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Vanished in a puff of smoke and pink mist

 

 
Dinosaurs are extinct, no argument.  Where disagreement begins is what caused dinosaurs to check out.

Scientists weighed-in by delving into the provable with a matter-of-fact methodology that advanced a single plausible cause:

  

A rogue asteroid strayed off-course and collided with Earth, creating violent shock-waves that reduced all living matter to pink and green mist.

  

Conspiracy theorists never miss an opportunity to thrive on the dark side.  They offered hundreds of sinister scenarios, but ultimately consolidated to promote one:

 

Dinosaurs were the first victims of population control.  Government "cooked the books" by intentionally designing census forms with no categories for dinosaurs, and census-takers were unable to include the beasts in the count.

 

Cartoonists suited up in greater, yet wackier numbers, and dived into the improbable with a what-the-hey lunacy having its own impenetrable logic: 

 

Gary “Far Side” Larson theorized dinosaurs became extinct because they failed to heed the surgeon general’s warnings about the dangers of smoking cigarettes.

 

Dan “Bizarro” Piraro believed dinosaurs missed boarding Noah’s Ark by an hour because they forgot to adjust their watches for daylight savings time.

 

My theory is Anti-freeze was not yet invented, so dinosaurs were ill-prepared to ride out sub-zero termperatures and marauding glaciers.

 

Science, conspiracy or cartoons, it all works.  So no matter how you look at it, pink mist or a puff of smoke, just like that - Poof! - Dino the dinosaur was gone!

Tap into the awesome power of prayer

 

 

Time for disclosure.

 

I’m not a praying kind of person.  Haven’t been since middle school days when we were taught that power of prayer was the best way to answer questions we barely had the language and wisdom to ask.

 

Then arrived our coming of age with the need to set goals.  We learned that personal energy sometimes greased the skids where prayer alone did not.

 

The problem with prayer is that its benefits are not obvious, nor immediate.  Unless one is committed to the ideology of prayer, the perception of its relevance wanes, particularly with the discovery that goals can be attained with focus and application.

 

With many mixed messages and arguments against it, prayer is stressed to keep a foothold in daily lives.  It's easy to see how the regimen of prayer withers when forced to compete with more riveting distractions.

 

Time for another disclosure.  Prayer has been on my mind lately, mainly because the nation's dismal state of affairs has been plaguing my thoughts, too.  This is not the country I once knew, nor is it the country I expected it to be. 

 

If I had known 2010 would see a nation under the spell of an amateur illusionist with a messiah complex bent on transforming the universe into his image and likeness, I might've kept up the regimen of prayer.  And I would've prayed less for what I thought I wanted and more for what I didn't:  an Obamination.

 

But maybe it's not too late.  Maybe we can still avert the terrible calamity of Obamination by tapping into the power of prayer.  And why not?  Hey, I'm in, so please join me in spreading this simple prayer-chant:  "No-Mo-O!  No-Mo-O!  No-Mo-O!"

 

Just think of it!  An email campaign to unite the nation in chanting to vanquish the Anointed One and his army of useful idiots.  Awesome!  Bring it!

Vanishing acts, chastity belts and consumerism

 

Question:  What do pirates, gum disease, and chastity have in common?

Answer:  Vanishing rain forests.

 

What?  Wait, stay with me.  This is easy.

 

The major ravages of deforestation are many – loss of fertile soil systems, degradation of resources, crop loss and starvation, eroding economies, displacement of local populations, and changes in weather patterns.

 

Bad stuff.  And these are just the high-profile casualties.  What about lower-profile victims of vanishing wood products, which for lack of media attention never see the front pages?

 

Peg-legs for pirates who lose a leg to a hungry shark, and whose quality of life depends on a realigned gait to keep from walking in circles.

 

Toothpicks for routing out spinach and elusive food particles, to prevent gum disease and unsightly "tooth-gap."

 

Chastity belts to keep a maiden pure during her lordship's absence by preventing illegal entry into her sacred temple (locks to secure the belts were made of oak before it was learned wood was no deterrent against a knight armed with a keyhole saw).

 

In "Big Yellow Taxi" singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell fired a warning shot about the dangers of deforestation:  "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone.  They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."

 

Mitchell’s lyrics are a conundrum.  Is deforestation the collateral damage of market response to sate ravenous appetites?  Or is it a cog in a profits-driven wheel to transform civilization into ravenous consumers to fatten corporate pockets?

 

Are there limits to consumerism?  Is excessive consumerism destructive?  What are its warning signs?  Is there a moral imperative to oppose it?  What price to pay, who must pay it, and how to quantify the damages of reckless consumption unless we chart its debris trail, recover and identify its victims?

 

My head throbs searching for answers.

 

What?  Oh, the part about chastity belts?  Mostly fabrication.  Sometimes y’hafta get creative to draw attention to tough questions.

 

Present the case clearly with mystery

 

To the uninitiated, art school critiques are lofty and instructional.  To those who sit through them, critiques are loopy entertainment.

 

One of my instructors concluded drawing classes with high drama.  Student work was arranged in front of the model while the prof prowled the studio perimeter.  With long strides, he circled the seated students, occasionally eyeing the drawings the way a leopard stalks prey on a savannah.

 

His circles got smaller and smaller.  Finally he stood before the students.  Head tilted, hand to forehead, eyes closed, he peered at an invisible horizon.  Then with a grand gesture, he waved his hand in a wide overhead arc, followed by a modified dope-slap, and began his critique:

 

“This drawing,” he would start, “I see it but I’m not convinced the elements of the figure have integrated into a unified, believable whole.”  His critiques were usually lengthier, but “I’m not convinced” was a kiss-of-death.  It was his way of saying a drawing didn’t engage.

