the howler monkey. He was dancing on a yellow banana peel.  Whatever that means.

The walrus tosses down the last oyster. You have a rifle, a big one. Unfortunately, you only have one bullet as the old shaman suggested only one bullet in case the vision quest involved the destruction of the world you might want to use it on yourself. 

You have a choice to make. Put a hot one through the walrus and split him with the carpenter who looks kinda stuffed already from the oysters.  Seems pretty simple. Then you notice something. Something that instantly fills you with a rage that would turn a sea boiling hot. That damn carpenter. He's the one. The one who did a half ass deck rebuild project for you which led to a stunningly embarrassing deck failure during a fourth of July barbecue with your ex wife's overweight Kansan relatives all standing on it. Aunt Beatrice broke her cankle.  Three places.

So what do you do? Smoke the walrus and have some good eatings. Smoke the carpenter and shove him out to sea and revenge a wrong. Something else? It's your call.  It always is.

The Zombie Code Dilemma

You've finished the NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle, and as is your wont, you've used a cryptographic algorithm you developed one hot desert day while vision questing on peyote and budweiser in in the Mojave desert when you were a 21 year old computer engineering major, to search for possible hidden messages in the puzzle answers.

Up to this point, all you ever get is gobbledygook but it's a fun and repetitious compulsion because you just never know if sometime you might find something.

Today is different. Today is remarkably different. Today you've discovered a stunningly cryptic set of phrases. You have no idea what they mean.  They appear to be incantations of a sort, some weirdly musical sounding spell. You are determined to discover their meaning.

You print your finding on an internet forum for spells and incantations and are immediately banned and your post removed. This seems odd to you. Then you get an email from a forum moderator who asks to call you.

He calls and explains that your incantation is the most deadly and horrifying one known to man and long lost to the annals of history. You wonder how he knows if it's long lost to the annals of history. He explains that that isn't the point. The point is the incantation can raise the dead, can create angry, stupidly lethal, hungry for human flesh, armies of zombies.  You are shocked and frightened.

He hopes nobody saw the incantation and no web crawlers picked it up. He's going to review the page visit stats and do what he needs to do.

You hide the zombie code in a locker at the bus station. You kind of forget about it until the earth is invaded by kind and benevolent appearing aliens who use psychokinesis to bend the will of earthlings to do only good and live in peace and harmony. Well at first that's what everyone thinks. But they are actually trying to create a world of human cattle, a steady food supply for their larval form - baby aliens that need to eat humans alive.

You've not been infected yet by their will killing hypnotic mind rays, you've been high in the Andes Mountains staking claims to purple agate findings that you plan to mine and sell to hobbyist lapidaries on ebay but there are no hobbyists anything anymore!  Not since the aliens took over.

You know there is one shot and one shot only, you can use the zombie code, which you memorized years ago, to raise an army of ancient Incan warriors, warriors that, according to local legends, once drove a similar race of aliens off the planet. But can they still do it? And will they discriminate aliens from humans or will they join the aliens in great feasts upon the immovable human banquet?

You're running out of time. You can't stay in the Andes forever, besides the aliens have sent out fleets of thousands of patrol cruisers slowly circling in low earth orbit scanning for hiders.

Do you unleash the Incan warrior dead and risk making a horrific situation hideous? Do you forsake the code and just deal?

Please answer below with complete sentences and defend your choices.

The Sea Cave Dilemma

You are leading your Boy Scout troop of seven young lads and your robot buddy Zoltran IV and Jack, the morbidly obese father of one of the lads, Timmy, on a beach adventure.  While hiking about you discover a beach cave with a large opening on top. All of you climb down in and look about. It's very fascinating and fun and before you know it you've all been in there for an hour or so.

Timmy, who has terminal leukemia, is especially happy as his dad is now out of the hospital following stomach banding surgery, and is walking again and taking Timmy on a dream adventure. Jack hasn't actually done anything physical, even going for walks, with Timmy for years.

