Booze III (3)

This is the third and likely not the final installment in the Booze series.  Based off of the popularity of these posts, I may just stop writing anything else and reflect on my drunken past on a bi-weekly basis. 

Who wants blackened chicken and where the hell is my car? 

These are not two questions that are asked under normal circumstances but if you read on, you will find that the situation I found myself in was anything but ordinary. 

I had been living on the near West Side of Cleveland near the Lakewood border with my good friend Chris.   On a boring Saturday night, we drove downtown in my car and parked at a local garage and went drinking.  We closed down some techno-club which was not in any sort of bar district of the city.  All I remember is that we had to walk down some stairs next to a Thai restaurant to get into the place. 

By the time we left, around 4 am, I had completely forgotten that I had driven the two of us downtown.  Chris was of no help either.  There was nowhere to get food in this neighborhood because it was basically the middle of no-man’s-land.  We got into a taxi and went home, forgetting that my car was in some sketchy parking garage in the middle of nowhere downtown Cleveland.

We get home and are drunk and starving.  Chris goes and begins to run his head under the faucet in the tub like he often tends to do when he is shitfaced.  I am not exactly sure how this helps, but you know what, whatever. 

I get the idea that I want chicken.  And luckily, I had purchased a package of frozen chicken earlier in the week.  Now, I know how to cook chicken, but when I am drunk, I make poor decisions. 

I heated up a frying pan to somewhere near four thousand degrees centigrade, opened the frozen chicken package and blindly inserted the contents into my nuclear hot frying pan.  I then began attempting to prepare some tater tots to go along with my chicken.  I don’t care what anyone says, it would have been delightful.

Somewhere in the middle of this spectacle, I put my head down on the counter next to the frying pan.  It turns out, completely frozen blocks of chicken don’t cook well in a frying pan, they basically just light on fire.  After some unspecified amount of time, I become completely past out with my head in a pile of frozen tater-tots with two pieces of chicken literally in flames, not a foot away from my head. 

I wake up to find Chris, soaking wet screaming at me and throwing baking soda on the stovetop.  He was still soaking wet and topless from having run his upper torso under the faucet for a half hour.  He is about as mad as I had ever seen anyone at me in my life.  For some reason in the midst of this fray, I come to realize that I had left my car downtown and began to ramble about this in some sort of drunk, confused, concerned, I just woke up into an emergency situation, type of babble.  This only added to Chris frustration because I was much more concerned about my car then the fact that I nearly burnt down our apartment building via frozen chicken. 

Luckily, I was able to go get my car the next day after paying a hefty parking fee, the chicken was unable to be salvaged.  Chris and I were able to patch things up, the tater tots were still edible 

Blue Goo and dishes do not go together:

At this time, I was around 21 and living in the middle of absolute nowhere Ohio, while working and in college.  My roommates and I had not done dishes for quite an unacceptable amount of time.  And it was time to do the god damned dishes.  My good buddy Matt and his girlfriend at the time agreed to go to the grocery store, while my other good buddy Ben and I stayed back and took care of the dishes. 

Both Ben and I have active gag reflexes and are unable to stomach disgusting things well.  And make no mistake about it, this dish situation was horrendous.  So I get the idea to mix up a batch of Blue Goo before we did them, you know, to take the edge off the disgustingness.

For those of you who did not grow up in rural Ohio, Blue Goo, is Vodka (a lot of it), poured into an empty Milk jug, and with Blue Kool-Aid and sugar mixed into it.  If cold, it is probably one of the easiest ways to get absolutely rip-shit in no time whatsoever. 

So Matt and his girlfriend leave to go grocery shopping, and Ben and I sit on the couch and begin passing the Blue Goo back and forth until it is completely gone,  time to do the dishes. 

We stumble into the kitchen absolutely blitzed around 11 am.  We decide that Ben will throw and I will catch.  At first, the system was working, we managed to get nearly half of the load clean and then the full brunt of the Blue Goo kicked in.  I began to get warmer and warmer until I was eventually pouring sweat like Jack from Lost.   I took my shirt off and Ben followed my lead.    Just then, Ben begins laughing his ass off but his laughter turned to pain when he realized that he had sliced his hand open on a dirty knife in the sink.  I began laughing at the overall situation just as I realized that I had done the same thing.  So now we’re both bleeding.

