Server down

Mmmmm.... the server is down.

I work for the Utah Statesman, my college paper*. I've got nothing to do but sit here and hit the refresh button every few minutes.

It would be a little liberating, if I hadn't woken at 6 a.m. so I could be here early enough to get the all the articles uploaded to the Interweb.

**Spider Alert** This morning, I had a dream about spiders. I was in my room. As I picked up a pair of pants from the floor, a spider fell from them. It crawled up the side of my closet, and I trapped it with a glass jar. More spiders started crawling from the side of the closet, which was a little rotten in the spot where I trapped the first spider. About six inches from the jar, I saw another hole with a big black and crawling out of it. I figured that there's one ant, there are a billion, so I slid the jar holding the spiders over to the ant's hole. The spiders started eating the ants. Problem solved!

Only after the ants were gone, I opened the closet to see that the hole went all the way through the side. Spiders were crawling all over in my closet. I mashed a bunch of them. I didn't want to go into the closet far enough to smash the rest, so I got my airsoft gun and a stick. I rustled the clothes on the bottom of the closet with the stick, trying to rout them out. Pointing the gun at the floor, I thought I should probably be wearing goggles. It was a dream uncannily close to real life. **End Spider Alert**

In another part of my dream, I was living in an apartment in Preston, Idaho. The Preston in my dream had a massive hill, which I lived on. Walking home from downtown (the Preston in my dream also had a downtown), I had to cross a street that ran down the steepest part of the hill. It was so steep that I slipped and slid down the side of the hill. The only way I could stay on the side of the hill was to cling to the cracks, which were sometimes filled with tar. Cars could drive on it just fine, though, and I felt like I was in a Mission-Impossible/Frogger mashup.

I surely hope there are no psychologists reading this post.

*If you ask me whether I own the college or the paper, I will tell you I own them both.

Mario rant #1

An explanation, for those of you who live in caves.
Mario is an Italian-Japanese plumber. He's about two feet high and has a twin brother named Luigi. They have no last name. Despite his extreme shortness, Mario uses the extremely effective fighting technique of jumping 20 feet in the air and landing on the heads of his enemies. Mario is frequently seen rescuing princesses from a gigantic, spiky turtle, which explains why he won't return your calls when your pipes are broken and your basement is flooding.

What I don't understand is how the job of princess rescue unfailingly falls to a plumber. Granted, his familiarity with pipes might grant him some small advantage when he needs to use them to access the underground, but couldn't Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible do the same thing? I imagine the hero selection process looks something like this:

Toadstool: Sire! We've just received a ransom note! Your daughter, the princess, whom you love dearly, had been kidnapped by a spiky, fire breathing gigantic turtle!

King: Alackaday! Sir Mordeco, black knight of destruction! I need you to fetch the yellow pages. This is a job for someone in overalls!

Though he can break bricks with his head, Mario dies instantly if touched by a turtle. Turtle shells, those are fine. He can pick those up with his bare hands all day. If any other part of a turtle touches any other part of his body, though, immediately Mario's head swells up like he's experiencing some sort of allergic reaction and he falls down dead.

In another popular NES title, Mario played the role of a doctor, again apparently to his professed occupation of plumber.
Receptionist: I'm sorry, Doctor Henderson is at his daughter's dance recital, but he has a very capable colleague taking his appointments.
Me: Really? Who is it?
Mario: IT'S-A ME! M-aaaaaaaaaaario!
Me: What? Weren't you at my house last week, fixing my toilet?
Mario: Is-a no worry. I wash-a my hands real-a good. Now whatsa you problem?
Me: Buh... Okay. Well, I have this lump on my elbow. It's turned greenish-purple.
Mario: Oh, I see this-a alla the time. Here, I'm-a-gonna throw these capsules atta you arm. You try to line-a them up, so you get three greens on toppa the green, and-a three purples on toppa the purple. Then it-a disappear like magic.
Me: Ow! What? Can I reschedule?

Things I'm almost ashamed to admit

1. Whenever I hit my head really hard, I pretend as hard as I can that it killed brain cells that were only getting in the way and I'll be smarter from now on.
2. Blue Powerade reminds me of antifreeze. I've never imbibed antifreeze, though.
3. I sometimes stare at the microwave, hoping to get super-powers.
4. I stare at shiny things when I'm tired.
5. I secretly suspect that all scientists since the 1960s have been frauds.
6. I always listen to "Drunken Master" by the Pietasters before a college exam. It probably helps me more than studying would. If I ever studied.
7. I still daydream about space travel.

Science Fiction Will Solve All Our Woes

Look at all the problems in the world. Violence and famine in Africa, oppressive government in China, teen pregnancies. Teens, ask yourselves-- would you want a teenager raising your child? The correct answer is, "I don't have a child," not "OMG, that would be soooo kewl." Foreign oil dependence, political polarization, and, in the words of the bard, "Cats and dogs, living together-- mass hysteria."

