Infrastructure Ideas for the Casual Dreamer

I was thinking the other day about the sad, dilapidated state of our infrastructure, our roads pot-holed as if we had been carpet bombed by the B-52s of Trickle Down Economics, our schools, ruined by the rabid anti-intellectual and anti-science movements about in our quaint little world power, and our bridges and dams bursting at the bolts and beams because a brush clearing enthusiast needed to go all “Super Saiyan” on some guy with a mustache in a desert far, far away, and, well, while thinking about this, I immediately thought of some positives for the future, or, “ideas,” if you will.

The Big Kind.

You know, the ones that John Boehner ponders over during a nice tanning session and 8 vodka tonics sans tonic water and then clicks the “Evil Button,” abolishing it to the deepest, darkest part of his brain: The Crying Gland.

So, as it were, a few grand ideas to fix America:

One: We take all the bankers and hedge fund managers, and replace them with illegal immigrants straight out of the strawberry fields. Think of the raw potential! A rag-tag group of, Non-native, non-English speaking workers from the bluest of blue collar backgrounds gets to control to all the money in the world! This fixes two problems, as we become the nation of dreams again by erasing the whole bullshit-unless-you’re-a-legacy-kid-at-Princeton thing, and put the dream right back in American Dream. Why, we could call it the Dream Act.

What’s that you say? What to do with the bankers? Well, I think this is fairly easy: make them enlist in the military to fight the wars they’ve been comfortably living away from for all of these years while betting against the fact that poor people might not be able to re-pay their loans. I hear Kabul is nice this time of year. Fighting season is bikini season!

Two: We free all the detainees from Guantanamo, drop them on Rick Perry’s doorstep, and film the following gun-slinging, dang-nabbin’ hilarity to make America’s next great Reality TV show: Rick Perry Has A Gun, And There Are Hundreds Of Muslims On His Porch. Just imagine the ratings! Liberals would love it for the literal irony, and conservatives would love it, because, well, they’re into that sort of shit!

And not only that, but we could show the show to a test audience of Tea Partiers in a giant theatre and release a bunch of naked, oiled-up gays into the auditorium, lock the doors Inglorious Basterds style, and then proceed to film that for the follow-up reality show. Oh, imagine the sweet, sweet moments in great TV.

“‘Ma, get the popcorn’ ready! Ricky found Mohammed hiding in his nubile, virgin daughter again! Ohhhhh he’s so gonna pummel his ass! Hey! What are all these queers doing in here?! Get them…get them…oooooohhh…look at their perfectly pedicured feet…”

Hey, what’s Marcus Bachmann doing in this all the sudden?

Three: We put a solar panel and wind turbine right smack dab in every douchebag’s yard who has one of those Ford F-350 SuperCab Small Dick Enviro-Murder Mobiles with the dirt-bike trailer attached just for shits and giggles.

Four: We re-pave the roads with lobbyists, so that not only do we get a new road surface, but we have a reason to go to work in the morning: to drive over the bastards who keep our country in a state of stagnation for monetary gain, thus bringing up our national moral and also making public transit much more on-time from the satisfaction it would bring to drive behemoth buses over the faces of thousands of lobbyists on the way to work each day. Look out Switzerland, we’re reinvigorating our time management skills!

Five: Every time someone at a Tea Party rally, debate, or feverish tax cut orgyfest yells out “Let him die!” in their opposition to health care for a sick, dying man, or an entire crowd cheers wildly for the mere mention of executions, we dump a billion dollars into KFC’s coffers to help speed up the evolution process. Now those are the sort of bi-partisanship agreements I’m talking about!

And big idea number six: We actually do start putting our money where our mouth is and we take on the fact that our roads look like a country backroad in Romania, our schools are stuck in a decayed state of the 1950s, and our airports, oh our glorious sock-juice covered airports, are such a source of national embarrassment that you can actually hear the rapidly developing world laugh out loud every time they land on our soil to take building contracts that were once covered by the American workers that built our country in the first place.

We put 12 men on the MOON FOR CHRIST SAKE! THE MOON! Can you imagine our country doing something like that today? There would be protests from all the old, crusty white people who think Obama only wants to goto the moon so he could found the nation’s first interstellar summer socialist camp for kids!

So, how do we get on the ball again, you ask?

It’s quite simple, really: get off Facebook, put down the Angry Birds, and leave Words With Friends on the table, I promise, it’ll be there later. How do I know this? Because it isn’t reality. It’s not tangible. What’s real is passing us by. Your suspension getting sheared off so the rich could have a lower marginal tax rate is real. Your kid learning in a room surrounded by asbestos and lead because half of the political landscape wants to abolish the EPA is real. And the fact that our generation, just coming into contact with upward mobility, is looking over a landscape of jobs that consist of “Content management” in “highly-regarded start-ups” that don’t produce anything besides selling you more ads and is considered America’s economic future, is real.

If we can’t buy what they’re selling us because there are no more jobs to build anything of lasting value or service, well, I think you know how the second part to this question goes: What is Rick Perry going to do this week when he finds out Ahmed ate all the Cheetos in the pantry?! 7 p.m., only on FOX.

The Wheel of Fortunate Cwaziness

Seemingly, every month a new story teeming with absurdity and delectable irony via horniness and “you couldn’t make this shit up if you were high, coked out of your mind, and knee deep in a bed full of strippers” rises up through the 21st Century Tweet-Machine. Needless to say, stranger than fiction is always in full effect when you have religion, sexual urges, money, and politicians involved, so let us explore a few scenarios that might or might not happen in the coming months of our fine year, 2011:

1. A Republican Congressman turns out to be growing marijuana in the basement of Congress via electricity made from Solar Panels while employing illegal immigrants from Mexico to keep the grow-house running, man. Crazy sounding? Yes. As crazy as Latino terrorist-woman squeezing out babies on to the shore of the Rio Grande with a Koran in hand and a predisposition to destroy America from the inside out? The horse says nayyy! I have a sneaking suspicion about Darrell Issa being the eventual culprit. Only a guy from California paranoid enough to investigate everything would be blitzed out of his effing mind and wondering where the Cheetos are that he must liberate from the vending machine. Probability of happening: 84.67 percent.

2. An oil executive turns out to be running a secret dolphin sex-ring in the Gulf of Mexico while BP employees take bets on which dolphin gets pumped full of oil and dispersant when they fail to impregnate a female dolphin. Crazy as all hell? Possibly. But as crazy as our President being a secret socialist orator under the guise of racism and Stalinism wrapped up in one big Kenyan hand-weaved Anti-Christ blanket? Methinks the right-wing doth protest too much. Probability of happening: 99.7 percent.

3. Mitt Romney turns out to have three secret gay husbands that he’s kept hidden underground in a small basement cellar under center field at Fenway Park for 15 years. Naturally, absurd sounding, but can it match up against Michelle Bachmann’s wild, wild world of Census mind control, government workers coming out of Yellow Wallpaper and collective of chic and stylish tin hats? You be the judge. Probability of happening: 69 percent.

4. John Boehner has an office aide who’s actually competent, not an alcoholic anonymous sponsor, and an emotionally mature single-lady looking for an average guy to settle down with and totally live the glitz and glam of the D.C. ‘burbs while someday dreaming of running for office without a screw loose. Probability of happening: 0.67 percent.

5. Mike Huckabee is actually an undercover brilliant satirist working with Sasha Baron Cohen on a film about how easy it is to dupe Americans into believing that dinosaur bones are God’s way of testing our faith, and that Satan is one helluva prankster. Probability of sweet, sweet neon man-thong profits happening: 2.2 percent.

And, most delicious of all: 6. Barack Obama stops caving in to Republican poker faces and realizes they’ll never give him an inch and starts cramming progressive legislation down the throats of all Americans to the point that the deepthroat metaphor chokes us up with tears of remembering a time when the magic of the second Death Star blowing up on November 4, 2008 was ripe in the air, the youth were celebrating the hope Senator Obama brought to a new generation, and we were all basking in the wonder of what could be. Probability of happening: Let us hope.

And now, for something completely different

A New Year, a New Start, a START Treaty and hopefully, a new outlook on whatever awaits us on our collective spiral upwards as sentient, intelligent beings…lets make this both a eulogy for those that have advanced us further along our path to discovery, self-growth and toward whatever drives us to breathe, feel, and find whatever makes us tick, laugh, love, forget the past and hit our money button, and an eye on the future. Newspaper-styled political columns be damned for the day, lets look at some perspective.

There are those that have been long gone by news cycle and generational standards by now, and still strike a chord deep within the smart legions of forward-thinkers, so now would be an appropriate time to reflect upon both the futurist, utopic dreams of Carl Sagan, Bill Hicks, George Carlin, John Lennon and whatever makes you imagine where we might find ourselves 10 years from now.

Considering the sad state of our space program, of which, is now mostly being dismantled for private enterprise (Hey, those tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires had to come from somewhere…), here’s a wildly mind-blowing stat that will make you ponder if we can both, A. Get our shit together, and B. What is physically possible:

The New Horizons probe currently on its way to Pluto at 36,000 mph, or, for an even more blink-of-an-eye, heart-stopping thought, 10.1 miles per second, will still take almost three years to cover the distance between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. Three years to go the better part of a billion miles in the vast, cold, lifeless realm of what we call space/dating. That’s 10.75 million times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Can we actually transverse these great distances, in a reasonable amount of time, either humanly or robotically? And if we could, how much of a bitchslap would both humanity and every member of Congress need to make the funds available, or a president who like the Great Progressive Hope he is, to appeal to all of our iPad and Kindled Youth to get interested in the ultimate answer instead of playing some mindless farming game on Facebook?

At our current pace, we’d need an army of Carl Sagans, although Obama is definitely trying. These things can’t be forced.

At the heart of all the planetary discovery knowledge we have, we still have absolutely no idea of visible, tangible fact of the worlds that lie under the clouds of the gas giants that prowl through the Outer Solar System, and can only fathom with our wildest dreams what they may be. For all we know, it’s made of Mink Fur and lube. Whatever probe we’ve sent to find out gets crushed under the enormous gravitational pull, heat and atmospheric pressure before we can find out.

Does whatever lies under the beautiful blue clouds of Neptune or the orange-tanness of Saturn grab your imagination without apology? Or hath that evil Vampire Lover of yours sucked your soul and pocketbook dry? Don’t forget that Top 10 list you have open in a tab to read later.

Business will never find out. Business is just a group of cocksuckers in the way of progress trying to pry every last dollar from your pocket before you knew what hit ya. They’ll always be two steps ahead, but for social progress, four steps back (Hi Mike Ness!).

This has to come from the drive and curiosity we all possess, especially as children. Again, my advice is to give every forming, coalescing mind of 7th and 8th graders a telescope. It might not grab them immediately, because, well, you gots to look hawt fer all dem’ cuties in middle school, but all you can do is plant seeds. Again, it can’t be forced like religion. Science is summed up as methods in experimentation and figuring things out for yourself via deduction, but it always leads to fact.

So, for the new year, put down that iPad with its deliciously SEO’ed article that creates nothing new or meaningful besides exposing you to ads and taking your page view for revenue, and lets make a change this year for both society and ourselves. We’ll only be better for it, and might even be less stressed and more brotherly toward each other.*

*OMG, we are so f@#ked.

The McRib is back! Honey, have you seen my pacemaker?

Here it is in all of its glory: 

The sandwich of mechanically separated finger-lickin’ doom and self defeat is back for a limited time only, presumably to temporarily drain the McRib goo silos somewhere deep within the dark, wanton heart of Middle America, but how could you say no to “The Legend” as the campaign to win the hearts and minds of the American people via Facebook and Twitter laugh out their maniacal course in pitch-perfect marketing?

Oh yes, the McRib awaits your salivating diabetic vessel of corn-syrup transport (Your ass says hi), but the only thing legendary about it is the ingredients list, of which, is probably an orgy of scientific calculation in salt, slop, pieces of Dick Cheney’s soul and at least five small Burmese children who fell to an unfortunate death in the McRib factory. Mmm…taste the mystery!

Sadly, there seems to be an all out blitz of positive media going around the interwebs with said sandwich of comet-guiding proportions, but there’s one thing you can’t deny: the McRibLips, for when you want to make out with your rapture-fearing wife at your friendly neighborhood McDonald’s, is hella cute.

Now, while the McRib vastly speeds up the digging of our oversized, round-shaped grave upon its release every few years, it brings upon itself a vast, universal sized array of questions that can only be answered by the most cretin and purely evil of our Marketing and Business Overlords (Blessed they be upon thy soul, lead us into delicious temptation, amen).

What exactly comprises the McRib? Well, if you’ve seen this picture of a cotton-candy-esque river of flowing pink goop, there’s not much left to the imagination. Oh, hell, who am I kidding. “Buy one now! The McRib sandwich, a specialized proprietary blend of Unicorn, Centaur and seven-week old puppies is only available for a limited time! Quick, everybody’s getting one!”

You have to wonder when the incarcerated pig woke up that day (If the McRib does indeed contain trace amounts of pork), what it thought it was going to turn into by the end of business hours. “A stamped shape of mystery meat? Please, I’ll at least be a dinner ham and a few pounds of bacon! Hey…hey, what are you doing with that rib-shaped branding iron?! …That is so not cool. McRibs? Aww s@#t…”

McDonald’s doesn’t even try to mask its evilness anymore. They’ve taken to the tube and Google with ads completely mocking the thing as “A legend, where no one knows it origins” with a caricature of Ben Franklin holding a glowing McRib with his mouth gooed with what appears to be a shade of defecated Rocky Road with a side of rimjob for the nose.

Oh, it’s good marketing, and creative, funny people are wasting their precious time in life selling the idea of making one comfortable through laughter and absurdity in a way that George Carlin is probably looking down from the heavens above in a state of pure shock. Instead of inventing new technologies that could create artificial gravity in space or cure cancer they’re selling the meat scraped from the bones of what once was living because it pays better in the immediate future. Social progressives, they are not.

You know, Pixar has always been good at pointing out serious societal flaws in their films through the lens of animations that have gripped the minds of millions of blossoming children, but you have to wonder if they know a little something more about ourselves than we do when it comes to the repulsive, blobular masses of gravitating gluttony that were the ever-so-delightfully-dumb Earthly population in Wall·E. But hey, what do I care? I’m eating a legend! We’ll never become that!

2010 Job requirements for the educated individual

I decided to shake it up a bit from the usual political panderings and sexual double entendre for the week. I give you…”The world according to what it takes to land an entry-level job out of college.” Enjoy.

Successful candidates will have or will do…

- A Bachelor’s degree, Master’s preferred (Ph.D even better)

+7 years of relevant experience

+5 years of knowing everyone in your field of study and/or expertise so we can use you real good so it’s basically like you’re not even working, you’re just a cog in the vast minefield of business that gets paid for knowing people

+17,000 years of FinalCut Pro experience with a diverse portfolio of everything from feature length motion pictures to clever, witty ad campaigns for the most successful Fortune 500 companies out there (Hey, Cavemen needed to be sold something too!)

+$2,000 in cash

-Tri-lingual abilities. One language romantic, the other, preferrable Cantonese for when you need to converse in a professional, and highly analytic manner with our overseas IT department

-Build a content management system for our website all by yourself in ten days or you die

-Design highly appealing eye-candy UI interfaces for our customers/viewers/don’t you know we don’t really do anything besides make Top 5 lists of buzzwords to get ourselves higher in the Google indexing algorithm so you can view all the ads that line our pockets while we sit around and basically do nothing all day besides rearrange deck chairs?

-Have your own Unicorn

-Have a great sense of humor

-But be serious at the same time

-Be a great cook

-You’ve run a Wall Street bank for the past 10-15 years

-Own a small ranch in Colorado

-Be a great blogger and Twitterer who can communicate to our vast, diverse audience of social media enthusiasts and know what it takes to get their attention

-Have a third degree in Marketing/Business/Selling cyanide-laced baby food to unsuspecting parents (We value campaigns that can move any product)

-You’ve planted an American flag on the South Pole (Moon, even better)

-Be great at giving massages

-Be great at giving Exorcisms

-You’ve written at least 5 “Top Ten” radio hits in the past decade

-Provide your own lunch four times a week (Free catering on Fridays!!!)

