Once you’ve gone on record as being a serial killer, nobody remembers the good things you’ve done in your life except for your neighbors, who always seem to tell reporters what a nice and polite person you were. So if you insist on being a serial killer, don’t practice your craft on the neighbors. You never know when you might need a character witness.

Ah, the Information Age. It really is a remarkable thing and an interesting time to be alive. Anyone on earth can now have the greatest research library ever assembled right at their fingertips. Why speculate about anything anymore when you can Google it and find out? The capital of Cameroon? Bam, it’s Yaounde, population 1,430,000! Who gets the most rainfall? Bam, Mount Waialelale, with a whopping 460 inches per year! The least? Piece of angel food! It’s the Atacama desert in Chile, with zero rainfall for the past 400 years. Cross those two bad boys off the vacation destination list. Practically anything you want to know is available on the internet, plus plenty you don’t need to know. In many ways, this current day can be called the “Too Much Information Age.” Consider these facts:

An American develops Alzheimer’s disease every 70 seconds. If you are one of them, this knowledge won’t help you at all, you’ll just forget it in about 30 seconds. You will, however, remember what you had for breakfast the day you entered grammar school, which, again, won’t help the situation a bit.

Bernie Madoff even stole money from members of his own family. Does that make anyone feel any better? Well, maybe some.

According to sworn testimony, former President Clinton’s erect penis has a distinctive curve to it. How’s that for too much information?

Warren Buffet’s net worth slipped from $65 billion to $40 billion during the recent financial collapse. He has had to drastically cut back on nothing at all. 

The total amount of man hours wasted playing Halo 3, just one dumb-ass video game, adds up to over 1,536,000 hours. That’s 64,000 years nobody can ever get back and do something else, maybe even something useful. 

A trillion is a one followed by a dozen zeros, which still doesn’t describe it any better than “a whole shitload.” 

Adolph Hitler loved children. Other people’s, that is, since he didn’t have any of his own, a good break for any potential Hitler heirs. Nobody could possibly want to go through life as Hitler, Junior. And a break for the rest of us. 

Speaking of grand-scale murderers, Joseph Stalin kept a piece of what he thought was Hitler’s skull on his desk for years. It turns out it wasn’t authentic when the Soviet equivalent of the Antiques Road Show guys told him it was worthless as anything other than an ashtray. Which was quite a coincidence, since Stalin was using the skull as his “good luck ashtray” once the eye sockets broke apart from being used to open his beer bottles, when he called it his “good luck beer bottle opener.”

There are over 162 million websites on the internet. This is one of them.

As it turns out, angels never congregate on the heads of pins, so no accurate measurement of how many of them can dance on one has been possible. However, four out of five dentists agree that the correct answer would be seventeen. The fifth dentist never agrees with anyone anyway, so who cares what he thinks?

And speaking of best guesses, entries in the online dictionary Wikipedia can be changed by anyone who feels like it, which doesn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence in its accuracy. Most of us are sort of sticklers for encyclopedia entries being written by people who know what the hell they’re talking about.

Approximately 6% of all people ever born are alive right now. That’s pretty meaningless, no? Plus, that’s another one of those best-guess propositions, so that figure isn’t exactly etched in stone.

The world’s most popular first name is Mohammed. Second most popular? A surprise there: Butch.

There are 44 kings and queens in the world today, all claiming to be ordained by God, as good an explanation as any for the fact that their subjects haven’t risen as one and tossed their high-living asses out in the street.

In 2007, the last year for which these statistics are available, airlines throughout the world misplaced 40 million pieces of luggage, 10 million more than the previous year. Out of the 40 million, 1 million were never recovered. Which sort of makes you wonder where a pile of 1 million suitcases could possibly be hidden. Less puzzling is the fact that airlines drag their feet when it comes to reporting these statistics.

People in Canada actually think that being Canadian is on the level even though the rest of the world knows Canada is really America-Lite. Most people are too kind to point out the truth, just like they do for the people of France-Lite, the “nation” of Belgium.

