Earmarks: The Alien Menace
The fine folks at Reason Magazine made this great video about some of Congress’s wasteful spending. It includes a special look at SETI, the long-time Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project that hasn’t found any evidence of interplanetary communication signals since the late 1960s.
Happy Halloween
Well, it’s that time of year again – my least favorite holiday! I started noticing back in NYC how Halloween was slowly changing several years ago. It went from a day for children to have a bit of fun by dressing up and enjoy some candy and some fun, and it suddenly became a day where degenerates of allegedly adult age would dress up and act like complete morons.
Well, the truth is that most of these folks normally act like complete morons, so the only true departure from the routine is the manner of dress. These folks have taken a fun day for children and have made it into another night where they can act irresponsibly, get drunk, and cause mayhem.
The women, on the other hand, have taken the opportunity to use Halloween to find their inner slut and dress up real trashy, leading them to make all sorts of mistakes. But at least these chicks live up to the Halloween tradition of serving up frights: one look at the rolls of fat about the midsection of the typical ‘naughty nurse,’ or of the cellulite ridden derrière of the average ‘sexy policewoman,’ and most observers do indeed experience genuine terror.
Nope – this is kids stuff. If you over-21 year old children are wondering why your personal lives are a mess, why you live in a small apartment with 5 people you barely know, and why your life isn’t coming together for you, start looking at your habits and start making better decisions. And most of all, start acting like an adult.
But that’s not to say we can’t have some fun today! Earlier in 2007 we lost one of the greats, Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett, who gave us the classic novelty tune, ‘The Monster Mash.’ Well, ‘Monster Mash’ is one of my favorite songs, so I poked around a bit and found a video of Bobby performing his song about one year ago.
So sit back and enjoy!
Some Intriguing Predictions from 1900
Way back in December of 1900, The Ladies Home Journal published a fascinating article by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. that offered a series of predictions of what would be in store for the USA and The World 100 years later, in the year 2000.
Well, here we are in 2007, so lets take a look at how well he did:
What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years
by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr.Prediction #1: There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century. Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.”
Prediction #2: The American will be taller by from one to two inches. His increase of stature will result from better health, due to vast reforms in medicine, sanitation, food and athletics. He will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present – for he will reside in the suburbs. The city house will practically be no more. Building in blocks will be illegal. The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare.
Prediction #3: Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.
Prediction #4: There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and well ventilated, or to high trestles with “moving-sidewalk” stairways leading to the top. These underground or overhead streets will teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight with cushioned wheels. Subways or trestles will be reserved for express trains. Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.
Prediction #5: Trains will run two miles a minute, normally; express trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour. To go from New York to San Francisco will take a day and a night by fast express. There will be cigar-shaped electric locomotives hauling long trains of cars. Cars will, like houses, be artificially cooled. Along the railroads there will be no smoke, no cinders, because coal will neither be carried nor burned. There will be no stops for water. Passengers will travel through hot or dusty country regions with windows down.
Just the thing to give Crazy 21st Century Moms Fits!
Yep, way back in 1967, comic books had ads for all sorts of great stuff! The Johnson Smith Company hawked everything from a life sized cutout of Frankenstein’s Monster, plans to build your own amazing robot, and my personal favorite, the X-Ray Specs!
Yep, much of this stuff would cause the usual suspects in today’s political scene to have a stroke! X-Ray Specs? So Junior can try and sneak a prurient peek at his buxom neighbor in her undies, or less? That’s sexual harassment in 2007! And the product of a patriarchal system designed to keep women subjugated for 1000s of years!
Well, that’s the song the usual suspects have been singing for a few decades now. And no matter what, they still find something to be crabby about! So this legion if misfit moms did their duty – create a generation (or two) of utterly sissified males, scared of their own shadows, and most alarmingly frightened by and of the women in their lives.
The truth is, Junior would benefit greatly from those X-Ray Specs! He’s supposed to wonder what that sexy neighbor looks like in the raw – gives him something to look forward to when he grows up! It’s high time the pushy & holier than thou Moms of the 21st Century just take a backseat and encourage some rascally behavior in their sons. The fate of the free world could depend on it!
Indeed, you won’t find a bigger collection of misfits and antisocial twerps than at the local mall, and we have our modern era of Moms to thank for it. Regardless of their intentions, the social damage is crystal clear: a generation of weakling, snarky, slacker males.
So that brings us to our first installment of Greatest Comic Back Covers, the back cover of Batman #194:
That’s right, Mommy! Get Junior a brand new Mattel M-16 Marauder so he can practice killing VC and other assorted enemies of freedom! What’s that? You just exhaled loudly, rolled your eyes, and announced that don’t believe in guns? I have news for you, sister – guns don’t believe in you! The reality of a gun doesn’t hinge on your narcissistic beliefs! The guns are real whether you believe in them or not, and whether you like them or not.
And don’t let your exaggerated sense of self importance make you look past the fact that this is just a toy gun, after all. Nobody’s going to get hurt!
Back in a saner time, a boy was encouraged to play with a toy gun. Several generations were encouraged to play with toy guns, and they overwhelmingly turned out just fine. Can you look at the collection of slackers with backward baseball caps and sagging oversized jeans at your local mall and say the same?
I call ‘em like I see ‘em: Moms of all varieties (married, single, or divorced) just love to tell us what a hard time they have, how they work a tough day job and still manage to be a great mother. I’ve got news for you: most of you suck at mothering. Your kids are out of control, have no respect for anyone or anything, are as dull as a doorknob, hang out with miscreants, have terrible diets, and are poorly educated despite their strong self esteem.
Great mothers? You’re not even good mothers. You’re absentee mothers. You’re lousy mothers. Take a look at your children – they suck, and when you look at them, you may as well be looking in a mirror.
To be fair, most modern era dads suck too. After all, this descent happened on their watch.
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