It’s Monday, and we have another, fairly large, batch of things not to do, courtesy of the IT industry.

(Submitted by Warlock)

• No longer allowed to rip apart old hard drives to salvage absurdly powerful magnets.
• No longer allowed to use salvaged magnets to attach small coworkers to large metal objects.
• No longer allowed to come up with names for servers.
• No longer allowed to create passwords that average people cannot remember.
• No longer allowed to create obscene mnemonics to assist people in remembering their passwords.
• No longer allowed to sing.
• Or dance.
• That includes walking like an Egyptian.
• And headbanging.
• Or glowstick. Yes, it’s dancing.
• No longer allowed to bring in music by that weird punk cabaret band.
• No longer allowed to bring in music by that weird folk band.
• No longer allowed to bring in any music from weird cover bands.
• No longer allowed to bring in any music that depresses people to tears.
• No longer allowed to bring in music at all.
• No longer allowed to build scale models of siege weaponry.
• Especially at scale 1:1.
• No longer allowed to add enough sugar to my chai to make the average hummingbird ill.
• No longer allowed to add sugar at all.
• Or take caffeine pills.
• Red Bull is right out.
• No longer allowed to use the plotter.
• Or the color laserjet.
• In fact, all print jobs are to be vetted by a superior.
• No longer allowed to sharpen anything.
• No longer allowed to wear breakfast cereal on a string necklace.
• No longer allowed to wear shirts with more colors than the average box of Crayolas.
• Must leave all hats at home.
• In general, no longer allowed to come up with creative ways to subvert the unwritten dress code.
• No longer allowed to improvise weaponry with the contents of client’s desks.
• No longer allowed to start fires.
• No longer allowed to modify anyone’s system sounds.
• Or desktop wallpaper.
• Or homepage.
• Not allowed to design own business cards.
• Must not install program forcing users to solve a Sudoku before they can use their computer.
• No longer allowed to make up own radio alphabets.
• No longer allowed to bring kung pao calamari for lunch.
• Yes, even if I brought enough for everyone else.
• No longer allowed to run workorders through Babelfish loops “a few times” before submitting.
• No longer allowed to label computers in Japanese.
• No longer allowed to send a new coworker for the “counterclockwise CD-RWs”, the “left handed trackball”, the “WLAN cabling” or anything involving the word “radioactive”.
• Condoms are not water balloons. And vice versa.
• There are three basic responses to receiving an assignment: “Will do.” “That’s a bad idea because…” or a request for further clarification. Hysterical laughter, blank stares, and attempts to “beat the stupid out of the client” are not acceptable.
• The proper response to an impossible customer request is to find another way to accomplish their objective, not to ask them if “they are out of their fucking tree” or to “go away and take their stupid with them”.
• Not allowed to reprogram anything to use Metric Time.
• While traveling on company business, no longer allowed to break the sound barrier, have anyone not a long-term close friend in the hotel room, or pay for anything in pennies.
• No longer allowed to quote entire scenes from Top Gun, Clerks, or Office Space.
• Not authorized to inflate anything (except a car tire that actually is on a car).
• Not allowed to answer phone with bad Indian accent, with the name of any business not this one, or in the persona of any cartoon character.
• In fact, no longer allowed to answer the phone.
• No longer allowed to pun “just the fax.”
• Must not engage in Primal Scream Therapy in public.
• Not allowed to find out the LD50 of common office substances.
• Not allowed to practice voodoo.
• Not allowed to chant menacingly.
• Not allowed to speak Ebonics.
• Not allowed to photocopy anything without adult supervision.
• Not allowed to challenge anyone to the field of honor.
• Not allowed to use blunt trauma on customers or their computers.
• Not allowed to register my objection to command decisions by goosestepping, giving the Hitler salute, or humming the Horst Wessel Lied.
• Salt is not to be placed in the sugar bowl. Sugar is not to be placed in the salt shakers. Flour is not amusing.
• Going to San Francisco does not necessitate wearing flowers in my hair.
• Not allowed to accept compensation for work in any way, shape or form except check made out to employer.
• Not allowed to wear steel-toed fuzzy slippers.
• Not allowed to recreate any famous movie scene.
• Not allowed to hijack forklifts.
• Not allowed to speak in pirate.
• May not wear any hairstyle stolen from Bob Marley, Wayne Static, or any anime character.
• Not allowed to make saving throws, skill checks, or to-hit rolls.
• Not allowed to perform the bounce test on any-thing or -one.
• When out of sick days, not allowed to call in “temporarily dead for tax reasons.”
• Not allowed to wonder if the ground will be friends with me.
• Fingernails are a luxury, not a right.
• May not use language that would cause a sailor to burst into flame.
• Not allowed to adopt mannerisms and voice of “Igor”, E.T. or B.A. from the A-Team.
• Not allowed to convene a board of inquiry, a court-martial or a firing squad.
• A meterstick is not a sword and is not to be held like one.
• Tai chi is a strictly at-home activity.
• Backup tapes are not to be juggled.
• CDs are not frisbees.
• When the Active Directory is misbehaving, there is neither unrest in the forest nor trouble with the trees.
• May not break any arms limitation treaties.
• May not use the soldering iron or any power tools without adult supervision.
• My phone number is not eight six seven five three oh ni-yine.
• No longer allowed to have cell ring tones that no one would ever expect from a cell phone.
• Am not allowed to incite civil unrest.
• Must at all times obey local and federal statutes regarding possession of weaponry, medications and lasers.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show is only funny in context.
• May not perform amateur medicine, including but not limited to chiropractice, massage therapy and acupuncture.
• May not quote ancient racial proverbs to justify any course of action.
• Not allowed to blackmail anyone with the contents of their browser history, email, or laptop bag.
• Victory laps are unprofessional.
• Not allowed to reenact any Monty Python skits, including but not limited to the Cheeseshop sketch, the Vikings sketch, the Dead Parrot sketch and the Crunchy Frog sketch.
• May not carry a flashlight that would not look out of place as a Star Wars prop.
• When faced with a difficult situation, Option J is not an option.
• Mocking people for their choice of password is unprofessional.
• I am not here to kick ass and chew bubblegum.

