Occupy Burn Comments? Is there a digital NYPD car we can all publicly crap on? Otherwise, not gonna happen.

I would like to take this opportunity to comment here and to apologize to each and every one of you reading this now for not taking the opportunity to comment on a previous occasion. The opportunity to comment does not come around often enough—the recent spike in cassava prices may have something to do with that, what with most comments getting more or less the same mileage they did back in the 1970’s—and it was a truly unconscionable lack of judgment on my part not to have commented at that time. One cannot comment often enough these days, I think, and so I wish to reiterate my comments for not having commented when I should have commented. As comments go, of course, this isn’t a very good one, and I would comment for that, but then again, I am not a professional commenter with an advanced degree in commenting, for which lack I would like to comment at this time. I am an entirely self-taught commenter and so my comments tend to be a little rough around the edges, and so I would like to again comment for my inexcusable commenting autdidactism.

I wanted to be a commenter when I was a boy; all of my childhood heroes were commenters and I would have collected commenter bubble gum cards had someone manufactured them in those days. No one did, the times being benighted as they were, and so I had to settle for collecting the baseball cards of players having bad years. If there was a pitcher on a last place team who couldn’t find the strike zone if he was standing ten feet in front of it with a half-blind umpire behind the plate, I had his card; if there was a hitter who couldn’t hit the broad side of a fat babe’s butt with a 2 x 4, I had his card as well. Sometimes I collected good players, but only if they were on the disabled list with a pulled hamstring or a torn rotator cuff. I kept all of my baseball cards in an old shoebox my father called the litany of woes, because everyone in the box had an excuse for why they weren’t playing as well as they might that season.

As you’ve probably surmised by now, I did not get to be a commenter. My parents opposed the idea out of hand, pointing out that commenters, however well they did the job, got paid squat. This was true, of course; commenting did not pay very well then unless you were Walter Lippman. In addition to the poor pay, most people in those days regarded professional commenters as little better than sob sisters, PR men, and Red Sox fans. Mindful of these facts, my parents insisted that I find some more remunerative line of endeavor like dope peddling or swindling little old ladies out of their life savings. I commented on not living up to their expectations, whereupon my father threw a fit and a Fig Newton at me and told me to shut up, he was sick of my comments. He was like that sometimes. I remember one Christmas where he dressed up like Santa Claus (say what you will about him, Pop could do a mean Santa impression) and came down the stairs to his waiting children with a sack of toys thrown over his shoulder and then threw cans of string beans he’d gotten for half price at us. That was a wonderful Christmas, or so my brothers tell me; I had a pretty bad concussion so my memory of that day is a little fuzzy.

Now, at this point you’re probably wondering why I’m commenting for just about everything under the son and, I’m sorry to say this, I’m wondering why you’re wondering. Explanations are so last century, after all; there hasn’t been a truly reasonable explanation for anything ever since Calvin Coolidge’s press secretary, C. Bascom Slemp, invented the cardboard tube that toilet paper comes wrapped around in 1897, but this hasn’t stopped people from looking for them. The modern comment, unlike many other art forms, and definitely unlike the classical comment, is about nothing at all. It is, in short, Seinfeldian in its philosophical provenance. You do not need to have done something wrong in order to comment on it in this our postmodern Great Republic. Politicians spend a lot of time commenting on one thing or another, especially during an election year, where if pandering for votes won’t work, a pol will grovel for them. I’m especially fond of pols commenting on events that occurred years, sometimes centuries, before any of us were born. Still, it’s nice to know that their hearts are in the right place, even if all that and a couple of bucks will buy you is a ride on the subway.

In any case, I don’t think I would have made a very good professional commenter. In listening to my comments on tape, I can tell that I lack the one great gift of the true commenter: sincerity. Yes, I can comment all day long, and as a part of my work, I’ve often had to do just that, but the people I’m commenting to can tell it’s all form and no substance. They can tell I am saying, I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience, sir, but that I’m thinking, buzz off, dumbass, and take your ugly wife with you. Sam Goldwyn had it right: if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. I just don’t have that in me, I guess.

Wrong Edmund. I meant Edmund Morris, not Edmund White.

I think zooms encourage laziness because I broke both of my zooms and now I have to use primes, largely because I am too cheap to buy a new zoom. Making a virtue of necessity is always a good thing, except when the necessity involved is a lack of sausage pizza and root beer. Then necessity stops being a virtue and becomes Frank Zappa and the mothers of invention. You know, I don’t really know what that means…

And yes, there are things you can do while the parade passes you by:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/akaky/sets/72157627918850744/show/

Sidney, dammit, stop messing with us. I was thinking that if we could improve the technology, we could run the Daytona 500 on nothing but day old Taco Bell fajitas. What an absolute disappointment this has turned out to be!

This is from the archives, but it proves that I am ahead of my time, at least when it comes to biofuels. Yes I am, the Steve Jobs of whiz:

I read in the New York Times recently, and if you can’t trust what you read in the New York Times then what’s the whole point of living, I mean really, what’s the point, that a group of scientists and engineers in Singapore have invented an electric battery that runs on human urine. Yes, you read that right, the battery uses urine as a power source. The battery also runs on sweat, saliva, and semen, although the whole concept of getting semen into a battery without the cops showing up to haul you away for public indecency leads me to suspect that we won’t be seeing the semen powered battery on the market anytime soon. In any case, of the three excretions, urine is the most efficacious as well as the most abundant. The designers plan to power small electromedical devices like glucose monitors and hearing aids with their battery at first, but they have plans of designing a urine battery to operate laptops, washing machines, and dishwashers in the near future.

