Press Release: Impractical Earthlings

The following excerpt is from a press release I received when working on Successful Meetings magazine in the 1980s.  I found it so funny, I scrawled the word "cartoon" on the top.  (I was cartooning my takes on press releases in those days.)

"Washington, D.C.--A unique initiative has been announced to collect, categorize, and share the broadest range of PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES. The International Center for Practical Principles now welcomes any type of idea, rule, law, observation, advice, motto, discovery, warning, perspective, theorem, philosophy, and alike, [itals mine] which could in some way help earthlings everywhere achieve desired results in a myriad of human endeavors. The focus of this first-of-a-kind undertaking is to identify sensible tools and relevant strategies which may be harnessed to better deal with the challenges which confront us, and impact our future. ...In our inherently imperfect world, the increasing need to recognize and apply practical principles is obvious."

To me, this visionary stuff seems like the most impractical approach of all, given the inherent imperfection of humanity: Why does Ed--the guy with the fax machine and P.O. box who wrote this--even say that like it's a bad thing? And leaving Ed out of it, what's wrong with being an insensible and impractical earthling, anyway?