Throughout this process, our jeans had become soaked with dish water as did most of the kitchen.  You would be amazed at how difficult it can be to contain dish water after basically drinking half a bottle of vodka while the guy next to you drank the other half. 

I took my pants off because they had become gravely uncomfortable.  At the time, I did not wear underwear so I was basically nude, standing in a puddle of dirty dish water, with my hand bleeding, laughing my ass off and drying dishes. 

Then Ben took his pants off.  To my surprise, he had smacks on, AKA tightie-whities.  Now for whatever reason, Ben did not want to take off his boots so he attempted to take off his jeans over his boots without taking them off first.  This is a feat that is tough for someone who is not fighting a half liter of 80 proof vodka.   So Ben falls down, hard onto the linoleum, right in the middle of the most disgusting puddle of dirty dish water I had ever seen.  He begins laughing and I begin laughing at him. 

Just then, Matt and his girlfriend return from the grocery store.  Mind you, they only left about an hour before.  And when they left we were completely sober.  But what they returned to was something that nobody could have possibly predicted.  Two men, both absolutely hammered, soaking wet, one in his underwear on the floor laughing his ass off and myself, drying dishes in nothing but my birthday suit. It was like some sort of crazy, southern, gay swing party.  We all shared a nice, long laugh.   

We were able to get the dishes done and mend our various wounds, I then past out on the floor of my bedroom for about six to eight hours as did Ben. 

It is all fun and games until you accidently knock your friend out and get questioned by the cops:

When I lived in Cleveland Heights my friend Ben and I used to frequent a wine bar down the road from us.  We were there often, as we could walk to and from our apartment.  Now this is sort of embarrassing but in order to make the walks more entertaining, and due to the fact that we had both been making fun of the immensely popular at the time “X-Games” recently, we came up with a game we called “Extreme Walking”. 

“Extreme walking”, was basically just normal walking, except you have to be drunk and do stupid jumps and tricks while doing so.   For instance, if there was a curb in your way, and you jumped over it, while doing a 360 was considered, to us an extreme version of walking. All the while, the other person would commentate the exercise like one of those, ubber-hip, skater boy, douche bag, X-Game announcers.  It was fucking funny to us. If you don’t think it is, try it once; I guarantee you laugh your ass off.

After about a year, both of us had become formidable extreme walk men.  We had gotten to a point where we began to try to distract each other’s maneuvers by pushing each other in mid-air in some cases. 

Most of the time, this practice was harmless but unfortunately, on this evening, I did not account for black-ice.  Ben leaped off of a landscaping planter onto the sidewalk next to me.  In an attempt to prevent him from sticking the landing, I pushed him.  He slid about 10 feet to his right and fell down and slammed his head into a glass window.   Normally there wouldn’t be anything funny about this.  But in this case, the window was for this brand new, underground, ultra-trendy nightclub which was absolutely packed inside.  So when Ben’s head smashed into the window, the laughter from inside was fairly audible to everyone outside.  So I naturally began laughing with them.

Everything began to happen fairly quickly at that point.  I realized that Ben did not get up in a reasonable timeframe.  And just as I began to get concerned a cop came out of nowhere and pushed me onto the ground and began screaming at me.  I remember he called me “tough guy” about 5 times, rapid fire.  It is really weird to have someone calling you “tough guy” when you had no intentions of in any way trying to be tough.   It occurred to me, that he thought we were fighting and that I had done this on purpose. 

Then I realized how ridiculous the whole thing was.  Like, what am I fucking Batman?  Like in the middle of a fight, I would have the foresight to realize that my opponent was about to land on some black ice, and I would then use that to my advantage to make him slide 10 feet into a glass window.   

Finally Ben woke up with nothing but a lump on his head and we explained the whole situation to the cop.  This wasn’t easy; try explaining something like “extreme walking” gone wrong to a police officer!  He then reminded us that he had every right to arrest us for public intox and/or disturbing the peace, but this time he would let us go with a warning.  Thank you Mr. Officer, I don’t know how I would have ever explained how I got arrested to my cellmates for this one.  What are you in for Tyrone? “Murder”, what are you in for Jack? “Murder”, what are you in for Matt? “an extreme walking incident”.  