After awhile in the cave you notice the floor is gradually becoming covered in salt foamed water. Zoltran IV analyzes the situation and notes that the tide is incoming and filling the cave and you will all die cold, watery deaths by drowning in the next 30 minutes if you don't climb out of the cave through the one opening on top.

Jack shrieks and clambers up the cave wall. He gets partway out the opening and jams himself. He's stuck. His head and arms are out and he can breathe and he won't drown but the rest of you are all stuck inside. No matter how hard you and Zoltran IV push you can't budge the still pudgy Jack.

There is only one solution. Zoltran IV has twin mini nuclear powered servo motors in his jaw and he has razor sharp teeth made of diamond coated rock saw blades. He could eat Jack from the toes on up in 15 minutes or so. He could open the hole.  It would be horrible. Jack would scream from the torture and the boys would see the most horrid sight imaginable. Poor Timmy! Do you sacrifice 8 so that one may live? (Zoltran will be fine, he's waterproof and breathes Castrol 10/40 Synthetic crankcase oil).

What do you do? Why? What are the pros and cons to your choice? After this could you ever peel a starfish off its rock again? Go clamming? Even watch an ocean sunset!

The Baby Livers Dilemma

You are a quadrazillionaire and a wonderful contribution to the global community. Right after college you invented a means to make infant formula out of sand and by doing so you eliminated unnecessary baby deaths due to starvation and malnutrition. You saved the lives of billions of  infants and babies.

You were picked by TIME magazine as Man of the Century for your sand formula for babies. Bono did an entire tribute album and Live You concert for you. You've hobnobbed with presidents and dictators and chairmans of the boards and baseball players and Popes and Ayatollahs. You are beloved.

But now, in your august days, you are afflicted with a deadly and rare disease you likely picked up in an Amazonian  jungle 30 years ago while visiting a village to test your sand formula. The light is fading. There is only one cure. You will need to eat a baby liver, freshly extracted, each day for the rest of your life. It has to be "fresh" or it won't work. It can't be "synthesized" in one of your gleaming state of the art laboratories.  IT HAS TO BE FROM A BABY THAT HAS DRAWN A BREATH.

The irony of this cure nearly causes you to leap from your speeding yacht on the French Riviera and end it all. My God you think My God.

But your desire to live burns strong. You have another invention almost finished - AIR FOOD. Food from air! You are at least a year away from completing the formula then the testing phase. You will end hunger on this earth. Forever.

You need about 800 fresh baby livers to finish your Air Food invention. Getting the babies and their livers is no problem as you are so rich and so beloved that you answer to no laws of lands or men.

What do you do?

Whoooo has the answer?

Your grandpa has a barn owl in his barn. As far back as you can remember he's had that same old barn owl living in his hay barn. When you were just a little scupper you'd go out and spy on the barn owl, who was usually sleeping during the day, sometimes gramps would help you collect owl pellets to later cut up with a pocketknife to find mouse bones. Once, when you were 8, you threw an apple at the barn owl and gramps found out about it and switched your hide with a willow branch.

Grandpa's been gone for years and you inherited his hay farm. You know the barn owl is still there and there is something oddly reassuring about his continued hooting presence.  It maintains a strong thread to the past and, in a way, keeps grandpa alive for you. Sometimes you wonder how a barn owl that old could still be alive since the oldest known barn owl lived to 11 years old and this one has got to be 30 something.  Sometimes when you're sitting on a hay bale in the barn and sipping a beer, just like you and gramps used to do after a hard day haying, the owl hoots knowingly. Sometimes you wonder if gramps isn't still alive in some metaphysical way inside that barn owl.

One morning you walk into the barn to check on the condition of the hay as it's been an unusually humid July and you put some up a bit on the moist side, and you notice the barn owl is absent.  Well, it's morning you think and sometimes the barn owl, a remarkably old barn owl, takes longer to catch his mice or kittens and may still be out a-hunting. You gaze absentmindedly at the ledge he perches on and you notice there is something up there, it looks like a small piece of paper.

