Beth's Contradictory Brain

Comedy

Walking along the boardwalk in AC, I got an idea from seeing all the huge billboards for upcoming shows.

I told Nerdstar, if I were ever a fairly well known comedian, I would have a "Pay My Bills" tour!

The show:

Thanks so much for coming! No, really, thanks for payin' my bills! I just got this amazing house a few months ago. You should see it.

Well, no, DON'T come see it. That would be weird. But, thanks for payin' for it!

And my car. Wow. I finally got a Bentley because it has all the B's on it - you know, for Beth. You should feel how amazing the ride is.

Well, no, I won't let you drive mine. But again, thanks for payin' for it.

Well, you've all been fantastic. Thanks for coming. I needed the money!

Good night!

And then walk off the stage.

Of course, then I'd have to go back out and do the rest of a real show. But I think that would be a fantastic opening.

Faith and Science

We finally got around to watching Encounters At The End Of The World this afternoon. One of Nerdstar's good friends from college has done two "tours" working down in Antarctica and actually took the picture used in the posters for the movie.

I love watching documentaries about nature and science and such. I love the Planet Earth and Blue Planet series - although what I learned is it is an eat and/or be eaten planet we live on!

I don't talk much about my faith or being a Christian, but it is a big part of who I am. And watching all those type of shows, and ones about science and the universe, simply re-affirm my belief in an amazing Creator God. I believe science brings us closer to, not further from, the mind of God. I believe that all of nature - it's vastness of color and creativity and variety - is simply a small reflection of the infinite creativity of God.

It surprised me to hear the narrator talk about how most of the scientist, who are brilliant and creative and well-traveled, believe man will not survive for long. How can people who are probably more aware than most of the amazing ingenuity and resourcefulness of people believe we won't find a way to survive whatever comes? We put man on the moon, hell, they're living in Antarctica, I believe we'll find a way.

Being a teenager in the 80s, I grew up hyper aware of nukes. We lived in Dallas, and my friends and I would talk about how we'd just be gone in a flash with all the military bases and so forth in Texas. We didn't have to worry about what came after. I believe in the terror of nuclear weapons. I don't believe in the claims of man-made climate disasters.

My Best Tax Idea

I posted this as a comment over on CaliValleyGirl's blog:

I have always wanted there to be a way on our tax forms for us to at least be able to say I want X amount of my taxes to go to X,Y and Z. That way we'd have some sort of say in how our tax dollars are spent. Even if we could only designate half of our tax dollars - then we'd have a much truer voice in government.

A True Stake in This for Taxpayers

With the government using tax dollars - your money and mine - to bailout and buy companies, what I believe they should do is start issuing stock certificates from these companies to anyone who's paid taxes in the past two or three years. Then maybe taxpayers would pay more attention and demand some return on their money. And, the government wouldn't be able to squander any profits that might be gained from this fiasco.

Yes

I've had this idea, of shooting paint balls onto the cars of bad drivers and then after so many hits they either can't drive for X amount of time or pay heavy fines, for years. Although I must admit these guys have put a lot more thought into it.

UPDATE: How funny, the writers and commenters on Throwing Things apparently don't read Vodka Pundit, yet they came up with this post today:

But, we mused, what if the law allowed everybody one non-injurious slap against everybody else?

There would be some rules. You can slap as many people as you want, but you get only one slap against any one person. That one slap would bear no legal repercussion, but the law wouldn't require that people allow themselves to be slapped -- businesses could impose no-slapping rules; people could employ bodyguards. Thus, you could be banned from US Airways or Best Buy for using your slap (and would be, until they had banned so many customers that they'd have to allow it) but you wouldn't be prosecuted. You'd never get close enough to Tom Cruise or Rod Blagojevich to take your shot. And just to keep this honest, I'm banning slaps-for-hire.

Read the whole thing and the comments... then tell me your slap list.

I Suck

I was flipping thru the news channels when I saw a brief segment on this place. What sucks so hard is that I've had that exact same idea for a few years now and have never found a way to make it happen. I suck. I've been talking to this guy at work about it, and he was trying to find some warehouse space or something, but no luck with his connections. Wait till I show him the link on Monday...

Evil Airways

No, this isn't a rant about the state of air travel these days...

I try to explain to friends of ours that, in spite of her adorableness and innocent looks, Nerdstar is the evil one. I'm rarely believed. It took my parents years to see it. This conversation we had yesterday backs me up.

We were out for lunch and talking about traveling when Nerdstar brought up movies on airplanes and that she'd been stuck watching Enchanted twice - oh the horror. Then she said they never show Snakes On A Plane, or Lost, or anything like that. Then we thought several air disaster movies they could be showing on flights, or even just the Airplane series. Then she said she could just make a loop of planes crashing in midair or on runways. I told her she could start her own airline and show all of the movies she wanted - and she could name it Evil Airways.

Florida Girls

Man, the video of those teenage girls in Florida beating the hell out of that other girl is whack. I don't necessarily find it shocking, I think most girls/women know girls can be brutal physically as well as mentally and emotionally.

