You're awesome!

All right. Recently, I made a big mistake. Someone on a music forum posted a question that asked, "My music is really good and I'm a super talented musician. I can't get motivated to make music because I feel the music industry is evil."



Admiral Ackbar told me it was a trap, but sometimes you have to fire up the Falcon and zoom in. I listened to the guy's music and it was just as I feared: Horrible. Not horrible in the way that the guy couldn't play or hold a tune, horrible in the Huey Lewis and the News kind of bad, but not even that good... actually quite a bit less good. A lot lamer than Huey Lewis. That's bad.

My response was "The world is glutted with people like Aimee Mann doing exactly what you're doing but having a hard time selling albums. If commercial gain has to be a motivation for you you might want to consider dropping music. If you can do it for the love of doing it then maybe you'll find success and if not at least you'll have artistic fulfillment."

Of course I got attacked. I was obviously a "wet blanket" and pissing all over this guy's dream. Actually the response was about 50/50 with those yelling at me and those commending me. It did get me to thinking:

How the hell did this piece of crap get the idea that he was awesome?

It's a pandemic. Hoards of idiots with no self awareness line up to audition for American Idol. People walk around thinking they're special for no reason at all. It's like some zombie movie. NIGHT OF THE LIVING ENTITLED. "Put me on TV! I'm AWESOME!"

Where the hell did this all get started? One could blame Paris Hilton, someone famous for nothing, but I fear that she's a symptom of a bigger problem like a sore on your genitals. There's a deeper issue at hand.

When I was in high school, I started to see it happening. Teachers like Anita Dowd were openly telling students that they're horrible work was amazing. I was stunned that it seemed like no one could do any wrong. I got up and left a senior level English class after being handed a ditto (yeah, I'm that old) about the difference between "good" and "well." I got up, handed the teacher the ditto back and said, "If you're a senior in high school and you do not know the difference between good and well you should kill yourself." A few months later I dropped out of high school. (that teacher never sent a single cut slip down for me) I'm really glad I did. It got worse. My mom, a public school teacher has been reprimanded for raising her voice to students who would not quiet down in class. Now everyone gets a participation trophy. We're all special little snowflakes! Unique and beautiful in the world!

... and this is why the idiot in front of me at the grocery store is taking 15 minutes to decide what kind of cigarettes she should get, because she is super awesome and everyone should just wait in quiet reverence. She knows she's awesome because her mom told her so (probably to make up for the fact that her dad cut out on them before she was born) and her teachers continued to tell her that. She's also angry because employers can't see the blinding light of awesome she is. She will go home and tell her friends how she should be on American Idol and they'd all agree that they'd all win if they could figure out when the auditions were.

So here we are in America having our butts handed to us by countries like Korea and India who actually have standards. HERE YE HERE YE! When I am KING this shit's gonna CHANGE. School won't be mandatory, but if you attend you'll find yourself out on your ass if you're not school material. Until robot technology is up to par we could use to to pick crops and all the other jobs that we currently use imported slave labor to do. Think you're too good for menial labor? Think again. The king's got floors to clean so my message to people who do not know the difference between "good" and "well" is that those floors have your name on it so get ready to mop. Don't like the mop? Start hitting the books.

Oh yeah, and if I ever come across someone performing with less talent than Huey Lewis I shall force them to perform the entire Huey Lewis and the News catalog with kazoos.. out of their asses. On live national TV! Now that'll be an awesome show...

Look at my circumstance.. and the bulge in my big, big big...

When I am king I shall dismantle all the Walmarts, Costcos and the like. Why? They're too big. As far as I can see they just encourage you to buy way more than you need. I'll always remember the glazed over look of joy on the Queen to be's face when she walked toward me with a pallet of strawberries big enough to feed a small battalion. She swore we'd use them all... mumbled something about smoothies and started to swoon. It was too much for her. I had to rip the pallet of strawberries out of her trembling hands and put it down. I lovingly stroked her sweaty brow as she shivered "Mark... is that you? I'm... so cold""- the loss of potential smoothies was devastating.

I admit it! I wanted them too! I don't even like strawberries that much!