I didn’t get a chance to respond to everything on my last ‘Dream MMO’ post. But people kept discussing game mechanics for the next week. So I figured “Why not keep this discussion going?”.

So evidently online game economy is a subject that the readers of my site have an opinion on.

Now, I still take the stance that inflation is inevitable, but can be mitigated from the design, although a lot of my readers disagree with that assessment. Or rather, in an ideal situation for an MMO there will be inflation. Because ideally there will always be more players, adventuring away and adding more virtual money to the economy.

One suggestion I saw come up a lot was to remove things from the economy. Which is true, if players are constantly having to replace their gear that would have a net effect of keeping their stockpiles of money down. Since that was the majority suggestion, let’s run with that tonight.

Of course, players get kind of cranky if you take their stuff away. I’m not saying that you should take players toys away on occasion, just that games need to be cautions about how they go about doing it. So here are the ideas I saw suggested last time, plus a few others.

Ways I think would be good to remove items:

Reduced Effectiveness With Use - It doesn’t force the player to ever give up a piece of gear, but it encourages the player to switch out as often as they can, in order to maintain peak effectiveness.

Damage - The equipment has it’s own sent of hit points, that are reduced by use. Eventually the equipment will break. Many games have systems similar to this. The best example I have seen was in the game Arcanum. If an item gets damaged, you could repair it. But instead of going back up to it’s maximum health when you repaired it, the current health and the max health would be averaged. So the more frequently you repaired you equipment, the longer it lasted. But that would make it cost more, and no matter what it will eventually break.

Binding - Once picked up, customized, or equipped, the item becomes locked to it’s owner. WOW made good use of this, as nearly all of the equipment from the first third of the game onward is binding in some way. Guildwars also did a neat job here, by making weapons customizable. You spend extra money on the weapon, to gain a bonus to it’s use, but then no other player can ever use it. They’ve basically found a way to get the players to pay extra for having their equipment bound.

Scavenging - WOW has this as enchanting, Auto Assault had a version of this. Basically you allow the players to turn the items they posses into the raw materials that they use to create new objects. As long as the player crafted items cost more resources to create than they yield when destroyed it shouldn’t be abusable. Especially is you make a separate set of resources that are *only* available from scavenging. If you link this to a damage system for the item, it could be rigged up that the less health the equipment has left, the less salvage it has. Which encourages the players to break their own toys as fast as possible.

