Mid-term elections, and the running is easy

Art courtesy of Ramiro Davaro-Comas

It's almost the mid-term elections in the old US of A, and I would have to say that I'm stoked. Our democratic system is the single greatest system in the history of the universe, which is why democracy is our chief export. It's even better because now corporations are able to donate endless funds to politicians who lack principle (equivalent to meth addicts without self-control). The greatest thing about our democracy is that it's so streamlined that candidates can simply rely on catch phrases and a die-hard extremist core of party supporters, leaving the vast majority of people, who view a broken system with disenchantment, sitting on the sidelines. In this country, we prove every day that democracies can function better when our politicians lurk under the shade of night and keep potential voters as distanced and unknowing as possible, than when all citizens vote for a government that can truly be called representative.

Children are Stupid

Try teaching a child how to cook a good steak on the grill, come back in twenty minutes and see how well they do. A lot of people might say that their child is really intelligent, but they could not be less correct. Children don't know how to talk for the first few years of their life, and when they do they ask the most inane questions like "where do babies come from?" and are easily entertained by things like "peekaboo" that smart people with object permanence would totally see right through. They talk to imaginary people, often with incorrect grammar, and they are terrible at math. What's worse is that they're too stupid to realize that they're stupid, and it's our sad and sorry job to just grit our teeth and pretend that anything they say makes sense.

Demi Spaghetti's Weight Loss Plan!

If you, like many Americans, want to lose weight, you may be overwhelmed by the sheer number of options out there, many of which are ineffective or even downright dangerous. Well, fear not weight-loss adventurer, for Demi Spaghetti is here to help with a weight loss program 110% effective! Many nutritionists would argue that a good diet combined with regular exercise is the only path to a more healthy you and that any alternative is superficial at best, but that's both difficult and boring, while Demi Spaghetti's solution is so simple and interesting a complete idiot unfamiliar with the simplest aspects of biology could have come up with it: Don't chew your food! The benefits to not chewing your food are instantly obvious: food becomes smaller and takes up less space in your stomach when you chew, so anyone would logically determine that not chewing your food will allow less food to take up more space in your stomach; it leads to the potential to choke on your food, which is proven to be an appetite suppressant (warning: always have someone trained in the Heimlich maneuver nearby while eating); and finally, you will never be bored and nor will you appear boring to your friends.

A Brief History of the 20th Century

Because I graduated college with a history degree and paid attention sometimes in class, I feel that it's my responsibility to educate the masses with a multi-part brief history of the world, century by century, starting with the 20th. This last century can best be defined by the man who lived through almost the entire thing: Ronald Reagan. While Reagan was alive, he protected us from national healthcare, single-handedly tore down a wall in Berlin with his bare hands, ending millennia of communism in the godless country, and tried to expand the availability of vegetables to the poor (many of whom he coincidentally invented). Some Reagan deniers might argue that he was only one of many figures that played a major role in the 20th century, but were Ghandi, Haile Selassie I, Albert Einstein, Amelia Earheart, or Eleanor Roosevelt even half as good-looking? If you doubt the completeness of my record, just look at that face, and tell him he's not your everything.

This week in TV land: Reality!

First of all, I want to be clear in stating that I'm a huge fan of reality television. After all, television is thoroughly entertaining, and reality is, well, a somewhat amorphous concept that can be used to describe everything that can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted. With this information alone a prehistoric ice man might assume that Real World, where shameless narcissists have absurd and heavily edited but not completely scripted interactions with each other on television for infamy and an unlimited supply of alcohol (appealing, I know), was the extent of reality television. Not so, with the rise of the modern reality family, who has done nothing to become famous except being rich and related to someone who, in 1996, probably would have just been another housemate on the Real World. Like the concept of Life Water (seriously, I can't stress enough how much it grates me that life and water, a redundancy to be sure, can be slapped on the same packaging and wrapped up with juice concentrate and sugar), Reality Television is a wonderful opportunity to redefine the meaning of a word in order to subjugate and coopt it to a greater and nobler cause: Cashmoney.