Then I'll make them pay me $9.95 a month not to get shot out of a cannon, but I'll have them shot out of a cannon anyway. Read your SLA.

Then I'll make them stack all of the unused apostrophes into a little pile, one by one with tweezers, and then I'll jump in them like autumn leaves. It just sounds fun. Remember, "it's" is an abbreviation for "it is". It's not that difficult!

Also, I will allow people to come up and kick them, 'cuz when was the last time you had the opportunity to kick a recording industry executive? It's fun for everyone.

All day.

Every day.

Toddlers.

It won't fix things, but I will feel better — and I don't even have children.

They will have a choice, however, from two cannons. One will point directly at a brick wall. The other will point at a huge mound of pillows and marshmallows. Of course, after they choose the pillow cannon, my minions will suddenly point it at the brick wall after all. Hey, they should have been able to read my mind.

I wouldn't want to spoil the experience, you see.

These people will have to teach drivers training courses — which I will raise to a mandatory two-year length — to teenagers, in their own cars. There may be cameras to record their facial expressions and screams of terror, in which case for repeat offenders we will broadcast these videos on empire-wide television so that everyone can laugh at them.

If it's better than what we get now, great. If not, well, more people will make fun of it, so I'm happy.

I won't require my minions to shoot them out of normal cannons. These will be special cannons. Inside, there is a touchscreen with cannon controls. Of course, the screen is greasy and has scratches all over it, making it hard to read and harder to control, and it registers random phantom button presses occasionally, but it's there. Buried several levels deep in the menu is an option to cancel the cannon firing. If they can find it (oh, did I mention that they'll have to select an option to show that they're in the cannon, because of course there's absolutely no way to detect that or to guess that someone trying to disable a cannon firing is actually inside the cannon), they will have to pay using one of six different payment methods (and again, the system obviously cannot detect that, say, the firee has just swiped a credit card even though after the firee has pressed the button for swiping a credit card suddenly the machine can read the credit card and validate it, but don't ask me why that is) and if they can do all of this within 30 seconds (and the buttons on the screen move around every now and then and there's a weight sensor that randomly doesn't work), I won't have them shot out of cannons and they are free to go.

Of course, they'll set off anti-theft sensors accidentally as they walk away, so I'll have my minions harass them for a few minutes. It seems only fair.

I will have my minions change the street signs randomly though. Why should their lives be easy?

First, if they write a genuinely funny or entertaining script for a sitcom without using a single cliche (whether dramatic, structural, or verbal) and promise never ever to use that phrase again, they can leave. Second, there is a secret passageway out of the room that leads to the cannon firing range, where the guards will shoot them out of cannons into the barren remains of Hollywood, where they will have to fend for themselves.

That's a television show I would watch.

Doesn't it sound so much more impressive with the "ize" suffix? If you don't know what a word means, though, don't use it. That's why I will make a good emperor — I will have an empire-wide problem to decrease ambiguity in communication. It'll only take a few cannons to make my point.

I will confine them to their houses (and possibly bedrooms) until they can complete a timed obstacle course where they must navigate through seemingly wide corridors made almost impossibly impassible by stacks of irrational objects placed at random in the most annoying configurations possible. I will also have my minions duct-tape their arms to their sides so they cannot push lighter obstacles out of the way.

Ravenous hordes of angry teenagers may chase the guilty through the course, throwing fruit and vegetables at them. I haven't decided whether the fruit should be fresh or rotten.

Perhaps I will also claim that they had the opposite genders. I haven't decided.