Of Cabbages and Kings

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U p d a t e.

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If you want an actual update. send in an email with an idea.

A solution.

I have a solution to the overpopulation problem.

The world is, most people would assert, full of people. A few of them are good, kind people who advance culture and help anyone and everyone in need. Most of them are selfish, illiterate rednecks, to whom I will from now on refer as SIRs. Their only purpose in life is to take up space, eat up food, and attain high levels of political power while giving nothing back to the community except a depleted ozone layer and high taxes. Although you'd think that the creatures would die out from sheer incompetence, it turns out that they reproduce like nymphomaniacal rabbits. Because of this, the world is speedily filling up; we're rapdily running out of places to put people. People are living in Siberia, where a nice summer day is about forty degrees below (at which point I hear flesh freezes if exposed to the air for more than, say, 20 minutes); people are living in Death Valley, where you die of heat exhaustion if you let one of your fingers poke out of the window of your car; people are even living in Los Angeles.

Let's stop and take stock for a minute: We have tons and tons of useless flesh taking up space and we have a profound lack of inhabitable area. Whatever should we do? I say that we should take out the trash.

So these SIRs are, by definition, incapable of reading. Thus deprived of a major form of entertainment, they most often turn to drugs to get their kicks. The money spent by just one SIR on drugs over the space of one year would easily buy island nations, and yet even though they can produce large sums of money from thin air they all still live in trailer parks and big white houses. A favorite drug of the SIRs is crack cocaine, a white powdery substance. Speaking of white powder, the US seems to have a major surplus of anthrax in its powder form. Anyone can see this is true - people are sending it to each other free in letters because their cupboards are full of the stuff and they have no other place to put it. Now, SIRs are quite stupid. My solution to the problem of overpopulation is to plant undercover operatives, government-sponsored, in major drug smuggling and distribution rings throughout the world. These operatives would each be supplied with a gas mask, some surgical gloves, other necessary protective equipment, and a pound of powdered anthrax (they could produce this last ingredient themselves just by collecting the residue from one day's worth of junk mail). They would be instructed to mix one part anthrax for three parts cocaine when their bosses weren't looking. The new mixture, when inhaled through the nostrils, would result in a sharp drop in population density throughout the globe and a huge increase in the survivors' standard of living.

Mr. Cheney, I'll be expecting an email soon. We'll talk. After all, this is your chance to get Dubya's spot.

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If you've got an idea for a story, essay, and/or rant, direct your email to electricidiom@aol.com and you just might be featured in next week's update. Quantities are limited and this offer will not last forever; act today!

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Today's essay topic comes courtesy of SteveJ.

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New rule: updates on Mondays.

Whew.

Done. Click November 6 on the Archives to find all the posts I moved over. I strongly suggest checking out the Frisco photo album on the left if you want photos like these:

NOTE: Massive copies (about ten times the size of your average horizontal photo) are available upon request, but please only ask for one or two; the files are very large.

Shopping carts.

Marshall Wilkerson! Fifth rung, starboard side! I dedicate my part of the boat to interracial homoeroticism!

Clomp clomp.

Footsteps up the stairs to the music department. There's an inflatable Led Zeppelin display blimp hanging from the ceiling. The redhead asks everyone he sees how he can get his mitts on it, but nobody knows. He scares away several small children and old women, all of whom never return to the state of Texas solely for this reason. Finally, he tracks down the head of the music department. Defeat: the zeppelin has already been claimed. Hopes are dashed to miniscule, scintillating fragments. Tears are, however, restrained - there's always eBay.

The doors open.

It's late at night. Streetlights are scattered around, roughly half of them are operational, you can barely see. Three guys walk out of the bookstore and begin their journey to Starbucks. Footsteps. They joke and laugh.

Metal on metal.

They can hardly make out their own feet; they have no idea what they're stepping on. The gummy ground sucks at their feet. One collides with a car and makes a satisfying slapping noise. They laugh. Rather, two of them laugh and the third attempts to mold his nose into its former shape.

Rattling.

The three gentlemen look around, bewildered. They heard something. Silhouetted against the lamplight is a roughly cubic contraption, a lattice of metalwork, waist-high. It's moving. Fast. It comes closer and they see someone inside it, someone else pushing it. The one propelling the thing emits a piercing cackle.

"I'm sorry!"

The muffled sound of apologies wafts from the cart's occupant. It hurtles forward. the operator lets go. It soars ahead for a few seconds. Both of its front wheels strike the cement median at the same time. A body is ejected from the contraption. It soars through the air. It thuds wetly against the concrete.

