Vonnegut by way of hardbodies

After seeing that an estimated 36,000 people floated by JoePa’s casket last week in Stepford Valley, Penn., I’m once again reminded that if we Americans could somehow harness just one-tenth of the energy that we expend on our national religion (football, baby!) and divert that energy towards the building of better, stronger and more cooperative communities from coast to coast, we’d probably be real impressed. Just a hunch.

And after slobbishly dialing up TMZ so I could feed upon the latest prurient blab about who’s having sex with whom, I’m once again reminded that we Americans—well, I’m sure this is a cultural plague in Iceland, Spain, and Brazil, too—but goddamn, we sure appear to be completely strung out on gobbling up the latest scuttlebutt about which nice-looking celebrity is having intercourse with which nice-looking hard body. I mean, how many people are out there in the great wasteland thriving on the vicarious thrills generated by these up-to-the-minute boinking bulletins?

Whatever the answer to that question, I’m positive it’s an absolutely awesome number that indirectly reveals that Kurt Vonnegut was on the right track when he wrote in his nifty novel Galapagos that the planet itself was in great peril because there were all these creatures with these huge and dangerous computers in their skulls, about 7 billion at last count, and they were just positively running amok with self-absorbed desires directly connected to either their (a) guts or (b) gonads. They needed to literally devolve because their behavior was utterly controlled by these outlandishly complex chunks of gray matter that were just too much, too wild, and too fucking crazy for Mama Gaia to tolerate any longer. And it took a few generations, according to Kurt, but the problem eventually got fixed in a most clever and humorous way.

Speaking of blab, there’s been much of this ever-cheapening commodity generated lately on the hot potato topic of the Keystone XL pipeline project, the one that would bring a nearly bottomless stream of tar sands to the oil refineries of America. In the midst of this particular blabstorm, someone asked a simple, direct question. “Why not build refineries in Alberta, where the sludge could then be processed and this pipeline talk made moot?” Good question.

The instant nutshell answer is, of course, money. As usual. Duh.

Estimates now holding serve say the pipeline project would cost $7 billion. Meaning it would probably top out at about $12 billion. To build the refineries necessary to deal with the massive volume of goo (think cold molasses) getting scraped out of the mighty Athabasca lode, it would, say the oil giants, cost $15-20 billion. (How many billions? Are you serious? Come on!) So anyway, there ya go. The discussions and arguments are all online, but don’t bug me about that stuff because I gotta find out why Heidi and Seal are getting divorced, and just where did it all go wrong