December 22, 2005
THINGS COULD ALWAYS BE WORSE...
A new feature at Beautiful Atrocities, where we set aside our usual mind-deadening negativity to focus on gratitude & infantile humor.
America is a many-faceted cesspool: a rogue state (Andrew Sullivan), a gay dungeon master (Jesse Jackson), morally repugnant & not worth fighting for (Cindy Sheehan), a police state (Rep. Ron Paul), passionately racist (Susan Sontag), ignorant (Michael Moore), the torture & political murder capital of the world (Noam Chomsky), a dumb puppy with big teeth (Johnny Depp), a dictatorship (Sean Penn) & a nightmare of hysteria, ignorance, stupidity, & belligerence (Harold Pinter).
However, it could be worse. We could, for example, be living on
Jupiter's moon Io, where geysers
spew sulfur 300 miles
high, so you can imagine the stink. Frenchmen on Io would be
insufferable, sulfur-farting surrender monkeys . Also, we would have to learn to live
without many things we take for granted, like oxygen & Desperate
Housewives.
The gravitational pull of Jupiter produces "tides" in the rocky surface of over 300 feet. Dramamine would be a human right, & since Io is constantly resurfaced by molten sulfur, Yahoo Maps would be even more unreliable than it is.
Io is also surrounded by something called a plasma torus, which sounds rude. With mean surface temperature -225F, baseball games would have to be played indoors on plastic grass, which isn't baseball but billiards. And since the rock tides continually heat & melt Io's interior, a working toilet would be a miracle.
Even worse, since the surface gravity is only .183 that of Earth, as soon as you crapped, it would flypaper itself to your ass. Bidets would be useless, as they would spray water senselessly in all directions, so they would really be fountains. So you see, things could be worse.
Posted by Jeff at December 22, 2005 12:34 AM
Comments
good grief. I don't come around here for, like, a week, and now you've gone all silly. unbelievable.
GET BACK TO THE SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES, BEAUTIFUL ATROCITIES!!!
honestly...moons...
Posted by: MacStansbury at December 21, 2005 09:34 PM
Can we just admit that the man has a point? Life is better here, notwithstanding your personal feelings about heat, gravity, the war in Iraq, and Desperate Housewives.
Posted by: Attila Girl at December 21, 2005 11:38 PM
Infantile humor is MY schtick. Gawd.
Posted by: SondraK at December 21, 2005 11:47 PM
I just bid 200 bucks for the right to shave johnny Damon bald.
That's gotta count for something.
Posted by: TC@LeatherPenguin at December 22, 2005 12:56 AM
Sheer genius! :)
Posted by: Sissy Willis at December 22, 2005 04:11 AM
This doesn't mean that I have to get all excited about Christmas, right?
Posted by: sadie at December 22, 2005 04:39 AM
"America is a many-faceted cesspool." And yet, so many people still want to come here. What a puzzlement.
Posted by: Redhand ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](/nav-commenters.gif)
at December 22, 2005 06:12 AM
>
Christmas has come early!
Posted by: RP at December 22, 2005 06:53 AM
By sheer bad luck, I happen to have Kurt Vonnegut's new book A Man without a Country (that's poor Kurt) sitting on my desk. In this masterpiece, he calls America a nation of "...proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers.... as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis once were. And with good reason." The book is full of similarly thought-provoking material. That Vonnegut, he sure is deep.
"Many-faceted cesspool"? Vonnegut only wishes he could write badly that well.
Posted by: utron at December 22, 2005 07:55 AM
Wow, so there IS a silver lining. In a cloud of ionized plasma.
Posted by: Josh at December 22, 2005 10:08 AM
There isn't anything wrong with America that can't be fixed with another novelty Christmas tune.
Posted by: Pile On® at December 22, 2005 10:37 AM
Thanks for putting things in perspective. I never ever thought of taking a crap on a moon of Jupiter before... but now it may become a life's ambition.
Posted by: Gordon at December 22, 2005 10:52 AM
Carl Sagan's dead, long live BA.
Posted by: Martin at Blogbat at December 22, 2005 01:35 PM
Better to be a many-faceted cesspool than a mono-faceted...cesspool...What the hell is a many-faceted cesspool? An octagonal cylinder?
And how dare Macstansbury accuse BA of dealing with substantive issues, ever! The idea. The nerve...the many-faceted nerve...Ok, I'm shutting up now.
Posted by: EssEm at December 22, 2005 03:51 PM
You gave me a flashback to Tom Swift: Terror On The Moons Of Jupiter.
Posted by: Dave Munger at December 22, 2005 07:09 PM
www.zombietime.com has loads of visuals that fall under this topic.
Posted by: Jeremiah at December 27, 2005 05:18 PM