A lot of the news isn’t news anymore, it’s opinion. Why? Because it’s much easier to generate an opinion than it is to track down and confirm a fact. Many “news organizations” rely heavily on pundits because it’s a low cost way to chew up time.

Here at Trail Baboon, we’re no different. Our staff reporter, Bud Buck, didn’t want to lose his weekend to all the turmoil at the capitol, and we didn’t want to pay his per diem! The solution? He spent Saturday and Sunday relaxing at home and checked the headlines every now and then. Late last night he was able to knock out this wordy document based on a few clips he caught on TV and some other stuff he saw online.

It’s not exactly the news, but it sounds important and knowledgeable, and it only took ten minutes for him to do it. Win-win! Cheap content is good enough if it makes you look. Even we can afford that!

This is Bud Buck with the Bud’s NewsBucket of News!

I have progress to report at the Capitol. That’s right, I said progress!

Though they were unable to reach a budget agreement with the Democrat in the Governor’s office, the Republican dominated legislature of Minnesota has at least followed through with a radical job creation bill – the Bogeyman Promoting, Alarm Heightening, Outrage Generating and Placard Producing Bill of 2011, otherwise known as the Constitutional Amendment on Marriage.

This is an aggressive effort to pump hundreds of millions of local and outside dollars into businesses that provide every possible avenue for influencing public opinion, be it advertising, analyzing, punditizing, provoking, generalizing, demonizing, radicalizing and traumatizing. Over the next 14 months, anyone with an incendiary idea to sell on either side of the gay marriage debate will have Minnesota buyers eager to invest! Thousands of gallons of bile will be produced! There will be lots of jobs for exaggerators! And it’s good news for quote manufacturers too! Politicians throw exclamation points around casually, but did you know that before professional reflex provokers can cast a single aspersion, a punctuation worker somewhere has to dig an exclamation point out of the soil with his bare hands? It’s good, honest work, and it’s growing because lots of exclamation points will be needed in the coming months! Really!

And the timing couldn’t be better, since these same hyperbolic industries frame much of the conversation around presidential campaigns. They were expecting to have a big, big year in 2012. But now that Barack Obama is getting credit for taking down Osama Bin Laden, the political calculus is leading potential Republican challengers to forego a run. One notable exception – the Pawlenty campaign officially launches today!

And yes, it’s a job creator! This campaign will be a shot in the arm for the Overly Dramatic Music Industry. Pawlenty videos lay it on thick, the same way I smother a salad in bleu cheese dressing – because I hate the leafy vegetables underneath! There’s so much volume on the voices and the strings that by the end of his pitch, I can hardly hear what he’s saying. Probably just as well, but I think it’s something about telling us “the truth”.

The last time a Minnesotan ran for president and promised to tell us the truth, it was Walter Mondale in 1984 and he was admitting he would regretfully have to raise taxes. I have a feeling that won’t be the message this time!

But I sure hope there are no gay people involved in any of these necessary word and image-based political industries. It would be a shame if they got the idea that Minnesota was inhospitable and left the state for greener pastures. After all, Iowa is right next door.

This is Bud Buck!

Bud is meandering all over the place, but he might have a point in there someplace. It could turn out that the struggle for hearts and minds will spark an economic resurgence in Minnesota. Unlimited spending starts now and goes through November, 2012!

What role will you play in the Outrage Based Economy?

We had an unusually busy Saturday, thanks to rain and the timeless allure of the end of time. So I thought it would be good to hit the “reset” button for today, in case baboons would like to continue a conversation.

Here’s a morning after limerick, for those nonplussed about the non rapture.

A man who predicted the ending
Received less than what he was intending
Just some minutes of fame,
While the world stayed the same
Its predicted apocalypse pending.

Looking over yesterday’s comments, at least we got a chance to spend some time thinking about end-of-the-world wine, cigars (for tim) and hugs.

As a general principle I avoid making predictions, though I may have assured someone in the summer of 2000 that Al Gore would be the next president.

Oh my, what to say about the predicted end of the world?

There is an apocalyptic mindset that is satisfying in a weird way. Things become simple when you know for sure nothing will matter after today.

It is easy to mock people who make such claims on religious grounds, but even science confirms that the world will, in fact, end someday. Just like comedy, the essence of the thing is in the timing. Is this the day? Tomorrow? All we know for certain is that it wasn’t yesterday.

It could turn out that the promoters of armageddon TODAY will get lucky and their (and everyone’s) number will come up. It will appear to the rest of us that they had it right all along, but their “I told you so” time will last for about 20 seconds, I guess. Is there any pleasure in that?

