“To demonstrate what he thought of the oogling visitors to his cage, the orangutan bescumbered them, hooting with derision as they screamed and ran away.”
Dwindling Helium Supply Can Increase American IQ
Earth is Running Out of Helium.
Children across America may be in despair soon. Kids born today will never know the pleasures of helium. By the time they reach their 4th birthdays, those children will be wondering what it was that kept those old-timey balloons aloft in the pictures they see of the days of yore. They will never hear the voice of one of their peers altered for a few moments by a breath of helium, and they will never themselves know the joy of talking that way until their mothers, in exasperation, say, “Stop inhaling from balloons before your voice freezes that way! It happened to a kid in Australia, so it could happen to you!”
This situation is so serious that both chambers of Congress have held hearings on the issue. There is actual bipartisan concern about our dwindling helium supply. Senate bill 2374, the Helium Stewardship Act of 2012, has garnered considerable support. Opening the House hearing on July 20, 2012, Rep. Rush Holt (D. – NJ), the Ranking Member on the House Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee, said, “We may be heading for a crisis … if we don’t face up to this issue.”
He’s right. Without helium, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade will be just a bunch of trucks pretending to be floats and marching bands. There will be nothing spectacular to see. Television coverage will cease and people will hit the malls for Black Thursday, which, without the parade, will become the norm.
Helium is so scarce that helium balloons are truly a scourge to necessary medical procedures like MRIs, which require the element to operate. Cornell University Professor and Nobel physics prize winner, Robert Richardson, says that party balloons should sell for over $100 each to reflect a more accurate value of this dwindling resource.
As silly as it may seem, terrestrial helium depletion is no joke.
Helium is essential for creating neutron beams. Weather balloons use it to reach the stratosphere. It is used to cool nuclear reactors and to purge rocket fuel in space-bound vehicles. Without it, superconducting magnets won’t work, so devices as common as the local hospital’s MRI to the Large Hadron Collider would be inoperable. Without helium, there will be no semi-conductors or microchips. And it’s absolutely indispensable for cryogenics. For the love of all that is immortal, we must save our helium!Helium is mined, just like other natural gas, from pockets in the earth’s crust where it is trapped. Its sale is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which sells it to private refineries for considerably less than its rarity and rapid depletion would indicate is a fair price.
The American Helium Hoard
There is a place that stockpiles helium. Where else do you think the canisters of the stuff come from? Of course, they come from the world’s largest Helium Reserve, outside of Amarillo, Texas, where over 30% of the world’s helium is extracted from natural gas wells. However, as wild and free as the helium is allowed to roam on the reserve, supplies there are expected to be depleted by 2016. By 2042, the earth’s supply of helium may go the way of the dodo. Helium is an endangered species … er … element.
We all know and love helium as the gas that inflates balloons. But scientists and engineers use helium as a coolant and in other complicated ways we mere mortals wouldn’t understand. It seems though, that those party balloons have been wasting this precious resource.
“Helium is non-renewable and irreplaceable. Its properties are unique and unlike hydrocarbon fuels (natural gas or oil), there are no biosynthetic ways to make an alternative to helium. All should make better efforts to recycle it,” says Lee Sobotka, Ph.D., professor of chemistry and physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He should know. He’s a scientist.
We can’t make helium? What kind of scientific incompetence is this?
Even though it is the second-most common element in the universe, helium is too light to be retained under the dome of the earth’s atmosphere. Terrestrial helium only occurs naturally when super heavy elements like uranium decay. We all know how slow that process is. We know, for example, that Chernobyl is going to be uninhabitable forever because of the decaying uranium allowed to roam in the wild there. Sure, Chernobyl is putting out a few helium atoms here and there, but that’s over in Russia or somewhere. It’s not here in America, where our reserves are running a bit thin.
What to do?
According to a paper published in the journal Nature, The most expedient way is to remove it from the brains of airheads, where helium collects in the crevices between layers of gray matter. We would provide a link to the exact article, but Nature is behind a horrendously expensive paywall, so we’ll summarize the article for you here.
You might remember from science class, when you had to memorize parts of the Periodic Table of Elements, that helium was the second element. It was the one that had only two protons and two electrons circling its nucleus. It’s the lightest element, and scientists have now revealed that, in a revolutionary approach to extracting terrestrial helium, they will begin farming airheads in order to figure out how to retrieve the helium that collects in their brains.