It’s not everyday you see a revolution announced in the New York Times or see the revolution get such prominent treatment in it pages. After all, the Times, in its infinite journalistic wisdom, buried the story of Dr. Pincus and his invention of the birth control pill somewhere in the middle of the A section, no doubt at the top of a page dominated by an ad for Saks Fifth Avenue, thereby completely missing the beginning of the sexual revolution. Not this time, however; this time the Times announced the coming revolution in the Sunday magazine section, where tens of thousands of people could see the future for themselves. Yes, the future is upon us, and yet, for the most part, we fail to see it. This nation’s reliance on unreliable foreigners and their petroleum is almost over, and we did not have to disturb a cormorant or discomfit a caribou in order to achieve our energy independence. No, indeed, all we will have to do is look out for number one.

There will be some problems, obviously, in gearing up for this new era of energy independence; this is a battery technology and there will be some old-new technology hybrids along the way as we move ever forward into the bright new world of tomorrow. The urine hybrid automobile, for example, might use the driver’s urine to run the battery and then shift to a standard internal combustion engine when the supply of urine to the battery ran low. Such a hybrid also assumes the creation of a new fueling infrastructure along the nation’s roads and highways, with special pumps located near the rest rooms for the convenience of the hybrid car drivers. The car buyer of the future may even have their choice between male and female versions of the same model hybrid automobile, given that a man would find refueling the battery of such an automobile while driving much easier than a woman would. The women’s rights movement would no doubt find this sexist to the nth degree, and may even sue to prevent such automobiles from coming on the market, or at the very least demand that the automobile industry design a car that could accommodate both male and female drivers. This would not be the easiest thing in the world to do, biology being what it is. However much the feminists may choose to deny basic anatomy, the fact remains that men can urinate into a tube while driving much easier than a woman can. This may even stimulate an interest in kilts as the uniform of choice for long distance truckers.

The benefits to the American economy would be massive, the new technology creating in its wake vast new numbers of jobs in the plumbing supply industry. Control of the fixtures market, especially the vital urinal market, would be up for grabs, with wildcatters, Silicon Valley types, and who knows what other geniuses going for the golden gusto. Business magazines would trumpet the call of the new markets available and hortatory articles would appear about the men and women who saw the technology and its possibilities and started battery and plumbing supply companies in their garages. The terms Battery Alley and Porcelain Valley would be as familiar on the lips of stockjobbers on Wall Street as Silicon Valley and Leavenworth are today. The importance of this market to all aspects of life here in our Great Republic will be so great that no one today can possibly comprehend it, and in the future the federal government, mindful of national security concerns, will have to strictly control the export of American urinals to foreign countries lest some of them fall into the wrong hands.

Big Oil, of course, will not go gently into that good night. They will try to stifle the new technology, but they will fail in the end; the market will stop their nefarious plotting cold. With an ever-growing demand for energy in China and India and the rest of the developing world, no one will pay the near extortionate prices for Middle Eastern oil when urine is so much more available and cheaper to boot. No, we’d have to stop complaining about Big Oil after the eventual triumph of the urine-powered battery. The battery makers would be the new economic villains, replacing the oil companies and Bill Gates as the objects of economic scorn and loathing. The big drug companies would come in for their share of the vitriol as well, as their control of the now strategic diuretics market would determine who could and could not get to work in the morning. Coffee companies, beer brewers, and soft drink manufacturers would all do well in the new economic dispensation. In fact, the new batteries would power a computer in a car engine capable of determining just how much beer you’ve had to drink and refuse to operate if there was too much alcohol in your urine, saving the lives of thousands of people who would have otherwise died in automobile accidents. Yes, a bright new future awaits us all, courtesy of those Singaporean gentlemen and their technical breakthrough, this key to the future, this battery that just needs us to keep going and going and going. And to think you saw the revolution announced in the New York Times, of all places; will wonders never cease?

“The fry cook at McDonald’s cannot be separated from the hamburger…”

There’s something very Zen about that…

The fry cook at McDonald’s cannot be separated from the hamburger…”

There’s something very Zen about that…

Struck me as somehow unhygienic, if not creepily cannibalistic.

You are being shallow, grasshopper. Like the fry cook, you must flow with the Tao of the Hamburger.

Panos, you don’t have to change this or anything, because I don’t think anyone in Texas gives a rat’s ass one way or the other, but I am not from Poughkeepsie; the Post Office didn’t like that I didn’t have a return address on the box, so rather than have squadrons of Postal Inspectors hold it up in order to examine the thing for explosives, poisonous snakes, or my mother’s meat loaf, amongst other dangerous substances, I slapped the address of the Dutchess County Building on the box and sent its on its way.

Civi,

http://youtu.be/gI6sARmxEuc

enjoy!

is there money in hooing, though, especially these days?

works, dammit, works! with an s at the end!

“The trick is to be behind the police lines, not in front of them. Credentials don’t matter. The NYPD are like any other guard dog. They smell fear but the fearless are invisible to them.”

http://youtu.be/GHnmWgv55ZU

Jason assentior, longam multa foraminibus excitat ignaviam vitrum in omnes utuntur, et denique cum luminis erigit accumsan pellentesque vigore actionis, et a sana mens sana in corpore. Suffragio pro mihi in proxima septimana comitia scriptor. AVE AKAKIUS!!!

AKAKY IRL: How did I get stuck with these idiots, that’s what I want to know. I mean, really, the other twerp wasn’t bad enough, now I have to listen to this crap morning, noon, and night? It’s enough to drive you to drink.

sufflare asinum tuum, sapien magna ;-)

Χίλια συγγνώμη, πολιτικό, αλλά έφτασα τα χίλια στην Αγορά Burn 02. Το έκανα, πραγματικά!

You know, I have no damn clue if that’s even vaguely correct.