Fixing Us Up

I’ve been thinking about fixing up our goodbye-Bush crisis. He played patty-cake with those bankers doing old-time, laissez-faire, robber-baron, footsie-footsie thinking. Now Prez. Obama has moved on to only 70-year-old ideas by starting up Mr. Keynes’ public money shovel. It worked before—when the shovel was big enough— so I expect it will work again.

The big question for me is where do you shovel all the money—in the same old carbon-cooking, late-age capitalism pork-pots or do you aim the shovel in new green directions.

We need to make jobs and make stuff, but let’s make something that doesn’t use up many resources, doesn’t burn much coal or oil, and helps people out.

Back in the 80’s, in an earlier mess, a bunch of people thought about making new stuff. It’s a good example. Boeing laid off engineers when too many jets just sat around doing nothing (sort of like those foreclosed-on houses, these days). Ever wonder why your baby carriage looks like a 747 landing gear getting ready for touchdown? Those hot shot, laid off engineers looked at the baby buggies like I pushed my son around in, buggies that felt like a boat on a truck chassis, buggies that took the whole trunk to pack them up and weighed more than my wife. Those smart-guy engineers changed everything with new light-weight designs that twisted into a little pile of tubes and cloth and fit anywhere. That’s the way to do it.

A month or so ago, my friend Sue started writing all sorts of politicians about the chance to make buses and passenger trains again in the US. That sounds like a good green direction for the money shovel to point. Where I live, we buy buses from the Dutch and train cars from the French. And have to pay in Euros that cost a bunch. We could change that. American cars look like buses anyway so why not do stretch Hummers and Escalades and give them away to any town that promises to add them to their bus fleet. That’s a lot better than buying whacko loans from defunct banks.

But we need something big. Bigger than buses. To keep millions of people in work. I’m thinking of the great business success of our time: Acrylic Nails. There are way more nail shops than factories in the US—more nail shops than just about anything except espresso stops and porta-potties (more about them later). Nails are green—not a big oil burner, a little oil makes a bunch of nails. And you don’t just do it once. They break, they chip, and sometimes you just want new pictures and glitter to jazz them up. But best of all, nail customers are happy as puppies with their fancy personalized weapons.

OK, there is a problem that keeps the nail industry in check. Most men have pretty short ones. We could come out with macho-themed nail pix, like skulls and daggers and other nasty stuff, or we could work on completely different “looking-good” products, that, like nails, take a while to apply and wear off in a week or two, but are for men too.
If we can get more nail action and some new products going, then ten million hard working people will open shops and we will have an entrepreneur burst that will light up our money supply like hotcakes.

Here’s my idea. I have been watching those crazy fans who paint their faces for games. Why not wear face paint all the time. It’s worth a try. Everyone with face paint for their favorite team, getting it redone once a week in private fan shops on every main street and mall in America.

Or what about those fancy beard trims. Barbers used to do it but now beards are do-it-yourself, like fixing toilets and sinks. Can’t we put barbers back on the map? If Bush can tell us to go shopping, then Obama can tell us to paint our faces, do our nails and get a trim.

Everyone can sneak out for an hour or so of nails, trim and facepaint without any trouble That’s 200 million folks paying 20 bucks each. That’s billions a week. Hundreds of billions a year. About the same as they are giving banks. Instead, they should mail out coupons for all the new shops that will open. Coupons for one treatment a week for the next year or so for every red-blooded, looking great (with their facepaint and trim and nails) American over 5 years old. (Let’s not forget the kids.)

That’s lot’s of jobs, lots of small business and not much oil and waste. Wow!

P.S. Oops, I forgot about the porta-potties and espresso shops. I’ll leave that for you to add on to barber shops and nail emporiums or maybe buses. Send you ideas in right away.

It was a disaster.

I knew right away this morning, stumbling toward the kitchen, boiling water, measuring out beans. Going thru the seven steps, or was it six. Finally pouring as the steam rose up from the kettle. Then it hit me. The filter was still on the counter. Jumping back, I knocked over the filterholder and my cup and dropped boiling coffee grounds on my foot. Yep, disaster.