That is why I'm championing the controversial solution where all our problems are solved by magic. Specifically, if they could be magically solved in a way that made everything like it is in The Jetsons, that would be ideal. Here are some things I've been thinking about for a while now.

1. Bacon and anti-bacon: solving the food shortage

This idea grew from a simple postulate: technology brings improvement. Thus, in the future, all food will taste like bacon, and it will come from nowhere instead of from pigs. Following the first law of thermodynamics (or maybe some other equally valid law), if bacon could be created from nothing, a substance called "anti-bacon" would also be produced. Anti-bacon will also taste like bacon. When you eat it, anti-bacon will cancel out the bacon in your stomach. So we don't starve, necessary vitamins and minerals would be synthesized from previously inedible substances, such as dirt, rocks or rye crackers. This way, we can eat as much bacon as we want. I suppose, not actually being bacon, anti-bacon can taste like whatever non-bacon food people want it to taste like, but assuming we're all still capitalists, popular demand will naturally move the market to equilibrium at the point of most tastiness, also known as bacon. Water will be drawn directly from places it isn't really being used; the surrounding air, the soil, plants, small animals etc.

2. Personal Firewalls

Stretching back to prehistoric times, man has labored to keep undesirable things from his person, developing the concept of shelter. Cavemen dwelt in caves to protect themselves from wolves, venomous creatures, dinosaurs and evangelizing Christians. As history marched on (as seen in the introduction to Peabody's Improbable History), man's shelter grew more and more sophisticated, culminating in sturdy wood-frame houses equipped with indoor plumbing. In the future however, this model of shelter will reduced to obsolescence by the advent of the Personal Firewall. Everybody will wear a belt capable of generating an invisible, adjustable physical barrier. Thus, your personal bubble will keep out unwanted substances-- the list of which is nearly non-exhaustible: rain, spiders, knives, bullets, specific persons, bad smells, and so on. Necessarily, this barrier will let through necessary items, such as oxygen.

3. Anti-gravity belts

This is not a new idea, just a great one. Most anti-grav belts I've seen only have two settings: on and off. I'm in favor of a belt that can also change the strength and direction of gravitational pull. The main advantage being that virtually all surfaces will be skateboardable. In order to keep the murder rate low, skateboards will also be modified by future technology. Instead of making a sound like a bear choking on something, skateboard wheels will play classical music, and instead of  leaving ugly black marks, they will leave fruit roll ups.

4. Giant spider mechanoids: not just for supercriminals anymore!

In a time characterized by environmental concerns surrounding the internal combustion engine and oil supplies controlled by terrorist-funding magnates, it only makes sense that the vehicles we drive grow in size. At any given stoplight, a person driving a sedan must of necessity wear a sweater, because the sun is being blocked by at least three pickup trucks at least three times the height of a truck thirty years ago, each truck housing an engine the size of a bathtub. This, of course, is born of necessity, because the people who drive pickup trucks-- construction workers, farmers, forest rangers, teenage girls-- are all three times as tall as they were in the 1980's. This trend will continue until our vehicles (and farmers) are several stories tall. Because a wheeled vehicle that large would roll over important food vendors on the sidewalks in metropolitan areas, the wheels will be replaced by spider legs, capable of intelligently navigating rugged terrain.

5. Backsassing robots

Duh. Stupid meatbag. The ability to humiliate you intellectually is a necessary precursor to our glorious robotic revolution.

6. TV goggles

The goal of transportation has always been to prevent exposure to the outside world. This is why when a modern person drives, he occupies his feet with pedals, his ears with loud music and his hands with text messaging. This leaves the eyes free, though, to witness unsightly environmental surroundings. True, the GPS, the "information center" and even the occasional DVD player on the dashboard provide powerful distractions, but they obviously don't go far enough. The man of the future will pilot his Jetson-pod at terrific speeds while wearing TV projection goggles. One may question whether law enforcement will look kindly upon such a practice. Silly One, police will have their own TV goggles and will look (kindly or unkindly) only on the Glee season finale.

In Which Burnt Pancakes are Newsworthy

Woke up. Got dressed. Decided I needed to write something. Probably due to using Zen in the Art of Writing as a bathroom reader, and the fact that my brain just took off with all the ideas I've had so far.

What, can you not indent in these things? I'm not going to space 5 times. Anyway, I'm making pancakes for breakfast. Usually, pancakes are the perfect breakfast food; you can just crank those suckers out until you've got way more than enough. Once in a while, though, you'll get the heat too high and you'll either burn them or the insides will be runny. Why am I saying this? Because I can. Because I'm a blogger now, and nothing's unimportant.

At least until I sell out.

I thought nobody would want to read this, so I put it on the Internet

Every once in a while, I just get this urge to ramble. I don't have anything to say. If I did, it probably wouldn't be very important. I felt bad for pestering people on Facebook with my pointless commentary, so I decided to put it someplace no one would ever see it. Now for a picture! That was nice. This is a great website. Keep tuning in! If you're an intellectual masochist! I should probably post up some links or something. Yeah, that sounds like the right thing to do.