Nerdstar thinks they should get six years in jail.

I think they should be made to join the Marines for an 8 year enlistment, four of which they cannot be promoted. If they were boys this might be more likely. I think it would do them a world of good. I think jail would/will only make things worse.

Ideas

I really wish I had media skills - you know, I could pull videos up and edit and dub and soundtrack them. I don't know how, but I sometimes have ideas that I think would be fun.

Tonight watching AI and seeing Paula's poor squashed boobies I immediately had Rage Against The Machine's Bulls On Parade in my head. Wouldn't it be fun to insert boobs for bulls and have a steady video stream of boob/cleavage shots for the duration of the song.

I'd also love to do all the out takes from The View of them being totally gay. Those small moments alone make it worth DVRing every day.

If I Were...

We've been to all levels of baseball games, from college to pro. One of the cool things is how sometimes (maybe more in college and semi-pro) the batters have theme songs that are played when they come up to bat.

So...

If I were a baseball player - my theme song would be AC/DC's Have A Drink On Me - and every time I hit a home run everyone in the stadium would get a free beer!

I'd be the.most.popular.player.ever.

Penny Idea

Every so often the idea of discontinuing pennies is floated. I think it's a great idea. Here's how I think it could be done.

Announce on January 1 that in exactly one year no more pennies will be made or circulated. In that one year period everyone can take their pennies to any bank and get the equivalent of 2 for 1 - that will encourage everyone to actually turn in all the pennies out there. Then the govt. can sell them as scrap metal to whoever wants it and probably make a profit. (I'm pretty sure the metals in the pennies are worth more than 1 cent.)

Amusing

While sitting in traffic on the way to work last Friday I was happily listening to Abba. (Shut up - it's Nerdstar's cd not mine.) The woman in the car behind me had something on her personalized plates about the opera and looked absolutely miserable. (I'm sure there was no correlation.) I had this thought, that if I could just run back and hand her the Abba cd for her to listen to, then she could have fun driving to work, too.

Then I had a thought about how much fun it would be if everyone's back windshield had some sort of display that showed what they were currently listening to. Especially with all the people out there with iPods on shuffle. Mine goes from AC/DC to Captain and Tenniel in no time.

Car Tattoos

I'm really liking having a brand new car. But there's one small issue.

I drove a '69 camaro from age 15 to 35. That car was mine and everyone who saw that car knew it was mine. (It even got me in trouble a couple of times when people saw it parked somewhere I shouldn't have been.)

So I'm having a little trouble with the new Corolla feeling like mine. I don't really like bumperstickers. I'm not likely to bother with personalized plates.

I keep thinking there should be car tattoos. Not sure what I'd want mine to be - but there'd probably be more than one.

Yeah, I could probably find some expensive body shop and some cool dude to do some custom paint something or other. Not sure it's worth what it would cost...

Interesting

Someone actually put into business a similar idea to mine about pimping out Ramen dog.

Mobile Pods

Driving around today I heard one of those commercials for OnStar and got to thinking about one of my old ideas again.

I think we're at a point technologically where we could have vehicles that are completely programmable and self driving.

Imagine a vehicle - a kind of personal pod that can come in models for any # of people; one person, two person, six person, whatever, pods - that all you do is get in - type in your destination, and sit back and let it take you there. In the pod there is wi-fi, music, video, whatever you'd like for entertainment, or even just space to sleep until you arrive. These aren't train like vehicles, they're all little individual vehicles, but could be smaller than current cars.

I think we could use existing infrastructure - roads and highways and such - maybe just lay whatever it is that would direct the cars in the middle of the lanes. This way it wouldn't be like building a whole new rail system or anything.

I know the initial cost would be massive.

But...

just think what it would be worth to never have to pay for car insurance, or traffic tickets, or to sit it traffic, or have another crash or fatality due to vehicles.

It could be set up where people either own their pods, or there could be X number of pods per house or whatever, not individually owned, but everyone has a swipe card and you just pay a per mile fee.

Anyway. Yes, these are the kinds of ideas I've had all my life. This one's not exactly The Jeffersons, but I think it's feasible if we wanted it to be.

Pimping out the Dog

While apartment hunting and eating in DC last week, we got to talking about ways to make some extra cash to fund Nerdstar's food habit.

We had Ramen with us on the trip and one afternoon we were outside Nerdstar's future workplace waiting for one of her co-workers to come meet Ramen and several people stopped and asked if they could pet Ramen.

It simply can't be stated how much Ramen loves to be petted, I think even moreso by strangers than us.

We simply put two and two together and figured we'd place some ads for fur therapy - $15 for fifteen minutes of petting Ramen.

Another service would be to rent him out for weekend afternoons to people who for whatever reason can't have a dog but want one - they can take him out for walks and hikes.

(I'll leave it to my dear readers to figure out just how serious we are!)