In some cases, even relatives of the doomsayers are laying on the ridicule. The New York Times profiles a family where the parents have bought into the apocalyptic scenario and their children are left shaking their heads. The kids come off as being remarkably well adjusted to the bizarre dynamic inside their own family.

Tomorrow will likely be a difficult day for those who predicted their own heavenward ascension in the “rapture”. Some folks even stopped paying the rent and quit saving for the kids’ college fund. Oops. Super embarrassing moment if we’re all still here on Monday! The lesson I’m taking from this – at a time when it seams like zealots have their heels dug in at the capitol and political positions are unmovable, it is still possible to get a human being to believe something so amazing and irrational, it changes their behavior.

A story is a powerful lever.

But why would anyone choose to accept this prophesy? Skeeter Davis said it best – sometimes we’re so mixed up emotionally, it FEELS like the world is ending, or that it SHOULD end.

I wonder of today’s frenzy has helped boost Skeeter’s You Tube views? She’s well over one million, and no doubt there will be many more today as people all around the globe search for the first video evidence of The End Of The World and wind up listening to this song.

The good news for those who were alive in 1963 – we managed to survive Skeeter’s hairdo. That gives me hope that we can withstand anything!

The world ends in ten minutes. What do you do?

It’s garage sale day today, tomorrow and Saturday.

Geez, we’ve just hauled enough stuff out of the basement to fill two houses. It’s the Clown Car Scenario – there’s no way they could all fit in the back seat and yet clowns keep popping out. That’s how I feel about board games. Did we really play all those?

We’re rich in cheap plastic toys, obsolete software, computer printers, yo-yo’s, kites, puzzles and electronic gadgets where one feature (cassette player, CD, radio) inexplicably stopped working. Do people really repair these things, or are they only useful as doorstops that happen to have a digital time readout?

Something happens to stuff once you have decided to retire it but not throw it away – you put it in an out-of-the-way place and it becomes invisible, like the dark matter that dominates the universe. An astronomer named Fritz Zwicky coined the term “dark matter” in the 1930’s to describe all the stuff that his mathematical models told him must be holding things together, even though we can’t see it.

I could be wrong, but I think Fritzwicky is the name of one of those board games I just dragged up the stairs.

We’ll open the doors this morning with about 1% of the debris priced. I wonder if I would have bought any of this stuff if it had come with a Truth In Consumption label – the retail price ($49.99) with the expected garage sale price ($3) right next to it. Of course there is no Truth In Consumption label requirement. That’s just another job killing socialist idea of mine – something I wish had been in place to protect me from my own impulsive decision making and grandiose ideas about what I was going to do.

So goodbye (with luck) to the Hilton of rat cages, the lovely canvas sling chairs we rarely sat in, the plastic pig that I was going to modify so it would light up, the tennis and racquetball rackets I stopped using, the power washer that I bought to do a difficult job that I eventually hired someone else to do with his own equipment, and so on and so on.

Time to face the deep, deep discount music.

Have you got a memorable garage sale experience?

Another mailing has arrived from the office of Congressman Loomis Beechly of Minnesota’s 9th District – all the water surface area in the state. I’m not sure what he’s talking about here – it may be just a bit of morning haze. Sometimes an elected official needs to connect with his public, or a public that might someday become his!

Greetings Constituents and Guests!

My sincere apologies to any fishing opener attendees who resent the way that bitter mid-May gale blew you around the beautiful 9th district last weekend. While you’re still getting over the chill, please allow me to extend the hand of welcome!

It was wonderful to have you in our territory, and I hope you come back soon! We 9th districters love the summer months when the population swells. And we also love the late fall, when everyone finally goes home. Nothing personal. You know how it is when you’ve got guests. So few people live on the water year-round.

Because the human population is so low, some people overlook the 9th district completely, but to me it is very real. I consider every thing that lives in the district to be one of my constituents – not just the voters. So every time you pull a walleye out of a Minnesota lake, it feels like a bit of a loss to me. But I saw that Lion King movie like everybody else. Circle of Life, you know.

Some have asked me if redistricting might possibly be done in a way that puts their on-land homes in the 9th district. As you know, redistricting is a total crapshoot, and literally anything could happen. We’re a little bit protected from gerrymandering because water surface area is an important part of our identity here, but there have been instances where a water main break has caused some people’s basements to be in the 9th district temporarily. If something like this should happen to you on election day, I hope you’ll come downstairs and vote for me!

The boundaries of the 9th are constantly being re-drawn by nature anyway. When it rains a lot, the district gets larger. In a drought, the opposite happens. Some small dams on Minnesota rivers are being removed – that shrinks the district too. But then some wetlands are being restored – that creates new areas.