The truth is there was no way we could get though even 2 of them before they became a pile of mold. I'm not even sure we could have fit them in our fridge. Yet she wanted them so bad. They were such a good price. Same thing could be said about all the items at the Costco. Toilet paper, razors... TVs... All so big... and cheap...

BUT AT WHAT PRICE TO OUR SOULS?!

Well first we'd have to get a bigger fridge to store the strawberries. I place with bigger closets to house the toilet paper bargains and of course, we'd need nothing smaller than a Lincoln Navigator to get it all home. Better have some more kids to help use up all those bargains. They won't cost much to feed at those prices!

I've heard that buying in bulk is environmental as you spend less money in gas making small trips, but as far as I can tell it's at least 3 miles from the end of the parking lot to the store entrance of an average Costco. With the gas mileage of your SUV that's going to cost you. Let's not even talk about the average length of the check out line. I'm sure one could be seen from space if it weren't for the roof.

What I'm proposing (woops, I mean decreeing!) is that we have many smaller shops. Maybe a few in each neighborhood. You could go there more often for smaller loads of just what you need. This may seem a waste of time, but guess what? You could walk there! You could cancel your gym membership because your workout would be to actually mimic what we're designed to do: Hunt and gather. You'll save money not having to pay that Bally's membership! Then something else will happen. You'll meet up with other people in your neighborhood and you'll start to become a community. Look at me! Bringing the people of my kingdom together! It's getting so god damn touchy feely I think I'm going to cry.

Slumdog divorce.

(Warning: may contain minor spoilers)

So, this morning I was listening to even more buzz about the runaway hit "Slumdog Millionaire." Yes it is a good film.  I get it. I totally enjoyed it and even appreciated the poop scene. It reminded me of the time my foot slipped into our toilet when I was using it to get a boost to get something I couldn't reach from our medicine cabinet... except a billion times worse. Any tale of orphaned kids is bound to squeeze a tear out of me and Slumdog does not disappoint. Maybe it's because I was replaced for the role of Oliver because my 4th grade play director thought, "I was a little too well fed to make a believable orphan." Fuck you Mrs. Satkowski, do you think the audience believed my performance as a keystone cop?

But what bothered me about Slumdog Millionaire wasn't the rags to riches story. It was the story of how true love will prevail though almost anything... true love that starts when you're five years old!

When I was 5 I thought it would be a good idea if I'd marry a girl named Jill. She gave me a puppy! I guess that's why they call it puppy love.  We were going to become veterinarians together. We'd ride to work on the horse her dad got her. To make extra cash to buy robot friends/servants I'd captain the Starship Enterprise on the weekend.

Good thing she could not have cared less about me! Don't worry, I got over it.  Plus, there's no way I was going to tear myself off the Enterprise to prescribe laxatives to kittens! Who was I kidding? Alas, it wasn't love but only unrequited infatuation.  Imagine for a second if when you were 19 someone from your kindergarten (or orphanage) came up to you and declared their undying love for you.  Creepy, eh?

This is what leads me to my decree of the day: There will be a sequel to Slumdog Millionaire called Slumdog Divorce. It will show how much they had both changed over the years and how little they were like the 5 year old orphans they once were. It'll have scenes where he realizes he hates the TV shows she loves and how she can't stand how he chews with his mouth open and they both hate each other's friends. He enjoys being the recipient of scat based love, while she's in to the rough trade. Their relationship does not work. However, there will be a happy ending in this movie.  We'll have it flash forward a few years to show him graduating college and finding a woman who he loves and has a lot in common with.  They'll wait a few years to have children because they want to enjoy each other for a while and get careers going before becoming parents.  The girl?  She realizes she's a lesbian and her and her life partner open up a mobile dog grooming business in Beverly Hills.  There will be a cameo with Paris Hilton's dog.

While it may not end up being box office gold like the original, it doesn't matter.  Sequels always suck anyway.  I'm the king!  I DECREE IT!

TEA TAX MY BUTT

I know I've been making a lot of decrees (or precrees?) and some of you are asking, "How will you pay for all of it King Mark?" With taxes, of course! LOTS OF THEM! Today Obama said he was going to stand by his promise on tax rebates on all Americans. Screw that. Under my rule you'll pay, pay a lot and like it. Why? Because unlike Democracy and all it's silly little bickering, the money you'll pay to me will get you some good crap. Universal health care, day care for kids, great schools, THE WORKS! Nothing is too good for my kingdom!