Obsolescence - If the player has the best sword in the game, he will never spend money on another. So make a sword that is better than that. This is what every MMO would probably like to do. But there are practical limits to how many new areas, and new equipment the development team can get into the play-space. And they will never be able to make it fast enough to keep up with the ultra-hardcore players. Don’t get me wrong, I like this idea the best, and it’s part of the point of MMO’s. At least it’s part of the justification for the subscription.

One possibility to use obsolescence without breaking the developers backs, is to supplement it with a procedural one up system.

Let’s say that the best sword in the game is the Longsword of Leetness. It’s only available by doing a long and expensive quest, and at first, only the absolute most dedicated players have them. But months pass and more and more players have found the time to complete the quest. Once a certain percentage of end-game players have the sword the game determines that it needs to ‘one-up’ the Longsword of Leetness. So it releases the Battle-axe of Leetness. Which statistically is pretty close to identical to the Longsword in every way. Except that it has a bonus when used against a player who is using the Longsword. When enough players switch to the Battle-axe, it creates a super-powered mace, that has a bonus to take on the first two, and so on. It think a nice money sink could be developed by giving the end-game players a permanent arms race against each other.

So any comments on the ideas I listed? Any other ideas to remove stuff from the players?

I’m not around tonight to write anything tonight, so here’s another batch of amusing things that other people made.

Here’s a great site to waste an afternoon that might otherwise have been productive.(Thanks Shadow Cat)

International Affairs. But for kids.

A great big dance routine.

Old news, but if you haven’t seen this yet, you should.

A new video game.

Anyone who’s known me for any considerable amount of time knows how dedicated I am to my hobby of writing fan fiction. Some fans write about “Star Trek” and some write about “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” while others write about “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”

My favorite show is “60 Minutes”.

And if you haven’t caught the buzz yet, they’re making a movie.

Look for it next summer: “90 Minutes — The Sixty Minutes Motion Picture,” starring Martin Lawrence as Ed Bradley and Owen Wilson as Morley Safer.

And not to brag, but some very influential people in Hollywood have seen some of my work and were impressed enough to pony up some dough for me to write the novelization of the screenplay.

Here is a sample chapter.

—–

Morley Safer sneezed, overwhelmed by the dust in the basement of the academic library. He wished his anonymous source would hurry up. He didn’t have all day to collect dust like the antiquated AV equipment that surrounded him.

He looked at his watch.

“Ten more minutes, and I’m out of here,” he muttered to himself.

“Oh, I don’t believe you’re going anywhere, Mr. Safer,” said a voice from the darkness.

Just then, the lights came on.

“You!”

“That’s right, Safer. It’s me. Phillip Morris, himself. Mr. Big Tobacco.”

“You think this is the first time I’ve had a gun pointed at me?” Safer tried to play it cool, though he couldn’t take his eyes off Morris’s nicotine-stained trigger finger, taut around the mechanism that could, at any second, send a lump of lead and blue flash out of the revolver’s cold steel muzzle.

“You think killing me will stop the truth?” Safer said.

“Oh, I don’t aim to kill you, Mr. Safer,” Morris wheezed with detachment and menace. “You have to take a message to your friend Mike Wallace. I can’t have either of you poking around in my affairs any longer. As for the truth, go ahead. Tell the entire world. Tell them the whole truth. Tell them that I am an alien from outer space aiming to conquer and control the human race through its tendency toward addiction. They’ll think you’ve flipped.”

Morris shape shifted. Before Safer’s eyes the CEO became a gray alien, his face devoid of features, his eyes big, black and empty.

“I find your Earth weapons crude, but very effective.” The alien had not spoken, but the words found their way into Safer’s brain, nonetheless. “When you get out of intensive care, make sure your viewers know we prefer to communicate using telepathy.”

One of the creature’s three fingers cocked the hammer.

“Not so fast, Phillip Morris!” Another voice shouted.

Ed Bradley stepped out of the shadows, shirtless and scraped but no worse for wear, an ammo belt draped over his shoulder and a machine gun trained on Morris’s gargantuan head.

“Ed!” Safer cried out to his colleague. “No one is supposed to know I’m here. How did you find out?”