I love a little after-dinner entertainment.

Story Time: Wonders of Banaca.

A school bus. Noisy. Full of children. It jerks to a stop and the doors open. A fourteen-year-old boy steps aboard. After looking around for an open seat, he finds one next some guy he's never seen before, leaning his head against the window and looking very dead. He could pass for thirty-seven. He sits down. The bus lurches forward for several minutes, stopping at seemingly random intervals.

His seatmate stirs and blinks his eyes, grunts, then thrusts his hand downward into the backpack below him. He pulls out a small bottle of minty fresh mouth spray. He looks to the left. He looks to the right. He takes a snort up one nostril.

Our hero blinks. The word "Interesting..." escapes his lips. He watches.

The minty fresh child next to him stares straight ahead at the seat ahead. Thirty seconds' time passes. A little blood runs from his nostrils and his eyes close. He slumps to the side, unconcious, resuming his former position. His head makes a satisfying clunking noise as it falls against the side of the bus.

The manling gets up and exits the vehicle, never seeing the other again.

Props to Pat.

Story Time: Goodness Gracious

Human. It's what's for dinner.

Squirrels frolic in a fairly pristine land - only slightly marred by the decrepit, skeletal wooden tent frames spaced every twenty or so feet - that comes equipped with a gently flowing river. One cocks its head, trying to zero in on an unnatural sound. All of a sudden, a group of five SUVs rolls into view. They halt and promptly vomit out twelve teenagers, most of whom immediately start squabbling about where they'll sleep. From its vantage point in a nearby tree, the squirrel hears cries of "We're over here!", "No, we're over here!", and "I got here first!", and climbs higher into its leafy fortress.

Having laid down the boundaries of their respective territories, the youngsters look around for something to destroy. One reveals a large saw, which they all happily put to work. The end product of their labor is a log twice as long as a grown man is high and just as wide, on which they promptly sprinkle kindling and lit matches.

They continue in this behavior for about thirty minutes before one of them realizes that it's not actually *working*, at which point the mob decides to scout around for kindling and tinder, and, while they're at it, small twigs. A shirt is sacrificed for the good of the fire. After much pushing and wheezing, the log is discarded and a flickering yellow flame is coaxed from the smoldering fabric, whereupon the children immediately get out their chairs and, having done everything they can think of to prepare for the oncoming evening, sit down and let their eyes wander, searching for something to destroy. One of them pipes up, saying that perhaps it was a little overkill to create a blazing inferno at noon when they won't start cooking until six hours after, but he is quickly silenced by the rest and never heard from again.

Time passes, during which some actual work is done, surprisingly enough.

The sun pierces through the foliage and drives its way through their corneas. It is almost nightfall. Stomachs growl; the assigned cook hasn't arrived with supplies. The light and rumbling suddenly grow more intense, and a lone child trudges out of the depths of a vehicle that was not there five minutes ago. He is almost overcome by the glares of hatred that are shot at him, but a few are too hungry to be angry and smile at their quartermaster, and - although he swoons and nearly drops the crate that he is carrying - he makes it to the circle of chairs. Someone fetches a bucket the size of a small wading pool, while several others wrestle a few jugs of water over to the fire. The recently arrived box is cracked open by sheer willpower, and a stack of approximately seventy-five small plastic packages is revealed. They are ravenously torn open and their contents are dashed into the nearby bucket. The water is poured in as well, along with the cargo of the smaller plastic packets contained in each of the larger packages. A child fetches some fire tongs and a shovel, both of which are used to stir the gunk in the kettle, and several of the sturdier adolescents grab the thing and place it in the middle of the fire, which has by now burnt down to embers.

They wait. Some grab bowls. Utensils are taboo.

The removal of the pail is attempted. After the burn wounds are nursed, steel bars are slid under the pot and it is lifted up and to the side before the heat travels down to the youths' hands. The bowls are brought forth and steaming hunks of Ramen noodle are forked out of the bucket. Some, after waiting for cooling to occur, simply dart their hands into the mass, snag a few strands of the sludge, and shove it into their mouths. A good time is had by all.

More time passes, during which nearly all of the Ramen is devoured and the campers fashion at least twenty torches. They grab the things - merely long sticks with masses of toilet paper the size of a man's head tied to one end - and, having lit them on fire, one by one throw them solemnly off the edge of the cliff for no readily apparent reason. It is now night and they again hunger. Time for dessert.