You climb the barn ladder and retrieve the paper. You unfold it and read:

We have the owl.
Bring $10,000 in unmarcked 20s to the Flying J truckstrop Exit 329
Tonight at 900.
By yourself!
Or we kill the owl.

You have exactly $11,547 in your bank account. You need every bit of it for a new motor for your tractor, hay baler parts as your old baler broke down last week and you've got another cutting in a couple of weeks, and you've got to make the final payment on your spouse's dentures or he/she doesn't get them at all!

What do you do? Do you pay the owl ransom and save your past or do you let them kill the owl so you can keep your farm and spouse happy? Or is there another solution? What is it?

The Dog and Butterfly Dilemma

It's 1978. You and your foxy girlfriend, Sheena, are in the coolest music store in your neighborhood. The Magic Mushroom Bong City.  Records, tapes, patchouli, Jungian Mandala posters, bright purple and thermonuclear green bongs. Outrageous!

At the Magic Mushroom Bong City the way-cooler-than-you record store clerks will play albums for customers so you can dig on them before you drop a five, man. They have a killer system - giant Klipschorn speakers and a Macintosh amp and like, dual Bang and Olufsen turntables and a sweet Nakamichi cassette deck.

As you and Sheena sort of cruise through the Magic Mushroom Bong City you are totally grooving on what they are playing now - Sin City by ACDC off their newly released Powerage album. Man, this shit rocks hard, man.

Sheena is wincing as she walks up to you "eeew, that music sucks, ask them to play Heart's Dog and Butterfly."

You cringe. "Oh baby, let them finish this, then I will"

"No! Ask them NOW. I hate this hard rock, I love Heart"

You cannot even imagine going up to the supercool record head shop dudes to ask for Dog and Butterfly. Not now. Maybe during a Stevie Nicks album or something. Not Sin City!

But you know Sheena and her demanding, petulant mercurial ways. A straight refusal is death with this patched faded seafarer jeans and tie dyed halter top hottie. Your friends still can't understand why a fine chick like Sheena is with you. Hell, most days you cannot either.

Shit.

What do you do? Lose every molecule of coolness to these dudes? You will never be able to go back to the Magic Mushroom Bong City. You will be mocked. You will be forever known as Butterfly Dude.

Make your move, man.

The Dungeon Master Dilemma

Kenny, the new developer on your IT team, has invited you to play Dungeons & Dragons on Friday night with him and some of his buddies from his former job at Micron. He's even agreed to let you play your 17th level Cleric-Warrior "Toriandalynn the Rising Sun" even knowing that he would like so rock the game and the other guys would like so be his slaves.

Kenny promises all the Diet Dr. Pepper you can drink and said he bought a LOT of Cheetos at Costco. It's an all nighter for sure.

On the same night you have an existing and standing obligation to be the Dungeon Master to your regular team (all guys from your IT Dept. who have been playing together on Friday nights for 7 years). 

The game you have planned for them Friday night involves their characters opening the Crypt of the Cryptomoniacomancer, truly the most amazing and terrifying part of your dungeon. You know the guys will speak of it, in hushed and awed terms, for YEARS. 

The guys have suffered horrible losses getting this far. Requirements Analyst, Herb, lost his 15th level Thief, "Brotto Brottogenarian" in a horrible cross fire between a huge army of orcs and zombified Elven archers.  Herb had played Brotto for 3 years and had a Brotto tattoo he designed himself on his left calf. He took a week off from work using Bereavement Leave as a result.

What do you do? Word on the street has it that Kenny, besides being a rocking host and excellent Dungeon Master, has actually dated women.  Yet, you can almost see the looks on the guys' faces when they open the Crypt of the Cryptomoniacomancer.

Do you play with Kenny and break the date with the guys? Or do you turn Kenny down and maybe never like EVER get another chance to join his crew?

The Cure for Cancer Dilemma

You are an Anthropology graduate student in the jungles of Peru working on your dissertation. You've been analyzing the matrilineal marriage patterns of the Yellow Jaguar clan who have never married outside their clan despite living right next to the very qualified and industrious Running Tapirs along the banks of some stupid muddy river.