Oscars

I thought Ellen - the straightest lesbian in America - did a pretty good job last night. Yes, the show went on way too long, but I'm not sure how you could make it shorter without taking out the semi-entertaining bits. I liked the dancers.

I think the commercials were better than the ones during the Super Bowl. Loved the iPhone commercials and the American Express ones. Finally got to see the sad little robot commercial - thought it was cool.

My idea for winning best documentary - figure out "the formula" - like making a documentary about children with AIDS trying to stop global warming while ending the tragedy that is Darfur. But then, at the same time, make a documentary about making the documentary just to win the Oscar - and that one would win the Spirit Awards.

And, if the Oscars were "green" this year - did all the people involved get their by hybrid car or bicycle instead of limo? Probably not.

Glad

I'm glad to see someone else has already bothered with inventing a heated keyboard, saves me the trouble.

Leaps

I was wondering the other day when we get to teleporting and telepathy. (Now that would be an A T & T that would make some money.)

Seriously. Thinking back over the leaps in technology in the past fifty to a hundred years, aside from medicine, most have been in travel - trains, cars, airplanes - and in communication - telegraph, radio, television, phones, cell phones, computers. But what real leap can be made from our current travel and communication? We can be anywhere in the world within about 24 hours. We can talk to anyone in the world at any time. The next step would have to be doing both instantly - traveling by teleporting and communicating by telepathy.

So other than leaps in medical care, what do you think will be the next big technological leap?

History Help

While in Moneterey, due to the conference Nerdstar was a part of, and the topics they covered, we'd talk about them over dinner.

An offshoot of those dicussions was about how little I know about world history. Hell, I'm only recently getting a better understanding of some parts of American history. And an even more deeply neglected area of my education was/is geography. I was telling Nerdstar I've always enjoyed looking at those "civilization timelines" in the front of world history textbooks, but I really never could wrap my brain around all of it. I have no good overview of what happened where and when in world history. Part of what led to me sort of giving up before really getting started was that the studying of Greek and Roman mythology without a strong foundation in actual history confused the hell out of me. I could never keep straight who the actual historical figures where, and who the made up ones where.

I got to thinking about how cool it would be to have a world map that has layers like those used to study human anatomy - you know, you've got the skeleton layer, then you put the next page over it and it adds the muscles and so forth. I'd love to have a world map that showed who was where when, maybe have the layers be every 100 years or so.

Yes, I'm a nerd.

Two Things

Two things I'd like to have...

A digital gas gage telling me exactly how much gas I have left and exactly how many miles it'll get me.

A "mute" button on the tv remote to turn off all the graphics on the screen, including all those annoying news crawls.

Day Dream

It's a darn shame I like living in the US so much (even if it's here in the Midwest)! One idea that hit me while listening to that AFI 100 greatest movie songs the other day was how cool it would be to go to Iraq and teach things like that.

Then tonight at Barnes and Noble I picked up Christopher Hitchens' new biography of Jefferson and a book about the transcontinential railroad by Stephen Ambrose. It led me to expand on that idea and think about how it would be fun to set up a big movie theater/cafe in Baghdad and show classic American films, have book discussions on people like Jefferson and Lincoln and really find fun ways to share this big crazy idea of democracy.

I'm in no way saying Iraq's government and democracy has to mirror ours. We can all certainly hope they never go thru a civil war like we did. But what's the point of over 200 years of trail and error and history if we can't be some sort of example - and what more fun way would there be to share that example than thru movies, books and music?

Random Wondering

I love sitting by the window when flying. I love looking down and seeing all the empty land in this country, wondering who owns it and why and what they're doing with it.

Then I got to thinking how fun it would be to own a field near an airport so I could create sayings in them that people on the airplanes could read. Of course, this lead to wondering if phrases like "crash and burn" or "die, die, die" or even just random curse words would bring the authorities to my front door. Who would even have jurisdiction over such a thing??

And no, it's not scary at all having an evil brain!

Customized Commentators

We watched part of the football games yesterday in between naps. The commentators usually either annoy me or bore me to tears. I know sometimes during games they'll mic the coach. So, I thought it would be cool if instead of having commentators they just mic'd the coaches and players and let us all listen in and really get the feel of the game. Yes, I know, they all say bad words - then make it an alternative audio line and you can subscribe to it or something.

Then, as the game went on I thought of a few more alternate audio tracks. You could have one for the women who might not be that much into football, but don't mind spending the time watching it with their men. The commentary could be something like Joan and Melissa do for all the red carpet crap. Then you could have a comedy commentary. Or a gay commentary. It's pretty endless really. And with all the stations satellite radio has - they could certainly easily do something like this!

New Ad

Nerdstar caught a new commercial for the Army Reserves this morning. It made me think of a different one for them:

Picture: Some lackey in a cubicle maze hell
Voiceover: Ever have one of those days you just want to kill someone at work? Join the Army and you can!
Picture: Tough Army guys firing big guns.
Voiceover: United States Army - it's not just a job - it's a stress reliever.