The longest running drama on American television was the western Gunsmoke, with 633 episodes from 1955 to 1975, all of which had the same cast of James Arness as Marshall Matt Dillon, Milburn Stone as Doc, Amanda Blake as Miss Kitty, the owner of the Long Branch Saloon who dressed like an Old West bar whore (and looked exactly the same after 20 years) and Clem Fuller as (what else?) Clem the big beefy bartender, with the exception of the whacky imbecile sidekick deputy role, with Ken Curtis as Festus Hagin replacing Dennis Weaver as Chester Goode after a few years. The show was as comfortable and predictable as an old beat-up shoe, which every member of the cast except Miss Kitty started to resemble after a while. Odds are you probably won’t watch it on the Nickelodeon reruns, or even like it much if you do, but this is the Information Age and this is more information you don’t need and really won’t remember all that well but that you can’t delete completely. No sense fighting it. That would be like living in the Bronze Age and avoiding bronze.

Few hookers actually have a heart of gold, which is not a professional handicap since that’s not the organ she’s selling.

So, the president laughed on TV and that’s big news, or at least a big topic of conversation about his sensitivity or perceived lack of it towards the plight of many working people who are suffering in this bleak economic climate. Well, to some of us it looks like a simple case of the Bullfrog Blues. The what, you say? The Bullfrog Blues, where the lyrics describe a situation where “you got to wake up laughing, laughing just to keep from crying.” First recorded by its author blues man William Harris in 1928 and widely popularized by the great blues/rock band Canned Heat in the late 1960’s, “Bullfrog Blues” describes having “one woman on your mind” that presumably doesn’t have you on her mind anymore, but can be used to describe any situation that’s so frustrating you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying.

And crying is what a lot people would be tempted to do if they got to be the President of The United States and found out that the guy who had the job before them screwed up the place in more ways than you would think humanly possible. Well, it seems the breathtakingly inept Bush The Younger spent eight years with an unblemished record, having never made a correct decision about anything. He inherited a balanced budget, a financial surplus, a booming economy and peace and all he was expected to do was not screw things up too badly. Well, a quick glance at his previous life reveals that Bush The Younger screwed up everything he ever touched; the oil business (possibly the only man in history to ever lose money in the oil business), a baseball team (the lousy Texas Rangers) and the governorship of Texas, where he set records for both incompetence and retarded teenagers executed.

His crowning anti-achievement, however, was being the worst American President ever and into any possible future. He left the joint broke, with two unresolved wars, a Bill of Rights under attack (from him, no less, who swore to uphold the Constitution twice), a drowned New Orleans and an economy headed toward the Second Great Depression. So how do you follow an act like that? Is there a broom wide enough or a bottle of disinfectant strong enough to clean up after this man? The only people sorry to see him leave office were comedians and the super rich, the only two groups of people to prosper under his watch, and now even they are suffering. You know you’ve screwed up Big Time when even the very rich are losing money, something that hasn’t happened since 1929.

So let’s hope Mr. Obama can keep laughing. The guy’s been busier than than a one-armed juggler since he took office, trying desperately to get the economy jump started so that the country can afford to fix the many other vexing problems we face in a lot of areas. The olive branch he sent to the Republicans has been sent back to him wrapped with a dead fish and the right wing media has been going into mouth-foaming overdrive to discredit his policies, even though the guy has only been on the job for two months. Then there’s the desperate morons bringing up his birth certificate again, a non-issue already disposed of during the campaign. Even evil old Shotgun Dick Cheney, the guy who decided to bring back the Spanish Inquisition, has gotten in on the act, bitching and moaning that his policy of torturing people just for the fun of it has been discarded. And still Obama maintains an eerie calm in the face of all this, and can even laugh at the irony of it all. That’s just what we need right now. When you’ve got the Bullfrog Blues, that’s the only thing to do in order to keep on keeping on.

You don’t get to have your own version of reality. Facts are facts.

Good old language, that wonderful, uniquely human form of communication. Language is what we use to describe pretty much everything, from our inner thoughts and feelings to dump trucks. Used properly, it is a sublime form of communication, removing all barriers to understanding and even, in the form of poetry, elevating our souls. The flip side to mastering language is using it to deceive. Not necessarily out and out lying, since that’s an art in itself, but misappropriating words to give them other meanings, sort of making it an anti-communication device. Take the word gay, for example, once a very descriptive and fun word describing an especially giddy and playful sort of happiness. Gay is now lost to us since it is used exclusively to identify homosexuals. Are all gays gay? All the time? That would be hard to imagine and they’d be a pretty annoying and shallow sub-set of humanity if they were. 