Tortillas are brought forth, piles of them, and are ripped into shreds which are then deposited into a nearby Dutch oven. Several sticks of butter are unwrapped and thrown in, along with roughly three quarters of a pound of brown sugar and one quarter pound of cinnamon. The container is placed on the fire and, once the butter has melted, is quickly removed via a handy metal bar that almost seems as if it was made for such a purpose. One can almost hear the sound of arteries clanging shut at the sight of the, for lack of a better word, food. It is all eaten.

One camper goes over to the cliff and attempts, for five minutes, to skip rocks on the river below. Considering that there is a sheer drop of thirty feet to the water and that the child can't skip rocks anyway, he does pretty well. He enjoys the sound of silence, then realizes that he's sitting twenty-five feet away from his brethren - silence cannot be a good thing. He gets up and walks back over to the circle of chairs. The words "It'll take a little while to melt through the plastic" greet his ears. He is about to ask what the speaker is referring to when he hears a small popping sound and a massive ball of flame rushes from the embers, almost as if it were trying to give its target a hug. It stops within several inches of the face of a nearby teenager, who - once the fireball has dissipated - slowly falls over backwards, missing a bit of eyebrow.

It is even later at night. It has been decreed that a monumental fire will be built and lit by torches, which the kids are now skilled at crafting. A special torch is created, made of toilet paper drenched in cooking oil and held together by twine and tree bark. One camper inserts small firecrackers while the rest aren't looking. The youngsters line up in two rows, forming a hall of people, through which the torchbearer walks. He flinches once or twice as the gunpowder in his instrument detonates unexpectedly, but continues on and thrusts the stick into the awaiting bonfire. More eyebrows are lost.

True story.

Telemarketers.

Lately it's been hip for all the cool cats to bash telemarketers. Seems like people don't like deleting hundreds of emails every hour or having their meals interrputed so someone who doesn't speak English as their first language can mispronounce their name at them.

Freaks.

So I've been thinking about that. What if I took an hour, and in that time, bought some of the things that these people are selling? Let's see what my inbox has to say about the matter.

According to Krystal, Stephanie, and Maria - all of whom are fat, balding middle-aged men living in their grandparents' attics - I would have upwards of seven Russian wives in the mail in under a week. I would also have a separate penis enlargement pump for every day of the year, effectively quadrupling my body weight before my brides even arrived. Let's see... Catholic schoolgirls would fling themselves upon me and demand sex (100% free after a three-month recurring fee of $39.95), I'd own three hundred credit cards, and seven queens from small, undiscovered countries I can't even pronounce would fill my bank account with their equivalent of money (all they need is my credit card number, the expiration date, my address, and the last three numbers on the back). Finally, I would delete all of the emails telling me to buy a car, because I wouldn't be able to fit my lower body into a room any smaller than the entire subway system of New York City.

Ah, capitalism.

Clothing companies in cahoots with weight control.

Every other afternoon or so, I head out to the nearby track and run for a while. What do you wear when you run? Shorts (I tried blue jeans a couple of weeks ago, incidentally; it doesn't work, take it from me). Now, I really, really don't like shopping for clothes. I just don't like it. Maybe it's the "oh, girl" being repeatedly blasted on the loudspeakers over and over and over, maybe it's the way that clothing stores have pictures of muscular, non-clothes-wearing men on every flat surface. I don't know. All I know is that whenever I pass by the Gap, I shudder. So the shorts I have, they're all from a year or two ago. As long as they offer protection from the sun and don't get me arrested, I'm fine with them, I don't see any reason to get new ones.

However, since a couple of years ago, I have lost a little weight, causing the shorts to be just a little big around the waist - you know, the part that holds the things up, so whenever I run I have to stick my hands in my pockets every five steps and pull upward sharply. This isn't exactly convenient. In fact, during the Cadet-A-Thon at camp when we had to fulfill several objectives in forty-five minutes, including jumping in the river (in normal clothing) and locating a golf ball and then running (in same clothing) uphill several hundred yards, in that order, I completed the run proudly in my Animal (Muppets) boxers; water + baggy clothing = less clothing. But that's a different story, and one that I really shouldn't have told. Shucks.

So I was saying that I've got big shorts. Well, while I was trying to run a few days ago, an idea burrowed deep into the recesses of my mind and was promptly forgotten. This morning, though, I remembered it and scribbled it down on my handy-dandy wall (the things are always there, they're the best notebooks ever created) so I wouldn't forget it. My idea was this, only partly spawned by my dislike of Slimfast and clothing companies: clothing companies have a deal with weight loss corporations. Jenny Craig gets a nice, fat (no pun intended, I promise) comission for every ten pounds one of her disciples loses. Why else would they be trying to get other people to become skinny? It's not like they're getting anything out of it.

