Things to Do When You’re Really Bored

Now that the weather is finally getting warmer and you’re doing far less shivering and stamping your feet to avoid frostbite,

you may find yourself looking for ways to fill the time. As a public service, here are some ideas.

1) Go through the grocery shelves and pick up a dry roasted food you’ve never tried before. Dry roasted chic peas weren’t too bad. Dry roasted seaweed? I’ll let you try that one yourself.

2) Try to deliberately drop your keys. Considering how often keys drop out of my hands you’d think this would be easier than it is. Is this evidence of key sentience?

3) Stand on a busy street corner and refuse to drink anything before you find someone who actually wants to have a star named after them from that stupid company that advertises on the radio.

3a) Wait, that’s not a thing to do when you’re really bored; that’s something to do when you want to die of thirst.

4) Read aloud an instruction manual from an appliance made in China, and note all the unintentional humor.

4a) Fair is fair. Take a class in Chinese and watch the Chinese speakers hide their amusement at your pronunciation.

5) Listen to an hour of Sean Hannity on the radio and count the number of times he miss-uses the word, literally. My number was 3 which should be pro-rated to 9 as I had to shut it off after 20 minutes. It’s figuratively mind-blowing that they let that guy broadcast.

6) Take a friend to a courtroom during a trial and sit near the jury box. Periodically hold up a sign that says, acquit, and have your friend periodically hold up a sign that says, convict. See who gets thrown out of the courtroom first.

7) Take a walk in the park and watch the squirrels. When you see a squirrel on the ground, cross his path so that you are between him and the tree he just left. I’ve only done this with upstate New York squirrels, so I don’t know if this happens everywhere, but the rodents of Albany freak.

8) Sew an orange vest and put it on a stuffed animal. Then carry it around and tell people it’s your service animal.

8a) Take the vest off the stuffed animal and put it on yourself. Then go to Home Depot. Do the same thing with a black and white stripped shirt at Foot Locker.

9) Stand outside a government building with a sign that says, “Yeah!” If someone asks you what you’re protesting, say, “You’ve got a point.” Then take out a magic marker and change your sign to “Heck Yeah!”

10) Stare a cat in the eye until he or she looks away. It makes you feel like you’ve established dominance, but the cat still won’t come when you call it.

It may also poop on your pillow.

11) Dance all by yourself in front of a dog. Dance until he turns his head in that universal canine gesture that means, “Humans are inscrutably odd.”

12) Take a plain t-shirt and two pieces of paper. Write, “something funny” on one sheet and tape it to the front of your shirt. Write, “something meaningful” on the other paper and tape it to the back of the shirt. Then go out on the street and try to give the shirt away to a stranger.

Or, if you want to be like me, you could just veg out on the couch and eat Pop Tarts.

Beloved George Carlin was many things, bur rarely boring.

Meteor Pee

 Meteor Pee

Back in 6^th grade Miss Blossom taught us the hydrological cycle. Water evaporates, gathers in clouds, and then rains back down. I listened, wrote it all down and even nodded my head.

But I knew better.

Rain was (and is) meteor pee.

You didn’t know that? I don’t blame you. It sounds a bit counter-intuitive.

So, you ask, why do you see rain a lot more than you see meteors, and why does rain usually occur where there are clouds in the sky? It requires a more thorough unpacking of the facts for the truth to soak through.

Rain that falls during the daytime could come from either source. Meteors are rarely visible during daylight. There could be thousands of urine-packed meteors above us at any given moment. Some, I imagine streak on by. Others treat our atmosphere like an interstellar rest stop.

You find that unlikely? You think you’d notice so many meteors? Do you see the stars during daylight? Surely if billions and billions of immense suns are rendered invisible by a few sunbeams, a few thousand comparatively tiny meteors could vanish as well.

So why don’t they tell us about meteor pee?

They created the hydrological cycle as a clever fiction to hide the truth from international gambling and resort concerns. Were such moneyed interests aware, they might attempt to redirect essential celestial waste products to casino fountains and golf courses. The hydrological fiction is almost universally accepted, but our English language betrays it.

What is a large grouping of meteors called? A meteor shower.

This is not to say that everything that showers in our language creates rain. There are baby showers for instance. But even the layman can see that babies have insufficient bladder capacity to create weather. Even if they could, you rarely see babies streaking along at 100,000 feet.

Meteors are unlimited in size, from the tiny squirt gun meteor, to the million ton super-soaker. A large meteor’s bladder holds more pee/rain than the collected bladders of a thousand day cares.

