GateHouse — Like most humans of both the small and grownup variety, my older son tends to save his more pressing philosophical, scientific and spiritual questions for the end of bedtime, after the books have been read and the teeth have been brushed and the lights have been turned out, when there’s nothing left to do but think and stare at the ceiling — or, in his case, the structurally insecure-looking underside of the top bunk bed. (It’s fine, it’s fine, it just has a few alarming-looking cracks and some duct tape and it makes this creaking noise when you touch or make eye contact with it.)
Well, that’s not quite all: There’s also the matter of turning on the fan next to his bed, then turning off the oscillating function so it points 35 mph winds straight at his face, then moving the fan closer because he can’t “feel the breeze,” then moving the fan farther away because having a high-speed fan blade whizzing away two feet from your son’s face is generally frowned upon by the medical community, especially when said son sleeps like he receives a small-voltage electric shock every 20 seconds that causes him to fling his arms like he’s trying to hail a Manhattan taxi. Oh THEN there’s the locating of three stuffed cats, one stuffed dog and one very old blue blanket that’s less “blue blanket” and more “a kind of trapezoidal-shaped assemblage of yarn.” There’s also the assurance that yes, I’ll go turn on the air conditioner right now, yes, I heard you. There’s also the assurance that whatever he wants to tell me about Minecraft can most certainly wait until morning. (Or never, because as much as I love my son, his stories about whatever Minecraft is are boring enough to make me want to start re-knitting the blue blanket.)
But once that’s all done, once we’ve completed the 105-minute pre-bedtime routine, that’s when the questions begin. And that’s when, last week, the talk turned to space.
GateHouse — Having pretty well established over the past two or three weeks that things on Earth are pretty unsalvageably jerked up, I think I’ll go ahead and cut my losses and apply for this one-way flight to Mars thing. I don’t know much about Mars, other than they have an Olympus Mons and we shot a rover there one time, but I’m pretty sure that if 90% of people support something on Mars, the Martian Congress will figure out a way to get it done.
Last week a Dutch nonprofit company called Mars One, founded by an entrepreneur named Bas Lansdorp, because his parents couldn’t think of a more Dutch name to give him apparently, announced it was looking for people to volunteer to become the first humans to live on Mars. They don’t need a lot — just four initial colonists to shoot on over, set up a colony and then, of course, never ever come back. It’s kind of like an interstellar-travel version of a Carnival cruise.
It’s a one-way permanent vacation that probably requires at least a little bit of travel insurance but according to Mars One thousands have already applied because, again, I mean, (makes “I mean really just look around” motion). But there are naturally questions about whether any company can swing the technology and financing, which is estimated to be $6 billion for the first four colonists and $4 billion for each subsequent crew of four, although the 10th crew is free and you get a free colony on your birthday.
GateHouse — Despite growing up in a reasonably comfortable Indiana suburb, I never really got into the music of Tupac Shakur. This put me in direct conflict with my younger brother, Dave; while I would spend my formative Camelot Music-stalking time making important purchasing decisions about Tesla and the “Wayne’s World” soundtrack and, God help me, that Styx album with “Show Me The Way” on it (I KNOW, I ALREADY KNOW), Dave was able to leverage his good grades and positive attitude, as well as our parents’ divorce, into permission to buy pretty much anything with a parental advisory sticker and an Intro on it between the years 1991-1994.
I bring this up because none of the girl-pantsed losers I listened to in high school would ever remotely be considered for immortalization in hologram form; you cannot be baked enough to clamor for an all-projection version of Tesla’s “Five Man Acoustical Jam,” which I owned in both CD and cassette form and which may be an inaccurate reference, as I’m pretty sure no one is Tesla has died yet. I should probably fact-check this point before emailing this column to my editors, but Siri is all the way downstairs. Hang on. “SIRI! CAN YOU COME UP HERE AND ANSWER A QUESTION ABOUT TESLA?” Ugh, nothing. These phones are so buggy.
YEAH, I’M TALKING TO YOU, LOSER. THE FLARE LOOKING THING, IN SPACE, THE ONE THAT’S SOLAR. You suck. You are the worst solar flare ever. You are a pink fluffy unicorn of solar flares. You are a fragile porcelain mouse of solar flares. You are a Hallmark Christmas ornament of solar flares, one of the ones with a basket full of puppies waiting for Santa with cookies or something. One time in 1999 I had to evacuate my hometown for a hurricane that ended up sputtering out over the Atlantic and arrived as the kind of autumn shower best used for frolicking and making sure one’s azaleas are sated. You are the Blooming Azalea Spring Shower of solar flares. Try to look cool in front of your black hole friends now.