Happily, that’s not the case, and gay people seem to run the full gamut of human personalities. Another word is parent. Once it was a noun but like many other words (like party and mentor) it is being forced into double duty as a verb. Then there’s combinations of words that negate the meaning of both of them, like “alternate reality” or “elastic definition.” Those phases mean nothing, or anything you want them to, and that’s the opposite of the aim of language. Language should not be ambiguous. It’s a form of communication and description, and the more precise our language, the better we have communicated. We need not surrender to either duplicity or stupidity when it comes to our language, in this case English, but the suspicion here is that the trend towards appropriating language for purposes other than communication is universal. Here’s some English words that we are letting get away from us:

Organic: Pretty much everything that is not a stone, an inert gas or water is organic, with our dictionary assuring us it means: “of, relating to, or derived from living matter.”  So you have all sorts of people marketing the food they produce as “organic” and you have to say to yourself, “well, I would hope so,” organic being a pretty minimal standard to be met to qualify as food. And when the word organic is coupled with the words “all natural,” count on the price to triple, but not necessarily the taste or nutritional benefits. There’s a lot of foods being labeled as organic and a lot of fools buy it without asking the question “Organic what?” Shit is organic, too, and very natural. So is uranium, so maybe using some more accurate words like healthy or wholesome to describe the ingredients in your food products just might give us a better idea of what they are worth.

Natural: Like organic, the definition of the word natural is being rendered meaningless. The fact is, so far nothing has ever occurred that is outside of nature, not even once since the beginning of time. Something man-made is not unnatural, otherwise people themselves have to be considered not a part of nature. And if we are not part of nature then what are we doing here? Are we something we dreamt up? (Now there’s a can of worms.) So the claim “all natural ingredients” has a pretty broad definition. For something to be truly unnatural, it would have to violate the immutable laws of nature, and so far nothing has. Stones don’t roll uphill on their own, light hasn’t sped up or slowed down and water still boils at precisely 212 degrees Farenheit. Monosodium glutamate is just as natural as a beaver dam, something that was put together from different existing materials by living creatures, all said creatures a part of nature as we know it. While MSG is not such a great thing, neither are beaver dams if you don’t happen to be a beaver.

Neo-Conservative: There’s nothing “neo” about being conservative. Either you are or you aren’t and if you are, you haven’t invented anything new to warrant the neo label. Had the Neo-Con movement produced any new ideas, on the other hand, then they would be welcome to their neo, but that wasn’t the case. The word “conservative” implies the avoidance of innovation, to conserve what has always been. Here’s the dictionary definition: “holding to traditional values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.” As a noun, conservative is defined: ” a person who is averse to change and holds to traditional values and attitudes.” So that whole “Conservative revolution” back in the 1990’s was a contradiction in terms. There is absolutely nothing revolutionary about conservatism.

Liberal: Defined as “open to new behavior and willing to discard traditional values,” or in politics: “favoring maximum individual liberty in political or social reform,” the term liberal does not always mean these things lately. Many liberals follow what is by now old and traditional policies and ideas, often ignoring the rights and liberties of others to disagree with them. Truly liberal ideas like granting homosexuals equal rights under the law meet with a lot of resistance from a lot of nominal liberals. Maybe if homosexuals offer to give the word gay back to us, liberals might change their tune and stop being so repressive and, well, conservative.

Text: Like parent and mentor, the word text has been pressed into double duty, this time not by linguistic laziness but by an invention. When you are using this recent invention, you are not “texting,” but are sending a text message, just as when you are writing or mailing a letter you are not “lettering.” Any other use of the word would be stupiding.

Spinning: This word can mean many things, but none of them have to do with the truth or actual facts. You can spin the truth until you’re dizzy and the sky will still be just as blue as it was before you started lying your ass off by misusing the medium of language. What is, is, period, amen, and no amount of spin doctoring, public relations, taking quotes out of context or offering “alternate explanations” can change that. And admitting a “misstatement” doesn’t mean much either. We already have plenty of synonyms for that: lie, prevarication,untruth, falsehood, and so on.