It’s the only way.
Helium Farms: The Permanent Wave of the Future?
Dr. Rutherford Becquerel, a nuclear chemist with the Curie College of Physical Science at Fermi University in Cern, Switzerland, will take a sabbatical to head up the Texas farming operation, which is expected to lure airheads from all over America and possibly even the world.
At a press conference last week, he explained that helium is what makes airheads so ditzy. Extracting the helium from the brains of these airheads will help replace some of the natural helium lost because of wasteful scientists who have performed their experiments so carelessly, and because of wasteful engineers who have used it so recklessly and relentlessly. Not to mention all those balloons at football games and birthday parties.
“When we use what has been made over the approximate 4.5 billion of years the Earth has been around, we will run out,” Sobotka said, joining Becquerel at the podium last week. “We cannot get too significant quantities of helium from the sun — which can be viewed as a helium factory 93 million miles away — nor will we ever produce helium in anywhere near the quantities we need from Earth-bound factories. Helium could eventually be produced directly in nuclear fusion reactors and is produced indirectly in nuclear fission reactors, but the quantities produced by such sources are dwarfed by our needs.”
“It is not a complicated procedure to remove the helium,” Becquerel assured the gathered journalists. “We either pierce the eardrum, or go through the nostril with a long syringe, and suck the helium out of the brains of the airheads.”
There was a protest by several hundred parents, whose children are blonde and who suspect that their children will be future airheads.
“There is no need to be alarmed or concerned at all,” Becquerel assured the protesters. Pediatric neurophysicist Marie-Pierre Soddy, recently appointed medical director of the project, agreed. “Helium extraction actually allows the brain to grow, to move into areas formerly inhabited by the helium. It actually cures the condition of most airheads,” she said. Her groundbreaking paper on the subject has been published in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and featured in the journal Neurology. Paywalls are firmly in place for both, so once again, readers will just have to have faith in the trustworthiness of this report.
It has been scientifically proven that natural blondes are no more prone to ditzy brains than the rest of the population. The hair-bleaching process, on the other hand, may create an inter-cranial helium buildup of unacceptable proportions. Soddy’s team continues to study this method as a possible way to create more helium to power their helium-powered experiments. The extraction of the helium gas from the brains of these helium-afflicted people will actually make them smarter and more sensible. A fortuitous situation, indeed!
It would cost too much to try to get helium out of the air, and recycling the helium set free by all those balloons is out of the question since they fly too high much too fast to be able to catch them with any degree of reliability. The helium quickly rises to the upper reaches of the stratosphere, punches through the mesosphere, rockets through the thermosphere, and wafts on out into exospheric space from there. It’s too light to hang around with the other elements, and it doesn’t bond to them so nothing holds it in place. (Hydrogen, on the other hand, bonds easily to earth-bound elements.)
Helium from the Exosphere?
The sun emits incredible amounts of helium every day. When consulted about Becquerel’s plan for helium husbandry, Dr. Ian Crawford, of Birkbeck College at the University of London, carefully had no committal comment as to its efficacy. However, he graciously offered what could be the next step to acquiring helium:
“There are about 22 grams of helium in every cubic metre of lunar soil. Once American IQs have been raised beyond the point of cost-effective helium reclamation, the moon is our next treasure trove for helium.”
In addition to the farm, Becquerel and Soddy will operate in the Texas panhandle, helium farms will be started in Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Exploratory missions to Australia and England are in the works. Because of Chernobyl, Russia has the world’s largest reserves of raw, wild, free-range helium, but exploratory missions have had to deal with radiation issues, and have not yet established a way to isolate the helium without taking off their lead-lined suits.
Sobotka believes that Russia will be the world’s major source of helium in 30 years if any remains on the planet. despite being the second most abundant element in the universe, we humans had squandered our supply in a macabre foreshadowing of what will also become of other non-renewable resources.
Soddy and Becquerel, whom their peers are sure to have sewn up the Nobel Prize in medicine, physics, and chemistry, also believe that with the mining of helium from American airheads, our national IQ will increase exponentially and we might even stop voting Republican.
“Miracles happen,” Dr. Soddy said softly, hopefully.
