Archive for December, 2017

A sliver of the future: Space Tourism. It’s what’s for dinner.

Be here now. You here it all the time. Be in the moment – that’s where it’s at. And while I don’t doubt the merit in being “present,” I also believe in expanding my awareness to include the future. To that end I’ve spent years practicing techniques that allow me to slither through cosmic wormholes and experience the future. I’ve become quite adept at it and sometimes I experience the future like there’s no tomorrow (so to speak). Unfortunately the interdimensional gatekeepers prevent time travelers like me from bringing back any of the good stuff. Instead I’m relegated to one duty-free keepsake memory from the future. After declaring this approved memory from a list of duty-free recollections, I then take it through cosmic customs and happily report it back to you in the present. And although it isn’t particularly earth-shattering or enlightening unto itself, this unique keepsake memory  does provide enough clues (much like a Sudoku puzzle) to allow one to fill in the blanks and perhaps imagine the society of 2031 in its entirety derived only from the scant evidence I’m allowed to present. If you can collate, extrapolate and percolate (as in drinking lots of coffee while trying to figure it out), you may be able to fully grasp the world of the future from the meager clues offered herein: as in this case Yelp reviews of space tourism flights. 

So without further fanfare or ado (could fanfare and ado be the same thing?), I’m mightily pleased to present to you my gift of Yelp space tourism reviews from the future.

5 Stars: Princess Space Cruise Lines

OK, first of all if I could give them 6 Stars I would. Princess dazzled me. What Princess Cruise Lines does on water they also do in the vacuum of space. Whether it was the unlimited Chilean sea bass (sustainably caught and ethically processed) at the seafood buffet or listening to 95-year-old Engelbert Humperdinck (also sustainably caught and ethically processed) sing his greatest hits in business class, Princess has managed to seamlessly extend their festive seaborne experience into a special airborne experience until eventually it becomes an unforgettable vacuum borne experience. And dare I say it: This vacuum does not suck. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s a lot of eggs.
Oh, that’s just some of your your lifetimes lived and unlived.

George Grossman died of natural causes at the age of 33 – if you consider being struck by a meteor as “natural.” George’s bewildering demise occurred while he was racing to the hospital to witness the delivery of his second child who would turn out to be a son named Jake. Many years later fatherless Jake (his mother Shirley never remarried) grew up longing for the father he never knew. Upon his death, Jake vowed to seek out his deceased father in the afterworlds. And one day it came to pass that Jake actually did pass, and upon ascending to the vault of heaven was pleased to see his long since deceased sister Kelly, his mother Shirley and a few family pets all waiting for him in a gauzy meadow. But where was dad? He’d waited his entire life for this moment and dad was a no show.

“What gives, Jake exclaimed? “Where’s dad,” he lamented in the ethereal waviness of the afterlife?

Just then a Yoda-ish guardian angel appeared and explained to Jake that when his father George died (meteor to the head), George’s soul was placed in the body of his son Jake Grossman.

“You mean…” Jake gasped.

“Yes, you’ve had sex with your mother. But don’t freak out because she was your loving wife at the time. Oedipal complexes aside, I’m here to tell you that you are your own father. That’s why he didn’t show up in the afterlife despite your life long yearnings. Now Jake, this rarely happens in the reincarnation business I superintend, but consider this from my perspective. You had just been born and you had also just died, and there was no time to implement the usual protocols so we took a short cut and played fast and loose with the code of interdimensional reincarnation birthing procedures and placed your soul in your son’s body. I hope you’re not too upset.

“As a reward for enduring our production snafu, in your next lifetime we’re allowing you to get in line twice when they pass out brains – or any other organ you may want to double in size. You’re also scheduled to inherit the handsome gene from your mother’s side,” explained the Soul Ombudsman. And with that crude gesture of frontier reincarnation justice, the little oracle evanesced into the ethers.

Just before whooshing into his new earth body, the soul of Jake Grossman was advised to: learn his life lessons, recognize his divinity and transcend the wheel of reincarnation. Achieving the first two would allow for the 3^rd item thereby providing him the key to the password protected speakeasy and allow his soul to reassume its rightful place in the rapture more popularly known as God’s After Party.

Every state endeavors to generate tourism dollars through ambitious marketing programs. But sometimes these promotions miss the mark. Witness these botched attempts at stimulating tourism through well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided brochures:

1. Colorado: Thanks to Recently Enacted Marijuana Laws Denver is Now the 2-Mile High City
   

   If you’re a generic tourist going nowhere in particular, you might like this nondescript and vacuous travel guide. Meanwhile But if you want to go some place check out these travel brochures some states probably wish they never created in the first place.

2. New Mexico: The Land of Entrapment
3. New Mexico: Come for the Radiation. Stay for the ‘Shrooms
4. Maryland: We’re Trying. Really. Please Don’t Judge Us by Baltimore
5. Wyoming: Live Rectangular or Die
6. Florida: America’s Dangling Body Part
7. Michigan: Good Mitten, Bad Mitten
8. California: The Land of Fruits & Nuts
9. California: Ignoring Sexual Harassment from 1850 until 2017
10. Delaware: We’re Anti-paranoid. We think everyone is trying to ignore us.
11. Arkansas: Our “kansas” isn’t pronounced like Kansas’s “Kansas”
12. New Jersey: America’s Lymph System Since 1940
13. Alaska: Our Most Northern, Western and Eastern State – Google It
14. Indiana: Who’s yer state?
15. Washington: Home to Boing, Tinysoft and Barstucks
16. Mississippi: “When yer standin’ on yer head, we’re number 1 in everything!”
17. Mississippi: Still leading the nation in outhouses per capita
18. Mississippi: More Potable Water than Ethiopia and Way More Paved Roads than Bangladesh
19. Mississippi: Separate and Equal Drinking Fountains for Each and Every Minority
20. Connecticut: “Even we don’t know why there’s a second ‘c’ in our name and we live here”
21. Illinois: Land of Lincoln, Air of Jersey, Water of Flint
22. Alabama: Thank God We’ve Got College Football
23. Louisiana: “Have you visited us lately? We’re barely part of the United States.”
24. Texas: Too Big to fail. We’re just underachieving instead.
25. Texas: At Least We’ve Got Austin
26. Oklahoma: Unchanged since 1907
27. Oklahoma: Unchanged since the Big Bang
28. Oklahoma: Come and Watch Time Stand Still
29. Oklahoma: We have a city named Enid – need we say more?
30. Missouri: The Blow Me State
31. Wisconsin: We’ve Lost Our Minds, Come Find Yours
32. Wisconsin: “I don’t care how inefficient they are; can we please go back to the one kind of regular screw in light bulb?”…and other pleas against modernity in the lighting industry.
33. