Russell David Harper

Worried about municipal water quality? Don't worry. These days, choose from dozens of individually bottled water substitutes, offered by the biggest corporations on the planet and available at most American gas stations. The future will be artificial, in spite of the best efforts of all those geniuses who know it's wrong but who can't help succumbing to the lure of big money in an endlessly diversified marketplace.

Bored? Follow this sentence to Silly 2007 or Silly 2008—where you'll find an archive of more than three dozen essays from another era. Or, if you're in the mood for something more serious, this sentence will take you to the New York Times.

Misc.

Everything in these pages has been vetted for truth, accuracy, and logic. For example, if it's true that a total planetary population of seventy or so human beings would do less damage to the earth than a population of six or nine billion, then you don't need to feel guilty for failing to give aid to the poor. Or for using birth control.

(Silly) Ideas |updated sometime in the year 2010|

Welcome to Silly Incorporated, my fake blog. The year 2009, by the way, was a wait-and-see year. As for 2010, I have next to nothing to say. Not yet, anyway. Meanwhile, please enjoy Silly 2007 and Silly 2008, a collection of essays devoted to the final years of the Bush administration.

"Mr. Harper, are you a Mac or a PC?" Both, but right now I'm using an expensive PC. Buy me a Mac and I'll use that too. I love the little differences.

Raise your own chickens. Take the time to raise your own chickens, and not only because they make cute pets or because they give college-educated Americans the chance to say, "I may not be a vegetarian but that doesn't mean I don't hate Big Agriculture!" No, do it also because if we can get this whole bird flu thing off the ground again we might start a planet-renewing human pandemic. (Plus, there's no substitute for a truly fresh egg.)

Sarah Palin is appealing. Sarah Palin is very rich and very pretty. I like her a lot. Plus, like her, I'm nostalgic for an earlier age that not only never existed but that dates to before my time. In other words, I have to admit: the fantasy of a cozy middle-class Christmas Eve, fire in the hearth and 1955 on the calendar and everyone in nice clean clothes and nobody drunk, the snow falling outside and a pretty young girl in a woolen skirt and starched blouse leaning on my arm and making me dizzy with her Ivory-soap scent, especially when you add in the promise of a good job in a world made permanently safe by American industrial might, makes me blush.

Barack Obama is probably great. Barack Obama is probably a great president. But his greatness would be such a black mark on the red-faced Right that we may never find out.

Embrace your screen. Now that we're sure the world is coming to an end, there's never been a better time to revisit the twentieth century, the apex of human life. Turn on and tune in to a better era. (Maybe start in 1912 with An Unseen Enemy and end with coverage of the Lewinsky scandal or replays of the McGwire–Sosa home-run race.)

Consider getting a Yukon Denali as your next "car." Now that so many people are going small again with their cars, consider getting something with a little more heft. Your chances of surviving a fatal accident are bound to go up. Better yet, as private contracts and illegal drugs continue to put roadblocks in the way of WPA-style repairs to the American infrastructure, you'll be better prepared for potholes, uneven pavement, and unplowed snow. Think big.

"But what about global warming?" It would take more than a few million chastened and well-meaning souls switching to compact fluorescents, hybrid sedans, and plant-based diets to put on the breaks now. Besides, such behavior only stimulates the global economy by leaving more resources for the planet's emergent human population, still clamoring for a taste of the good life that the Americans lived out onscreen and over the airwaves in the last century. So let your compost pile rot. (But keep your reusable bags; they're better than the ones the stores give you.)

I got my iPhone for free. Okay, it's not really an iPhone, but it's a phone, and it was free with the plan. So I could afford expensive headphones. Now I can listen to all my favorite albums, hundreds of them, stored on a twenty-five-dollar thumbnail-size memory card. So in that way it's better than the iPhone.

"Are you still going to give us links to nice-looking people?" Of course. Try this. And don't worry: I wouldn't send you anywhere that wasn't safe. If you don't believe me, you'll just have to search for your own pictures.

"Do you drink bottled water or tap?" Tap. I don't like to throw away plastic bottles, even if I know they'll get new life as a reflective highway lane divider or a park bench. If I get cancer or something and don't decide right then and there to kill myself (having already lived out the majority of my dreams), maybe I'll sue somebody and make the case that all profits from the superfluous beverage industry should go to maintaining and upgrading the water-delivery infrastructure. (Note: beer is not superfluous. Miller et al. would get to keep their profits as far as I'm concerned.)

"What about the iPad?" I love the iPad. The touch-screen interface gives me a break from all the keyboarding and mousing I've done over the last twenty-seven years. Or it will, when somebody buys me one. For now, if I want to watch Bladerunner, I'll just have to settle for my television (the sound, channeled through my stereo system, filling the room with its eerie perfection) or my computer (using the same headphones I use for my free iPhone). Maybe when I retire I'll be lucky enough to sit all day in a giant cushioned chair, motionless except when touching the screen or plugging in the recharging unit. Maybe that's what death will look like.