Annual Christmas Post for 2012
~~This is a re-post of my annual Christmas blog, for all you perverts who asked for it. ~~
~~My sister will never forgive me.~~
The year Jack was 15, he and I went to my sister’s for Christmas dinner. When we got there, Susan put a pork tenderloin in the oven and we gathered around the tree to open gifts. Susan’s two boys, ages 15 and 13, were there, as was my mother. We spent a lovely hour ooohing and ahhhhing over what everyone got and gave. It was a very nice time.
We were almost through opening gifts when Su left to check the pork tenderloin we were having for Christmas dinner. She was in the kitchen for a few minutes. The rest of us waited to open any more gifts until she returned.
We were chatting and laughing and not paying any attention to her when Su tip-toed back into the living room and tapped me on the shoulder. “Come here,” she whispered.
I had been sitting on the floor. I got to my feet and followed her into the kitchen.
“Have you ever cooked a pork tenderloin?” she asked.
“Sure,” I told her. “Lots of times.”
“Good. I have something I need to ask you, then,” she said, and opened the oven door. She reached in and pulled out the roasting pan holding the meat. I thought she would has me about how to tell if the meat was cooked through, or how best to carve it or something. I am always willing to dispense sisterly advice. But that wasn’t what Su wanted.
“Is it supposed to look like this?” she asked.
I gaped.
I blinked.
Su put the pan down on the counter and grinned at me real big. “Shhhh,” she said.
We walked back into the living room, and she beckoned to Mom.
I couldn’t help it. I could barely hold in my laughter, and it was obvious. I do not have a poker face at all. When my mother followed Susan into the kitchen, I did my best to keep three large teenage boys at bay, thinking they were too young and … ahem … tender … to witness what had been prepared for Christmas dinner.
I was unsuccessful. The boys barreled into the kitchen just as their grandmother was in the act of looking at the slab of meat that faced her. Their Gran glanced up with a quizzical look. For a second I thought she didn’t get it.
Then she burst out laughing.
The boys crowded around. “What is it? What’s so funny?” they demanded. Their mothers and grandmother were laughing too hard to tell them.
Su headed down the hall to the bathroom before she wet her pants. When she came back, she suggested that a creamy Bearnaise sauce would be a lovely accompaniment.
That set us off again. Sis headed back to the bathroom.
We females of the family enjoyed every bite. “Mmmmmm.” “Yummy.” “This is delightful,” we said.
The boys, for some reason, opted for a meatless Christmas dinner.
And now, for the crucial question:
If a pork tenderloin is circumcised, does that make it kosher?
No Yeti
The beauty of these letters is sublime.
Skeptic that I am, I cannot move beyond this simple truthful statement to play some other word.
Re-Twinkies
The Sky is Falling.
The End is Near.
It’s the Apocalypse, and it’s not even December yet.
How could the Mayans have been so wrong?
Yes, Twinkies Lovers, that means you are likely to feel the disaster first and foremost, and there’s no telling how long it will last. It may last forever.
I have written about the Twinkies Famine of 2000 and the Great Twinkies Depression of 1987, both of which were reported upon by the venerable New York Times. Twinkies addicts clamored for their fix, Ebay made out like a bandit, and, eventually, things returned to normal.
But this time? This time it’s going to be worse. Much worse.
When “normal” returns, it may not be the same “normal” we know and love. Like Bill O’Reilly lamenting the loss of the normal United States populated by Ward, June, Wally and the Beave, the new normal may be damn near unrecognizable.
!!!!
| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Best of Times | ||||
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Fine, so I had to insert a tiny smidgeon of political commentary. Nevertheless, dammit, Hostess is depriving Traditional America of Twinkies on a timetable that resembles greased lightning.
There is no time to waste.
Stop reading this blog immediately and get thee to thy local Twinkies Distribution Point post haste. It is expected that on Monday – just three days hence – the bankruptcy court will let Hostess shut down operations.
Hostess would have to shut operations anyway, because its bakers threatened a strike. When it filed for permission to liquidate, Hostess said that it no longer had the resources to weather a prolonged strike, which apparently they expect this to be. This means that over 18,000 Hostess employees will be out of work in an already challenging job market.
Curse you, striking bakers! Why couldn’t you wait? It’s all about you, isn’t it?
Stockpile all the Twinkies you can – and fast. Even if Hostess sells the brand and the recipe to another company, there will be a gap in production.