One of our biggest growth spots for the 9th district is in drainage ponds around suburban shopping malls. A single thunderstorm in Maple Grove can make my district larger for two days! And I’m delighted to have more metro area constituents, even if most of them are ducks and geese. In support of these potential votes, I’m working hard to fight expansion of unfair municipal rules about pooping in the park.

With all the housing foreclosures in the Twin Cities, I’m thinking some enterprising people might move to vessels anchored in these drainage ponds. It would be great to have more year-round residents and some stability in our head count, but beware the financing issues. You don’t want to have an upside down mortgage in a houseboat!

If it should happen, please contact my office. We’re here to serve you!

Sincerely,

Congressman Loomis Beechly
Minnesota’s 9th District.

What would it be like to live on a boat?

This note arrived early this morning from Spin Williams – a big idea man and the marketing genius in charge of The Meeting That Never Ends.

I see the city of Minneapolis is making a bid to get the Minnesota Vikings to fully participate in a plan for a new stadium on the site of the Metrodome! And at the same time there’s a push to expand gambling by building a casino on the other side of downtown Minneapolis.

Sports and gambling!

At The Meeting That Never Ends, we agree that S & G are the promised land because that’s where the money is! And everybody needs money, so it makes sense that these two ideas are crashing the party at the very moment the legislature is trying to solve a huge budget problem. Far from being distractions, S & G are the answers, and they’ve come knocking!

Some loud people don’t like having their money taken away by government to pay for “the common good”, especially if the good in question is perceived as being for people more common than they are. And let’s face it, who doesn’t think everybody else is a lot more common than they are?

But many of the same complainers will hand over huge sums of money gambling, following sports teams, and gambling on the sports teams they follow. In just about every case, they are guaranteed to part with phenomenal amounts of cash. But they can’t help themselves. They love sports and gambling too much. And why not? The entertainment these activities provide has real value

Government, on the other hand, is seen as dull, uninspiring, greedy and wasteful. However, to the people involved in the decision-making, it is exciting and unpredictable. Anything could happen!

That’s why we think every state in the union, and particularly a sharply divided state like Minnesota, could close its financial gap by permitting, and taking a cut from, gambling on state government decision making!

Think about it! Right now you have an exciting two horse race for the new Vikings stadium – Arden Hills or Minneapolis. It’s a three horse race if you count Los Angeles. Sports fans are intensely interested, so why not let them wager on the outcome? The state would take a portion of all bets, so in spite of the fortunes being made and lost by players, the government wins every time!

Lots of issues would draw massive wagers; putting gay marriage on the ballot, building the Stillwater bridge, or redistricting! Let people put their money behind their passion in a constructive, public way. They could get rich if they prevail, and if not … at least they could say they were in the contest to the end.

It’s a typical complaint that people with money will flood the political system with cash contributions to politicians and PACS, much of it in a thinly disguised attempt to influence public policy in a way that pays off for them financially! But public policy is too weird and nutty to control – it’s all a crap shoot! And when it’s not a crap shoot, it’s poker, which is the game the governor and the legislature are playing over the budget. In the end everything will be determined by who has the best cards and the most nerve. And poker is hugely popular entertainment!

So let’s totally buy into that idea, and turn state government itself into a public policy casino!

Just an idea. I don’t really have time to follow up, though, so you can take it from here.
Spin

Like most of Spin’s ideas, this one is half finished and full of unforeseen problems. But he’s not an implementer, he’s a creator, and I think he has already moved on to the next challenge.

Like to gamble?

Dear Dr. Babooner,

When my youngest graduated from Stanford in ‘08 and took a job at a venture capital firm that finances Initial Public Offerings for tech startups, I relaxed. I thought he was going to be spending his time with responsible people. So imagine my surprise when he comes home for Thanksgiving and he’s got a tattoo on his arm – a company logo for DigiChip – an image of a standard potato chip but with sparks flying off the sides and all kinds of technical thingies on it. And it was etched on his arm – that beautiful, pristine, still baby-soft skin! I almost fainted. His explanation? It was the first account he ever worked on, and he wanted to remember it.

I still can’t believe he turned his body into a shrine for this miserable company, because they were out of business by the following Memorial Day. I think my child’s ravaged skin is the only thing left of DigiChip – not that anyone would notice because he’s cluttered up the rest of his exposed flesh with logos from all the OTHER companies he’s worked with in the past 36 months – mostly bankrupt news aggregators and failed social networks (why would you name one “Sardine Tin?” People don’t want to be THAT close!). I joke that they’ll have to fire him in two years when the illustrations start creeping up his neck.