One thing you've noticed is they never die of cancer. It is unknown to them. They die of many other things including falls down cliffs and drownings but not cancer. One day a shaman gives you the reason why. The tarry extract from some really yucky beetle. They eat it and smear it on sores. They never get cancer.

You, Mr or Mrs. or Ms. I Hope I Get a Job at a State College with my PhD and Not Have to be a Social Worker Somewhere Graduate Student, just discovered the cure for cancer! You are going to be so rich, so famous, so beloved. You will be Time's Person of the Year and win the Nobel. You will write your memoirs at the age of 25 and title it "How the Yellow Jaguar Hunts." Oprah will sob big Oprah tears when she introduces you on her show.

Here is your dilemma. You have a nasty stepdad who is dying of cancer of the spleen, perhaps, as you've postulated with your siblings due to the old bastard's frequent splenetic rages overusing and overactivating the organ. He has six months to live.

You really can't stand the prick. You've sent him frequent postcards from the jungle just hoping he'd keep you updated on how fast his demise is approaching. Of course, the old creep never replies.

You remember as a young child, the mysterious deaths of every little kitten your mom ever got you, the burned fur, the weird drownings in your backyard inflatable wading pool. Although you never saw him do it, you could tell by his chuckling and hooting whenever you would discover a little Sparky or Fluffy having expired all 9 lives at once that he probably had something to do with it. And, on Christmas, how he always made sure you got new pajamas with little kitten patterns all over them.

So, here you sit with the cure for cancer and your seething disgust for that loathsome steppig of yours. Do you wait him out and not release the cure for cancer until he's bought the farm and is planted deep in the ground?

Or do you not deny millions a new chance at life to wait for your stepdad to die and instead release the cure now even if means he is saved along with all the others, even if it means you can see him now down at the Silver Moron Lanes with his league night buddies swilling vulgar domestic beers and holding court as he bursts out with "I'm too tough sumbitch to get kilt by no cancer, hell no!"

Which do you choose?

The Stolen Baby Dilemma

You've dressed up like a nurse and snuck onto the newborn unit at a local hospital.  As you enter the room with all the sleeping newborns and glance furtively about to make sure you're not being watched you walk over to two little babies. One is red-haired and howling like a Banshee Monkey from the Third Inter-Forest on Kwakiutl IV and the other has just the tiniest wisp of dark hair, and looks like a funny little man! But he's quiet and still and looks beatific like a baby Saint.

You have only seconds to decide which baby to steal. One is incredibly loud but seems extroverted and a lover of environmental cues and the other seems more introspective and contemplative and a potential patron of the poetic arts.

You live in a shack in the steamy hot bayous of Louisiana where you build Pirogues out of Cypress and Gum for Cajun fisherman and gator hunters and you've got only seconds to decide which infant you will take home and raise alongside the banks of a sultry swamp full of cottonmouths and water moccasins and largemouth bass the size of BUICKS.

Which baby do you steal? Why?

The Found Wallet Dilemma

You are on your third date with a cute graphic artist who works for Coldwater Creek in Sandpoint (or a handsome pediatric neurosurgeon from the Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur D'Alene) and you are hoping that maybe you will get lucky later tonight but you are scared. You are worried. You are afraid of what you should tell your date if it gets to the "hot and heavy" place.  You know that he/she has a right to know. That you have a duty, a true obligation to tell them.

But it's so hard. It always is. Sometimes you hope that the relationship never physically progresses to the zone of awareness. To the zone of disclosure. When the hot probing kisses become an avenue to, well, to an intersection of truth or lies.

So, it's always like this. Do you tell your soon to be lover the secret you wish to never reveal. The secret of shame. Do you tell the person that you are.actually.an.alien? That you are a Zorakian escapee from a prison barge in the Ninth Prefect of the Outer Circle? That you are a wanted man or woman or that, ironically, the natural state of the Zorakian is hermaphroditic? And that you are leaving a MASSIVE carbon footprint (this is why you rarely date Sierra Clubbers) from the 7346 micro-miniature jet fuel-powered Shape Transdermal Transducers that allow you to appear human? Perhaps he or she has noticed your odd cologne?

