Quick Fixes

NASA is responsible for some of the most amazing technological miracles of the past century (that whole "putting a man on the moon" thing was craaaaazy). As consumers, it is our duty to take those amazing achievements and repurpose them in totally asinine and self-serving ways.

#5. Cancer-Destroying Balloons That Fix Your Hair

NASA

NASA's Dennis Morrison created nanoceramics -- tiny ceramic balloons 10,000 times thinner than a human hair that can be filled with cancer medication and injected directly into malignant tumors. This is sort of like the plot to Armageddon, only instead of detonating an asteroid from the inside out, NASA is annihilating the swollen cancer baseball on Grandma's eyebrow.

Also Used For:

Frizz control. The nanoceramics release ions that smooth and relax hair, so a hairstyling company called Farouk Systems incorporated the technology into a line of flat irons, making the world a better place for Jared Leto.

The following all-new two-and-a-half minutes of distilled insanity comes from Cracked.com Senior Editor David Wong's catastrophically deranged book that somehow became a film adaptation starring Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti that was then somehow selected for the Sundance Film Festival and pretty much all of the other film festivals:

For those of you who saw the teaser months ago, this is a brand-new, full trailer for John Dies at the End, which will be splattering into theaters January 25. Oh, and for all of you who just said "It's surely not coming to MY city, I'll just download that shit off BitTorrent!" -- well, guess what: They're making it available for legit download on iTunes on December 27 of this year. Wait, shouldn't all movies be released this way?

Loyal readers know that I have been mentioning this thing about every five minutes since, oh, about 2007. Forgive me for my excitement, this is kind of a big deal for somebody who writes things on the Internet. For the rest of you, you have to admit that the movie looks like fun.

Oh, and can I take a moment to thank you guys? In addition to all of this, you people put me on the New York Times Best-Seller List with the sequel to John Dies at the End, titled This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It, which came out at the beginning of this month. It has 276 five-star reviews on Amazon, so hopefully those won't all be angrily flung back at the stores where they were purchased, covered in urine. Here is an unrelated video of a farting hippo.

The economy is in shambles. If only the people in power would listen to the third-party experts screaming from the sidelines, right? There's no way expert economists are full of shit, right? Wrong. Dead wrong.

#3. Just Give Out Jobs for Free

[IMG:1.jpg]

If the recession is a hangover from the hardest (and most expensive) party that jerk bank manager threw, unemployment is the mother of all headaches that we're having now. It's the most pertinent side effect of the sluggish economy and the primary factor used to measure any growth. So, what if we could end it altogether? That's what the World Economic Forum, a yearly gathering of spunky international experts working to fix the world, set out to do. Using their collective expertise, business leaders put forth a resolution that would solve the problem of creating jobs without actually paying employees.

How would you pull this off? By not paying them, that's how. The resolution stated that in order for teenagers to receive necessary work experience, they should be given a job for two years with no pay. What the resolution didn't account for was that using teens for cheap slave labor does nothing to actually create jobs.

According to MIT economics professor Peter Diamond, even if these teenagers had the ability to land a job more easily in the future, that's still assuming that there will be jobs for them to land. Finally, someone with brains ... there's no way an economics professor at a prestigious school could be wrong.

It seems like all political ads are the same. We're sick of seeing commercials for Obama and Romney, yet we can barely remember what a single one is about. You can try to stand out by being innovative or controversial, or you can take the easy route and make an ad crazier than the entire population of an insane asylum. For example ...

#5. "Ike ... Bob"

The 1952 election was the first to see the use of TV ads, so we understand that nobody quite knew what they were doing. But it still should have been obvious to Adlai Stevenson's campaign that they needed to employ voice actors who sounded like humans, not Marvin the Martian.

Stevenson's strategists wanted to suggest that an Eisenhower administration would be controlled behind the scenes by Robert (Bob) Taft. Why they thought having their two actors repeat "Ike" and "Bob" like they were insane conjoined twins would accomplish this has been lost to history.