Sigh. My apologies for using valuable Internet to yell at a galactic event that I do not remotely begin to understand, but I have good reasons:
I find that most of my problems can be solved by yelling.
It wasn’t even a galactic event, really. This big-shot solar flare that was supposed to burst forth from the sun, scorch its way across 93 million miles of cold black space and rock the Earth like a solar hurricane did what I can best describe as jack squat, given the inconsiderate confines of the average newspaper reader’s sensibilities, and apologies to my grandmother, for whom “jack squat” is probably pushing the limits of what’s acceptable discourse among respectable company. (Sorry, Grandma, I write dumb jokes and “jack squat” is kind of right in my wheelhouse.)
Before you make your decision, let us realize first that the ocean is, of course, filled shelf to shelf with hideous terrors, like those fish that make their own lights, giant goopy squid and giant goopy squid that make their own lights, probably to aid them in eating humans. (There are also eels, of which I do not approve one little bit.) I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason the ocean is there, to serve as a huge Hideous Terrors Production Machine, as well as serve as a super-convenient dumping ground for our industrial waste.
But this week we can add two new items to the list, which is good, because I I haven’t experienced a pants-dampening fear of swimming in the ocean in a while. (Full disclosure: I’ve been snorkeling one time, and it was in Hawaii, and I was nearly devoured whole by a monk seal, which is a lie because they don’t devour people, but it looked mean, and also the snorkeling reef than went from 30 feet deep on one side to 90,000 feet deep on the other, and a manta ray was staring at me with serial-killer eyes and making a slashing motion cross its throat with its manta ray fins, and I am not exactly filled with the desire to get back in the ocean anytime soon. Also once my wife tried to kill me with a shark. Long story.)
Yet, if I were to ever re-enter the deep blue sea, it would not be in Australia, which is where the planet’s most bloodthirsty predators go to practice being more murderous. DO NOT THINK YOU ARE FOOLING ANYONE, WALLABIES.
GateHouse – The good news: The world will officially not end as a result of the disastrous tsunami of semi-coherent pepperoni-mouthed idiocy that would have defined The Herman Cain Presidency! The bad news: It will probably end as a result of one of the following:
Octopi that walk among us, or
Giant Air Jordan-sized insects that eat carrots and look like they could punch people in the face.
There are two horrendous animals you should check out on the Internet right now, which is weird, because the Internet is mostly used only for cute animals, such as puppies and kitties and squirrels playing harmonicas.
But in this case the Internet has given us a video in which an octopus at a marine reserve is seen swimming around in the water, which is where octopus usually go. The water is where octopi do octopi-like things, such as admire their own arms and destroy Captain Nemo’s submarine and make fun of those commercials where wankers buy each other Lexuses for Christmas. But in the video, after a few seconds, the octopus WALKS OUT OF THE WATER ONTO THE LAND, while onlookers gape and holler and burst into tears and riot and rightfully flee into nearby mountain terrain, WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY SHOULD BE DOING because octopi DO NOT WALK ON LAND, which you know already if you attended school, even ones in Kentucky.
(Incidentally I’ve just been told that it was actually a giant squid that destroyed Captain Nemo’s submarine, but I can’t think of anything unusually evil that an octopus has done in movies so I’m leaving it. If anyone knows of some seriously evil octopus shenanigans, email me.)
GateHouse — Over the past couple of weeks, the boy has become a pretty huge fan of molecules.
Molecules in the air, molecules in the water, molecules in the table. Molecules in space, molecules in him, molecules in his blanket. I spent much of Mother’s Day hopelessly attempting to calculate the number of molecules in the space between (holds fingers about a millimeter apart), and failing in spectacular, fiery, Cubs/Donald Trump fashion. If you know how many molecules are in that general area, I beg you tell me now, because I’m about 30 seconds away from tweeting Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he is SO TIRED of me doing that.
The problem with being interrogated about molecules by your 7-year-old, aside from extrapolating that I can probably go ahead and take these football helmets to the consignment shop, is of course that I haven’t the foggiest what to tell him. (We determined once that air is made up of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide. “Is carbon dioxide a molecule?” he logically asks, and I’m like DUDE I HAVE NO IDEA, hang on let me tweet Neil deGrasse Tyson.)
At left: CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. At right: Just some rocks.
