Boring Food and Drink

I sort of have to wonder about the person who decided that salads were a good idea. See, because I'm pretty sure the idea of putting a whole bunch of leaves in a bowl together and calling it food came before the idea of ranch dressing, and eating a salad without any sort of anything on it is like trying to eat a tree. Eating a salad with dressing, on the other hand...is pretty disgusting too, but at least there's actually some sort of flavor involved, and has the added bonus of making you puke your guts up if you try to eat more than one bowl. I realize that different people have different tastes, and plenty of people like salads, but I'm sure there's got to be a better way to eat healthy than to have to start eating the weeds you pulled out of your backyard.

You may have guessed by now from all of my incredibly subtle implications that I think salads taste like bags of lawn clipping, but less exciting. See, if you eat a bag of lawn clipping, there's the chance that a poisonous spider or something will jump on your face, and then you get to take an exciting field trip to the trauma ward. If you find a spider in your salad, that probably just means that you need to clean your kitchen more often. There are very few experiences more boring than eating a plain salad. Maybe eating a plain salad while filing taxes and drinking iced tea.

Speaking of iced tea, I also hate iced tea. If you could somehow liquidize nothing, it would taste like iced tea Drinking iced tea is like drinking air, followed by an extremely bitter and vomit-inducing aftertaste. The only way to improve iced tea is to fill it with so much sweetener that you might as well be drinking snow cone liquid, which actually isn't that bad of an idea. It'll probably kill you, but at least then you don't have to drink iced tea anymore.

Buy All of the Drugs

Commercials for prescription drugs always scare me a little bit. They always suggest that you ask your doctor about their specific drug, and I am reasonably certain that that is not how the doctor-patient relationship is supposed to work. So you have some commercial for Make-Your-Life-Suck-Less-Icil, and they'll be all "If you have an existentially unfulfilling existence, ask your doctor about Make-Your-Life-Suck-Less-Icil." I'm pretty sure if you said to your doctor "HEY! The commercial lady said that I need this RIGHT NOW!", he'd probably inform you that you are, in fact, not the doctor, and to let him do his goddamn job.

People complain about "Big Pharma" a lot, which I think is a really stupid term, but it is pretty damn irritating when you realize that medicine is a business just like everything else. I mean, I don't want to deride people for trying to make money, since they're just trying to stay alive like everyone else, but it sort of doesn't seem right, does it? I mean, you're in a business that improves drastically the more people stay unhealthy. In fact, you are producing an item that becomes useless once it's successful, which is a conflict of interest on several different levels.

Of course, I'm still not going to be one of those nutjobs who completely dismisses modern medicine. Because seriously, screw you guys. If you let your kid die because you think "God will save him", you deserve to go to hell. They're kind of like those idiot in New York who made their kids pull out of school to hold signs on the streets about the rapture. You sort of feel for those kids, but then you realize that those are the idiot fundamentalists of tomorrow, and it gets sort of morally ambiguous.

And On the Third Coming, He Should Have Rockets

If there ever is a second coming, Jesus is going to be in for a bit of a dilemma.* I mean, how is he going to actually convince people that he's the real Jesus Christ? If some guy walked to you and started saying that he was the son of God, and that you should drop everything you were doing and follow him around the country, you would probably call the local mental hospital and have him committed. I know the whole idea of Christianity is "believing without proof", kind of like Santa Claus, but I don't think that would work very well. Hell, maybe the second coming ALREADY HAPPENED, and people just dismissed the guy as some crazy cult leader.

In the Bible, the people who dismiss Jesus (at least, before he shows off his superpowers) are always portrayed as ignorant, because they aren't seeing that he is OBVIOUSLY the son of God. But you know, you can't really blame these people for having a healthy amount of realistic skepticism. I mean, would you really believe this guy right away? If anything, some of the disciples are outright weirdos for going with him in the first place. I don't know, I think regardless of any time period, it's a good idea to not immediately follow strange bearded people.

So that's why I think that if Jesus wants to come back, he needs to do it really spectacularly. I know that goes against all the claims of how he's supposed to be humble and not show off and all that, but nobody's going to believe him otherwise. Maybe a little song and dance number in the sky with some angels. That'd get people's attention. And simultaneously cause every atheist on the planet to suffer a heart attack and die.

*I'm putting on my "agnosticism" hat!

They Have a League For It, Seriously

Some people aspire to be athletes. I don't personally understand them, but I certainly see the appeal. Other people want to be actors or musicians. Again, and admirable goal, and a reasonable thing to strive for. And some of us just have something we're really passionate about, like medicine or animals, and we work hard to make a living out of the thing we love. All of these things are perfectly fine, because they give us something important in our lives to strive for. And then there are the people who want to be competitive eaters, and those people scare the hell out of me. Usually, I try to have an open mind about these kinds of things. You know, I try to remember that just because I don't understand something doesn't mean other people can't enjoy it, but there is no excuse for how disgusting and wasteful competitive eating is.

