BoatBanter.com - 29 things to be happy about

29 things to be happy about
Yes, it's all doom and gloom and war and global warming and Bush.
Except when it's not
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, January 25, 2008

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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, a.k.a. "the morning after pill," a.k.a. 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.

26) Karl Rove is gone. Trent Lott is gone. Rick Santorum is gone.
Richard Pombo is gone. Sweet Jesus, a whole rancid stew of hardcore
Bu****es has vanished like rat-tailed thugs from a murder scene,
leaving behind all manner of shrapnel and smoking craters and karmic
wreckage for the next wave of politicos to try and clean up. But hey,
at least they're gone. Mostly.

27) Gay couples are just as committed in their relationships as anyone
else, and are often more satisifed. I know, big shock. Will these two
new studies matter a whit to the right-wing homophobes who ignore all
such studies, including those that have proven, say, that the adopted
kids of gay couples turn out just fine, or that married gays don't
actually cause riots, floods, or Ebola virus outbreaks? Of course not.
No matter. Still good fuel for the fight.

28) A whopping 84 percent of Americans claim to be somewhere between
"pretty happy" and "very happy." No, no one knows what sort of crack
they're smoking. I mean, haven't they all seen the global warming? The
imminent apocalypse? The staph infections and the drug-resistant
bacteria and the Islamo-fascists and Dick Cheney's black and vile
stare? Why all the happiness? It is because of all the Prozac? Or is
it because of No. 29?

29) 1.20.09.