“I’m that good, baby. And you’re lucky I am. Otherwise, you’d be filing your reports from six feet under. Put the gun down, Morris. The jig is up.”

“Up yours,” Morris projected into Bradley’s mind.

“You alien muthafucka!” Bradley opened up on the shapeshifter with the all the M-60 had. Empty shells clattered to the floor as round after round splattered gray alien gray matter all over the dusty overhead projectors behind it.

Bradley then reached into his waistband and pulled out the 9-mm handgun he always carried just in case. He tossed it to Safer.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, Morley!”

They made their way through the labyrinth of stacks, up the stairs and out the front door. They each breathed a sigh of relief once inside Bradley’s Cadillac El Dorado.

“Check it out, Safer, I just got this new amp.” Bradley cranked the volume on his stereo, and soon Safer could feel the throbbing bass rattle his lungs.

“This be the shiz, my nigga,” Safer shouted over the hiphop groove.

“What the fuck, white boy? You can’t say nigga. Only I can say nigga.”

“That’s a load of shit, Ed. You’re saying a word is off limits to me just ’cause I’m white?”

“Damn right. You white folks got every thing else. You stole the blues, you stole rock n’ roll. There’s even white boys rapping now. You ain’t using the word nigga.”

“Whatever.”

They pulled up to the stoplight. The music so loud, they didn’t hear the black helicopter hovering over traffic.

But they noticed when the Volkswagen behind them erupted in a blazing fireball.

“Shit, they got a chopper on us!” Bradley cried. “Stinger missiles, too.”

“Well then, floor it, bitch!”

Bradley stomped on the gas. Tires squealed. The caddy swerved to avoid cross-traffic that had the light.

The helicopter rained bullets down on the Cadillac and surrounding traffic.

“They fuckin’ up my rims, yo!” Bradley shouted. “You gotta take that chopper out! Use the RPG in the back seat!”

The caddy weaved through traffic, the helicopter hard on its tail, leaving destruction in its wake. Cars crashed. Trucks exploded. Exciting shit. Safer hung out the window, the rocket launcher on his shoulder, taking aim at the helicopter.

“Can’t you keep this car moving in a straight line,” Safer complained. “I can’t get a shot on the copter.”

“Hey, don’t tell me how to drive and I won’t tell you how to get shot down by Lesley Stahl.”

Another explosion jolted the car from behind.

“The road don’t get no smoother. Shoot them muthafuckas!”

Safer cleared his mind, took aim, held his breath. He had but one shot. He squeezed the trigger.

Direct hit. The helicopter blew up. Pieces of it fell out of the sky onto cars and pedestrians. None but the pilot were seriously injured.

“Ha ha! Nice shootin’, my nigga!” Bradley said.

Bradley and Safer walked into CBSNews headquarters, greeted by their colleague Lesley Stahl.

“Hi boys.”

“Lesley, you should have seen it!” Bradley rejoiced. “You ain’t the only one that’s good at shooting down around here!”

She eyed Safer. “What’s he talking about?”

“Oh, it was nothing, really.” Safer said, shuffling his feet.

“Nothing? Nothing? Lesley, this helicopter was on our tail, and our boy Safer here took that motherfucker out!”

“Safer! Bradley!” Mike Wallace shouted. “In my office now!”

“Gotta go,” Safer said to Stahl. “Tell you all about it over dinner tonight?”

“Um… No thanks. I’m waxing my cat tonight.”

“Now, Safer!” Wallace shouted.

The two men followed Wallace into his office.

“Shut the god damn door!” he ordered. Bradley obliged him. “I just got off the phone with Phillip Morris! Can you explain why you’re harassing him, Safer?”

Safer and Bradley looked at each other, chilled.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you, god damn it!” Wallace shouted. “What the fuck are you doing bothering an important businessman like Phillip Morris?”

“I was doing legwork on a story. I didn’t know he would be there.”

“Didn’t know he would be there? You’re telling me he’s got nothing better to do than just show up wherever you happen to be!”

“Sir,” Bradley interjected. “Phillip Morris is an alien. And he’s supposed to be dead.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Bradley? And what the fuck were you doing there? Aren’t you supposed to be working on a story about air bags? And where the fuck is your god damn shirt?”

