Monty by Jim Meddick for January 08, 2017

I always thought, your first question should be, “Why were you imprisoned in the bottle?” The answer might influence your wishes.

An excellent choice for the first wish! :)

To add insult to injury, Tesla doesn’t have authorized dealerships. Their business model is to sell directly without dealerships.

Wishing for more wishes is a sure sign of greed with is why I am fine with this outcome.

The third wish is always, “I wish none of this had happened.”

I wish this was a 3-liter bottle instead of just 2-liter…

I had wondered what might happen with a third wish like that.

The irreverence is why I love this strip!

I love this fantasy as a thought experiment. I’m pretty sure there’s always a way the genie is going to screw you. Is the dealership going to ask you where you got that key? How will you explain? Where did that million dollars come from? From a bank vault, in marked bills, more than likely. Meddick just showed how wishing for more wishes will screw you. “Magic always comes with a price.” The only safe wish is to be freed from the curse of the wishes. You can tell the genie you wish him not to harm you, you wish to remain uncursed by any wishes, and you wish him freedom and happiness.

There’s a wonderful story – I forget who by, maybe Larry Niven – about a woman who is granted the usual three wishes. She asks to be make the most beautiful woman in the world, so the genie makes her the mos beautiful octogenarian. She asks for wealth beyond the dreams of avarice and he gives her nothing, because nothing is beyond such dreams. Then she says “I wish that you may fall totally, permanently and unselfishly in love with me” and after that the genie gives her whatever she desires, and can’t even be jealous when she takes human lovers.

I’ve read a lot of stories based on this fairy tale over the years and the only ones that ended well for the recipient were the ones where they wished for a fruitful and simple life and felt empathy for the genie and wished for their release from bondage. A lesson we could all benefit from.

As a Dungeons & Dragons DM, I would’ve done the same thing to some greedy freak. You gotta be a darn lawyer to get a wish just right.

I’d seen a short film with three men stranded on a desert island who find a genie, who gives each of them one wish. The first one wishes to be back home in Italy with his mom cooking spaghetti, the second wishes to be in Paris among the most beautiful women in the world…the third can’t decide, lamenting that his two friends always helped him make decisions and says “I wish they were here to help me!” and…

As a Dungeon Master, I always enjoyed screwing over the players with a Wish spell. It’s so easy to find the loophole that the players refused to exercise the wish spells in short order.

Excellent X-Files on this subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_Souhaite

Then there is the guy in Oakland who finds a lamp, rubs it, Genie appears and gives him one wish: The guy says: “I want to go to Hawaii, but I hate flying and get seasick, so I want a bridge from here to Hawaii”. Genie says: “I canʻt really do that because of storms, high winds and oceanic cargo ship traffic. Pick another wish.” Guy says: “OK, I want to understand women”.Genie says: “Two lanes or four”.

Mountain Dew Monty! Aye, there’s the rub!

The movie “Bedazzled” (the original with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore if you please) played with this well, as the Devil gives a poor shlub seven wishes that all have a downside that outweighs what the wisher wanted.