What is the correct behavior at the point? You know this relationship is ready to advance to the next level and as you ponder this deal-making or deal-breaking dilemma while walking your date down the street to a blues club where you will see Little Tommy and the T-Birds with Special Guest Big Mama JD when all of a sudden you spot a wallet on the rain slickened dark street under some hyper-oscillatory mercury vapor streetlamp  flickering in the night.

You pick up the wallet and notice it has $10,000 in hundreds. Your date isn't paying attention as he/she is trying to fire up a smoke in the cool breeze. There is identification in the wallet. Some rich looking dude. So here is your dilemma:

Do you keep the wallet or the money or both or do you call the owner?

The Sinking Lifeboat Dilemma

A Princess Cruiseliner strikes a rogue iceberg somewhere a million miles off the coast of South America. The cruise ship sinks and only 30 souls escape and swim to a small lifeboat meant to hold seven. Half of the survivors are weak and injured from the sinking and from a hideous intestinal virus that had rampaged through the ship in the day prior. A storm is coming. The lifeboat is now overloaded.

You, however, are not on this lifeboat. You are on your mega-yacht, all waxed teak and polished brass and expensive Japanese Kobe steaks and imported dark Lithuanian beers.  You are on your way to meet up with the current King of Ireland, Seamus O'Hurlihey, and his floating party armada celebrating the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the potato by Spaniard Conquistadores in the Peruvian Andes.

You are running late and are without onboard communications as the Guatemalan hookers you picked up a couple days prior got way blasted last night and spilled their tequila all over the radios and shorted them out. You are also in a deadzone for cellphones and one of the hookers got mad and threw the sat phone at  you and it missed but went into the drink. Any other possible communication/signaling devices are absent or not functioning.

You boat up to the sinking overloaded lifeboat full of diarrheal injured and scared cruise ship passengers.  Your hookers are bitchin'  because they are hungover. You don't feel so great yourself and  you're dying to  hook up  with the King of Ireland. 

You know you could easily get all of the 30 survivors on board and rush them to port, a 2 days journey, but you would not make the rendezvous with the King of Ireland. You also know that these sick people would make a horrid mess of  your gleaming leather furniture and gorgeously patina'd teak with their projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea.

Plus, they would use up  your ibuprofen with all their fractures and stuff and it feels like an entire flock of angry brown pelicans are behind your eyes right now, pecking pecking pecking to escape your now mounting and brutal headache. Which isn't being made any better by those annoying babies crying down in that lifeboat.

You have a couple of cases of Evian on board and some frozen Wolfgang Puck dinners you were going to let the hookers eat to keep them out of the Kobe steaks and fresh Patagonian Toothfish and a bag or two of Mission Tortilla Strips. Some band aids you could spare.

What do you do?

The Breadloaf Dilemma

Well, you all did so well on the Zoltran Dilemma, an ethical quiz designed to help you identify and clarify your values and standards, that I thought I'd run another one for you to discuss and share.

This one is a slightly modified version of the classic stealing to feed your starving family dilemma.

Dilemma:

You are in a small grocery store, let's assume it is a locally owned neighborhood store. You and your wife and three children are starving. We won't go into the reasons why except you've been unemployed for an awfully long time and lack any sort of financial support system to help you out. Perhaps you are a reformed pirate and have no other skills right now and living in Kansas, a state that is not noted for it's opportunities for sea-borne piracy.

You are standing in the store and holding a loaf of luscious soft and golden brown bread. You have no money but you are going to try to talk the  grocer into letting you take it home and start a tab of sorts, some sort of credit, even though there is a crudely hand-drawn sign stating "No Credit, Dont Evn Ask!"