Then the cop told us to “be more careful next time” and that “Ben got lucky by not being more seriously injured”.   But it isn’t like Ben had even been examined for any sort of a concussion or anything, so I felt like it was a little too early to make that sort of an assumption. So unless this cop moonlights as the best neurosurgeon in the world I find this statement to have been a dubious claim.   Finally he let us just walk away.  We went right back to extreme walking.

I wish....

People would stop blaming the President for not having jobs: 

When did it become Barack Obama’s responsibility to get everyone a job?   He is the President of the United States, not the President of the KForce Staffing Agency.   I wish that we could just have one “The President tells it like it is, day, once per year”.  On this one day, the president can say whatever he really wanted to say and be guaranteed no repercussions.  Because I would love to see Obama get in front of a microphone and tell everyone, “I’m terribly sorry that I can’t find a job for those of you who dropped out of school after the fourth grade and short of cooking up meth, have absolutely no vocational skills whatsoever, but I was too busy killing the guy who wants to fly airplanes into our buildings, thank you, god bless you, and god bless the United States of America”. 

That old people were not allowed to drive:

Old people should have to take another driving test when they turn 70.  And this test should be extremely difficult.   It should be borderline impassable.  It should be so hard that the old people don’t even attempt it and they just surrender their driver’s licenses to the state on their 70^th birthdays.  The test should involve things like swimming and pull-ups and using Twitter and staying in a handstand for 10 minutes; all things that are nearly impossible for old people to do.

These people are a menace on the roadways, which is a fact.  Not a year goes by in my life where I am not nearly killed by several old people who are still trying to drive cars.    It’s not good for them either.  I’m sure they don’t enjoy getting yelled at and flipped off all the time.  They drive slowly because they are scared of going any faster.  Their old hollow bones could not possibly withstand any sort of a fender bender and they know this.  So they don’t take any chances. 

The only compromise I would be willing to make here is to make it illegal for old people to drive during peak traffic hours.  Relegate the old people to driving between 11 am and 4 pm and then again between 7 pm and 5 am.  If the old people needed any exceptions to these windows, they could apply for a one day pass that grants their exception.   But this could turn into a double edged sword as you would likely have a shit load of old people all trying to drive around during these windows which could become a catastrophe.  Also, most old people can’t see at night for various reasons so the 7 pm to 5 am window would likely become a Hindenburg scale disaster of epic proportions.

That golf courses didn’t let just anyone play golf:

Every public golf course, right now, across the entire United States of America, is packed with hacks that have absolutely no fucking idea how to play golf.  This is a problem that I have personally witnessed grow to near biblical proportions over the past couple of years.  On a daily basis, 90% of the people who decide to go golfing are so bad at golf that it is hard to imagine how they ever managed to become toilet trained.   For people like me, who actually know how to golf and take it somewhat seriously, this is a major annoyance as I find myself constantly dodging errant tee-shots, waiting behind some idiot to line up and subsequently miss a three foot putt for five minutes, some guy who can’t golf trying to teach his kids how to not golf well, old men, who move so slowly that they would have a hard time getting out of the way of steam roller, women who think it’s just hilarious to be out trying to play golf, absolutely shit-faced thirty something’s and kids smoking pot in the woods.   And not to mention, the worst of the worst, the business men who golf because it is just something that they are supposed to do as business men.  These men generally have thousands of dollars worth of the best golf equipment, none of which they have any idea how to go about using, they play like they are tour players, measuring every putt, and every approach shot like their lives depend on it, just to slap their next shot 120 yards into the woods in front of the thirty people who are stuck behind them, because no business man, has ever let anyone play through.   

Golf is the only sport like this.  It is the only sport where someone else’s ineptness directly affects everyone else's experience.  I propose a skills challenge that must be met on the driving range, under the supervision of a golf course employee, prior to being granted access to the golf course.  If you are unable to hit a drive more than 150 yards, you’re gone, if you can’t make a putt from 30 feet in less than four strokes, you’re gone, if you think 15 minutes is an acceptable amount of time to spend on a par 3, you’re gone.   And just for good measure, they should be physically kicked in the ass throughout their entire walk back to their cars by golf course employees and fruit should be thrown at their cars as they exit the parking lot.

These are skills that anyone who has half of an idea of how golf works, could easily pass but at the same time would weed out the typical golfing riff-raff that we decent golfers are forced to put up with every weekend.   

People would stop taking about “Our Founding Fathers” as though they were so great:

I am sick and tired of hearing folks talking about what the “Founding Fathers” meant for America.   Whatever they wanted no longer applies to the reality that we have created for ourselves.  The wonderful group of men, known as your Founding Fathers, that you love so much also loved things like slavery and not letting women have rights and hanging people who they thought were witches.  If you had your way, and the country actually turned into what the “Founding Fathers” had envisioned for it, we would have no cars, next to no technology for that matter, we would all have to learn how to farm, or make shoes, or shape molten metal with hammers, there would be no diversity, women would have no say in anything, people would still be dying from strep throat and scurvy and we would constantly be at war with the British, slugs and cocaine would still be considered acceptible types of medication.  So thank god you are wrong, because that sounds terrible.

 Someone would revisit the 40 hour a week idea:

Who the hell decided that it would be a good idea for everyone to work for forty hours every week of their lives and that’s the way it’s just going to be forever, and if you don’t, you get no health coverage, end of discussion?    Shouldn’t this at least be up for debate, ever?   I think people should only have to work for as long as it takes for them to complete whatever their job is on a weekly basis.  If that’s five hours, then that’s how much you work.  Conversely, if it takes them 60 hours, then too bad, that’s how long those slow ass people have to work.   I do believe that there are a lot of people out there who grossly underestimate how long of a period of time forty hours is.  You could build a small airport in less time than that.  Forty hours is a long, long time.

I am probably spoiled as I work in the IT field and over the years have come to the realization that the most talented IT people are the least busy ones because they have found ways to automate everything. Yet, those people are still forced to drive to a building 5 times a week and sit around and act busy in order to remain qualified to receive health care benefits.  How much electric bill money and fossil fuels could be conserved by not making people drive to a building every weekday?

That we were allowed to select exactly which Television Channels that we wanted:

Why can’t we do this yet?  Is there a reason why I get the 8 channels that I watch and another 1000 channels that I don’t?  It is not like I am going to wake up someday and all of sudden want to watch CSPAN or OWN or the Hunting Channel? 

The ability to select only the channels you watch would give the consumers the power to band together and deactivate channels that broadcast content that they dislike.  If all of a sudden, on a near overnight basis, 8 million people discontinued Fox News, I am pretty sure they would tone down their rhetoric.  Instead, since we all have to get these channels regardless of how we feel about them, they can pretty much just keep doing whatever they want because they have the control. 

It would also severely limit the cable companies from being able to justify the hundreds of dollars they charge for cable.  If I am only getting 8 channels, then you have to stop charging me for a thousand. 

An ex-Clevelanders take on Lebron

Patience is key…

I used to live in Cleveland. I was born and raised in the area.  I love the city, the people, the attractions and pretty much everything about it.  I embrace its negative image that many people who have never been there have created for it.  If nothing else, it keeps those kinds of judgmental shitheads out of my home town.  I don’t like to see horrible things happen to my city.  I don’t think anyone does.  But, on my birthday last year, July 8^th 2010, Lebron James tore the heart out of me and a city that had previously done nothing but worshiped him for his entire life via a 1 hour special on ESPN that he personally named “The Decision”.  If I ever become an actor and have to get myself into a pissed off mood for the camera, I know that I can always think back to that evening.

Patience is key…

Over the past ten plus months, I have been forced to endure the sight of the Miami Heat run through their competition.  Competition like the Celtics and the Bulls and Magic who were previously able to hold Lebron in check.  But now, along side of Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, who really could stop him?  So Lebron James will get a ring.  And it is time for me and some fans to accept a few inconvenient facts….

Patience is key…

Lebron will win multiple titles with the Miami Heat:  This is a very hard pill for a Cleveland sports fan to swallow but it is going to happen.  Any team that has Lebron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh in the starting lineup will win multiple titles.  It is a simple matter of mathematics.  There is simply not enough high powered talent left in the league that could team up and deny them of their multiple titles.  In basketball, if you have three of the best 6 players on one team, they won’t be stopped.  As bad as it may be for the integrity of the NBA product to have the most hated franchise in sports win multiple titles, it is going to happen.  There isn’t an international All-Star team that could be assembled who could get in the way of the abomination that is the Miami Heat. 

Patience is key…

Lebron James is never going to stop taking shots at Cleveland:  Lebron has joined forces with two of the best players in the league.  He no longer needs to be the best player in the world in order to win night in and night out.  One of the three just has to be that guy once every three games and they will be fine.  Therefore, his stock as a great basketball player is on the downswing.  He will likely never win another MVP trophy again.  After all, how could anyone justify a single player being the most valuable player on a team where he has more help than he knows what to do with?   

Lebron also irreversibly tarnished his image on July 8^th.  Anyone who lives outside of the Haitian Slums in Miami realizes how much of a dick move “The Decision” was.  Most people can’t get themselves to understand how a human being could possibly be brain dead enough to think that that would have been a good idea for more than eight seconds.  The spectacle took a level of arrogance that has never been seen before in organized sport.  It introduced pure hatred into professional basketball.   So if you team his regression as a basketball player along with the thermo-nuclear destruction of his public persona you have a recipe for a lot of pissed off sponsors.  There are a lot of people at companies like McDonald’s and Nike and ESPN who need Lebron James to be “liked”.  They literally have invested hundreds of millions of their dollars in people liking him. 

So what do you do when you have an image problem at work?  You pass the buck.  It is the easiest way to get the heat off of you.  People have been doing it for centuries.  If Lebron James blames the Cleveland Cavaliers ownership and his former players and the city of Cleveland for not getting him enough talent, or not trying hard enough in the playoffs or being spoiled by his greatness, enough times then it will eventually stick.  Unfortunately, one complete dickhole of a move usually leads to another.   Eventually Lebron will be able to deflect the pressure on himself back onto Cleveland.   He has all of the resources of Nike and ESPN and ABC and Disney and McDonald’s to help him do so. 

Patience is key…

The Cleveland Cavaliers are not going to win an NBA title before Lebron does:  I am terribly sorry Mr. Dan Gilbert but this was one of the dumbest statements anyone has ever made outside of the nut house.   I do understand how pissed off you were at the time you made this statement and I can appreciate your team spirit.   I think the Cavs can turn it around in about three years and be back in title contention but I think the Heat are going to win the titles for at least two of those three years.  There is just nobody left who can stop those three shitheads in Miami. 

Patience is key…

Why do I keep saying that patience is key:   From a Cleveland fans perspective, the short term is going to suck…. a lot.  We are going to have to sit and watch one of the biggest pieces of shit the world has ever seen win multiple titles with two of the other biggest pieces of shit in the world along side of him.  But it is going to get progressively better as the years go by. 

First off, the new Collective Bargaining Agreement that the NBA is ready to impose is going to lower the salary cap.  It is not going to be lowered enough to prevent Miami form having all three players, but it will be low enough to make sure they can’t ever get any better than they are right now.  Basically, I really hope Miami is completely in love with Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller as role players because they are going to need them for the long haul.  I also hope those two guys never expect to get a raise because Miami has so much invested in their big three that they can’t pay them more then what they get now. 

Secondly, it is going to be harder and harder for Miami to attract decent role players.  Other then the fact that they won’t be able to pay them as much as everyone else, who wants to go play fourth fiddle next to three of the biggest prima donnas that the sporting world has ever seen?  They are going to have to go out and keep getting old men, who have given up trying to win on other teams and want to go to Miami just for the chance at a ring.  So have fun with the Zyndrunas Illgauskas’s and Mike Bibby’s of the world. 

Thirdly, the pressure on that franchise is never going to let up as long as they have all three of those players.  Not a single one of them strikes me as someone who handles pressure particularly well.  One thing my good buddy, Mr. Cavalier Austin Carr will tell you….  “Pressure always burst the pipe”.  Sometimes it takes a while but it will happen.   Lebron no longer being “the man” on a team, relentless media frenzies before and after every game, people booing them in every arena outside of Northern Cuba, people constantly asking Lebron questions like “What would this championship have meant in Cleveland?”  “Wouldn’t this have meant more if you had been able to do it yourself and in your home town?” Lebron not being able to take a piss in a Wendy’s bathroom without people hating him for it, the list goes on and on.  Eventually, this burden will weigh the team down.  Eventually someone will beat them in the playoffs and that loss, teamed with this pressure will tear a whole in that locker room.  You cannot have that many ego’s, with that much pressure, and that much riding on everything, with that much money floating around, and not win. 