Yeah, you're probably thinking I'm just going to spend it on fancy bejeweled pants and a working C-3P0... and you'd be right. But just maybe... I won't have to collect a lot in taxes at all! What if I cut some crap that's doing nothing? First let's start with where I can trim some fat.

1) End the War On Drugs. What the hell is this about? Has anything changed since this war started? Instead of a war, I'll do actual police enforcement of crime's that have victims. Sit in your house doing meth until your teeth fall out? Have at it, just don't take Mrs. Magilacutty's purse to fund it. With meth legal it'll probably be cheap enough to do enough to kill yourself before you can make it over to her place anyway. The artificially high cost is just making it harder for people to kill themselves. Pot? Please. Unless someone can convince me that it's a crime to eat an entire box of Ho-hos, I don't want to hear it. All drugs will be legal to people over the age of 18, and for the more dangerous ones like PCP, they'll be special theme parks you can do it in. Pay no mind to what they're carting out in those trucks heading for the Soylent Green factories. With all the money we save on not fighting this fake war and the tax revenue from the sale of legal drugs I shall pave the roads with SOLID GOLD. Fuck that. Gold mining really fucks up the world and people. I'll PAVE THE ROADS. That's it. Imagine driving on a nicely paved Rt 880?

War On Terror. Over. My bombers will fly over all the Arab countries and drop billions of recycled Playboy magazines. You know you have a create of them somewhere that you're not using since the internet was invented. Give 'm up! They're angry at us because they're jealous of our porn! To those porn drops I'll add packets of water soluble lube, condoms, pot and rice crispy treats. Trust me, those terrorists will be as docile as Scandinavians when I'm done with them. All without a single drop of blood spilled.

Mandatory schools: OVER. Go if you want. I'll still have a free public school system but it will focus on people who want to be there, and by that I mean parents who want their kids to be educated. Since the others are going to end up in the Great Flags Meth Park why waste time and money educating them? With the money I save I will give every child a Nintendo DS! Only if they keep their grades above a C though. Our kids will come out so smart that India and Korea will be shocked. The technology they build will finally make our dreams of flying cars a reality.

So those will be my major spending cuts. I hope they'll be enough so we don't have to raise taxes too high... oh right, since taxes are a percentage of income then if you make a lot then you're rich already! WIN! If one company here give me some lip about not being able to provide health insurance or decent wages to it's employees as it's execs are flying around in private jets I'll take said execs and spank them publicly. Pants down on their driveway in front of all the neighbors. Because that is how it happened to me. I'm not even sure why I pulled that family's hedges out.

We'll make great pets!

This weekend the Queen and I decided to take a departure from our usual morning ritual of listening to music while we eat our toast and coffee, and instead decided to watch cartoons! The first thing we landed on was Curious George. I was interested, yet also disturbed by the show. I'm not even talking about George's owner's bizarro canary yellow outfit. What the fuck's up with that hat? Is he some weird pilgrim or missionary? Is his role to bring Christianity to monkeys?

Aside from the weird outfit, the most troubling about the show was that Curious George seemed to be a really weird blend of animal and human child. He wasn't able to speak, but he was able to understand how to go to a pet shop and pick up food for some pet mice. Why didn't he pick up his own food while he was there, and if he could, why would he need the dorky guy in the yellow hat? Retail takes a fair amount of cognitiont for a monkey, but I'm going to suspend disbelief because as far as I can tell it doesn't break it's own logic. However, where it all breaks down is where he's now in charge of other pets as if he's not a pet himself. I know different animals have different levels of intelligence but in this case the pets were more or less just some realistic mice and a snake. With the Mickey and Pluto deal at least Pluto isn't a basic dog. Pluto is more like a slow child to Mickey and Minny. Pluto... we just don't know.