The coffee conundrum: how to make coffee before having coffee.

Sort of like the chicken and the egg. But I always come first, groggy, bleary and trying to carry out those seven coffee-making steps in the right order without any neurons firing. I have the steps written out and nailed on the wall but forget to read them. Nothing works.. But after two sips my daytime starts. After a big cup with its iridescent greenish bubbles floating on the dark brown thick liquid that I love, I can think and read and even do math and all those normal brain things without much trouble. I just need a jump start to get going.

I tried other ways. Exercise. It doesn’t wake up the brain. It makes it happy, but still thoughtless, after a mile or two on the track. I tried smoking but was afraid I’d die, not in fifty years, but now when I nodded off back under covers with it dangling on my lip.

So it’s coffee for me. And face the conundrum daily. And fail once or twice a week.

This got me thinking. Can’t there be another way. Maybe a caffeine patch and a smart alarm clock that slaps it on my forehead five minutes before it goes off? Maybe an automatic injection of caffeine from a syringe hidden in my pillow? Way too tricky. It would miss me and get the dog and he would go even more psycho running around after his tail for an hour or two while I tried for a final few minutes of sleep. I need something simple for my daily brain fix.

Then I remembered those genetic engineers again. They are taking genes from plants and sticking them into rats to make them smell good. They are taking genes from fireflies to make goldfish glow at night. They are taking genes and moving them all around for silly reasons. But do they face the big problems? I want them to take that caffeine gene today and stick it in people. Stick it in me. Maybe wire it to the wakeup system in the bottom of my brain. Then every morning—my eyes open and Bang! The juices flow and they smell like coffee. I am my own coffeepot. No more beans. No more failure. No more disaster. Life is good.

Then I thought why stop there. I remembered my exercise. That happy feeling I got when I ran a lot. Instead of just being awake why not be happy too? We already have the gene for it. You just have to work too hard for it.

Remember those old smart guys in England who had a calculus of happiness. Mr. Bentham said the best plans lead to the most happiness for everyone. And he made a lot of sense. And the Declaration of Independence promises us that we all get to pursue happiness all we want. But why pursue it—just make some exercise happy juice in your brain and be happy.

Yes, we do have the gene for human happy-juice but let’s hook it to something besides exercise. Something easy. A little work would be fine for getting happy but not running all the way across town. Let’s get those scientists to hook up that gene to something like scratching real hard, for instance. Get a runner’s high when you scratch your back for a minute or so. Feel low, scratch your head. Feel blue, scratch anywhere and that gene kicks in and the happy juice squirts out in your brain and joints and you are happy as a snake on a warm road at sunset.

Why stop there? There are even bigger happinesses. Mr. Bentham probably wasn’t thinking of this but how about sex. Not the messy drippy, plug-it-in, every-once-and-a-while sex, but all-the-time, happy sex. Just move the wiring. Move those sex nerves from your privates to someplace else. Leave all the complicated plumbing and baby-growing parts where they are. Just move the wires. It’s like moving the phones or rewiring the house. We need those scientists to get to work on this right now. This is one hot plan, Mr. Bentham. You should have thought of it.

Your nerves creep along from your spine and grow towards their destination. They have some kind of map or they move along little valleys in your body and finally they hit the spot they are aiming for and you can feel stuff. So the problem, Mr. Scientist, is how to give nerves a new map. So they start out just like normal but grow and reach someplace that you can use more often. Not the place where your mother told you not to touch. Then we humans would have true happiness. Or something close, like feeling real good.

Where could those nerves grow so we could be really happy? Maybe someplace where we could do something public, something social so you don’t lock yourself in a room jiggling your nerve ending all day. How about growing sex nerves all the way down to your fingers.

Then you would really enjoy shaking hands. You would go looking for friends to say howdy to and then after a few firm, all-American, tight grip minutes of the old up and down--Blam. The neurons fire and you are one happy dog. Not to mention your friends.

