Artur Akhmetzyanov

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Invincible burger not made of glacier

AFP / ANGELIKA OSIEWALSKA

Welcome to Iceland - The Land of Fire, Ice and Indestructible Junk Food. No, it was not cryo-chambered at the heart of Vatnajökull as some sort of saber-toothed squirrel from Ice Age. It's a much more curious and pragmatic case, as BBC reports.

When a tiny American-Scottish food startup Son of Donald (sometimes called McDonald's) shut down all its evil branches in Iceland in 2009 to celebrate the collapse of the national economy and Geir Haarde's government, a smart local named Hjortur Smarason saw a window of buy-and-hold investment opportunity in the asset class like hamburger and fries (not overglorified bitcoin, ha!). Now, 10 years later, BBC reports that this fast food combo set looks better than ever, streaming live and driving 400,000 hits daily to the website of Snotra House hostel in Southern Iceland, where it's stored in a glass cabinet under vigilant surveillance of elite Swiss Guard, eating chocolate and telling Pope jokes.

Bearing in mind the fact that McDonald's feeds 1% of global population daily with its nondecomposable 'food', it shouldn't come as a surprise that more people consist less of water but more of burgers and fries, slowly changing their genetic structure from normal human DNA to Happy Meal.

McDonald's commented in 2013 that "in the right environment, our burgers, like most other foods, could decompose". I guess it's just not the right time and not the right environment yet, at least not on planet Earth and not in 2019. Let's wait till commercial space travel gets commoditized to the extent where every intergalactic ticket comes with a bundled burger & fries deal so we can bring it to Mars and leave it for the future generations.

I'm sure it's gonna happen relatively soon with technological progress accelerating exponentially. Even stand-up comedians use virtual reality now! I know I'm the King of Subtle Segues. It's fascinating how modern tech allows us to recreate live experience of laughing with the audience, when in reality you're laughing alone in your room like a madman with Oculus headset on. The show experience might be same but the aftertaste is irreplaceable. When you finish a live stand-up show, you leave the venue, exchanging glances and enthusiastic reviews with fellow human audience members. When you finish a VR stand-up show, you take off your headset, hiding your vertigo and embarassment from a cat that doesn't even like stand-up. The cat likes milk and wool balls - things from the analogue past that are not yet to be experienced with AR/VR/MR.

However, it might be just the matter of time before one of FAANG gang leaders invests in the pet-focused hardware/Internet-of-Things solution. Yes, another seamless transition to the last news bit. Well, it happened - someone finally bought Fitbit. To be more specific, this someone is the Search Emperor Google. It's a logical move to fight Apple in the wearable fitness tracking space. If you can't build it, buy it. But wait for the punchline - Google will not use health and wellness data from Fitbit for its ads, according to the announcement. Seriously, hire these PR folks to write for The Daily Show.