This is travesty.
Twinkies
Because someone mentioned it in comments on my Facebook link to a recent blog post, I am now compelled to discuss the pros and cons of Twinkies, that sweet treat adored by stoners and other kids everywhere.
The Twinkies Legend ramped up a few years ago when the fried Twinkie was introduced to thronging sophisticates of fair fare. People drove for hours just to taste it, and the initial purveyors of this particular fine food sold 26,000 fried Twinkies in just 18 days. The magic was not obvious to those watching from the sidelines, but no one can deny the faithful. We, personally, have never tried this delicacy. According to reports, the famous creamy filling melts and soaks into the cake, giving it a souffle or pudding-like texture. It was an instant hit.
Deep-frying isn’t the only way to get Twinkies into your family’s diet. There’s an entire cookbook, 112 pages long, containing more than 50 recipes with Twinkies as an ingredient.
Never get between Americans and their Twinkies. In 1987, teamsters who delivered Twinkies to New York City and its New Jersey suburbs went on strike. Area Twinkies lovers panicked. The reaction was “not unlike smokers who start to tense up when they run out of cigarettes and all the stores are closed.” Twinkies addicts called distant friends and relatives to send in emergency supplies. We imagine the airlifts resembled Berlin in 1949.
Disaster struck again in March of 2000, when the teamsters’ strike closed bakeries all over the Northeast. The Internet came to the rescue during this “Great Twinkie Famine of 2000.” eBay made out like a bandit, selling 20 batches of Twinkies for over $5,000.
Twinkies are popular, no doubt about it. According to Hostess Foods, 500,000,000 Twinkies are produced annually. In case you got cross-eyed counting zeroes, that’s half a billion, with a B. America’s population today is a little over 3.14 hundred million; America is pi, and Twinkie is the ubiquitous cake that radiates among us.
You might think that with popularity like this, the company that concocts Twinkies would be sitting on a big pile of money. Not so. Just this January, Hostess Brands filed for bankruptcy protection – the second time it has done so in the last ten years. Yesterday we learned that negotiations with its unionized employees might result in the employees owning a piece of the action. Twinkies lovers everywhere hope that out of these bankruptcy negotiations will come the ingredients for Twinkies’ success.
Like so many of our favorite mass-produced foods, the ingredients of Twinkies cannot be identified by the common consumer. In fact, they are so mysterious that a guy named Steve Ettlinger wrote an entire book about these ingredients. It turns out that Twinkies come from mines. That’s right. Twinkies ingredients are mined (limestone, gypsum), drilled (petroleum), refined, and synthesized into those tongue-twisting polysyllabic compounds that are printed on the package.
Upon learning about these ingredients, we were bemused to realize that it is necessary to chill Twinkies before frying because plastic melts at high temperatures. And that creamy filling? There’s no cream in it. It’s sugar and shortening. Maybe even made from beef – so vegan Twinkies lovers, beware. When confronted with the truth about the sources of ingredients, David Leavitt, Vice President Snack Marketing at Hostess said, Deconstructing the Twinkie is like trying to deconstruct the universe. We think the millions of people … would agree that Twinkies just taste great.”
That’s right. He said it. Food doesn’t actually have to be made of food to taste good.
Science has weighed in on the Twinkies question. The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project at Rice University subjected Twinkies to a series of strenuous tests to determine their properties. T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. is an acronym for Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes In Extreme Situations. Dedicated researchers jolted Twinkies with electricity, dropped Twinkies from staggering heights to replicate Galileo’s experiment, exposed Twinkies to radiation, plumbed the depths of Twinkies intelligence, subjected Twinkies to rapid oxidation, tested the density of Twinkies, and more.
At this point, we are hard-pressed to find anything positive about Twinkies except their taste. We thought that perhaps the nutritional value would be positive, since we heard rumors a couple of years ago that someone once went on a Twinkie Diet and actually lost weight. It turns out that what the guy essentially did was starve, so don’t replace your amphetamines with Hostess products just yet. If you want a hypoglycemic rush, Twinkies are your tool.
So what about the rumors of the eternal shelf-life of Twinkies? Turns out this is in error, too. We can attest to the lie. When we helped our teenage son empty the trunk of his car once, we found a box of Twinkies that had been bouncing around back there for quite some time. “In case I need a snack,” he explained. Sure. Boys get hungry. We understand. So we removed one of those delicious golden snack cakes from the box. It felt funny. It was hard. Like, brick-hard.