-Be a highly competitive Quidditch player

-You’ve killed Satan in many different venues

-You’ve worked at Zynga! (And killed Satan there)

-Be 10 percent Belgian

-You’ve killed a Rhinoceros with your bare hands

-You’ve killed Dane Cook with your bare hands

-You know both Windows 7 and OS X Snow Leopard like the back of your sleep-deprived eyes and are multi-talented in multi-platformed ways

-You’ve taken over the world at least twice

-You’ve won two Super Bowls, three NBA titles and a World Series all without using steroids

-You actually designed the Saturn V rocket

-You cured cancer

-1,456,000 years of Flash or Dreamweaver work (With a portfolio to show it!)

-And, again, a great sense of humor

Salary: Hourly, highly competitive

Oh, and don’t follow up with you application . But if you do, we’ll send Uma Thurman and a couple of swords to your house to f@#k you up because you bothered us in the middle of our work day.

Have a good one!

The answers: Now conveniently placed in your telescope

Credit: National Space Foundation/Zina Deretsky

Some 20 odd blogs ago, I brought up the point that if you gave every child in America a telescope, say around the 8th grade level, where the mind is exploding with wonderment and a genuine desire and gravitational pull for knowledge, you could probably wipe out all the massively ridiculous 19th Century problems that still plague us on Earth in the 21st Century in a relatively short amount of time. Religion, Gliese 581 f called. They want their donations back.

Something beautiful is abound when we put our money where our imaginations and quest for “The” unabridged, all-knowning, money button of an answer is. The other day, humankind discovered the first possibly habitable exo-planet orbiting a star currently not known as “The Sun,” or, for you flat earthers, “That son of a bitch that thinks it knows better!”

Gliese 581 f is a planet three times the mass of Earth and within the Goldilocks Zone of what we can perceive as possibly habitable and holds the ability to maintain water without it being completely frozen or boiled off the surface in a Three Stooges-esque sublimation effect. The fact that we found a small dot of dirt flying around in the deep lightless void of space is pretty damned impressive. The fact that it’s not a massive gas giant like Jupiter orbiting so close to the sun that it causes an obvious strobe effect is even more impressive.

Can you imagine dropping that on someone 500, 100, hell, 50 years ago? They’d tie you up the stake and watch you burn in the village fireworks show.

Even more impressive that the previously aforementioned very impressive discoveries? It wasn’t made by the Hubble or Kepler telescopes, orbiting far above the Earth’s atmospheric distortion effect when it comes to the ability to see the night sky without billions of moving water molecules it its way. It was made by the Keck Observatory far atop a volcano in Hawaii.

Shit, that has to make you feel pretty good about who we are and where we are going as a civilization. This is of course if you forget about wars, greed, Christians and Republicans for the moment being.

Getting back to Gliese 581 f, its in the astronomical money shot known as The Goldilocks Zone, which is basically the distance between the orbits of Venus and Mars compared to a star like our own where water would be in a liquid state judging by what we know as possible. That acceptable distance changes with the different kinds of star from hot to cold, and with Gliese 581 it’s a lot closer to its parent star. Like 37 day complete orbit close. Hell, its even got its own solar system of fellow planets too!

So what if we really invested in giving every forming mind a path to the night sky? Don’t you think it could grab a kid by the teeth and change his or her ever expanding world? This isn’t the stuff of science fiction anymore. It’s right outside the door and floating above you.

We’ll probably never know for sure if we’re alone before we all bomb, starve and parch our fellow brothers and sisters into dust, but this is a start. A Universal Reset Button is closer than you think, and it lies through the scope of two reflecting lenses, giving us a better grasp of the great human experiment.

Maybe we can finally give everyone a banana instead of a grenade to fight for some worthless religious conviction, or a hug instead of a stab in the gut, or love instead of hate. Knowing we aren’t alone would completely change the world.