What kind of child does it take to say "That's what I want to do with my life"? Probably not a very well-adjusted one. Your parents would probably be pretty damn disappointed in you. While all of your friends were outside playing, you'd be seeing how many pieces of fried zucchini you could eat in thirty seconds. They'd probably send you off to a boarding school to try and stop you from being such a weirdo. Your two possible futures would be competitive eating and food-themed supervillain.

People often make jokes about how people in third-world countries would be shocked by ideas like "appetizers", where we eat food before we eat food. One can only imagine what the reaction would be to competitive eating. "Oh yeah, he eats like 50 hot dogs in a minute. What? Oh no, it's incredibly painful for him. He doesn't even really like hot dogs. Hmm? Oh, because we pay him to do it." I don't think there are many things that are more stereotypically "American" than that, with the possible exception of "competitive eating but also there's guns".

Yet Another Ramble About Space

It sucks that we're going to have to start relying on the Japanese to colonize Mars these days, since America has apparently given up on manned space travel entirely. Now, I talk about space travel, and colonizing space in particular, way more than any rational human being ever should, but it really shouldn't be that hard to see why. There is an inherent wonder, so to speak, in the idea of traveling off into the unknown to see what the rest of the universe is like. I mean, when you see all of the crazy things that evolution has created on THIS planet, it's downright invigorating to imagine how things could be in other parts of the galaxy. It's really not hard to imagine why our ancestors were so desperate to explore the rest of the planet. It's exciting! Who knows what could be out there? And considering how many times they were proven wrong about what they thought the Earth was right, imagine how many things about space we could have dead-wrong. We need to get back out there and start finding things!

We originally started the Space Program to compete with the Russians, right? No one's denying that, right? That's probably one of the few things that everyone can agree on, in fact. So if we're already admitting that we aren't above doing things just because we want to prove to everyone that we're awesome badasses, why are we pretending that we aren't interested in funding a program that's sole purpose is essentially "Oh my God this is so goddamn cool"? Sure, there's also science-y stuff, but mainly we're just doing it because space is awesome. And in an age when people are really not impressed by America anymore, including Americans, why the hell not? We spend plenty of money on other stupid stuff, we might as well spend it on something that might let us get out of the whole global-warming thing.

We started getting really good at this sort of thing, and now we're giving up. No, screw you guys, we can do better than that. Start taxing the rich as much as you possibly can, and then put all the money into space travel. I want to have a moon base by next year.

The Universe Is Broken Part 5

The idea of plumbing scares me a little bit. Not in a 1950s B-horror "Oh my God there are snakes coming out of my toilet"* sort of way, but in a "This is clearly some sort of sorcery, how the hell did they figure this out" kind of thing. I mean, when you read about how the Ancient Romans apparently managed to get indoor plumbing, it can get a bit bizarre. That's too much for my brain to handle NOW, and I'm using the goddamn Internet.

Then again, that sort of comes out sounding like the insane ramblings of someone who is really into conspiracy theories. "Ohh, you know who puts that water in your house? The GOVERNMENT! The government is evil, as we all know. Who knows what kind of horrific things they're doing with those pipes! I bet plumbers are secretly FBI agents, planning to take over the world through the limitless power of poor water pressure!" I think you need to have a balance between blind trust in the state and being a paranoid wreck with no social skills. Yeah, I still don't like you, 9/11 Truthers, no matter how many angry comments you leave on my website.

See, if the government wanted to put mind-control poison in our water, they would've done it a long time ago. Just because something would be scary doesn't mean the American government is all over it.

*Although I did read somewhere that this actually happened to someone, and "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" has never lied to me before.

It's a Dragon Shaped Like Al Pacino

I always wonder about people who get tattoos. I'm not one of those people who gets all worked up whenever I see someone with tattoos, screaming about how they're going to regret it at the top of my lungs and frightening nearby children, but I do always wonder a few things. For example, I wonder how many tattoos are gotten while sober. See, because the stereotype for tattoos is getting completely plastered and waking up with a tattoo of Colonel Sanders performing lewd sex acts on various endangered species with no memory of how it got there, but there's also plenty of people who just go out and GET tattoos. Or, even more so, plan for weeks and weeks for what they want their tattoo to look like, where they want to get it, and all that good nonsense. And then I guess these are the sort of people who die in horrific and slightly hilarious accidents at a young age, because you very rarely see a ninety-year-old man with a full back tattoo. Or maybe old people are more sensible, and they decide to actually wear shirts from time to time. I don't know, I don't have any tattoos.

I've always thought that you should get a tattoo that will look even better once your skin starts to wrinkle. You know, like a tattoo of an elephant or something. That way, it'll just become more and more realistic. And people will look at you and think "Hey, check THAT guy out. He made a stupid decision, but he PLANNED AHEAD with it. How smart of him!" People would be even more impressed if you managed to convince them that you made that decision while drunk. Although I'm not sure why a ninety-year-old needs to impress people. I'm pretty sure at that point you can just go "Check it out, I'm still alive! Hooray for science!" More old people need to take advantage of that. Saving two bucks at the movie theater isn't really taking full advantage of being old.

How about just tattoos that look like moles and stuff. So you can secretly be a rebel, and still be buried in a Jewish cemetery? Or you could just wear clothes with patterns on 'em. You know, without all the needles and stuff. That could work.