Crap, it’s cold out again. Like 1° at the moment, and it’s not supposed to get a whole helluva lot warmer today, either. That, and there’s more snow coming. Like, “double digits” coming tomorrow and especially Wednesday. Oh boy. Not that I’m one to complain, of course. Well, not so much about the snow. In fact, we might as well go ahead and set a record this year. No point in wasting the 115 inches we’ve had so far, and for a measly 85 more, we can hit the 200 mark for the first time ever. I’m not too crazy about the cold, though. You know how us old folks get. Everything seems to hurt when it gets below about 15° or so, and as I was out tidying up the driveway late yesterday afternoon, it was cold and windy. Sucks.
So, apparently there’s something or other going on over in Egypt, which is one of them A-rab countries, but not one of the bad ones, ‘cuz they haven’t caused any trouble in quite a while (if you don’t count that Mohamed Atta guy). Not bad for us, anyway (which is all that counts), but not too great for the Egyptians, I guess, as they do not seem at all happy with their President.
This, of course, creates quite a dilemma for the US government. On the one hand, we supposedly espouse the virtues of democracy and all that. But that’s assuming they elect the people we want them to, and that their population consists of a small but wealthy class that makes for good consumers, and a vast underclass that exist to be a source of cheap labor. It’s OK for them to have elections, as long as they play ball the with our corporations, don’t allow any of this populist uprising horseshit, and – of course – don’t mess with Israel.
You may recall we weren’t terribly amused when democracy reared its ugly head in Palestine, and they elected Hamas (once Dubya realized that was a political party – or, as we call it, a terrorist organization – and not that paste they make out of chick peas).
Egypt hasn’t really hassled anybody since Nasser (except they won’t let us open up and explore the Hall of Records that Edgar Cayce said was under the Sphinx, and will answer all our questions about Atlantis – the bastids), and they’ve played nice with Israel.
Plus we do a fair amount of trading with them (we send them corn, and they send us natural gas and sand – a win-win). So we don’t want the people over there picking some government that isn’t gonna play ball with us, and is gonna stir up all sorts of trouble.
Especially since most of “the people” over there are poor and really can’t be trusted to do what’s best – for us.
This uprising by “the people” is also apparently a bit disconcerting for the “People’s” Republic of China, which has blocked anything related to ‘Egypt’ from its intertubes.
Of course, we’ve got more important things to worry about over here – bath salts. Yes, bath salts (and plant foods). Now Chuck Schumer has jumped on the salt wagon, and he’s looking to enact a federal ban on the synthetic substances Mephedrone and MDPV. Apparently you can get really wasted on this stuff, or something. And it can kill you. So they say, anyway. Having seen ‘Refer Madness’ a time or two, I’m not really ready to take “their” word for it (I mean, they’d have you believing LSD was bad for you, too) – though I’m not rushing out to sniff up (or whatever you do with it) a box of bath salts to test the theory, either. Not until I run out of carpet deodorant, anyway.
It’s amazing what people will do to catch a buzz (back in the porn theatre I mentioned the other day, one guy used to come in once a week, sit in the front row, and huff about six cans of K2R Spot Remover – now there’s a great way to spend your day off).
Of course, if they’d just make pot legal, people wouldn’t need to jump through all these hoops just to get high and forget the fact they have to go to work in the morning.
Speaking of which, where the hell did I put my tube of model glue?