And the winner is ...

Sometimes an idea is so wonderful, solves so many problems, and is so right for the times, it just cannot be stopped: ideas like easy mortgages for the poor, the Snuggie and gun-carrying clubs at the mall. Great Ideas that make America greater!

The Poopster for America Prize (the contest searching for a new eco-sound, toilet-replacement) just received one entry so powerful that we stopped the contest! It was a game changer, a show stopper and the mother of all inventions, rolled into one. Just as we predicted when we set up the contest--your days are over Mr. Crapper and your tired old invention has had it, too.

Today, the Poopster Institute proudly announces the winner in its new millennium toilet replacement contest: NetPoop--the idea that flushes away all those tired ideas of street sewer plumbing, constant street dig-ups and repairs and local, inefficient sewage plants. Mr. Crapper was right for the 1860’s; NetPoop is right for today!

Just like you do for your dog, do for yourself. Get a baggie and pick it up. That’s the NetPoop way. Then the baggies are mailed to NetPoop Central where the methane that we collect will light our American torch once again.

NetPoop won because it not only makes our trillion dollar sanitary sewer network obsolete and unnecessary, but also chips away at two other troubling issues that we face in today’s complex, interconnected world :

• Problem 1: The end of the Post Office will come when NetFlix stops shipping DVDs and delivers all its movies online. Ten percent of the US mail will disappear. Mr. and Ms. Mailman and about 3 percent of the US workforce will start looking for Macjobs if we don’t replace a ton of crappy movies with something else. Net Poop solves that problem. Now the mailman has a pickup at every house everyday (if you are healthy) and he does not have to worry about losing his job to email or iPads.

• Problem 2: Contamination of our precious dumps with dog droppings is threatening out water supply and filling our landfills with evil bacteria. Who would have thought that humans would become a dog do-do service NetPoop works for dogs too. Now humans will be on an even par with their pets: baggies for all, two legs or four.

So you are wondering why it’s NetPoop, and not MailPoop. Because you get to check your account online and see how you are doing in the save-America-one-bag-at-a-time campaign. You log in and order your individually barcoded baggies (Don’t just take the ones in the park dispenser). Then you can check your creditpile as often as you want.

Now that we have a path thru this messy issue, we at The Institute are starting a new contest cycle. Send us your worrying issues and we will pick one for the next contest. Don’t fret about a solution, just sent us the problem. Our contest will get those all-American minds humming away, working on something besides loopy politics for a while.

A Big One for Mankind

I am a pessimist. That’s all right with me.

Optimists are wacko dreamers. I’m not. They plan for nirvana, a stateless workers’ paradise, heaven, lots of virgins, and global free markets. Everyone has their own idea of what it’s going to be like before long. I have news for them. This is it. Get used to getting up on the wrong side of the bed. News will be terrible and you’ll feel rotten and have to go do some dumb job for way too many hours. That’s it. Be happy, it could be worse.

OK, it’s not that way every day. But there are enough rotten days so you lose count.

I am a steady-state pessimist. I don’t think its going to get much worse either. Some pessimists see doom and fire and bad tattoo sores doing us in. But we get used to this life the way it is. People are about the same as they were way, way back when they climbed in trees and mostly ate bananas. We have mothers who hug us and brothers who beat on us. We grow up bad, but not that bad. Not bad enough for hell. Not good enough for heaven either. That’s for sure.

So why don’t I think things will get better? I look at what us most highly evolved Americans really think and do. We are not getting more peaceful. Almost half of us have guns in our house. Thirty thousand people a year get fatally shot, suicide included (that’s more than half the total). We make about five million guns a year. We make about four million babies in the same time. That’s one gun per baby with enough left over for every immigrant to have an automatic, even if they send a couple guns back home. How can it get better with odds like this?

But will it get much worse? Here is the good news: every year, for every killer with a gun there are 25 thousand non-killers. That’s a lot. That’s like one guy in a good-sized, sold-out baseball stadium shooting the person next to him every July 4th. All the other days of the year everybody just sits there and holds tight to their guns yelling and shouting and even winging a couple folks, but they don’t kill anyone. Only on July 4. That’s not too bad. Not great, but think how easy it is to shoot a gun. I used to do it. Pull the trigger. Bang. Some guy is dead. Western Civ really did well on this design--bullets work good! (Look at the shooting suicide success rate—92%--that was an A in my high school).

You want to hear about bad. What if every guy with a gun in the house just shot two people—not even a minutes work—then—zap—that’s it. We’re all gone. Even the babies. That’s bad. Real bad.

Optimists argue that things are different now in the post modern world. We have cheeseburgers, ipods and SUVs for everyone. Our monkey-ancestors living in the trees never had anything like that. Even those knights who bashed in heads and chopped off arms never got much past one-horsepower engines and battering rams. Now factories in China churn out enough stuff for everybody to have all new duds every July 4th and throw out their old clothes, shoes, refrigerators and, even, friends once a year. We live in a world of stuff and it’s almost free compared to a couple hundred years back when most people wore rags, ate potato skins and drank gin and opium. The optimists ask me, how can you say it’s the same when what people fought about is stuff. I want yours and you want mine kind of fights.

It’s true that we do have way too much stuff being built, but remember, we still fight over it. But now, guns make fights much messier. And A-bombs clean things out good but are very bad for us people. I watch the news and see the bodies lying around. Even the crowds at Wal-Mart Presidents’ Day sales give a punch or two. No one really has enough stuff. Who doesn’t want another hot cell phone or fancy droopy pants? Or maybe a big shiny gun to put in their new car next to their six-foot-wide speakers and wheel-lifting music amplifier machine. Even poor people want stuff--like food and maybe a doctor visit. So don’t give me the China argument that we reached our stuff capacity. We can pile it up a hundred feet high and still fight over new hi-tops and skull painted tee shirts. We are like those monkeys who had free bananas but still fought wars over their banana piles. We just exchanged bananas for hi-fashion poofy dogs and big-print hoodies.