“But I got wind that Morley was walking into a trap.”

“Shut the fuck up, Bradley! You’re on thin ice! Thin! Fucking! Ice! I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about aliens and dead businessmen and traps! It’s bullshit! I’m sick of this loose cannon reporting! Safer, you’re off this story! I don’t want you going anywhere near Phillip Morris, do you understand me?”

“But Mike,” Safer said. “I’m on to a big story here.”

“Do you understand me!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now get the fuck out of my sight. Deadline is coming up tomorrow and I want to see something good from both of you!”

“Yes, sir.”

Bradley and Safer left Wallace’s office, hanging their heads. They turned the corner in the hall and there stood Andy Rooney.

“Did you ever notice how you two are a couple of fuckups?” he said.

“Shut the fuck up, Rooney,” Bradley said. “Aren’t you supposed to be in your office bitching about paperclips or some shit?”

“Whoa. Snap,” Safer said.

A few weeks ago I wrote a rant to clarify my thoughts on a few issues. Amongst the comments was this one, by Stickfodder:

“Ok in response to #2 I wasn’t old enough to vote the last two times so don’t you go blaming me blame my parents for not having me sooner. And as for #4 Skippy and Michiel In 2008!”

Now having someone want me for President certainly appeals to my vanity. On a scale between “Doesn’t Care About Recognition” and “Bottomless Vortex of Emotional Need” I probably lean just a teensy bit towards the latter.

But as much as I appreciate the vote of confidence, I must point out that it is misplaced.

But as a quick aside, I want to note that if I did run for office, I would never have Michiel as a running mate. Michiel is sane, logical, intelligent and moral. In other words horrible VP material. You see, if something bad was to happen to me, people might think that Michiel could step in and do just as good, or perhaps a better job than me. And that simply will not do.

The true purpose of the office of Vice President is to make everyone terrified of letting anything happen to the President. I don’t want sane, logical, intelligent or moral for a VP. I want a barely controlled psychopath. I want a man who can, at best, display a fingernail’s grasp on reality. The kind of guy who would call a press conference to strangle a kitten or eat a baby. Someone who becomes visibly aroused when talking about getting to be in charge of the nuclear arsenal. Because if somebody tries to assassinate me, I want those Secret Service agents motivated to jump in the way.

Which leads us back to the original point of this post, which is that I would probably be the worst President ever.

I would bring to the office a sense of, oh, let’s call it whimsy. The sort of whimsy that is usually associated with Pee-wee Herman, or Caligula.

I would preemptively invade foreign countries. Not because they harbored terrorists, or had natural resources that our nation needed. My military adventures would be based entirely on how hot the women of the country in question tended to be. All assets would be pulled out of the Middle East, and refocused on Brazil. The women there are so hot that they got a hairstyle named after them.

Now to be fair, there’s a lot of good things I could probably accomplish while in office. For instance, I have a sure fire method to reduce the price of gasoline.

Step One: Invite the heads of every major petrochemical corporation to come visit me at the White House.

Step Two: Arrange for comfortable seating, drinks, hour’dourves, perhaps a nice string quartet.

Step Three: The Speech.

The Speech will go something like this:

“Gentlemen, I am very glad that all of you could take the time out of your busy schedules to join me here tonight. As you are no doubt aware, our nation is currently undergoing a bit of a fuel crisis. But I am positive that the people in this room have the know-how and motivation to set things right. I would like to introduce you fine people to Master Sergeant Atrocity.

Master Sergeant Atrocity is a former Special Forces weapons expert. He then spent eight years in Delta Force, followed by a ten year career doing black ops and wet-work for the CIA in a variety of hot-spots around the globe. He’s brutal, efficient, practically invisible, and completely loyal to me.

If gasoline at the pump isn’t under two dollars within the next three months, Master Sergeant Atrocity will go to your home and torture your family to death in front of you. Then he will finish you off. And it will look like a suicide. A messy, lengthy, and amusingly creative suicide.

Are there any questions? Yes you there, the CEO of Conglomco International?”

“Who the hell do you think you are? You can’t just interfere with our business and threaten to–”

“Master Sergeant Atrocity? Please give our friend here a lesson in applied economic theory.”

“VIOLENT LOVE BEGINS NOW!”

