Today’s post comes from Bathtub Safety Officer Rafferty.

At Ease, Civilians!

Be at ease and be at rest. Calm down and stay relaxed, please. I’m here to remind you that in work and life, pacing is very, very important. The suddenly warm weather we’re having after prolonged exposure to a cold, snowy, inhospitable climate-from-Hell is very dangerous, because it will make people want to do all of their end-of-winter chores in one weekend.

For those people, I have one word:

Don’t.

Ladders, rakes, shovels and clippers can be useful tools, but if you overindulge they will turn on you and they will hurt you. Accept his fact: our spring has been delayed. Nothing is as it should be in the final days of April. I know at least one person who has vowed to finally take the Christmas lights down off the highest peaks of his house this weekend.

More power to him. It is good to tackle the most delayed chores first. But there is no way you can catch up to the season in a single weekend.

I know what happens to muscles that have been idle too long under the strain of sudden activity. I’ve spent my career warning people about our relentlessly brutal and indiscriminate friend, gravity. I’m here to sound the alarm for what I believe is a VDW – a Very Dangerous Weekend.

Take it easy, really. We’ve skipped over spring. It’s going to be a long summer. Pace yourself.

Yours in Safety, Always,

Bathtub Safety Officer Rafferty

B.S.O.R. is always preaching excessive caution and pressuring us to lay back and do less, but this weekend he may have a point. A cooped-up people can become over-active under the influence of a long-anticipated and unfairly delayed warm-up.

What’s on your to-do list?

Today’s post comes from disgraced and disreputable former journalist Bud Buck.

The FAA announced today it will assess delay-blame on a minute-by-minute basis across the entire nationwide air traffic system so travelers do not waste time nursing their misdirected ire.

“I’m mad as hell,” said perpetually angry regional sales manager Aaron Shoelicker. “If I have to sit on the tarmac for an extra 20 minutes alongside some whiney infant who can’t stop blubbering about his need to get to Tampa for a noontime meeting, I want to know immediately who I can hate for being put in that situation.”

Shoelicker complained that during an especially lengthy airport delay earlier this month, he was allowed to spiral into a towering fit of rage only to find out later that the culprit was bad weather at his scheduled destination.

“I got wound up and had a monumental tantrum at the check-in desk. Later, when I found out the reason for the hold-up, I felt like an idiot because I was essentially shouting about Minnesota having a snowstorm.” he said. “Back in November I was begging for snow, so the irony is not lost on me.”

Simone Forage, another frequently ballistic flyer, admitted exhaustion from repeatedly launching herself into a series of spittle-soaked tirades in response to a recent spate of unattributed flight postponements and missed connections.

“I didn’t know who, exactly was behind all this,” she said, wistfully. “So I let the flight attendants have it, and everybody in first class got a piece of my mind too. If someone had simply explained that it was really the Republicans’ fault, I could have focused my ranting more efficiently.”

The FAA will closely measure degrees of travel-delay blame and will categorize it across a spectrum of responsibility that includes Democrats, Republicans, the President, Congress, Gays, Television, the NRA, Hollywood, Video Games, the Koch Brothers, Mario, Luigi, and the Kardashians. The results will be posted on large information boards at all major airports, and airline employees from the pilots to the gate agents will apportion blame for each delay at the time it is announced.

“We owe this to the traveling public,” explained Special Agent Foster Wellington of the Federal Spleen Administration. “Helping people fly off the handle productively allows us to conserve our National Bile Stockpile, which needs to be nurtured in case we encounter something that’s really worth getting all upset over.”

How do you manage your anger?

Dear Dr. Babooner,

I struggle with a harmless compulsion that many others despise. I’m upfront about it and have even sought help from a bike-to-your-location therapist (The Cycle Analyst), but still they roll their eyes and find someone else to talk to whenever I enter the room simply because I’m a pun worshipper.

My wife says I have taken this too far and have limited our options because I will only buy goods and services from pun-named outlets. Why is that so wrong? Pun-based businesses need customers too.

So what if my favorite Hawaiian resort is Here Today, Gone to Maui?
My preferred oceanside bar is Rum With a View.
My favorite bodega is Juan in a Million.
I buy my plants and Fronds of the Family.
I always get a cup of coffee at Pony Espresso.
I’ll stop for a bottle of wine at Life’s a Cabernet.
I shop for furniture at Coucho Marks.

There are plenty of shopping choices for me out there. I have a satisfying life and I don’t feel constrained at all. If anything, it’s a fulsome prison. But when I try to explain myself, she groans. And not in a good way.

Should I change my habits, or continue to stop at every pun shop I see?

Sincerely,
Mel Arky

I told Mel that going window shopping with him would be a pane in the glass. But that’s just one opinion.
What do you think, Dr. Babooner?

Last April we enjoyed an early, warm Spring, so naturally my expectations were raised for this year and I made it a point to get the patio furniture out as soon as possible.

A weekend of grilling burgers and eating potato salad in the great outdoors was certainly going to be possible before the end of April.