These are just a few of the words we misuse in our lazy pursuit of anti-language and the cynical practice of non-communication. While languages constantly evolve, expand and change with the times, the idea is always to give us more and better options to express ourselves with as much clarity as we possibly can. In today’s English language we have at our disposal more that 10 times the vocabulary that existed when William Shakespeare was writing. He did okay conveying his ideas, some of them quite complex and elliptical. The least we can do with our expanded arsenal is to speak and write plainly and clearly and to add to the joy and power of language, not detract from it. All we have is each other, so let’s treat the way we communicate with the same respect and love that we feel for others. Barring that, if you hate everybody, at least have the nerve to make it crystal clear.

Fat people need love just like anyone else, only a lot more of it.

My name is Ed and I’m a Polar bear. The people at bobcrespo.com have been kind enough to allow me this forum to address a lot of discussions about me and my fellow Polar Bears that has been going on in human society. We bears know people are pretty fascinated with us, what with all the camera crews you people send up north to film us and those tourist buses on tractor treads that drive right into our damned living rooms, so to speak. Frankly, its been kind of annoying. I can’t tell you how many hunts you people have ruined for me, and I’m only one bear. You think maybe you can tell the announcer to shut the fuck up next time and just dub in his lame comments later in the studio? I’m a Polar Bear and even I know about voiceovers, dammit! When the seals hear one of you pompous clowns using his dopey “serious narrator” voice they know immediately there’s a hungry bear ready to pounce and they beat it pronto. Thanks for nothing!

Plus there’s all that hardware involved in filming TV shows; the cameras and the trucks and snowmobiles, the wires and all the klieg lights, to say nothing of that roaring generator you need to produce the electricity for all that crap, plus heaters, your coffee pots, microwave ovens and your damned computers and screechy televisions and radios. There’s not exactly a whole lot of electric outlets handy up here in Antarctica, so you bring a mini-version of your own environment with you and then pretend you’re braving the elements. Do you assholes think all that stuff is silent and invisible? Maybe to your TV audiences it is, who only get to see what’s on one side of the camera. We bears know better, and that jefkoff with the parka and the goggles perched jauntily on his forehead where they don’t do him any good can’t get into the trailer fast enough to get naked with the make-up lady in the heated jacuzzi when he’s finished droning his idiotic lines and squinting into the camera like he’s Daniel Boone out conquering the untamed wilderness all by his lonesome. Oh, he’s a real he-man all right, protected by 5 big guys with hunting rifles the viewer doesn’t get to see either.

At least the Eskimos we used to deal with didn’t have anything but their coats, kayaks and spears, and lived in ice igloos that didn’t require tearing up the entire Antarctic to build. Then they met the rest of you, and the hunting encounters between us and them became pretty one-sided. At least when they were hunting us before, there was an even chance that we would be enjoying some raw Eskimo, not quite as tasty and fatty as seal meat, but a pretty decent meal if you ate two of them. Then all of a sudden they all had high powered rifles and snowmobiles and went to town hunting Polar Bears and selling our skins so rich people could make love on us in their ski lodges. We don’t mind so much getting killed and eaten, that’s the way of the world up here for all of us eventually, but there’s something wrong with being left out there to freeze uneaten while your hide is a thousand miles away getting stained with love juices from some fat, sweaty lawyer and his mistress.

So now we get word that all the countries that border our territory got together and decided they wanted to protect us Polar Bears. Great, now we’re really in for some interference in our seal hunts. Not only that, they’ve sent teams of idiots up here to study our love lives! How would like me and a couple of my buddies to watch you puny hairless monkeys doing the wild thing? That can be arranged, you know. We’ve had a few meetings of our own in Polar Bear Land, and guess what? We’ve decided we’ve had enough of your protection and your damned interference so we’ve put you on our endangered species list, with us doing the endangering! That’s right, Peeping Toms, we’ve issued orders to eat on sight regarding humans with cameras. For your information, Polar Bears adapted once to changing climate conditions and we will do it again if we have to, with you or without you. You people tend to screw up everything you touch so we’ll thank you to look after your own heinies and not ours, unless you want to risk one of us chomping on your ample butt. This is Ed the Polar Bear casting my vote to muddle through whatever comes without your input.

