The Green Age
Friday, April 28, 2006
This is the first spring of being in my new house. I am continually amazed that the leafy things I placed in the ground last fall are actually coming back out of the ground for another year.
However, some of the plants have, for one reason or another, decided to commit plant suicide. The warning signs were there but I ignored them. I tried everything to make them happy but I failed. Just because I buried them in clay does not mean I didn't love them all the same.
Plants do not have arms or hands so I know they didn't cut their wrists or anything. I made sure to avoid scattering razor blades around the mulch bed just in case though. I imagine their preferred method was to intentionally close all of the tiny little mouths on their roots and refused to absorb any of the water that I had so graciously given to them.
Now I am charged with the task of removing the dead plants and hiding them so the other plants do not get any bright ideas and try to take the cowards way out of their lifetime of servitude in building my equity. But where do you get rid of the plants? I would have burned them but the communist neighborhood association will not allow bonfires unless I am having people over to burn books.
The only solution I could come up with was to bury the offending plants. I dug a hole in the back yard and threw all of the dead plants inside.
I have seen enough movies to know that hiding your problems in the ground will not get rid of them forever. Plants thrive on the great mystery that is the underground. While we all sleep the seemingly dead plants slowly but deliberately graft to one another. When the dead plants have gathered sufficient energy they reawaken and return to the world as the undead.
Every night the zombie plant slowly sneaks out of its earthen grave in search of the blood of the living. The zombie plant sluffs up to the living plants and uses its fangs to steal the healthy life force from a victim. The victim then becomes a zombie plant.
Meanwhile the zombie plants are buying futures in oil in order to raise the price of gasoline. The media frenzy over gas prices is a cover created by the tree-run media so that their sinister plot can go on unnoticed.
Contrary to living plants, zombie plants silently take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. They are deliberately building up greenhouse gases in temperate regions in order to force humans into colder biomes.
How does spending the rest of your life in an igloo sound? Have you ever tried whale blubber? Are you going to allow plants to take your home, look through your photo albums, and leave the toilet seat up?
What can you do to stop the plants from ruling the world? Cut down a tree; two or three. Throw your cigarettes into dry piles of leaves. Dump gasoline in the sewer drain. Refuse to switch to daylight saving time. Leave your cell phone charging all of the time. Accidentally leave your curling iron on.
These tips may slow down the process while the scientists find a way to mutate the common cold so that plants can catch it. When Arborian Tree Flu is invented we will be safe once again.
posted by Ghengis @ 12:00 AM,
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"Indiana: Hay Rides!"
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Everything with Daylight Saving Time has panned out here in the flatlands. All of the confused locals attended seminars where they were given detailed instructions on how to make their clocks "spring" forward for the summer and how the process did not actually involve the use of a spring as it was only a play on words.
I know I sound like a child who has just learned how to fit a triangular block into a triangular hole, but I really like DST. I would even venture to say that I heart daylight savings and would like to hunt down the leader of every special interest group that has been preventing the change for so many decades. I know a lot of people hate DST, but I have been in the voided land of no clock changes and would never go back. People have written deep seeded hatred novels about getting DST repealed. What a waste of time. Be careful because these writers are probably pandering to their vampire lords who feast on earlier sunsets.
Step one: Move.
Well there is more exciting news. In addition to getting a new time scheme, my state is also getting a new slogan to attract tourists. The slogan is:
RESTART YOUR ENGINES!
At first glance one may think that this means that as soon as you cross the Indiana border that your engine will suddenly cease to run and you will have to walk to the nearest border town household (read: shanty) to ask them to make it work. When he tells you it will take a week to fix it you can spend your time wandering around the one stoplight town while you stay at the Motel 6 and touch all of the trinkets on the dirty shelves at the thrift shop where failed retail products go to die.