“How long have these been back here?” we asked.
Our progeny shrugged. “A few months, maybe.”
We were glad he hadn’t been on a crime spree. Had he needed to use the Twinkie Defense, he’d’ve broken a tooth.
Out of Zombies, Egypt
A few years ago, the Archaeological Institute of America published an article hypothesizing that the formation of ancient Egypt was linked to recurrent Predynastic zombie attacks due to outbreaks of Solanum virus. Further study has proven the early hypothesis to be true. In matters of archaeology, history, and development of civilizations, this finding is every bit as significant as learning that the Higgs boson, theorized since the early 1960’s, does, in fact, exist.
Solanum, as you may know, was isolated in 2003 by famous zombie researcher Max Brooks, who immediately published his findings in the scholarly Zombie Survival Guide. Solanum is the insidious virus that feasts on the frontal lobe, killing its human host’s ability to maintain basic bodily functions. (The virus has absolutely no relation to the plant genus of the same name, despite the fatal characteristics of the nightshades. The tastier, less deadly members of this plant genus include tomatoes, potatoes, and eggplants.)
The virus keeps the victim’s brain alive, though, and actually mutates it so that it is no longer oxygen-dependent. As the Urban Dictionary correctly points out, “By removing the need for this all-important resource, the undead brain can utilize, but is in no way dependent upon, the complex support mechanism of the human body.” The mutated brain eventually controls the body of the host, but in a very different way than the original, uninfected brain.
The most recent outbreak of Solanum happened just three years ago but was apparently confined to the jackalope population. This outbreak was particularly disturbing because for the first time Solanum was proven to have infected a non-human host. However, in examining the historical documents, it appears likely that the Rabbit of Caerbannog, encountered by the British King Arthur and his loyal Knights of the Round Table in their quest for the Holy Grail, may well have suffered the undeadly effects the Solanum virus, too.
Headless skeletons found at Egypt’s historic city of Hierakonpolis are what gave the ancient zombie plague away. According to archaeologists studying the site, “[t]he number and the standard position of the cut marks (usually on the second-fourth cervical vertebrae; always from the front) indicate an effort far greater than that needed simply to cause the death of a normal (uninfected) person. The standard position also indicates these are not injuries sustained during normal warfare.”
The archaeologists’ findings mirror what we know to be true about modern zombies. In multiple documentaries about the zombie plague, George A. Romero taught us that the best way to stop a zombie is by decapitating or braining it. Deprive the Solanum of its host, destroy the tissue in which it lives, and it cannot animate that which ought not to be animated in the first place. And if you think for a moment that these films are not important, think again: in 1999, the first of the documentaries was one of 25 selected by the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress as one of the most “historically… important” films ever made.
Recent studies of the Narmer palette, discovered at Hierakonpolis, served as the interpretive breakthrough the scientists needed to piece together the clues at the dig site. We don’t have to tell you that the Narmer Palette was named for the famous Egyptian King of Dynasty 0. That’s a zero, not a letter, and it stands for the dynasty that begat all future Egyptian dynasties, back when begetting was still a new thing. (The people of the Levant would jump on the begetting bandwagon about fifteen hundred years later. They would maintain the trend until 70 C.E. That’s when the Romans sent them out on a diaspora, which is the Aramaic term for “schlepping your kids all over creation.”)
About 5100 years ago, Narmer ruled Upper Egypt (the south part, closer to the source of the Nile). He was known among his people as “Raging Catfish,” which, as a mascot and spirit animal, does not exactly seem terribly fearsome, but nevertheless, that’s what “Narmer” means in ancient Egyptian. The Catfish moniker may have come from his propensity to dam up the Nile to increase the tillable acres in his kingdom. Dams make for still water, where catfish like to scavenge, but when they want to go farther and butt their whiskered heads against the wall of the dam, well, they rage.
But as history would happen, the Solanum virus outbreak in the Nile Delta, to the north, got out of hand and the northern king ruling the area couldn’t keep things under control. The hordes started to move south, toward Narmer’s kingdom. Narmer would have none of that.