Nobody really cares who wins the rat race. Why would they?

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has been following the news diligently, which is what we do around here, seeking signs that our nation is coming together to solve a very vexing set of problems. So far there’s not a huge body of evidence suggesting a unified effort. In the financial sector, outside of throwing mad money around and demonizing a certain few executives, it seems that the industry-wide chaos that led to the current financial meltdown still reigns. Research here at The Department seems to indicate that the only thing preventing a rain of banker and stockbroker suicides from the gleaming towers of Wall Street is the fact that modern skyscrapers don’t have windows that can be opened. 

Studies further indicate that this architectural feature, coupled with general inertia, is inhibiting a healthy changing of the guard at the highest corporate levels. The fact that the leadership in most of the troubled banks, investment houses and insurance firms has remained the same is only contributing to the problem and the economic recovery is being stalled by the many dimwits who have somehow found themselves in charge of these institutions. The recommendation here is to fire everybody who lost money running a bank, an accomplishment that a few years ago would be hard to imagine. They are, after all, banks, and banks are designed to do only one thing, to earn money. Does anyone open a bakery and not bake bread?

On the political front, there is much ballyhoo over global warming and alternative energy. In California, where there is a giant desert called the Mojave, many people have proposed installing solar energy collectors, the thinking being that this is a desert where the sun shines mercilessly all the time. “Not so fast,” says California Senator Diane Feinstein, there is the beauty of the desert to be considered, and the large tortoise population. DOPOTO will have to take her word for it on that beauty-of-the-desert idea since we have no one at The Department willing to go to a desert and check it out. None of us here is a tortoise able to withstand life in a barren wasteland. No word on where Senator Feinstein would prefer to place the solar power facilities, but one of California’s nicknames is “The Sunshine State” so presumably she’s got a backup plan to place them outside of the 25,000 square miles of ideal terrain for solar power that is the Mojave Desert. The Department eagerly awaits her ideas and proposals.

On a similar note, no volunteers were available to visit the Arctic to check out the Polar Bear problem, what with it being 40 below zero half the time and human beings being about the same size as seals, the Polar Bears’ go-to meal of choice. So, once again DOPOTO is dependent upon the numerous reports of impending climate change emanating from governments, scientists and corporations. It seems that there is no exact agreement on this global warming premise as far as its severity, the timing of the apocalypse and whether or not we can do anything about it except make documentaries and write reports. What we do here is write a whole lot of reports so the hope is that we’re doing our part to prevent catastrophic climate change.

In more political news, it seems that the President of Iran is really not the President of Iran. America’s new president, Barack Obama, made peaceful overtures to the nation of Iran, figuring their government would respond to it one way or another. But in Iran, there’s a creepy guy in a funny hat and black robes that has authority over their president, and it’s not the Iranian Supreme Court. It is instead someone called their “Supreme Leader,” a powerful religious guy sort of like Popes of previous centuries that wielded enormous political clout. This guy, being really old and in no danger of actually having to fight himself, has ruled out peace as something he’d like to talk about. 

To be fair, The Supreme Leader of Iran is simply following a human custom as old as civilization itself: old guys wanting even more money and power firing up young guys to go fight and die in pursuit of the the old guys’ objectives. It is a system that works. Not very well, unfortunately, but it does work. The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious has studied numerous wars and it seems that no leader of any nation has actually picked up a weapon in many centuries, when kings realized that going into battle themselves only results in one of them getting his head cut off as a trophy for the other king. The thinking among world leaders, Supreme or otherwise, is that there are a whole lot of expendable heads available to do the dirty work. 

And so in all areas of human endeavor, the squabbles continue, waiting for someone to come up with a good idea so that it can be alternately praised or condemned. Research indicates, however, that good ideas seem to win out eventually in spite of any objections. A good case in point is the world of medicine, where doctors no longer think there is any such thing as “ill humors,” bleeding sick people doesn’t help their situation all that much and simple sanitation saves more lives than a thousand medicines. Of course this realization took centuries to sink in, with many a hapless patient dying at the hands of filthy quacks, but that is the nature of the human beast, as hard-headed a creature as any. The word “ignoramus” was not invented to describe any other creature but man. This has been a report from DOPOTO, where pointing out the obvious is our only skill.