Why is this important? Well ol' George behaved like a little kid when he wanted to, but when it was cool to be a monkey he'd have that to. It's just not fair. Can you imagine if you had the abilities of a monkey with human intelligence? GET YOUR STINKING PAWS OFF OF ME, YOU DAMN DIRTY APE! But here the message to children was clear: If your neighbor's pet snake and mice escape and go traipsing around the ledge of your apartment building, by all means go get it because monkeys and children are basically the same. If this doesn't cause death or a near miss, at the very best it's going to cause grave disappointment when the child actually meets a real monkey and instead of fun filled hijinks's it masturbates in front of them and then throws it's own poop. Next thing you know that child is going to grow up and become the CEO of a paper company and the deforestation of the rain forest will commence. How sad will it be if the king can not get the cancer drugs we're going to discover in the rain forest because little Billy destroyed it?

Next came Spongebob. Way better IMO. All the animals were sentient here and had super silly personalities to the point where it was totally unbelievable even to a 2 year old. (maybe the crabs they consume in the crabcakes weren't but they never show you) Plus, the comedic timing was better and the artwork was superb. While no first season Ren and Stimpy, it will get my seal of approval when I take the throne.

Anyway, when I am KING I shall decree that if you are going to make children shows that depict animals in an anthropomorphic way, they must ALL be sentient. If the cat eats the mouse, then we have a flash back to when the mouse was falling in love with his wife and how they all wept tears of joy when the first litter was born... but it will be OK because the mouse will have a stick of dynamite it will light inside the cat. Basically I'm going to have Matt Groening actually create the Itchy and Scratchy show in it's own series... maybe do a live action movie... Man that'll rule.

I'll know Kung-fu!

YAY! :http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/23/news/companies/FDA_stemcell.reut/index.htm

I've been angry for a long time that we're not already cloning people to use as spare body parts ala The Island. How much longer will I have to wait for my stem cell scalp replacement? I had a helluva head of hair as a young man and if we don't get down to business things might get pretty bad for your king. Having seen my sister after she shaved her head, my guess is that I also share the gene for bad heads for being bald, unlike:


I know, but are you surprised that a guy who's planning his reign as king while in real life doesn't even have many friends is a vain guy? Don't worry, I'm hoping for all the major organs to be replaced at some point. For as much as life pisses me off, I do like it. In fact, it's one of my favorite things.

You're probably thinking, "But King Mark, what about your stance on court ordered birth control and limiting the population? Won't this life extension technology create too many people?" Good point. Well first of all, I'm king, god damn it. So suck it. But for my subjects, here's how it will work. If you've had your allotment of kids, we'll keep you at 100% as long as you can afford it, but as soon as you hit your natural life expediency we'll be pulling a Logan's Run on you complete with white tunic. Sorry. This will change if you're super smart and useful to society or if you make music I really like. Hear that Brian Eno? You'll live forever! Jonas Brothers... sorry! Unless you can prove you've never procreated. If you can keep it in your pants then you'll get that extra lifetime. My guess is the Jonas Brothers probably are already responsible for a few kids. Oh those rock tours!

I'm sure this will create all sorts of issues and lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it, but by then I hope we can all just download our consciousnesses (SP...er?) into vast computer systems and then it won't matter. Then we can all be in the Matrix and wear super cool clothes and do kung-fu. When that technology happens I shall leave my administrative chambers every day by starting a car chase out of the parking garage. At some point I will drive off the side of it, flying across the street and into another parking garage. Woah.

When the rain comes...

Today's post is a simple one, but I hope its simplicity does not detract from its importance. Today as I was driving to work in the rain I came across a median with at least 6 sprinklers watering away. Watering in the rain... during a time of drought.

What the fuck? When I'm KING, all the money that's now spent on public service announcements and press releases to tell people to conserve water will be spent on removing all flora that needs to be watered and replacing it with indigenous plants that need no extra water at all. There are tons of succulent and cactus species that seem to do OK here in the SF Bay area all on their own. Do we really need grass that's from Kentucky here? I'll leave the systems in but have them set up so that they can only be used in extreme situations when they're pushed past normal ecological stress.

NO SOUP TO GO FOR YOU!

My Queen to be wanted me to make some decree against Campbell new soup product, "Soup At Hand." Basically a microwavable version of it's normal soup that's in a cup designed to fit in your Ford Explorer's beverage holder. (Stay tuned for my decrees on Ford Explorers and SUVs in general) My knee jerk reaction was that she was against it due to it's egregious waste of materials in it's packaging. I'm down with that. Upon further discussion I found out that she was against it because of it's extreme convenience.