Various unpleasant wet and squishy noises result.

“Are there any other questions?”

“What happens if we go public with these threats?”

“I would describe the results of such a breach in confidentiality as ‘Spectacularly Unfortunate’.”

“I see. Well it’s cheap gas for America from now on I guess.”

Step Four: Replace the carpet.

One day I walked into my supervisors office and the entire design team of my project was in there, in the middle of a very serious debate.

(Names changed to protect the guilty)

Cred: Ask him! (points at me as soon as I enter the room)

Me: Ask me what?

Sill: Do you think Annie Potts is hot?

Me: Who?

Pick: The actress who played the secretary in Ghostbusters.

Cred: She was also in Designing Women.

Me: Well she was hot. I haven’t seen her since the mid-90’s.

Sill: She’s aged real well.

Cred: Dude, she’s like, 60-something now!

Me: That doesn’t mean she can’t still be hot. That just makes it less likely.

Sill: Let us consult the internet.

Internet image search commences. After a brief search a current picture of Annie Potts is procured. Her MILFdom is debated. (Or GILFdom as the case may be.)

Pick: She looks pretty good for her age.

Sill: I agree. And she’s a redhead. I’d hit it.

Cred: You guys are nuts. I don’t find her attractive at all.

Me: I gotta go with the other guys on this. I think she’s still pretty good looking. Plus she’s famous, which has to count for something.

Cred: But I can’t stand her voice.

Sill: (Gives Cred a look which could only be described as “withering”) When you fantasize about women you have them speaking? What the hell is wrong with you?

Pick: I think less of you as a man now.

Everything sucks.

Don’t believe me? Read this.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080621/ap_on_re_us/out_of_control

A third of the country is underwater and tomatoes will make you vomit your own poop. Man, it’s high-time to get the hell out of here.

(Voice of Satan): “You can’t afford to fill your gas tank, and you will sit for days at the airport with not so much as a bottle of water, because security will take it away from you. But go ahead and try to leave. Kill time by shopping at that shitty overpriced bookstore that only sells People magazines and Tony Robbins motivational cassettes. Hungry? Have a six-dollar muffin! There is no escape! Bwahahahahahaha!”

I put a gallon of gas in the car last week. Payday was still 10 days away so I only had five bucks. As I went to put the gas cap back on, I accidentally made eye contact with another guy who was fueling up.

“This used to be a good place to buy gas,” he sighed. We exchanged a look that’s usually reserved for the funeral of a distant relative — dejected resignation. “It’s really sad, but what are you going to do?”

You know that bumper sticker, “Grass, Gas, or Ass. No One Rides For Free”? You know things have gotten bad when you’re sitting behind that guy in traffic and instead of thinking, “douchebag,” you’re thinking, “Well, that makes sense. What do his friends expect? That he’s going to just drive them all over town willy nilly? Buncha freeloaders.”

Eight years ago, when that guy went to pick up his date, the girl would receive a long lecture from her father on the order of, “I don’t want you seeing that boy. He’s no good. He has no respect for anybody, and he obviously doesn’t respect you.”

Now the girl’s dad’s saying, “That kid has a good head on his shoulders. Excellent business sense. I think he’s a keeper. See if you can talk him down to a handy. He’s going places.”

One of those ginormous monster SUVs cut me off in traffic the other day, setting off one of the most artistic, eloquent, and deeply-rooted-in-high-school-economics barrages of obscenity I’ve ever mustered. The gist was something like, “You selfish fucker! It’s bad enough you can’t use your turn signal, but you’re driving one of those unnecessary, wasteful machines that’s increasing the demand and lowering the supply, thus driving up the price! Cocksucker!”

Then I saw the “Iraq veteran” sticker on his bumper and shrugged. “Well, at least he fought for it.”

I think Iraqi war veterans should get free gas for life and it should be paid for out of the personal bank accounts of key Bush administration members.

I suppose the upcoming election should make me hopeful, but none of the candidates are using the words “George W. Bush” and “guillotine” in the same sentence yet.

