Coinstar‘s commercial is kind of funny, but there is one fatal flaw with the idea of the Tooth Fairy turning in all of her quarters for crisp twenties — what is she going to do when she gets to a kid’s house and has to leave something under the pillow? Ask his parents for change? Are the kids just going to get really lucky? Or reallyunlucky when she makes use of the pliers to get some extra value out of your mouth (as Terry Pratchett imagines)? And what about after she’s collected all of the teeth? Those have got to be a bitch to carry around, too. Is there a Toothstar machine that changes teeth for sand dollars or mermaid’s purses or whatever the hell they use for currency up in fairyland? And what is the value of the different types of teeth? I think molars must be worth the most.

I found an article that claims that one of the useful purposes of lying about the Tooth Fairy is “giving a child a sense of faith in things unseen”. Yes. That’s great. And then once they discover that Santa and the Tooth Fairy are damn dirty lies, hopefully they’ll learn a valuable life lesson and become skeptics. Critical thinking is a good thing.

I have another question. If the Tooth Fairy was my parents, and Santa Claus was my parents… just who is this God fellow? Are parents really that egotistical? I mean, well… I guess a lot of them do seem to think that they’re omniscient.

While I was learning about the Tooth Fairy, I also found an interesting example of a situation where it would be to one’s disadvantage to be omniscient. In a game of chicken “if A knows that B is in fact omniscient, then A will simply decide to never swerve since he knows B will know his logical decision and B will be forced to swerve to avoid a collision”.

Ha! And this site says that I can’t play chicken with God and win. Shows what they know! Unless God doesn’t mind getting into a huge car wreck (and why would he mind, really). But I think that’s a tie, isn’t it? Good enough for me, against a fucking God!