What, expecting smutty teabagging jokes? I’m disappointed…

Damn! You’ve figured us out, Republicans!

No!!!! Not the Terror Baby plot! You sons of bitches! How could you ruin everything for us so easily?! We, the league of Bible burning heathen corruptors were going to destroy America from inside-out with terror babies. They were going to grow up so innocent, so American as Apple Pie…until we activated the T-chip in their Muslim-loving soul, turning them into an army of dildo-weilding abortion doctors reciting the Koran that would sterilize all pregnant women in America, rendering you unable to birth your blubbery, fat, Jesus-loving Xbox Athlete and WalMart employee of the year. You bastards.

Yes, that was the latest craze this week in America (I could swear that I’m forgetting something…). Terror Babies, filled with WMDs and anthrax and, hey! I found the WMDs! Well would you look at that…needless to say, representative Louie Gohmert proved for endless entertainment again this week when he accused Anderson Cooper of totally being in on this plot to take down America from the inside, turning the country into a zombie state of Islamic Hitlerism.

Rep. Gohmert, a co-signer to the birther bill that hilariously failed in House committee, is just the guy who you’d catch f@#king a chicken if you walked in on him in an airport bathroom.

I mean, this is a guy who’s probably been terrorized by those snide, awful, intellectual liberal scum for his whole life so he probably feels the need to lash out and take down the lamestream media in his spare time when he’s not sucking on his thumb with the blinds drawn, and the house sealed for fear of a stray book sighting or science experiment by the kids in the neighborhood making the rounds.

Oh, it gets better. Rep. Gohmert used to be a Chief Justice on the Texas 12th Circuit Court of Appeals. A full-fledged, black-robe sporting big shot, that decided cases affecting peoples lives. Deliver us from conspiracy, amen.

How Anderson Cooper made it through that interview without just completely losing it and laughing his ass off at an insane man on the other side of the screen, I do not know. That kind of role playing would have made Sam Bee break character.

But, as we all know, this isn’t even the most ridiculous thing of the week. Did you hear? Did you see? Muslims are just totally plotting to give us a lefty handshake only mere blocks from the site that they all attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.

Don’t you just love this phony outrage? This rally cry? Yes, it’s probably a dumb idea to build something with Islamic connotation that close to the site of the World Trade Center (Building anything that worships an invisible man in the sky who needs money seems slightly idiotic), but for the protectors of the Constitution they’re making themselves out to be, Republicans are seemingly forgetting the whole First Amendment thing.

Meanwhile, millions of minds could be changed in Pakistan about how idiotically dickish Americans are if we paid any glimmer of attention to the despair currently flooding their country. Hell, we could even change the hearts and minds of the Muslim world with a massive inflow of aid, dropping food, Bibles and Bibles full of porn and lube on this disaster-stricken corner of precious Mother Earth, but instead we’re too busy screaming at each over violating the First Amendment and letting the terrorists win. It must be campaign season in America. The idiots are out in force.

In other news, 18 percent of Americans now think that Barack Obama is a Hitler stripper. Wait, no, I’m sorry, Muslim. Ah, there’s the right pole. Poll! Now, I’m not one for human evolution, but this somehow managed to go up from 10 percent last year. Has it really slipped that far in this country since the Second Blowing Up Of The Death Star in 2008, the celebratory Ewok’s brains turned into a mush of vapid gruel, that a fair percentage of us think that Obama is the a secret Muslim in disguise hell bent on giving blowjobs to gay Austrian dudes in the Oval Office while simultaneously lighting the Constitution on fire in front of kids? That the First Amdenment really doesn’t say what it means? That Muslim women are rowing across the boarder, pumpin’ out a baby, cutting the umbilical chord and floating back across to a life of Latino luxury while their child awaits his orders?

I think someone put something in the high fructose corn syrup. As Chris Hayes said the other day, “The country has a tendendacy to lose its mind from time to time. Often in August,” and I think he’s on to something.

Who put this socialism in my Bud Lite Lime gad dammat?!