And wars. Don’t forget those. Things get really bad when you give out a hunting license to bag a couple of your neighbors.

You optimists think things change when you got new ideas and religion. Praise the lord and pass the ammunition. God plays cheerleader too often for me to have much hope for him. And Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Bush twist ideas like wrestlers giving the famous pretzel death hold. Ideas don’t change people. Ideas just give us something besides stuff to fight for.

Is all hope really lost then? I hear there is one last chance that things may change. My friend, who helped invent computers, tells me that we are on the verge of something new. Those genetic engineers are messing with our brain cells, making us better. Things may be different but I am worried because this friend used to tell me about how computers would solve everything. Now I put up with spammy email, work all night from home after all day at the office, watch out for four jillion useless blogs, and run when house refinancing ads pop up in my online dictionary. My friend says gene therapy will fix us up, even if computers didn’t. Engineers are working right now on impulse control circuits in the cerebellum to slow them down with some hot-shot enzymes. It might work.

I am scared. I like my impulses.

In the morning impulses get me up, not my alarm clock. Impulses make me eat chocolate and crab legs. Impulses make me do all sorts of stuff. Put on the impulse brakes and who knows where that leads. We may just sit there and smile. Why shoot anyone if you don’t get an urge is what the scientists say, but I say why do anything at all. Hurray for urges. At least for mine.

And who’s to say they won’t just replace my old fashion impulses with ones like they show on TV, telling us to eat more cheeseburgers and wear more droopy clothes. Impulse control is way too big for big corporations to pass up.

So I say leave my impulses alone. I am making a list of everything I had an urge to do last year, before those engineers got working on my enzymes. I will be sticking to my old urge list, keeping my true, original impulses, no matter what those engineers do with my cerebellum. To make sure, I am writing my Impulse Popper© computer program that jumps up on my screen (like those Viagra ads do now) and tells me to do something right now that I had an urge to do last year. Not weird new corporate-driven impulses. Real Chuck Kerns impulses that I know are my own. That’s how I fight back.

Now the real news. I am going to sell my Impulse Popper © program to Google and save us all from all those false-implanted cheeseburger, Jack LaLane Juicer and hair restorer urges that we know will get implanted in our enzymes soon. With my Impulse Popper © you can stay pure and live according to your true self. Your cerebellum may change but your impulse list won’t. You can pass it on like an heirloom to your kiddies and human nature will always be the same.

Well that’s not quite true. Don’t tell anyone but if you do have an urge to shoot someone on your impulse list, Google is going to erase that item. Their lawyers advised them about this. So maybe some things will change after all.

Green Thoughts

I cut down on stuff coming into my house. I save electricity—curly lights in every room. I save water—the lawn dies happily each summer. I buy less—don’t have the money anyway these days.

And I pay attention to what goes out. I recycle—I sort stuff into big green and blue bins and instruct my wife (with moderate effect) on the intricacies of plastic reuse classifications. I compost—my banana peels and coffee grounds will soon be born-again dirt. I dutifully trek back to Safeway with my plastic bag offerings (suspecting that they just chuck them in the dumpster when no one is looking).

I am one green guy.

But I have been thinking about something we send out everyday and spend God knows how much money, time, effort and energy in transporting to a big industrial-style, centralized processing plant. You know, the family sewage.

In this time of decentralization, how come we have a big, superhighway of poop under every street? Right next to the fresh water pipes and cable TV.

I know that in the good old days everyone just dumped their poop out the window and men just took a walk in the newly invented garden behind every upscale urban house. Sewers were a big (but little considered) advance for civilization. With sewers, poop flowed downstream and the rich moved up on the hills. Then when the scientists learned how to cook it and clean it up in their processors for dumping in the rivers—Wow! Cities didn’t smell the same. Except for the horses and then later for the cars.

I left out the part about cholera and dysentery, (formerly known as the bloody flux, thanks Wikipedia) going away. With these guys flushed from polite society, stomach growling and cramps were a thing of the past. Hurray for Sewers!

But now in post-industrial America, when we have closed down shoe factories, plants for making steel and iron and even lots of our airplanes get built in France, do we need the biggest factory in town to turn out processed poop, just to remind us that the US was once the industrial giant of the world. I suspect no.

It's just no one has had the foresight to see what is hidden. Sort of like before vacuum cleaners, or food processors, or even back when the best place to sit and read was just over a big hole in the floor. This was before Mr. Crapper (now of great fame--his name made immortal thru daily use) did his great work and invented the toilet with its water valve that lets poop go out, but keeps smells from coming in.

Now is time to move beyond centralized, industrial-sized solutions. We have cell phones, not central switchboards; we have laptops, not IBM 360’s; we have ipods, not radio stations; we have skateboards, not steam trains. Life in the US is small and spread out, like the suburbs, and poop needs to keep up.

We need a new way to deal with it. No pipes coming out of the house. Just pull the handle and BAM: everything gets processed, clean water flows out to the tomatoes and a pile of clean, sweet-smelling, org-dirt comes out ready for the garden.

We have a prize to send someone up to outer space. That encourages rocket development. I say lets develop the poopster. Offer a new prize, a million bucks, to you, Mr. or Ms. hot-shot inventor, to think about poop for a few minutes and design us a poopster. that's what I call the invention now, but remember, it will be named after you when you succeed.

Mr. Crapper’s big days are over. When you win, you will be remembered once or twice a day by everyone on earth (if we have good marketing).