As soon as Narmer finished putting down the zombie hordes, the grateful citizens of the upper and lower Nile Deltas held themselves an election and declared Narmer King of Everything. It seems that the old king of Lower Egypt had lost his head, and thus his crown, in the zombie wars, the grateful inhabitants of the delta decided to give that crown to Narmer, to wear in conjunction with his own crown. Fortunately, the adoration of so many Egyptians of every stripe made Narmer’s head big enough to hold two crowns, and thus Upper and Lower Egypt united under a single ruler and the First Dynasty began.
The ancient stonecutters of the Nile were especially delighted that they could go around carving things without jumping and running for their lives every time they heard a moan. In grateful appreciation, they got together and designed the Narmer Palette, a big stone carved on both sides chronicling events of the zombie uprising.
As Egyptian rulers would frequently do upon the resolution of some momentous event, Narmer decided to change his royal sobriquet. Besides, folks in the north thought “Catfish” was too endearingly redneck for the ruler of two magnificent kingdoms. He became “Menes” and founded the northern city of Men Nefer, which means “enduring and beautiful.” In modern language, Men Nefer’s name is pronounced “Memphis.”
While “enduring” might suit the victor of the Great Zombie War who had saved humanity, Narmer/Menes probably had enough battle wounds to disqualify himself as “beautiful.” His southern subjects recognized the need for a name change but did not like the one he chose for himself. Some people wanted him to take the title of Zombie King, but others suggested that name was probably culturally insensitive given the circumstances. So, they came up with the next most deadly creature they could think of, and they called him the Scorpion King.
Vivoleum
Let’s just accept it as fact: the whole energy from fossil fuels thing is bad.
Only a finite amount of oil and gas exists under the crust of our planet. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. We aren’t reclaiming it after we use it. Recycle gasoline? Come on, who are we kidding? We burn it and convert it into greenhouse gases, which just pollutes the planet. We don’t use those greenhouse gases for fuel or convert them into something more useful and less dangerous. We spill oil and petroleum products in our oceans and saturate our ground with them, but we can’t pick them back up and use them afterward.
No, we have a real problem on our hands. We’re going to use up all our fossil fuels, and then we’re going to be screwed.
Big Oil isn’t investing nearly enough money into developing alternative fuel sources. With chart-busting profits from oil and gas, why should they? They’re riding a tsunami of a wave of corporate irresponsibility, but with all that money, who’s going to stop them? Their lobby is way too strong for the government to shake them up.
It’s up to someone else to find a renewable, reliable, and economical alternative fuel source. Altruistic oil giants just don’t exist.
Or do they?
Last week, there was a huge meeting in Calgary, Alberta of Canadian oil and gas magnates. According to its website, “Canada’s largest oil and gas event had a record-breaking pre-registered attendance of nearly 20,000 visitors and exhibitors. Over 600 exhibiting companies had the opportunity to showcase the latest technologies, products, and services.” The keynote speakers at the luncheon on the last day of the conference were Shepard Wolffe of the US National Petroleum Council and ExxonMobil’s Florian Osenberg. Word was that these notable gentlemen would talk about a study commissioned by the US Department of Energy.
The 300 or so luncheon attendees were treated to an impressive PowerPoint presentation and entertainment by the YesMen. The execs just didn’t realize that the YesMen were entertainment, exactly. They appeared to be representatives of Exxon-Mobil and the National Petroleum Council and had a mind-blowing proposition.
Why not use human remains as a renewable energy resource? We’re just like whales, after all, just slightly smaller. Since we like to “biggie size” ourselves, that makes so much more of us that is just being wasted when we die. Something should be done about the wasteful behavior associated with our funeral rites.
Burial? Inefficient and expensive. The half-lives of these bodies in their satin-padded, air-tight caskets are too long. Cremation? No, no. Cremation actually consumes the fossil fuels we’re trying to conserve these days. Viking funeral? What? Do you mean litter the oceans with more garbage?
The GO-EXPO actually distributed a news release to assure people that “Keynote Luncheon speakers were impersonating representatives from Exxon Mobil and National Petroleum Council.” These are not the droids you’re looking for, lunch-goers. Move along.
This is satire by The Yes Men on par with Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” The pranksters actually distributed vigil candles made of their product, “Vivoleum.” Brilliant!
According to its website, “The Yes Men agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out the stories of their hijinks to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business. In other words, the Yes Men are team players… but they play for the opposing team.”