While you are standing with the loaf of yummilicious bread, the grocer gets a phone call and turns his back to you, the door is only a few steps away, you could be out and sprinting down the street with a loaf of bread for your starving family in seconds the only thing you see in your way is an elderly man who suddenly turns towards you and quietly states

"My God, man,  you look so hungry and you look desperate as though you have a whole family starving and dependent on you to feed them, and perhaps you are considering stealing that loaf of bread, don't worry, son, the grocer can't hear me, that is probably one of his girlfriends (he is a notorious whoremonger) calling him, listen, don't do it, I am incredibly wealthy and have an entire barn full of canned goods you could pick from, no charge, and thousands of dollars in my wallet I would happily purchase you carts full of groceries here to feed your family, all I ask of you, if I do that, is you kidnap a fat happy toddler for me sometime, it doesn't have to be today, but sometime in the next year or so, and don't ask why, it's not your business, but if you swear you will get me a fat tasty toddler then I will make sure your family is fed, we will buy you all the food you need today, and you may have free access to my barn full of canned goods, just say yes and all the food you can imagine is yours."

What do you do:

1. Flee with the bread.
2. Brain the grocer with a large can of Campbell's Hungry Man Beef Stew and take a bunch of stuff and rifle through the cash register.
3. Turn around and leave, taking nothing, and renewing your effort to find a job, to find some legal and ethical means to feed your family even though nothing has worked out to this point and they are so hungry.
4. Agree to the old man's bargain.
5. Other - Describe and defend.

The Zoltran Dilemma

I like to occasionally pose ethical dilemmas for my readers to solve. I think that there is a purpose to blogging that is perhaps a bit loftier than just virally loading youtube videos and discussing one's political views. Perhaps it is to think about the things that matter - to seek to understand the values and standards that underpin our daily behavior.

I am going to present an ethical problem and ask you to solve it in the comments section - what would YOU do? I will assign (silently and to myself) MPUs* to your answers to seek to understand the inner worlds of my readers so I can provide a level of thematic consistency and internal validity around morals, ethics, values, beliefs that will hopefully result in your reading of this blog to find certain guideposts and beacon lights to lead you on a path to a life of righteousness, purity and hope.

*MPU - Moral Processing Units:  A measure I just invented used to calibrate the metrics of moral/ethical problem resolution across dimensions of depth, breadth, detail, clarity, reason, logic.

Dilemma:

Your grandfather has recently passed away. You have been left everything in his will. You hardly knew your grandfather. You arrive at his ramshackle old farm in the backwoods of Bonner County, Idaho. Most of his old cabin and property is deteriorated and slovenly. The stream running through the property runs red with the rust of old tractors, buicks and log skidders.

You walk into his old barn. When you open the barndoor the inside is flooded with light. In the barn you see something that stuns you. In the middle of the barn next to old rotted hay bales and skeletons of dead barn cats you behold a bright shiny robot. The robot is 7 feet tall and glimmers in the afternoon sunrays. Next to the robot on a bench are three old computer punchcards and an envelope. You open the envelope and read:

This is Zoltran IV. He is a robot I built from 1956-1963. He has never been turned on.  All he needs is one of the three computer cards placed in the slot in his chest. Each card programs Zoltran to do something different. Once you choose the card it cannot be removed. Zoltran's function will be forever chosen.

I could never choose which card. That is why Zoltran remains asleep. If you are reading this it means I am likely dead and have finally received relief from this hellish dilemma of mine.

Choose wisely

After you read the description of what each card programs please tell me which one you chose and why.

Card 1

This card will program the Zoltran IV to steal and eat babies. He will rampage through countrysides and cities eating babies. He cannot be stopped.

Card 2

This card will program the Zoltran IV to destroy bank vaults and remove the contents and bring them to you. You will be rich beyond your wildest dreams.  The police will not be able to stop Zoltran. He is invincible.

Card 3

This card will program the Zoltran IV to use his mighty powers to help save humanity. He will respond to your verbal requests as long as what you order him to do contributes to the greater cause of mankind. He will build homes for the poor, pick crops for the hungry, stop wars singlehandedly. He cannot be stopped if his mission is to save the earth from poverty and pestilence and in all ways help raise up the downtrodden and end hate and mistreatment of others.

So, which card will you slide into the Zoltran's chest and why?