 

Painting and drawing are similar to preparing a case for trial:  there's gathering and processing evidence, organizing facts, plotting strategy, mounting a compelling argument, and finally convincing a jury beyond reasonable doubt that the assembled package presents a believable whole.

 

Yet this is where a trial jury and a jury of art patrons part paths.  French impressionist Edgar Degas said, “A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy.  When you always make your meaning perfectly clear you end up boring people.”

 

Art is successful when it is convincing and engaging, because without the pull of mystery or doubt, art patrons (the jurors) yawn and fast-forward to the next piece.  In the fickle court of cultural opinion, "draw-power" is king, and on the stand an art work that dazzles and mystifies is the star witness. 

 

Vincent Van Gouda, artist & critic

 

Swiss army knives don’t write term papers – yet

 

It’s May, month of commencement ceremonies, mortarboards and diplomas.  Your over-achieving prodigy graduated summa cum laude and you’re looking for the appropriate gift.  

 

Wenger, the Swiss manufacturer of precision tools, has the answer:  the Mega-Blade, Model 16999.  This Swiss army knife on steroids weighs 2 ½ pounds, measures 9" long, and has a phenomenal repertoire of 87 implements to handle over 150 functions.  Here's a sample inventory:  

 

Multi-bit Phillips screwdriver

Fingernail file

Surgeon's scalpel

Tire pressure gauge

Laser pointer with 300-foot range

Slim-jim car door opener

Blood pressure monitor

Corkscrew

Cigar clipper

Dental plaque remover

 

Packaged in a handsome, black leather carrying case, it retails at $1400.  There is no job the Mega-Blade can't do – except write resumes for your job-seeking grad whose mission is to learn to design the next level of Mega-Blades able to write term papers for the following generation of students that never learned to write. 

 

Oedipal edibles and brain feuds

 

Nutrition, frozen foods and other random flashes of lunacy...

 

In some parts of the world people go to sleep at night with an upset stomach because they had too much to eat.  In other parts of the world people go to sleep at night with an empty stomach because they had nothing to eat.  Irony for breakfast, over easy.

 

Anything that improves productivity is good for the economy.  Agri-business grows veggies in freezing climates – peas and carrots now sprout up flash-frozen.  No packaging required.  Pick, thaw & eat!  Ideal for the family-on-the-go!

 

Edibles compatible with intellectual development are “brain food.”  Conversely, for edibles which are combatable with intellectual development, wouldn’t these cause “brain feud?”

 

Prehistoric mothers consumed the weakest of their young as long as they were edible.  Male children who survived this ritual grew up to eat their mothers because it was inevitable – they were Oedipal.

 

Fast food for thought.

 

The “Space-Grabber” – I got mine, get your own

 

A common predicament:  It’s a weekday night.  You’re meeting people for an hour of shmoozing.  Time is limited because your friends are on their way out of town.  You’re prowling the streets for a place to park; you don’t want to pay $15 “special event” parking, and you don't want to walk 2 miles.

 

A fantasy solution:  It’s a GPS device that finds street parking within a quarter-mile of your destination.  It locks-on the spot, secures it with an invisible “fire-wall”, then takes control of your vehicle and zips you to the location.

 

This idea will make me wealthy.  I’m calling it the “Space-Grabber.”  I got mine, get your own.  

 

Extinction is the pits

Once upon a time, folks were self-supporting.  They were pioneers, who when faced with challenges, got creative, stretched their budgets, rolled up their sleeves, lathered up with elbow grease, and put noses to the grindstone.  And got-R-done without driving drunk into a deep river of debt at 120 mph. 

 

Don’t know what happened to these folks.  If they haven’t vanished altogether, then they’re an endangered species, on the brink of extinction. 

 

Just a casual observation…no cause for alarm or anything…but unless the country smarts up to what made it great and rediscovers its creative spirit, there’s no guard rail to prevent it from driving into its own river of extinction.

 

Brace for impact!

 

Flat earth and other fictions

 

In the distant past, superstition was law.  Conventional wisdom saw a flat earth at the center of the universe, while the sun and stars circled overhead.

 

When Columbus failed to sail off the edge of the planet, reason prevailed and men concluded the world was round.  Galileo's study tidied up the package:  the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe.

 

This wisdom endured for the next six centuries, but lately it's been losing ground to mankind's appetite for new fictions.  A man named Obama has usurped the sun as the center of the universe, and now all the stars and celestial bodies circle his every word.

 

The earth is still round, but yet we're told it's overheating and the oceans are swelling.  When the sun was running things, this was never a huge problem.  It only became moreso with the arrival of the One at the Center, and his entourage of all that hot air.

 

Coincidence?  You decide.

 

Flashes from a fevered mind

The H1N1 virus brought its show to town.  One of the groupies slipped out of the entourage and mugged me.

 

I was pummeled by chills and sneezes, and my sinuses ran like an open faucet.  I countered with soup, fluids, Tamiflu, and an elixir that launched me into Loopy Land and feverish delusions.

 

While recovering, I needed ideas for a blog post.  My mind was fuzzy.  I flipped through old sketches, doodles, brain spurts, and other cranial meanderings, but nothing I had previously written compared to the deranged flashes of lunacy bursting from my febrile brain:

 

Sci-fi hash browns – a burp in solid state

All new “Breath of Jesus" hand soap & body wash

How to Americanize the African killer bee

Recycling center for cannibals

Shrink-wrapping virginity for longer shelf life

“Playdead” – a girlie magazine for vampires and ghouls

 

Hmm...primo stuff!  If all it takes to overcome writer's bloc is a little H1N1 now and then, hey, no problem.  Y'all come back anytime, y'hear?