It took me hours to access Vivoleum.com, the web page touting the Yes Men’s “product.” Perhaps because Exxon was busy yelling “trademark infringement” and generally not being good sports over being the tool and butt of one of the best practical jokes I think I’ve ever heard of.
One of *Those* IM Conversations
So, yeah. I quit talking on Yahoo instant Messenger a couple of years ago. Well, longer ago than that, really. But I still have this one friend, let’s call him my Best Girlfriend Forever (because that’s what I call him), who likes to chat on it.
He doesn’t like Skype, and he insists on using Messenger even though the only time I’d see his messages were when I’d check my Yahoo mail once a month or so, since I only used it for shopping and I absolutely never checked it because so much spam comes to that account it’s impossible to find real correspondence there anymore. Actually, one other friend who moved to Baltimore several years ago, and whom I hardly ever hear from, uses Messenger, too, and I’m embarrassed to say that I miss his messages most of the time.
So just for these two friends, let’s call them my Best Girlfriend Forever and That Guy Who Moved to Baltimore, I reinstalled Yahoo Instant Messenger when I got a new laptop. Just for Kicks. And for them.
Of course, only my BGFF knows I have it installed. I’m invisible to everyone else. Tonight, though, somehow and for some reason, I was visible for awhile. Out of the blue comes a certain troll I had not chatted with for several years. Like, since I had used Messenger back in the days of the Virgin Training School. The conversation, predictably, went like this:
winteret: Hi Aramink… the last time that we chatted I had told yo that I was fascinated with bellybuttons since each one is as unique as a fingeprint. You were beginning to tell me about yours…
aramink_rust: I doubt that. Mine is uninteresting. I mostly use it for lint storage. I also use it as a focus for meditation and contemplation.
winteret: That’s great. What type do you have?
winteret: ????
aramink_rust: Lint-filled. I already told you.
winteret: Lol… so you have an Inne?
aramink_rust: Sometimes I take the lint out when I want to contemplate it, but when I have no other place to store the lint I have to contemplate a navel orange instead. It can be a problem.
winteret: You’re such a tease…. what coin size and how deep is it?
aramink_rust: Oh, I wouldn’t take money for it. If I sold it, where would I store my lint?
winteret: Oh come on now… please stop being sarcastic…
aramink_rust: Who’s being sarcastic? Not every container is suitable for lint storage, you know.
winteret: What does your knot look lke?
winteret: ????
aramink_rust: My knot? I’ve never examined it.
winteret: Your knot is the pattern located at the bttom of your bellyhole. What does it look like?
aramink_rust: Um… I’m thinking it looks like, well, a belly button.
winteret: Every bellybutton is as unique as a fingerprint… the outer rim, the inner walls and the pattern (knot) at the bottom of the hloe. What does yours look like?
aramink_rust: There’s a lot of lint in the way. I’d pick it out, but I think I need a crochet hook. I can knit a sweater with all the lint I have crammed in there.
winteret: do you like having it tongued?
aramink_rust: What?! You just asked if I like having it tongued! Fucking freak-ass fucktard! You want to turn my collection of belly-button lint into boiled wool! I just know you do!
winteret: Mmmmmm… do you do any bondage?
aramink_rust: You want to tie me down with my own belly button lint! Shit! You’re freaking me out, Dude! I mean, how crazy is this going to get? Next you’re, like, going to want to have belly-button buttsecks! Ew!
winteret: What’s wrong??
aramink_rust: What’s wrong? WHAT’S WRONG? You’re tying me down with boiled wool made from my own belly-button lint, you’ve threatened me with belly-button buttsecks, and you want to know what’s WRONG?
winteret: What type of gag do you prefer to be gagged with?
winteret: ????
aramink_rust: Mmmffff!!!!
winteret: mmmmmmmmmmmmm… I thought so
So tell me: What do you do with your lint while having smokin’ hot belly-button buttsecks?
Small World
I wished my cousin a happy birthday on Facebook, and Jack Wagoner, a law school compatriot, jumped in to ask how we knew each other. I created what I thought was a great answer:
We went on a crime spree together back during Prohibition. I had my gat and Lisa had hers. We confronted Al Capone in Hot Springs. Told him to hand over his booze or get the heck out of town. He was “blown away” – and we got our booze. I’ll let your imagination fill in the blanks.
