Good Ideas?

The nice people at Paleofuture made a list of seven products that get their names from "dystopian fiction."

That phrase gets quote marks because one of the products is Duff Beer, which is Homer Simpson's favorite beverage on the eternal animated show The Simpsons. I suppose you can make an argument that Springfield and its four-fingered yellow residents make up a dystopia, but this piece didn't and so it looks to me like the list's conceit thins out a little bit.

And the "Margaritaville" piece is one of those all-too-common internet jokes in which a smart and snarky writer smartly snarks on stuff in mainstream culture. Josh Fruhlinger has built a 12-year career doing this with newspaper comics even though he wrote all of his jokes in the first six weeks and has been recycling them more often than Mary Worth recycles plotlines.

But the Paleofuture piece deserves mention because it brings to light the reality that a company thought it was a good idea to make a food substitute and call it "Soylent." If you don't know why that's creepy weird rent the movie and Charlton Heston will tell you. There's also a muscle relaxant named "Soma," which is the name Aldous Huxley gave to the drug that made everybody happy, dumb and easy to control in his Brave New World. I can see the doctor saying, "Hmm...if I could wring a couple extra MRIs out of this guy I could pay for my boat, but there's really nothing wrong with him except a bad cramp. Wait...maybe I gave him this Soma..."

Maybe it's supposed to be ironic. I really do think.