I do Not Have Graphs, and I Will Not Point at Them

According to Yellow Freight, my metal lathe is on its way to Charlotte, North Carolina. It hasn’t gone very far since leaving Vermont on Monday. They estimate a Friday arrival, but I have my doubts.

I can’t believe it’s almost here. I’m still trying to come up with things to make with it.

You know what occurred to me last night? I should design a garlic press. There are NO good ones. The Good Grips cheap one snaps if you squeeze too hard. The aluminum Zyliss jobs shed grey aluminum oxide into your garlic. The Good Grips expensive ones have handles that eventually slip off. Frustrating. Is tool steel food safe? I should be able to make something that will last forever and pulverize garlic effortlessly. And I think I should make a stainless mallet to use in the kitchen. It would be swell for peeling garlic cloves. I hate reaching into the garlic press to pull out the peels.

I also realized I am not limited to metal. I find myself looking around at round or nearly round objects made from plastic, wondering what warped things I can do to them. I need to get some end cutters and come up with a way to do some milling. I have to make the most of this tool.

I saw something really depressing today. I was changing the birds’ newspapers, and I saw an article about hopeful kids training to do “green” jobs. Can you believe that? None of that nonsense is going anywhere. Sooner or later everyone is going to get out of denial and admit global warming is a fantasy, and the harder times get, the less people care about the environment. Meanwhile these poor deluded children are being trained to be fecal recovery technicians and hygiene discouragement activists. It’s like it’s 1980 and people are choosing to dedicate their lives to disco music. The Environmental Boogie Nights aren’t going to last.

I’ve enjoyed global warming tremendously this winter and spring. Last night it got down to 67 degrees, in late April! That’s magnificent. Summer will be much easier to tolerate this year, because winter and spring were so cool and pleasant. Thanks, Uncle Al. I know a lot of semi-aquatic polar bears–animals which spend half of their lives swimming–have been drowning for my benefit, but I didn’t sweat much this winter, so it was worth it. Keep on drowning, guys. And grow nice and fat so the rugs we make out of you will cover large areas.

I wonder what other semi-aquatic or fully aquatic species will start drowning as things get worse. Penguins, maybe. Walruses. Fish. You may think fish can’t drown, but remember, Uncle Al uses computer animation to make phony videos of animals drowning, so the fact that it never actually happens is no obstacle. I’ll bet he also had his stooges make up a video of him winning the 2000 election. Zaphod Beeblebrox meets World of Warcraft meets Vanilla Sky.

His Nobel Prize win seemed fictional but oddly, wasn’t. His whining about a nonexistent crisis beat out a lady who risked her life saving actual, non-CGI Jewish kids from Hitler. You know what? She should have saved polar bears. That would have been gold. Or maybe Coca-Cola should make warm fuzzy CGI videos of Polish Jews sharing a Coke and a smile on a big iceberg. Then the Nobel Committee might have thought they were cute and therefore worth saving.

Actually, Uncle Al doesn’t make CGI polar bear videos. According to news accounts, he just steals them without authorization and passes them off as his own. If he hadn’t chosen his videos carefully, his audience might have seen polar bears drowning one minute and having a Coke the next.

Coke is a great beverage for polar bears, because it goes great with their favorite meal: raw human being. A polar bear will actually spend a day trying to bash its way into your house to eat you. My guess? They know we cause global warming, so they’re trying to get a square meal and do Mother Gaia a solid, all in one shot.

Here is wisdom for you. Given the choice, avoid green vocational training and learn to drive the big rigs. You’ll be choosing a field which has the benefit of not being based on an imaginary demand.