We ruled at Oaklawn after that, and each of us ruled a bath house, too. We had the finest food, the best masseurs, the sleekest automobiles, and the widest whitewalls on our sleek black automobiles. We dressed in ropes of diamonds and decorated the ballroom at the Arlington with our mere presence. Crowds threw flower petals down before us, and the soles of our shoes never touched the soil.
Then liquor was made legal. We were forced out of business and grudgingly retired to a small lake in southeast Pulaski County, where I spent hours reading books, and Lisa chased after children. She swam and played on the Lake, basked in the sun, and entertained lavishly. I hid out at my mama’s, too disgruntled for company, and thought about taking revenge on the damn government. How dare it make liquor legal? I was making money hand over fist, running all those vices out of my bathhouse in Hot Springs! Now I hung out at a Lake House, where the only mineral water came in a bottle, and other bottles were professionally filled with legal booze. What a hideous way to live!
Not only that, Lisa and I both had to work hard to avoid the golf course. Our great-grandfather, the sports-loving Scotsman, conspired with his sons-in-law to build the silly thing, and generations of Campbell-spawn have proven themselves to be pathetic duffers out there. Just ask our cousin Donald K Campbell, III. That’s right. My law partner. Do you know how hard it is to work with a family member? I have to be nice to him. Mama says so. And his daddy says he has to be nice to me. It sucks! Lisa Jacobs is the only cousin I’ve ever been able to be partners with – and that was partners in crime.
Well, I’m not counting Lisa’s sister-in-law, Kendall Pickens Jacobs, who wasn’t a family member yet when she and I were partners in crime. That was eons ago. We maintained dens of iniquity from Arkansas to New Jersey to New York and back again, and no one knew but us. Well, and our “clients.”
I was shocked one morning when I got up, and Kendall told me my ears had grown overnight. I looked in the mirror. Fearing donkey ears like Pinocchio, I looked into that mirror with some trepidation, let me tell you. But no, no donkey ears greeted me. Instead, they were the floppy ears of a friendly dog. I had dog ears! How was I going to work if I had dog ears? This was a tragedy! And I had a class that day!
It wasn’t as though I could just call the plastic surgeon and get it taken care of immediately. I asked Kendall if she had a gat. She thought I said “cat,” and offered to take me to the Humane Society. I burst into tears, thinking she wanted to be rid of me, but eventually, I got up and took a shower. I had to. One just doesn’t bag law school classes and think one can get away with it.
So that afternoon, after lunch, just moments after I had reached the plastic surgeon who agreed to take me on an emergency basis that very night, I walked into Torts class. And there you were, Jack Wagoner. There you were, with your irreverent grin and your lack of empathy. You crowed about my misfortune, “Oh, look!” you notified the entire class at top volume, as though you were the paper boy selling the “Extra” edition of the paper because some really juicy news had broken. Like Superman’s identity had been revealed. Or Batman had been unmasked. Or the bill had come in for the $6,000,000.00 man.
“Look!” you yelled again, barely containing your laughter. “Orsi’s a dog-eared slut!” The entire class looked. None of them were surprised about the “slut” part, but all of them wanted to see my ears. John Pagan could not get anyone’s attention that day and declared the class a complete loss. I’ll never forget his cruel words: “Well, Ms. Orsi, I’d say you are an attractive nuisance, but you’re just a nuisance.” That hurt worse than Kendall’s offer to take me to the Humane Society.
After that, I could only get a date with T. Kevin O’Malley, who took me to a wrasslin’ match out at Barton Coliseum, where grannies called encouragement to their favorite athletes by crying out endearments such as, “Rip his fucking head off!” How low I had fallen. T. Kevin and I only stayed until the first granny yelled, but several others yelled as we left. I was terrified. I didn’t have my gat, which Kendall had taken from me the moment I declared myself a danger to my own life upon seeing the shape and size of my fur-covered floppy ears.
So it all belongs together. Me, Lisa, Kendall, you, Skip, Don, everyone. It’s the Great Circle of Life, Jack. So now you know how Lisa and I know each other. We go WAY back.
Jack said, “Orsi, I am so honored to have you devote that kind of time to entertaining me.”
What are you talking about, Jack?! I entertained myself! …And then you told me you called other people “dog-eared sluts,” which absolutely crushed me.
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