Except lots and lots of money.

Lots.

Now, why would clothing companies have a clandestine, never-to-be-uttered-by-human-lips-except-for-mine deal? (It's secret, too.) Well, when people lose weight, their clothes get baggy. When their clothes get baggy, they buy new ones. And for those guys like Jared - the Subway guy, not the guy I know, although now that I think of it he's lost a lot of weight too - and that wrestler guy I know who's lost about a hundred pounds, they probably have to make many, many more trips to the mall than they would if they had remained at the same waist size. Every fat-guy-turned-vegetarian equates to another five put-my-money-in-the-bank-and-live-off-the-interest aerobics instructors. After all, the coaches and the trainers, they make you run and do push-ups, they make you lose weight too.

Of course, the opposite also has to be true. McDonalds? American Eagle pays out the nose every time someone buys a Big Mac. Those parents who filed a lawsuit against McDonalds a while back because they fed their kids Big Mac breakfasts, lunches, and dinners and gave them lard smoothies to chase it down, not knowing that the children would grow to gimungous proportions? Those kids are responsible for several hundred early retirements.

I always laugh at the guy who buys a 99 cent salad because he's "trying to save money". He's going to lose himself some waistline, going to lose himself most of his retirement fund, all because of the $5 a week he saved buying salads instead of tacos.

Whoa.

So I'm sitting here behind the desk of the Youth(Wired) department of the San Antonio Public Library, watching the sky through the window because I'm a volunteer in a department with more than enough people already. I do, however, get questions from time to time. So I'm watching the sky, a bird flies by frm time to time, there's this cool window right in front of me. All of a sudden, this child, I'm looking at him right now, can't be more than 10 years old, comes up to me. He stares at me and starts dancing. Dancing's the only word I can think of for it; I think he did push-ups on the ground for a while (I couldn't see him because of the desk, so I'm not sure, but I saw his head pop up every few seconds) and from then on he basically acted like a ballerina for five minutes. He's still doing it, he hasn't looked directly at me since he started, not even when he noticed me start typing about him. No, he looks at inanimate objects, like the middle of the desk or the chair five feet to his left or stuff like that. He's making these thrusting movements from time to time now, I don't want to know where he learned them. All right, he's hitting himself on the chest. Now he ran away.

Thank god. No, no, he's back again.

He hopped up and down a couple of times, trying to kick himself and catch his feet at the same time. He fell over.

Project Brainiac

And the blind shall lead the sighted.

MOST THINKING DONE IN SHOWER

We've all got stuff to do. Lots of stuff. And when we actually get some free time, we want to relax, watch some TV, unwind with some mindless carnage or, depending on the equipment we were issued at birth, some godawful soapoperas where the main character has played three different roles in the same show, all of which were killed off within a month of their introduction. We don't have *time* to actually ponder during the day; we're too busy. So when do we actually think? 

 Not often, to be honest, but during the short period of time when our brains are active and not occupied with a pressing problem, we are usually in the shower. That's right, the results are in. The average American gets 73% of his thinking done while taking a shower. Where do we get the rest of that thinking done? 37% of the thinking gets done while we toss and turn in bed right before we go to sleep, and the remaining 23% gets done while we daydream through math class.

In light of this new study, I'm pleased to reveal Project Brainiac, a side hobby of mine that I've been working on for a while. The Brainiac is a new model of shower designed to stimulate brain action and thus improve your thinking, giving you a lot of bang for your water bill buck and saving water while it's at it, for I'm sure that once word got out that people thought more in the shower much more time would be spent in the things. Writers and inventors would attempt to get all of their thinking done in the shortest amount of time possible. They would put a bed under a showerhead and hire a math teacher to read equations at them, possibly causing a brain overload and a nationwide shortage of mathematical tutors, resulting in the mass cheering and subsequent mass unemployment of students nationwide.

Thus, to avoid global starvation and stupidity, I have created the Brainiac, the shower that increases brain activity with a stream of 132% authentic gamma rays. The radiation penetrates the thin wall of your skull straight to the soft, sensitive tissue of your brain, targeting the creative thought centers located in the right side of your brain. Testing done on small, pink fluffy bunnies has created a new breed of bunnies with ears that are three times wider around than the average hare. The new hearing centers are filled with brains, you see, allowing them to reach new cogitational heights. I'm not exactly sure what the thing would do to humans, but I say it's worth a shot. After all, if you don't care about saving water and bunnies with brain ears, then you... well, then you've just wasted five minutes of your life.

They're mine now.