I thought a lot about this. I'm a product of a culture that promises everyone a "life of leisure" via technology. I love technology yet here was my queen telling me to ban some of it. My worry is if something like this would be banned, where would it stop? Would I have to ban frozen chicken pot pies or my beloved pop tarts? One could easily argue that the car the soup is meant to be consumed in was a convenience that should be banned. Unfortunately I'm not sure many of us can live a life where we have a nice hearty home cooked breakfast every morning and walk on over to work.

My gut feeling is that the Soup To Go is a chunky sirloin symptom of a larger social sickness that needs to be addressed.

Why are we so hell bent on convenience anyway? No one prefers the Soup To Go over a home made bowl of hearty soup. I know why we do it. Because we work too god damn much. It used to be that the adults in the family unit where segmented up between earning money and running the household. I'm not going to go into the fairness of this but it seems to be a good business model. I liken it to a small Korean restaurant I used to go to where the wife ran the front of the house and the husband cooked. Now, however we've got a situation where no one wants to cook and everyone wants to work the front of the house so the Korean restaurant has to get microwavable Bulgogi for it's customers.

So our economy seems to be based on the fact that each family is going to have two incomes... and get this, ones that require more than 40 hours a week of work. So add a commute of 1-2 hours a day to a 10 hour day and we now are spending half our day trying to get money. If we're expected to get 8 hours of sleep that gives us 4 hours to eat, bathe, poop and form relationships with other humans. How the fuck did we let this happen? As KING I SHALL NO LONGER STAND IT!

My gut feeling is we don't even need it. How much time does anyone actually spend working during the day anyway? I bet we could get the same amount of work done in 6 hours a day with a half hour for lunch and another half hour for breaks. SO, I decree the work day will no longer be 8 hours, but instead will be 5 hours not including break/lunch time. This will be awesome on so many levels. When you work it will have to count. You'll save money not eating out so much or buying Soup To Go. Unemployed people will gain employment to pick up the slack on anything that needs to happen that can't get done during the 5 work hours. I'm sure this can work... I even think a far away land known as Germany may even be doing something like this and they seem fine. This may cause my nation to not be one of the super powers, but I don't care. Look at Italy. Once they were an empire and now they just make movies about the bitter-sweet nature of life and ridiculously overpowered sports cars but what ever. They killed the last guy who tried to pass some laws giving employers stronger rights to fire employees. That's how little they want to work! We just need to learn to appreciate the bitter sweet nature of life and rambling, slow paced, go nowhere moves about it!

So things might get a little crazy for a while, but with my decrees limiting population growth and refusing to import goods from countries who engage in slave labor it'll all work out. I haven't worked out he finer points, but I think that a focus on living life rather than GNP may end up working out for us.

P.S. The Queen makes a kick ass soup.

I swear to god!

The phrase "I swear to god" was spoken quite frequently when I was a young lad, by both me and my pals. Usually it was right before or after some bold faced lie. "I swear to god, I jumped off my garage roof and didn't get hurt at all!" or "I have every single Micronauts figure, I swear to god!" Basically it was something we said as a kind of hyperbole helper. I SWEAR TO GOD IT WAS THE BEST!"

That's why when I listed to Obama take office this morning I cringed when they got into the god talk. It really doesn't mean anything, does it? I don't know why but I get scared when anyone who believes in a higher power that is known for things like starting over with a giant flood and telling a guy to kill his son to see if he's really into him. I cringe when at the core of their believe a simple "I forgive you" gets rid of most horrible crimes. Not that I actually believe that Obama believes one word of it. Just like the guy he's replacing I think that most god talk is really just pandering to old people who are really terrified of a point where they become nothing.

But it got me thinking. When I'm sworn in, er, I mean coronated, how's it going to go down? More importantly who's going to be the entertainment? I love music but I'm pretty sure that I won't let Springsteen near my ceremony. He grew up a few miles down the highway from where I live and every time I hear him drawl in that heartland affect I want to scream, "BRUCE YOU'RE FROM NEW JERSEY!" How did he get accepted as a representative of the fruited plains? Asbury park is not known for it's farm community.