OK, with the nerves moved, making babies would be more like going to work. Not much fun. No pleasure. Just follow those seven steps in the instruction manual and then—Bingo--conception.

But that’s OK. One of the big problems was that it used to be too much fun making babies. Now you have to go buy the book because you are no longer hard-wired to do it. Most people would be going around giving the howdy-do so often they wouldn’t have time for making babies. Just when they really wanted one.

The church would like it. Sex without fun and fun with proper handshakes. And to top it all off, when all those churchgoers shake hands before the sermon on Sunday, going to church would be fun too.

Finally, thanks to Conrado LaRiviere, a man with lots of pretty good ideas, and the conversation with him last Tuesday that led me here.

Dead Pharaohs

Every once and a while you find out one little thing and it sets off a cogitating avalanche. The old brain sizzles a couple minutes and all the old ideas about how things ought to happen get fried into a mushy omelet that won’t hold together anymore. It’s a brain blowout.

That happened when I was a little kid and heard what you put where to make babies at recess. Then again when I was in the army and figured out why I was sitting locked up in a tiny trailer listening on a big radio to some other army headquarters talking Russian about their latest girlfriends: so we could drop big, fat A-bombs on them and break up their little patty-cake parties.

It happened again the other day. I was hearing about old Egypt before pharaohs married their sisters and got fancy with tall, pointy pyramids. Back then, really far back B.C., everyone dead just got covered up with a couple feet of dry, hot sand. Then, if someone happened to dig them up after a hundred years or so, they looked fine, just a little wrinkled. Sand dried out those naked hot bodies like three-year-old prunes and the dead folks looked like they might just sit up and talk about the weather or what they had for dinner last night.

But you know how rich guys are never satisfied, even back then. The pharaohs started buying fancy wooden boxes covered with gold paint and cat pictures on the sides. Then when they died, they got packed in their boxes, like a fat old sardine with their wives and servants and then locked up in a old damp cellar way down under their fancy new pyramid. Down where it’s so damp even the bugs get wet feet. So what happens there? After a month or two the dead turn into a nasty box of Pharaoh mush. As smelly and smushy as road-kill rabbits rotting on the road side.

To save the day, Egyptian hot-shot scientists came in and looked up how to make pickles and Egyptian sauerkraut and tried it out on their pharaoh.

That was the little thing I learned. Mummies are just a nostalgia craze. Wanting your body to rise up after you’re dead is just an accident of geography. All history is just a bad experiment in pickling and packing the dead to save them for a rainy day in dead-guys-walking heaven. This risen dead body thing would never have happened if Egypt were down in some jungle and all our followup Western Civ religion ideas dealt with a wet and soggy afterlife.

Anyway, how come you want an old, used dead body to come back to? I’d rather return as a hot looking 55 Chevy or a T-bird spouting flames in the wheelwells and cruise a million, million miles on an empty road-race hi-way running all over heaven.

And even if I got this body back I’m not sure which parts I'd want in it. My muscles peaked about when I was 30, but the brain was not in great shape for a long time after that. And what about those parts the doctor cut out. They can stay out. They are preserved in a jar down in the basement and that’s fine with me.

Looking Good

Those genetic engineers are really working hard, fighting disease, killing insects and making money. But do they deal with what people worry about most? Not much, I say. I am talking about Looking Good.

Why do I say Looking Good is the number one concern? Three arguments:

1. The only real growth industry in America is a “Looking Good” business. Can you go a block in any city without seeing the “Nails and Waxing” sign? If a Starbucks or a Microsoft of Manicures had started up 20 years back, another Bill Gates would be giving away all his money because he had way too much.
2. We put up with the whinyest, do-nothing-good stars just because they have nice hair, a nice shape, no hair in the wrong place and nice nails.
3. We not only put up with, but watch, as bouncy young things flaunt their Looking Good in ads for everything from bandaids to botulism.

Case closed. Looking Good is number one.

Why don’t our genetic engineers tackle this problem? Lots of money is just around the corner. Is it really a hard problem to make people look good? Here’s a little help to get you engineers started.