The latest atrocity hurts me more than all the previous tattoos combined – the company is called “Mother’s Milk Energy Drink”. The image is a bottle of the product with a heart superimposed over it, and yes, the word “Mother’s” on a scrolled banner.

If my child is going to have any form of “Mother” written on his skin in indelible ink, it had better be there as a tribute to ME, not to honor some toxic combination of carbonation, corn syrup and caffeine!

He says “If you want it to be for you, mom, it’s OK to think that. I’m sure the dudes at Mother’s wont mind.”

Dr. Babooner, I bit my tongue, but what if I mind? Doesn’t that count?

Sincerely,
Listen You Dope, I’m Angry!

I told L.Y.D.I.A! that this was a terribly unfortunate situation and I can understand her distress, but she needs to remember two things.

1) Tattoos today are not the same kind of outsider’s social statement they were when she was young.
2) Some people just get too wrapped up in their work.

When one’s child emphasizes the professional over the personal, one should feel pity alongside the rage. Eventually it will dawn on him (in the shower perhaps), that he has emotionally over-invested in these shaky IPO’s.

And it wouldn’t hurt to mention sometime that when you gave birth to him, it was an extremely risky and terribly painful Initial Public Offering that has been a good investment overall, though there have been some shaky quarters of late.

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

It seems like every May there’s a morose note from Wendell Wilkie High School’s perennial sophomore, Bubby Spamden. What a pity – to be so young and so bleak in springtime.

Hey Mr. C.,

Summer’s coming, and it looks like the job scene for teens is tough again this year. Getting a definite “no” or just plain being ignored all the time can wear a guy out, especially since all I’ve ever heard since I started school was how great I am and how I should really, really feel good about myself all the time no matter what.

Well, that’s not entirely true. The past few years of being held back as a high school sophomore has been kind of humbling, but I started with a huge excess of self-positivity and there’s still some left in the barrel. Still, I’m thinking about giving up my job search so I can preserve what’s left of my ME! reserves.

I have looked all around and so far there’s just nothing. It doesn’t help that my grandfather is applying at all the same places I am – the burger shop, the coffee place and the movie theater. He’s 84 and says he needs some extra money to help pay for his medications or he’ll die. Talk about piling on the guilt!

When I told my mom I’d have to stay in the basement playing video games all summer so grandpa could live, she gave me THAT LOOK. But I’m serious! It really helps to have the feeling that what you’re doing (or NOT doing) makes a difference in the world, and making it so I could buy my popcorn from Gramps at every summer blockbuster this year while getting to see him so happy behind the counter, over-filling the pop orders, snarling at the 12 year olds and getting fake butter smeared on his cheerful yellow ScreenLand vest, that would be something I could point to with pride while I tell my friends ‘I helped make that happen!’.

Mr. Cornsmut told the FFA kids that some farmers get paid to not grow crops so I’m wondering – could I get paid for staying out of the job force? Seriously – me not being in the way of more deserving candidates is worth something, isn’t it? In fact, being absent-for-hire may be the next big business opportunity! There’s so much competition for everything, why not pay me something to thin the job herd by at least one?

If that worked I’d also try to get paid for staying out of the wilderness, out of the bowling alleys, out of that crafts store my mom likes and out of the dentist’s office too! It looks like every single place is more and more crowded than ever before, except for bookstores and video rental places, so there’s lots of opportunity.

I would even consider taking money to stay off the roads, if only somebody would give me a car first so I could get paid to park it. Then I could start dating, as long as my girlfriend was OK with us not actually going anywhere.

My mom says if I don’t find a way to make money this year, they’ll send me to Punctuation Camp, so I’m getting a little desperate. What do you think of my idea, Mr. C? I know you’re in the job market – would you like to be the first to pay me something to stay out of your way?

Your pal,
Bubby

I told Bubby he was making a LOT of assumptions with his “plan”, not the least of which is the wild guess that some fictitious girlfriend would be satisfied to just go sit in a car with him. I know teenage girls are sometimes irrational, but it’s hard to imagine that there is one so lacking in common sense and ambition that she would be attracted to this offer. If she does exist, her parents might pay her something to NOT go out with Bubby – a wise investment, I think.

As for Bubby getting paid by me or anyone to not apply for jobs – it sounds like a Ponzi Scheme or trading in bundled sub-prime mortgages – a method of making money that could only work if one could suspend the laws of mathematics. So ten years ago he might have had a shot with that idea, especially on Wall Street. In 2011, maybe not.

He gets points for imagination, but Punctuation Camp sounds like a real possibility.

What would you give up in exchange for money?