Still doesn’t sound right?

Meteoric behavior is at least in part, accounts for our confusion. When they urinate, meteors tend to do it through banks of clouds (which presumptuously take credit for the rain.) Why is that? Do they see clouds as opaque bathroom stalls to ensure privacy? Nobody can be sure, as meteors are notoriously impatient, and rarely, if ever pause to answer questions.

But attributing precipitation to clouds is transparently false. Clouds are like fog on drugs, flying up in the sky all airy-like. There’s nothing to them – no bladders, or canteens, or even tiny tea cups. How are they supposed to hold rain up there?

All the clouds carry with them is lightning. If they were really the source of rain, wouldn’t the water put the lightning out before it even got started?

Lightning’s another possible reason why meteors might choose clouds accumulations when they pass water. When the clouds do their lightning thing, meteor pee puts most of the fires out before it can hit the ground.

Imagine how much trouble we’d be in if that didn’t happen! We’d have lightning fires all over the place, burning down houses and barns and zip-line stations.

You could make a good case for intelligent life out there by observing how often the meteors pee on places that are under lightning siege.

Then there’s the behavior and content of rain.

Rain falls both straight down and at angles, just like meteors fly at different trajectories. Clouds just float like lazy bums. Do you really think Mr. Stratus Fractus and Ms. Cumulous Nimbus have the energy to throw rain sideways?

Rain sometimes has minerals, or acid content. Do you see rocks and acid flasks up in the clouds? Heck, if it weren’t for airplanes and high-flying birds, clouds wouldn’t have any solids in them at all.

So at the end of class, I went up to Miss Blossom, and I told her that I knew the real story.

“The real story?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “about rain, and where it really comes from.”

“Where do you think rain comes from, Headley?”

“It comes from meteor pee,” I said.

“Meteor pee? That’s just plain ridiculous.”

“That’s right, Miss Blossom. You keep pretending it comes from the clouds.”

“Headley,” she said, “where did you get this astonishing notion that rain comes from meteor pee?”

“From the weather people on TV,” I said.

“Huh?”

“C’mon, Miss Blossom. They’re called Meteor Urologists after all.”

That shut her up. Make believe is fine, but they really should teach the truth in school.

  Here's some early George Carlin playing the Hippy Dippy Weatherman

The Grinch

He’s so much a part of our holiday that we forget that the Grinch is a relatively modern addition to Christmas – barely fifty years old. He was crafted by two geniuses – Dr. Seuss, and Boris Karloff, who supplied the voice. Is it because tart makes the sweet sweeter that characters like the Grinch and his much older colleague, Scrooge stand unabashedly among the much jollier Santa, Rudolf, Frosty, and Clarence the angel.

There must be something more to it.

I think we can pretty much forget the Jim Carey version. 

 Most children under 10 have never heard of it. The Grinch was meant to be in rough animation with the voice of Frankenstein’s monster giving it life.

The Grinch sells a lot of Tequila, as the story is the subject of a very popular drinking game. Odd – that thievery and drunkenness would be forgiven as the Grinch is celebrated in these politically correct times.

Of course It’s a Wonderful Life is similarly celebrated, and nobody mentions Jimmy Stewart’s brawling or the verbal abuse of his wife, his kids, Bert the cop, and a school teacher.

But the Grinch was also an abuser of animals. Something that was accepted and considered funny in cartoons of the 60s, surely can’t be tolerated in an age of PETA.

Where do these Christmas icons get their teflon? Do we forgive the Grinch because adorable Cindy Lou Who does? Maybe it’s because he did kindly heroic things at the end.

But what did he do? He stopped a sled of stolen loot (and the pet he had abused constantly,) from falling off a cliff. That’s certainly a feat of strength, but any unrepentant thief would wish to do the same. He blew a trumpet as he rushed into Whoville, returning most of what he had taken,  (remember, items fell off his sled.) But he still had all that he had at the beginning of the tale, and he and his minion got a great meal out of the deal. What was so kindly or heroic about that?

So – we have a crafty, avaricious, spiteful man. He steals everything he can from his neighbors. He then gives some of it back, but his victimization cycle leaves him in the black. Not only does he gain materially, but he’s haled as a hero and a great guy. He gets to sit at the head of the table and decide (through carving,) exactly how much roast beast goes to each citizen of Whoville.

Oh – I get it!

We revere the Grinch because he is the patron saint of politicians.

Here's more from Carlin on politics - Warning, Carlin was not exactly delicate in his presentation