First, think about why people don’t look good. Looking Good doesn’t start with the parts, the nails, the lips and the legs; it starts with smooth lines. Think about racing cars and jet airplanes. They look good.

People are not designed that way. Planes hold their shape with stiff, smartly-designed skins. Skin for us humans is just a bag to hold a bunch of soggy, mushy parts. Worse yet, the parts are stuck to stick-figure bones that poke out in pointy elbows and knees. How can this design ever look good without serious food deprivation, muscle management, or even surgery?

What about using fat to smooth it all out into nice aerodynamic lines? It works for whales. No way for us humans. Our fat bunches up in strange places—It turns to low-slung, bulges on our bellies and hips.

Worst of all, skin sags with time. Thank God for clothes.

Are we alone in the animal world with this problem? Think about sleek jaguars, tigers and fast looking pussy cats. They have smooooth lines. They are Looking Good!

But just dunk one in a bucket of water (if you are brave). They look just as bumpy and baggy as us humans do. But they have FUR to cover them up.

Yes, you engineers out there--Fur smoothes out boney, bulgy, bumpy lines and makes those cats sleek. We humans could be sleek too. So just get to work and give us Fur.

That’s not all. Think of the savings on clothes. Who needs clothes when you have a deep, dark sable back and a mink-underbelly. Or a fuzzy sheep-wool chest and alpaca legs. You’re warm too. Way too many advantages to pass up.

O.K., Some of you might miss skin, but how much of it shows anyway. Even when we are naked, the lights are usually out. But with Fur lots of new Looking Good possibilities are available: stripes, spots, pintos, braids, bangs, and real pony-tails. A whole new growth industry in brushes and dyes is waiting for those Nail shops on every corner.

And best of all, everyone looks good.

Little Green Men (and Women)

I have been thinking about genetic engineering. A lot of those engineers just work on one problem—All our foods are weeds. At least to their weed-killer sprays. So the engineers are taking the weediness out of our beans and corn and other veggies. That sounds like a good idea. Don’t kill our food along with the dandylions and crabgrass.

Some people call these engineered plants-- Frank’n beans. Named after an early scientist who also rearranged parts of one species. We should remember that this guy Frankenstein was a big success in his science; he just failed in human resource management. He hired poor help. It was the help who stuffed in the bad parts (stolen from the criminally insane).

I hear the engineers today are pretty successful with their weed work. But I have news for them. They are working on the wrong side of the problem: working on supply and we need to work on demand. You can only grow so much and then that’s it. But you can always shrink demand. That’s a green solution.

Some people tell me that there are too many people and we need to cut some out. But that leads to the “who gets to stay” question and then wars and concentration camps and other bad things. So forget the whole idea of cutting out anyone! Everyone gets to stay and make all the babies they want.

The solution to really shrink demand is to let the engineers make people smaller.

What is with bigness anyway? I bumped my head again this morning; I don’t fit in airplanes; and I have to shop in expensive big and tall stores (I am both). Bigger is not better. Remember that.

I have watched my wife many years now. She is only 10 percent shorter. But she eats about half of what I do. If we made everybody ten percent shorter every generation, then we halve the demand every 30 years. Voilà.

There are other good side effects. Like taking up less space. Every car is a limo. Every airplane seat is first-class. Every Macdonald burger really is a meal. And your little house is really your castle, or maybe, with a few modifications, an apartment block.

And you are always bigger than your kids. Every parent knows that this is a good idea. They get bigger than you when they are teenagers and this leads to all kinds of problems. Enough said there.

There are some things to work out. Like pets. We could just only have Chihuahuas, but they are nasty, little creatures. We need a new, foot-long dog, maybe an irish setter or a golden retriever. And those genetic engineers could make them vegetarians while they are at it.

The only question is: how small can you make people until they start getting stupid? We know that amoebas are dumb, but little cats are pretty smart. And I know lots of really smart short people so I am not worried for four or five generations.

The big problem is PR. We need to change the image of the small. The new message is: they are cuddly, they don’t cost much, and they are really green.