(Silly) Ideas |updated October 10, 2008|

All of the ideas on this page, though silly, have been vetted for common sense and accuracy. If you find anything amiss, please write to me. I will try to represent as many viewpoints as I can possibly tolerate. And if you'd like to be notified of updates, just let me know. Whenever a sufficiently silly idea coincides with one of my few days off, I will try to share it with you. (Please note that 2008 hasn't yet seemed sufficiently silly to warrant many new ideas [for one thing, my free time's been spent lying in bed and reading or snacking in front of the television or running up local hills or convincing the kids that there's no reason in this day and age to be bored rather than jotting things down]; it might be a good time to review 2007—if for no other reason, to get a good idea of what "silly" might look like this year when it happens.)

Après le deluge. Six billion money-loving humans cannot be sustained indefinitely. Are we ready for the near future, when the majority of us will almost certainly be dead? (More . . .)

Old, sexy, young, and bald. The top two presidential tickets present a staggering degree of diversity. (More . . .)

Global warming equals global pleasure. According to a new survey, things may be looking up for human beings as the planet warms. (More . . .)

Some innovations are great; others are overrated. As the modern world races toward perfection, it's time to take a moment to reflect on our modern marvels. (More . . .)

Embrace your television. Especially if you work hard, you deserve to watch television, even if you live in Ithaca, NY. Indulge your senses. That DVD of The Deer Hunter? It counts as television. So does your collection of Three's Company.

Consider not getting a Volvo as your next car. Trade in your Volvo for a less intellectually pretentious car. Besides, they've gotten so expensive and stylish these days that it's hard to believe there's even a shred of socialism behind them. It seems more like a case of Scandinavian chic.

Subarus run on fossil fuels. It's true: Fuji Heavy Industries, the makers of Subaru, designs its cars to run on gas, not leaves and twigs. Still, they're great cars, and they cost less, on average, than Volvos (which are great cars too, but see above).

Even liberal fat people don't revolt. If people are overweight they don't take to the streets and revolt, at least not spontaneously and en masse. For one thing, they're getting enough to eat.

Organic farming and the Malthusian principle. We should all support good farming practices (by eating local and in season whenever possible), but until universal birth control is a reality, farming will have to continue to cheat to meet ever-rising demands from the ever-present swarming, impecunious, hungry mobs. Cheating generally means petroleum-powered nitrogen fixation (for fertilizers), pesticides, and bioengineering.

The New York Times is great, but it has its limitations. When you really want to know what's going on in the world or how the United States is doing at the job of managing itself and its mission in the rest of the world, by all means, read the New York Times. The staff of that paper would commit hara-kiri before it screwed anything up. And if it did screw anything up, it would make sure to conduct its own public catharsis—not resting until the editors were sure that every last stone had been unturned and every last question posed. But remember, the paper's liberal bias is a form of wishful thinking. The paper is politically liberal, yes, and for that it should be applauded. But it is at the same time financially conservative. This means that for every report on the rise of China, there's a deep-down wish that whatever China does, its actions don't interrupt the schedule at the Met or the primacy of the shops and boutiques in the paper's own corner of the world. "The continued availability of adoptable girls with an aptitude for math and classical piano would be nice too," one observer was recently quoted as saying.