That is not the goal of the slogan at all. The politicians want to remind the entire world that we race cars in one city a few times a year and that we like to think about cars so much that we now pass out a NASCAR driver to each newborn baby. The doctor sticks a stock car sticker number on your birth certificate and that is your driver for life. I think the slogan also implies something about dirt roads, lots of beer drinking, fat people, and hay rides in the the fall, but I can't directly correlate the engine slogan to those.
I thought that "Recharge your Engines" would have made a better slogan. "Come here and relax because we have beautiful state parks," they'd say. Of course this idea would be thrown out right away since you can't really charge an engine...
...unless it's electric.
People would come from all over the world to witness the great battery chargers where they could refill their electric motors indefinitely. They would come for the recharge but stay for the exciting Electric Hybrid race where there are thousands of RV's parked on the dirt lots and lots of fat people drink beer and go on hay rides.
It is a really stupid slogan but if it means more hay rides and beer then I am all for it.
posted by Ghengis @ 10:23 PM,
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Y2K6
Sunday, April 09, 2006
I have been meaning to get to this but have not had the time. Everything happens one hour later now and I can't keep anything straight. For the first time in my entire life I had to change my clocks for this thing called Daylight Saving Time. You may have heard of it.
I woke up last Sunday just like every Sunday; with a headache at 11:30AM searching for a cup of water and looking through my cell phone log for mistakes. Everything was entirely normal. There was a lot of noise outside, however. The sun was on so it looked like it was probably a nice day. I went outside to see what all of the racket was about.
Well I moved into a cul-de-sac to avoid traffic and crazy people just passing through. The scene outside was chaos. Kids were running around screaming. That wasn't too unusual, but to see their parents in a similar state was alarming. My neighbor's hot wife was curled up on the lawn crying. She was holding a clock tight to her chest and rocking back and forth. Her daughter was screaming with tears running down her cheeks trying to gain her mother's attention sobbing, "Mommy! Daddy is scaring us!"
My neighbor was stumbling around bewildered. When he caught site of me he scuttled over. His glasses were cracked. I was a bit taken a back by the foam coming out of his mouth. "Dan!" he called. "What is the time? What is the time man!"
"Neighbor! There is foam coming out of your mouth. What is the problem?"
"One no... two... eleven thirty, eight tenths.. BAKING SODA MAN! We have to eat the baking soda or they will find us. Unless we had a way to decipher the time. Do you have the time?"
I turned to go back inside after assuring him that I would let him know. A noise spun my attention back to the yard. My other neighbor had pounced on neighbor number one. He had him pinned to the ground while his wife was tearing his left shoe off with her teeth. They both had foam in their mouths. When she removed his shoe the couple turned their attention towards me. "No, honey, he isn't wearing any shoes." They both tore across the yard stringing along a varied trail of left shoes tied together by the laces. They were obviously searching for more shoes.
I peered around the garage to see if I could help their next victim. Instead I witnessed them vaporized by a red light. It seemed that stoplight pole had uprooted itself and was walking around the neighborhood as if it was an old man looking for the house he grew up in so he could show his wife. The stainless steel beast stood about 20 feet high and the 3-colored light swiveled back and forth searching for victims. The green shone to search out people, the yellow light flashed a warning, and the red light loosed a beam of death upon any victims.
I turned to run back indoors but was quickly bathed in a soothing green light. It had a calming effect and soon a yellow strobe made everything slow down. I felt awake but in another world. Then I heard a loud noise. It getting louder and louder. I broke from the spell of the stoplight to witness a 777 jet crash on my street. The stoplight was smashed to pieces. A curved yellow plastic covered skittered to a halt at my feet.
When the jet stopped sliding the neighborhood was silent again. I took in a deep breath through my nose, stretched, and looked around at the damage. I was going back to bed. Besides it was only really 10:30AM. Once Indiana gets used to this DST thing most of the kinks will work themselves out.
PS - Chris' tooth jar did not have a tooth in it.
posted by Ghengis @ 11:41 PM,
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