29 things to be happy about!
Happiness knows no particular order, and neither does this list:
1) We may very well, within a year's time, have a black president. We may have a female president. We may, unfortunately, also have a bizarre robotic nutball Mormon president. No matter how it turns out, it will be very strange and unnerving and different and a bit startling and therefore at least remotely interesting to watch. Which, you have to admit, is far better than how it's been for the past seven years, which is utterly humiliating, repellant, cancerous.
2) Here is this ingenious new alarm clock. It has an Internet connection that hooks directly into your bank account. If you oversleep, it begins to withdraw funds from your account. And donate them. To groups you really, really despise. Ten minute oversnooze? Fifty bucks goes to the GOP. Oversleep a half an hour? There goes $100 to the NRA, the Heritage Foundation, the Bush Presidential Library (for all the crayons). Sleep till noon? Five hundred bucks to the Aryan Nation or National Right to Life or the Lindsay Lohan Cocaine Fund. Because nothing is more motivating than abject hate. Except, of course, abject love. But that's a completely different gizmo.
3) You're not imagining it. Your intuition was completely correct. Tom Cruise really is insane. Also, it is a safe bet that Tom and Jerry O'Connell will not be working together anytime soon.
4) Women and minorities appear to be galvanized by Hillary Clinton's presidential run. Youth and college-educated voters appear to be galvanized by Barack Obama's. No one at all is truly, deeply galvanized by Mitt Romney or John McCain or crazy little Mike Huckabee, and everyone is generally repulsed by the fetid little tyrant that is Rudy Giuliani. All of this, remarkably, seems just about exactly as it should be.
5) There is apparently a fairly good argument to be made as to why Google — a 10-year-old company worth $100 gabillion that's run by a pair of geeky 35-year-olds who still, to this day, in just about every photo, look like they can't believe this is all really happening to them — should buy the New York Times. Which seems, at first glance, totally insane. Then it quickly begins to make perfect sense.
Then you're like, wait a sec, you know what? Screw the Gray Lady; Google should buy General Motors, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Kraft and Dow and Viacom and pretty much all of North Korea and just wipe them all away and replace them with nice organic flowerpots and solar farms and really big trampolines. How much better! (Note to Google: Forget the NYT. Please buy The San Francisco Chronicle. Way cheaper. Plus, we're local. I would very much like to eat free sushi in your amazing cafeteria every day. Thank you.)
6) Gentle Giants rescue.
7) "I Don't Want to Blow You Up!" is a new children's book by the author of "It's Just a Plant." It dares to tell children that the vast majority of scarf/turban/headband/burqa-wearing peoples in the world do not, in fact, wish to bomb them, eviscerate them, eat their brains with a rhino horn or hang them upside down and steal their Playstation 3 and rape their dog. Despite what Bill O'Reilly's children's book says.
8) Britain has officially dropped the "War on Terror" label, given how, well, it's not really a war, given how most terrorists are not exactly highly organized armies of well-trained soldiers and are, instead, mostly scattershot clusters of insane fanatical murderers and suicidal religious mutants, and should be treated that way. The war on Christmas, now that's a real war.
9) TheAtlantic.com is now free. No more paid subscriptions to gain access to its excellent archives and full-length pieces. Upside: You can now read David Foster Wallace's brilliant 2005 piece on right-wing radio. Downside: the giant, throbbing mixed blessing that is Andrew Sullivan's blog.
10) Dolphins love sex. Frequent, kinky, aggressive, even violent. Homosexual, bisexual, incestuous, you name it. Sometimes with other species. Sometimes gang-rape style. Sometimes in frothy orgies. Sometimes (sort of) with humans. Yes, dolphins.
11) This just in: The cosmos is actually filled with supermassive black holes. It is also packed with dark energy, a very strange and mysterious material that appears to be pushing out the edges of the universe at a faster and faster rate and no one knows why, or what the hell dark energy actually is or how it works and it might all merely point to the overwhelming fact that the universe is, in truth, a giant, random, unpredictable mindf- of a place that's not even really a place at all, but more of a concept, a theory, a wicked delicious shaman's peyote dream and consequently its mysteries can never be "solved" and its cosmic messages never fully decoded and therefore you get to sit back right now and take a deep breath and exhale very slowly, and smile, safe in the knowledge that we actually know very, very little about anything, and we always will.
12) You can now study, in academic circles, the glory that is the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
13) The pollutive factories, the mountains of plastic, the enormous carbon footprint, the illusion of better taste, the myth of health. Yes, people seem to be waking up to the giant $15 billion sham that is the bottled water industry. Fact: The EPA's regulations for tap water are actually more stringent than the FDA's rules for bottled water. Solution: Filter your own tap water, get a Sigg. Easy.
14) Dude, like, did your dad just post a message on your Facebook wall? Is that your mom texting you from her iPhone? Yo, brah, is that your grandma doin' the jitterbug on her own MySpace page? Dude, WTF are all these old people doing all over the Web 2.0?
15) RU-486, that very safe, woman-empowering drug from France that induces a very early stage abortion, is proving to be a quiet, revolutionary, highly personal and yet very effective giant middle finger to the misogynistic Christian right, much of Congress and about half the Supreme Court.
16) Hormone-free, grass-fed beef really does taste better. Organic food really is healthier. Tell everyone you know.
17) Absinthe.
18) Whiskipedia.
19) Drawn!
20) Gary Vaynerchuk.
21) The disappearing car door.
22) Arts & Letters Daily.
23) Cate Blanchett.
24) Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain."
25) Abstinence education is, of course, a dismal failure.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...otes012508.DTL
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