Thought of the Day

This morning some episode of Buffy was on & it somehow involved wishes being granted by an evil djinn. I found myself wondering what I'd do with a 'genie in a lamp'. For some unknown reason, the thought popped into my head that if I found an honest-to-goodness magic lantern, I would find some way to give it to the Dalai Lama. That would probably be my wish: "I wish the Dalai Lama would find this magic lantern sometime today and be able to make wishes on it". I wondered to myself, "what would the Dalai Lama wish for?"

He'd probably free the djinn.

Why not use the wishes for myself? Djinn are craftier than coyotes, & no matter how carefully I worded my wishes, the djinn would figure out some way to fuck it all up. Including the thing about the Dalai Lama finding the lamp. It would probably be all out of charges, or unrecognizable as a 'magic' lantern. It might just look like some discarded bedroom lamp. Or it could even look like an ancient oil lamp, which was basically a rock with a ground-out depression in it for pooling oil & floating a wick on top of it. That would be better than the discarded bedroom lamp simply because I'm sure the Tibetan monks could recognize and find usefulness in a prehistoric oil lamp (I know I would recognize it because of books like Clan of the Cave Bear & probably find some usefulness in it myself, even if I never rubbed it to make a djinn pop out of it), whereas a discarded bedroom lamp is just someone's carelessly tossed-out trash.

From now on, anytime I find discarded bedroom lamps, I'm going to rub them - just in case.