GateHouse — You guys might have missed this last week, as the news cycles were thick with unimaginable disaster (Japan) and unimaginable stupid (everything else, let’s just pick two random ones how about “Martha Stewart is a grandma” and “Timberlake/Biel split” whoa wait really?), but a scientist says he found life in space. This is an unprocessably big deal, the culmination of millennia of stargazing and decades of technologically wondrous exploration and hundreds of terrible, terrible movies with Will Smith in them, and yet as “confirmed alien life” does nothing for you in the page views department let me also very quickly mention that I can help you find out WHAT REALLY SPLIT UP JUSTIN AND JESSICA. (I don’t want to give it away, but Martha Stewart = totally involved.)
(It also doesn’t help that this guy has been more or less shoved given a metaphoric swirly by his colleagues, but as I’m just here to make dumb jokes, not get in the middle of a nerd-fight, let’s just press on.)
Anyway, a few weeks ago, late at night, on a corner of the Internet very few people frequent because it rarely contains information on the porny antics of a man best known for making cornball sex jokes on America’s second-dumbest means for delivering alleged comedy (you’re reading the first), it was reported that Science located evidence of extraterrestrial life. This, of course, is no great shakes, as we’ve learned that science is to be selectively ignored and distrusted, so it’s understandable that it took a little while for a story confirming the EXISTENCE OF ALIEN LIFE to find its legs, or tentacles, or amorphous bulbous glowing laser-firing appendages, whatever they have up there. (I’m hoping that at least there’s something akin to a tauntaun, but that’s just me, I get cold easily.)
GateHouse — There are, on the face of it, tons of reasons why cloning a woolly mammoth is a magnificent idea, if not one so awesome you can’t believe that America’s feeble, short-sleeved inventors haven’t thought of already (let me know how it goes with that “high-speed rail,” nerdlingers, while me and 12 friends are riding my brand-new new mammoth around the infield at the Daytona 500). Just think of a glorious, mammoth-filled future, the convenience, the ease of cargo transport, the chance to finally have a huge meaty rib delivered via roller-skating waitress to the side window of your rock car.
But, as it turns out, there are evidently some loser reasons against mammoth cloning, and not just the usual worries about being gored to death, being trampled to death or being trampled to death while being gored by the early, unsuccessful trial-run mammoth clones from the practice machines. God knows what those abominations could have on them — wings, dorsal fins, mouse faces. I’m not sure if you’ve ever given serious consideration to what happens when an entire subterranean cloning facility full of failed, bucktoothed, emotionally unstable almost-mammoths run amok and inevitably slaughter their creators — which obviously happens every time anyone clones anything around here, jeez — but I’m sure the aftermath would be something you’d want to wear the old shoes to mop up. “MAMMOTH DISASTER IN SCIENCE LAB,” the headlines would scream, and on the plus I guess the headlines would pretty much write themselves, leaving copy editors with more time to spend fleeing into the countryside, crazed with murderous fear.
I’m talking about mammoth cloning – I know, again — because it turns out that having successfully cloned every other animal in that Darwin book from the library, and also having fixed every other problem on Earth, Science has decided to try cloning animals that technically don’t even have firsts anymore, calling into question whether the word “cloning” is even accurate here, but whatever, we’ll leave that to the poindexters from the AP Stylebook.
Pictured: Spandau Ballet, or Dexy's Midnight Runners, or possibly Taco
GateHouse — As it is the New Year and a time for rebirth, rededication, refueling, rebranding and at least three weeks of semi-consistent exercise which will gradually taper off and then eventually plummet to a zero-baseline in what will almost certainly become a fiesta of couch-sloughing and chocolate frosted donuts by early February, I would like to make several Important Proclamations for my little columns in the year 2010:
No more hidden messages; reading each first letter down vertically will no longer reveal coded instructions to any of the secret societies to which I once belonged. My apologies, Order of the Sphinx Bullfinch, but you’re just going to have to figure out some other way to control Parliament.
I officially retire the belief that if you say something funny to me in an email or IM, I both own and thought of it, which I am doing entirely of my own volition and not because of any threatened legal action or anything, so just stop looking at me like that, all judge-y.
No more puns about cows. Nobody likes them, and they tend to put readers in a horrible moooood.
No more embellishing, outlandishing, stretching, fabricating, exaggerating or embiggening things to make for “better stories” or “dramatic tension” or “because the things that actually happen to me are not remotely funny.” And this very instant by promising to you, the reader who is killing time waiting for something to load in the other tab or for the dryer to beep already, that I know this much is true:
I'm a a writer for such outlets as Men's Health, South Magazine, Nickelodeon's NickMom.com, Billboard, brucespringsteen.net and Paste, a syndicated humor columnist for GateHouse and a father of two (the younger of whom has been personally approved by Bruce Springsteen) on the coast of South Carolina. Even longer bio/clips.
I'm a a writer for such outlets as Men's Health, South Magazine, Nickelodeon's 