After all, if God didn’t mean for humans to sit on the deck, why did he invent beer coozies and all-weather swivel rockers?

I guess we have these things because they look so interesting and downright sculptural under eight inches of wet snow.

Describe an outdoor spot where you could sit for hours.

Having had enough of persistent ice and prolific snow, I have taken a weekend pass to travel to the Kepler 62 exoplanets in search of a more hospitable home.

How could I not be excited by Thursday’s NASA “rollout” of these beauties? Worlds slightly larger than Earth (more room for me!) are orbiting close enough to their suns to have liquid water – a necessary component to support Kardashian-based life forms like ours.

Yes, there could be creatures on these worlds as strange and puzzling as the ones that inhabit Earth. Even moreso, since some of the scientists examining the scant traces we have seen of these planets (virtually nothing but a blink) have supposed that they are “water worlds”, completely oceanic environments as inhospitable and off-putting as the Kevin Costner movie of the same name.

Could life-forms like us live in these places? We’ll probably never know, but Lisa Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy said “it might even be cooler life than we have here. Looking at the oceans, we find a lot of interesting life-forms there.”

Perhaps some people will find that intriguing, though I’m the sort who doesn’t care for shellfish and cringes at anything slimy. On second thought, I’ll probably stay home.

But that’s before the marketing effort kicks in. I have no doubt the Kepler Exoplanet Resorts Corporation will find a way to spin the total absence of land, not-quite-powerful-enough sun, and arduous to-and-from travel times (1,200 light years!) into selling points.

After all, every vacation involves some heavy lifting. And if it was easy to go, everyone would already be there.

If you were a fish, what sort of fish would you be?

Several major news organizations sent out false reports yesterday in their haste to be the first to tell you something had happened.

But the thing they said had happened hadn’t happened, though perhaps it will soon or maybe by the time you read this, it already has. But yesterday, when they said it had, it hadn’t.

Getting a scoop has long been the goal of many a serious journalist. The bigger the story, the harder it is to get out in front of everyone else. So when the margin of victory is minutes or even seconds, it’s understandable that some of the top contenders might flinch, hoping that someday a sizable number of people will remember that their organization was the one to deliver the earliest news.

If people remember such things.

So now I have a news flash of my own. Time May Not Exist!

I’m pretty certain I’m the first one out with this story, because I just learned it from a Discover Magazine article that was printed in 2007. And in the article, they quoted a lot of smart people who were talking about time a long time ago, and the consensus seems to be that “a long time ago” doesn’t actually mean anything.

There’s more! The closer you look at time the more confusing it becomes and the less certain you are about everything. And so it seems like everything that has happened and will happen is accessible, with the right technology.

So I’m going to claim the scoop on this particular headline:

Scientists Have Just Conclusively Proven That Time Is Artificial And Everything Exists At Once!

Of course this hasn’t happened yet, but when it does, the explanation will further illuminate how “yet” is a meaningless concept. Details to follow.

I’m happy because journalism just got easier! It appears you can write any headline you like and simply wait for it to come true.

What story would you like to break?

Dear Dr. Babooner,

Two years ago I found a childhood friend on Facebook. Delighted, I sent him message after message until he finally friended me.

Now that we know each other again, I am appalled. While I recall us being compatible as 8-year olds, his current political views are so far from mine that seeing his knuckleheaded posts in my Facebook News Feed makes me feel like I am stuck in his basement on a rainy afternoon, playing with his stupid toy soldiers in a pointless game of mock war where we blow things up for no reason and gleefully attack defenseless civilians and I can’t leave because I have to wait for my mom to pick me up but she’s getting her hair done downtown and won’t be here for another two hours and it’s too far to walk home.

Now that I think of it, maybe we weren’t compatible as 8-year olds either.

Dr. Babooner, I’m a noncompetitive and tolerant person. My ideas are no better than anyone else’s. I’m willing to be friendly and open with all people, even if we don’t agree. And I’d like to think that my philosophy of acceptance, my devotion to clear reasoning and my general aura of non-insanity can gradually change people’s hearts until they think about things in exactly the same way I do, no matter how wrong they were at the start.

However, I really, really want to instantly and permanently “unfriend” this new/old acquaintance so I won’t be exposed to his moronic ideas every single day. If I have to read another one of his rants, I’m afraid I’ll become a screeching, spittle-soaked lunatic, shouting for a posse to visit equal parts justice and humiliation to his unsuspecting head. And if I do that, how can I hang on to my self image as a non-judgmental person?

Sincerely,
Seeing Unsympathetic Political Epistles Rouses Inklings Of Rage

I told S.U.P.E.R.I.O.R. to spin the rationale. Rather than telling yourself you’re dropping this “friend” because his ideas are unacceptable, tell yourself your doing it to spare him the stress of having to read your own “incorrect” thoughts. That way, you can remain tolerant and nice, while he stays a shallow and unredeemable dunderhead.

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?