So, here's what I'm thinking. The festivities start with Led Zeppelin doing "Kashmir." The audience waits with baited breath. "Where's king Mark?" they'll say. On stage will be a crazy device and I will be revealed like this along with Kanye and Daft Punkt performing this song as I come out of the machine. I'm then joined by my Queen. She'll have my scepter and give it to me and we will both approach the podium. I will then make a speech about how the time has come to stop being jerks and now start being a nation of cool people. WWFD? (What would Fonzie do?) I will not mention god and as a matter of fact I'll take a the books of all the major religions (don't think I'll forget you Dienetics!) and put them in a pile and have two Dr. Evil LASERS torch them. I'll even get Mike Myers to do the honors. At that point I'll walk over to Steven Hawkins and hold his arm up like a paraplegic price fighter and yell "WHO DA MAN? HAWKINS!" Planes will fly by spewing fireworks and R2D2 and C-3PO will join us on stage as Carrie Fisher puts a medal around my neck for delivering my people from darkness.

At that point the crowd will go crazy and the most amazing LASER light show ever will commence (Using the smoke from the fireworks. I saw it at EPCOT center once and it was really cool) Then Prince and the Revolution will be revealed doing "Sexy Motherfucker" as the party continues. Eventually a helicopter will come and the queen and I will be taken to our volcanic lair.

Woebegone: GONE!

I love talk radio. I don't know why but I just do. It's like you're always around some people chatting about something. Even if you don't care about what they're talking about it feels comforting to me, like I'm really not horribly alone with my own thoughts. Those rascally thoughts just love to push me into a lovely panic attack! Maybe it's that it's easier for me to hear that people are thinking and talking about problems like the economy, the war in Iraq, or Arty Lange's heroin addiction than to know it's happening and let me think that somehow I have to think about how to fix it. Maybe it's to distract me from the terrible secret.

However, there's one thing I'm going to have to do when I become KING. It's going to be one of the kind of arbitrary things I do... that I have to do, to keep people on their toes. That thing is that I'm going to take Garrison Keillor and his Prairie Home Companion off the radio waves forever. You'll still be able to download it via podcast or go see it live, but I'm done with having that guy take over my NPR for hours and hours each weekend with is annoying drone, retarded stories about small town wisdom and music that sucked when it was first popular in the 1800s. I'M SICK OF IT. How the hell are we going to reach the future if we still have this sick fondness for a past that for the most part really sucked. Oh, and while I'm at it, Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me will also be getting the axe. Sorry, I can't take that smug drollery and frankly I just end up feeling stupid at the 3 minute mark.

You, one of my future loyal subjects, may be asking, "Well what will take their place?" Easy. I'll take Howard Stern off satellite radio and put him and his show just as it is on NPR. The line up will kind of go Fresh Air/Howard Stern/This American Life/Adam Carolla. I think with this line up we'll finally be able to offer the public a truly balanced view of the world and the part my kingdom will play in it.

OHBAMA!

Boy oh boy, it's a big weekend. Battlestar Galactica starts up again and we get a president that to the naked eye appears to be smart, honorable and an awesome public speaker. I'm hoping that it's such a stark comparison to the jerky, smarmy, weasleface mushmouth he's replacing that the nation is bathed in a warm golden glow and we all act like dot com employees on Ecstasy at a rave for the whole weekend.

This is exactly why when I'm KING Obama will be appointed president.

"What what what?" you may say. "Why bother with a president when you're king?!" Well, I don't plan on being a tyrannical king. I'm hoping to actually improve things and part of my vast wisdom is that I'm sure I'm going to come across a lot of crap that I won't know how to deal with. I'll probably mostly ignore his pleas to dismantle the public stockades and other humiliation punishments I'll be enacting, but I feel it would be nice to have an opposing opinion from time to time. You know, someone to say, "Do you really think that running a tube from Chaney's butt into GW's mouth and from GW's mouth back into Chaney's mouth creating a mobius loop of excrement is a fair punishment for their war crimes?" (I'm thinking that may be a little light of a sentence)

Also, Obama seems like a dude I'd like to hang with from time to time. He and his family are really personable and good looking and let's face it, I'm going to probably want to avoid the public a lot and I know my subjects are going to want to see Obama and his cute kids picking out dogs, getting reprimanded for hosting keggers in the White House (in a few years, of course) and doing things that make the masses feel like everything is going to be all right while destracting them from me.

