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?

Dear Dr. Babooner,

One of my dear friends is having an extravagant wedding! The groom’s family is loaded AND they are sort of obsessive-compulsive when it comes to all the rules they follow and the weird behaviors they expect from other people.

His mother is so touchy, ordinary people are not supposed to touch her unless she touches them first!

Talk about taking yourself seriously. They’ll have a full orchestra and TWO choirs!

This in a church that already has a perfectly fine pipe organ. How much music do you need to say a simple “I do”?

My friend the bride thinks it is all so wonderful, but I can’t help thinking this is excessive and embarrassingly ‘over the top’. I know it is my responsibility to ‘ooh’ and ‘aaah’ over the posh arrangements and make a fuss and validate all her tasteless choices, but I’m afraid if I do she will be able to tell I’m faking it.

But on the other hand, if I say what I think she may never speak to me again! The whole thing gives me a stomachache. Either way, I feel like our friendship is doomed!

I’m thinking I should just not show up and claim later that I made a mistake writing down the date!

Would that be so wrong?

Sincerely,

Just a Common Her

I told “Common Her” that yes, it would be wrong to skip your friend’s wedding because you are afraid she will see through your façade. You appear to be so shallow, it is likely that she has already seen through your façade and has decided to like you anyway. Or, as you suggest, your friendship may be truly doomed. In either case, you might as well go for the perks. I hear you’ll get one free glass of champagne, possibly two, but under no circumstances will anyone get three!

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

Pseudo-journalist Bud Buck has been following the controversial smartphone data collection story, and has apparently decided there’s a larger audience hungry for fresh details that will push them to becoming even more alarmed. He is more than willing to provide them.

Some Cellphones Stalk Users
by Bud Buck

Hot on the heels of revelations that cell phone tracking data is being collected and stored by Apple and Google and that these phones log your whereabouts even when the location feature is turned OFF, I have uncovered an instance of a smartphone that knows where its user goes and how much time he spends there, EVEN WHEN HE IS NOT CARRYING THE DEVICE!

A Bud Buck Reports Investigation has discovered that at least one careless user, Thomas Carping of Belle Plaine, routinely leaves his phone at home, but the phone still somehow knows where he is.

“Usually I take it with me,” he explains, “and I’m always going to pretty much all the same places anyway. I know it remembers. So I guess when I accidentally leave it in the pocket of yesterday’s pants it still has enough information inside to predict where I’ll be. That’s really smart … and really creepy.”

Carping claims that when he inadvertently leaves home without his phone, other telephones around him tend to ring, and that those phones ring in sequence along a route he typically follows. People he has called in the past receive phantom calls.

Carping’s friend, Luanne Locavore, confirmed his assertion.

“Tommy walks into my place and he’s not here more than five minutes before MY phone starts to ring,” she says. “I pick it up and it’s just line noise, and then a hang up. I check the log and discover the call came from HIS cell, but he says he left it at home.”

Carping believes that smart phone designers have built the devices with “the soul-sucking, meddlesome personality of an obsessed harpy.” He claims he has made no commitment to the phone and yet it seems bent on “tracking my movements and going out of its way to ruin my fun.”

I found it surprising that he could have a mobile phone plan that required no extended contract or commitment, but Carping insisted it is true. He and the phone “are good friends. We’ve done some work together, but that’s as far as it goes. I am allowed to leave the house without it, no matter what the phone thinks.”

Locavore agrees, saying the phone “obviously has other ideas. It’s almost like it’s trying to find him.”

And those ideas may include more than a simple phone call. Locavore revealed this shocking tidbit – she insisted that Carping download the tracking data from his phone and they discovered that on some days when he left the phone in his pants pocket on the closet floor, the device actually went out in search of him.

“All the tracking information is in there,” she says. “One night when he said he didn’t have it, the records show it came and sat out in the street in front of my house! Creepy! What will I do if it rings the doorbell?”

Locavore finds it troubling that the device can form such a strong attachment, and she thinks Carping should do something “before it gets out of hand.”

Her suggestion?

“Drown it in a five gallon pail.”

Both Carping and Locavore took offense at this reporter’s offhand suggestion that perhaps Carping had more to hide than he was letting on, and that his phone was being operated by another person during the times when it appears to be trying to track him down.

“He’s single and lives alone,” said Locavore. “That’s what he’s always told me.”

Carping readily agreed.

“Yup,” he said. “That’s my story.”

But can anyone ever be truly alone once they become involved with a smartphone?
Time will tell! This is Bud Buck!

Which of your appliances loves you the most?