Fourthly, Cleveland has Karma and history on its side.  Lebron James is going to play basketball for about another 12 years.   He is going to have some ups and downs and win several titles and make a lot of money.  But while sports history fades away into the background after time, you being a complete asshole remains front and center forever.  So Lebron will never be able to enjoy his empty titles as much as everyone else does.  He is never going to be able to go anywhere without people asking him about that decision.  Whatever he does from here on out in his basketball career will play second fiddle to the errors of his youth.  He is never going to experience what Michael Jordan did when he held the Championship Trophy after killing himself, with limited talent around him, for six years.  Any tears Lebron sheds when he wins that title will be for the camera, not because he played though walking pneumonia in the playoffs like Jordan, or with a broken hand like Kobe or played perfect fundamental basketball like Duncan.  It will be because he manufactured a championship with his friends.  It will be the most meaningless championship in the history of sports. And people will call it this.  And Lebron will hate them for it. 

Then of course we have the history factor on our side.  How well does being a complete douche bag usually work out in the long run when it comes to pop culture icons?  Britney Spears is still trying to stop eating hot dogs for breakfast lunch and dinner, Michael Jackson had to spend the last 20 years of his life being shot up with elephant tranquilizers in order to function, Lindsey Lohan is still trying to snort any powder she can find under her sink at the Betty Ford Clinic and Tiger Woods is not even a factor on the PGA tour and watched his entire family move to Sweden as a result.   So we, as Cleveland fans are going to have to learn to sacrifice short term joy for a long, entertaining, downfall of the hated one. 

So history always has the last laugh and it will with Lebron too. And part of me will be sad to see the downfall of a kid who has been called “The Chosen One” and “King James” since he was 15 years old.  Because the intelligent part of me will understand how someone like that never really had a chance to develop a normal logical brain.  I will “get” how compassion and the ability to be humble and a sense of personal responsibility could have never been harbored in the brain of a teenager who was given a Hummer on his 18^th birthday and was on the cover of Sports Illustrated before he graduated from High School. But I will still smile when it happens because I won’t care.   Because he earned every horrible thing that will ever happen to him.

Twister Anyone?

The weather has to be stopped.  Nothing else in the world manages to demonstrate to the human race just how feeble and powerless we really are.  We can invent things like IPad’s and International Space Stations, find planets rotating around distant stars, erect billion dollar structures that are visible from space but as soon as the wind kicks up or the ocean decides to create a bigger wave than normal, we all become ants on the driveway surrounded by kids with magnifying glasses.

I don’t believe that controlling the weather is impossible.  I think it would be hard.  I think we can do a lot of things to better protect ourselves in the meantime. I don’t think it would be a perfect science, but none are.  I liken the people who laugh at people who endorse weather control as morons.  Isn’t it at least worth a shot?  Or are we just supposed to sit around and watch Japan fall over into the Pacific and people in the Midwest float away in funnel clouds and people in the South have their homes flooded over and over and over again, on CNN, for the rest of our lives?   I would rather deal with something after I had exhausted every effort to eliminate it then just blindly deal with it. 

At some point we need to decide if this planet is ours or not and make some tough decisions.  Are the causes that we have our smartest people working on now really all that noble to begin with?   You can’t tell me we can’t pull a few people out of designing the next great phone or figuring out a new kind of pill that gives old dudes bigger hadrons and task them with applying their genius toward something that could save lives.  Currently we are not getting out in front of this problem; we are not doing ourselves any favors.

I also don’t want to hear a lot of noise about how car exhaust and aerosol cans of hair spray are to blame for the recent uptick in severe weather.  Whether it was a contributing factor or not is no longer the point.  The fact is, we needed all those things, we still do, they aren’t going away anytime soon, so we need to figure out how to survive on Earth with the shit we need.  We made this bed, so we minus well make it comfortable.

We already know that we can ionize clouds in order to weaken their strength.   We do it all the time with hurricanes that are scheduled to make landfall.  Why can’t we do this in the Midwest with storms that have a shot of producing tornados?   Now the meteorologists will likely say something like, they pop up too fast to possibly be able to react to them and ionize the clouds.  But this is my point exactly; let’s all just give up then and go back to designing our social networking websites until we all get sucked up into the sky. I will bet if someone offered a 1 billion dollar reward to anyone who figured out an affordable system to ionize cumulous clouds that have the potential to produce tornados in a timely manner, someone would figure it out in 10 years or less. 