Leaf Blowers

When I'm king I shall outlaw leaf blowers. Stop being so damn lazy and just rake the leaves. Leaf blowers are far too noisy, energy wasting and in the end just blow dust and debris around which ends up going in my eyes when I'm riding my bike around, which I still hope to do when I'm KING. Oh yeah, and if you're caught using one of those gas powered scooters or skateboardy type things it shall be impounded, destroyed and you will be stripped naked and force to write "I'm a jerk" on your naked body with lipstick 100 times on live TV. Howard Stern will host.

Come to think of it, when I'm king I'll have my town's roads closed to non human powered vehicles on days when I feel like cruising around on my bike. Maybe one day a week I'll change the name of the day to Bikeday and on that day only human powered vehicles will be allowed. Maybe on Tuesday or Thursday because I'm definitely going to change one of those day's names because it's retarded that with all the letters in the alphabet we have 2 days out of seven that start with the same letter. Screw you Thursday. Your name is ugly sounding anyway. GONE.

That does point into the whole problem with the fossil fuels. I think I have a handle on this one too. First of all, buses, cabs and other fleet vehicles have been using Natural Gas for a long time. When I'm king I will declare that Markovia (Marklichstein?) vehicle companies will only be able to make vehicles that use domestic resources as fuel. That means if we can only generate 10% of what we need to fuel traditional gas vehicles then I'll hire some fancy math guy to figure out what your take of that can be.

All the money the U.S. has been wasting in the middle east will not go to actually developing and deploying things like solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and safe nuclear energy systems. My hope is that then all the OPEC countries can go back to what they're really good at doing: Inventing forms of math (I'm looking at you algebra!) and herding goats. Oh yeah, and man I enjoy a good date in my granola. Granola helps your reading scores!

GOD!

OK, this one's a bit heavier and may have to span a few posts, but yesterday I was incensed (as usual) when I read the title of some Linkedin post that hit my mailbox. Here's the article:

http://myfathersbusiness.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/god-owns-my-business/?goback=.nws_22670373_40868

So... WHEN I'M KING... here's how I propose to deal with people who feel or act that there's some sort of supreme being that personally feels it's job consists of owning business and in general helping some people out, while it ignores others [see disasters]. This is a tough one for me as I'm pretty sure I don't want to out and out outlaw religious faith, but the hubris involved in this narcissistic thought process has to be punished. It makes for a very bad humans. "My business is doing well because God owns it!" shames the guy who worked his ass off his whole life, operating a small department store, and now has nothing because Walmart came in to town and destroyed him. I declare that those who believe that some sort of God gives them dominion over anything or anyone will have to submit to a tattoo on their foreheads that reads, "I'm a self absorbed asshole but my god told me it was ok." Probably do this in two lines so the font can be easily read. People who also claim to have had conversations with god will have tattoos that read, "I'm a self absorbed lunatic..."

When I am King.

So, for quite some time now it's been obvious to me that my true calling lies in my skill to become supreme ruler of the world. This is best shown by my ability to make people generally ignore me unless I act in a silly way or say something stupid. With this in mind, I shall set out to use this blot to outline various changes I'd make to our current system making the world a paradise once again. I won't stop until bluebirds tie ribbons in every one's hair and stem cell research supplies a solution for my thinning hair.

So, to begin I will start small. We all know that a lot of small changes can end up making a huge impact on the planet so here goes.

When I'm KING, people who do the speed limit or under in the fast lane shall be put in a stockade for a day and smeared with human excrement. It's rude and shows that you are only thinking of yourself and your lack of need to get anywhere in a timely fashion. Move it or lose it, and the it shall be the state you're in when you're not in a stockade with poop all over you. This will also be a punishment for those who feel it's OK to move into the fast lane when all the traffic is going the same speed and thus making the safe amount of car lengths between me and the car in front of me a not safe amount of car lengths.