(Note to Secret Service: I’M ONLY KIDDING! I have deep philosophical convictions against killing people, whether the killing is legally sanctioned by the fall of a gavel or otherwise. It’s just that “guillotine” was less ambiguous than “the stocks” because stocks can refer to those things sold on Wall Street, which a presidential candidate might actually mention, but what I really would have meant are those two boards where you put the prisoner’s head and hands through and lock him in, so the general public has the opportunity to walk by and shout curses at him, throw rotten eggs and salmonella tomatoes, or give him a good swift kick in the ass. That would be more fun anyway, come to think of it. Right there on the National Mall, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, or maybe over by the reflecting pool near the Vietnam War Memorial. Poetic, indeed, but see how many more words that took? Suffice it to say, if that happened I’d sit on the tarmac for up to a full week to take my vacation to D.C. Besides, they have pandas at the National Zoo, and my daughter would just love that. The point is, I do NOT actually wish the president death or even permanent disablement. I just want to give him a titty twister.)

Even when Bush leaves office it won’t be the last we’ve heard of him. Traditionally, every president gets his memoir published. It’s just too bad the title, “If I Did It, Here’s What Happened,” is already taken.

Sorry if all that sounds bitter. I’m trying to look at the bright side of it all, and here’s what I’ve come up with:

Four dollars a gallon is just a free-market solution to global warming. Recent reports my father-in-law claimed to have heard on the news show that Americans have collectively reduced their travel by some 40 billion miles.

Come back, polar bears! Everything’s going to work out!

Why hasn’t the White House and Fox News started sharing this wonderful new perspective on things? Why isn’t there a sign on every gas pump explaining this, like the signs at IKEA that explain that they only hire a handful of unhelpful assholes so they can keep prices low?

My guess is for the neo-cons and oil companies to take on that perspective, they’d have to acknowledge that global warming exists.

Here’s another ray of optimism for you: I wouldn’t be surprised to find out people are starting to find their proverbial last straw broken. For a lot of people, it’s starting to feel like they’re just going to work to buy gas so they can go back to work. Once that feeling catches on and spreads like a virus, people will quit going, and when their boss calls to see where they are, the reasons are going to sound absurd.

Like, out of the almost 300 million people living in America today, at least one guy really liked tomatoes. Like, that was his way of treating himself for working so hard — every Sunday, he would sit down with a ripe, red, round, succulent, juicy tomato and he would savor it. It wasn’t much, but it was the thing that kept him going.

And a couple weeks ago he went to the store and, “What the fuck do you mean there’s no tomatoes today!? Why do I even bother! Fuck it! I’m staying home! You got any tomato seeds?”

And after three days of no one at the office hearing from him, his boss called.

“Oh, no. I’m fine. I just decided to stay home and work in my garden. Yeah, forever. Should be a pretty good crop. All organic. Hey listen, do you have any butter you can trade me? I’ve fallen way behind in my churning.”

And that’s how we’ll all become Amish again, but we’ll be the most technologically advanced Amish people the world has ever seen. You’ll spend four hours churning butter to take to the guy who shod your mule, but before you ride your bicycle all the way over there, you’ll text him to make sure he’s home.

That actually excites me — like we’ll renew our vows with ole Mother Earth.

(This is why you don’t mix metaphors, kids. See that last sentence, I have us married to our mother. Yuck.)

I’m taking up a couple new hobbies in preparation for this new technoprimitive society. Today, I started my garden. For now, it is but a lonely, potted jalapeño pepper plant, but I have dreams of expanding so it takes up my whole back yard and has a miniature golf course through the middle of it, so I can pick and play.

If only I hadn’t started so late in the season.

Also, I intend to start practicing with a boomerang so I can hunt small game. Why not a rifle? Because in a pinch, I don’t know how to make bullets. But I have a pretty good idea how to make sandpaper. Plus, I’m pretty sure the game warden’s not checking for boomerang hunting licenses. I’ll have to check, but I’m pretty sure the guy at Cabela’s is going to answer me with a weird look when I ask to buy one. So there’s, like, $20 I just saved, which will keep me going back to work for half a week.

Todd Merriman is a standup comedian. He lives just outside Austin, TX, with his daughter Ava and his babymama Erin. Todd will be opening for Brian Posehn (Just Shoot Me, Mr. Show, Comedians of Comedy) at Cap City Comedy Club in Austin, TX, on Aug. 7, 8 and 9. Call (512) 467-2333 for details.