This brings me to the issue of tidal waves.  There are presently over 200 laboratories around the world that do nothing all day except simulate tidal waves.  Yet whenever anyone asks them how it’s going over there, all we hear is “We still have a lot to learn about these waves”.   Well what the fuck?   How long is this going to take exactly?   Is there anything else we can do from our end?  You people have made the choice to study waves all day, every day so it’s time to figure it out. I’m no scientist but I am pretty sure a tidal wave is just the result of a metric shit ton of water all rushing ashore at the same time.  I also don’t think we will ever be able to stop the root cause (earthquakes under the sea floor), but how do we protect the coasts?  Is there anything we CAN do?  Or should we all just keep floating around in our cars, screaming for help every time one of these things blows in?  Every coastal city in the world, that has half a head full of sense, has some sort of 1920’s style break wall in place.  So they had to have had an idea back then about how to stop oceanic flooding.   Maybe we build them bigger?  Maybe we build them 20 times bigger?  Wouldn’t spending a couple billion on that pay itself off as soon as it worked once?  Or should we just keep flooding and melting down Nuclear Power Plants and causing trillions in damages for halves of entire countries? 

Hurricanes are an issue I think that we should have people working on stopping around the clock.  We generally get the same answers as we do with tidal waves; “There is still so much we don’t understand”.  Well that is just fine then, you just sit there and study then while we all drown. The damages that we endure from hurricanes could be made minimal by both of the aforementioned techniques.  First you ionize the shit out of the storms in order to weaken them; next you have your new massive break walls in place to eliminate the storm surge.  After all, the storm surge that hurricanes produce is the real killer.  That is what causes the most deaths and property damage. 

Finally, if you live somewhere that is at risk of real windy situations, such as hurricane force winds, tornadoes, down drafts, micro-bursts, dust storms etc… do yourself a favor and live in some sort of a structure that can withstand these things.  Let’s maybe stop putting trailer parks in Tornado Alley.  Let’s perhaps stop building New England style homes in New Orleans.  Let’s get something in place where the roof doesn’t rip off in winds any higher than 80 miles per hour.  Maybe put that thing on some stilts if you live in the French Quarter?

Let’s also build sections of our basements that don’t sit directly below our homes.  Just one room, built into a wall in our basement that is not directly under the house that is likely going to collapse and crush us in a tornado.  Maybe we look into mandating the same type of shatter proof glass that car windshields are made out of, for the houses that are at the highest risk of being hit by a twister? 

Then of course there is the education factor.  This is the favored approach by all sorts of people in law enforcement and meteorology.  The more people know how to react to various weather situations, the better prepared they are to react properly when they occur.  This is all well and good and I don’t want to sound like too much of a prick here but this idea puts entirely too much faith into current US population.  Can we please just face the inconvenient facts here?  Most of this country is thickly populated by a bunch of real dumb folks.  Most of these people cannot be sat down and taught things.  Even if those things could someday save their lives.  You kind of have to devise operational solutions for these sorts of people that will save their lives without them ever having to even put down their moonshine ladles or manage to get their tongues of their bus windows.  Basically you can’t expect most people to be able to do anything to help themselves.  You have to do it behind the scenes, on their behalf.  It is unfortunate, but it is what it is. 

The education approach is also quite flawed.  I remember in grade school where we had our “tornado drills” These drills consisted of all the students, walking out in the hallway and bending over with our hands on our heads.  Thank god a tornado never really happened because we would have probably been better off just trying to run away from it.  Then of course there was the ingenious nuclear bomb drill that consisted of us doing nothing but getting under our desks and closing our eyes.  Thanks teacher, I am sure this quarter inch piece of Formica above my head is all I am going to need to survive the thermo-nuclear explosion outside of the school window. 

Education is overrated. Education relies far too heavily on people ability to learn things and not having complete dipshits deciding what to teach them and how to teach it to them, too many variables.  Technology is a much cleaner solution.  We have a lot of smart people left, but they are going fast.  My suggestion would be to get them on the important jobs before it is too late for us all.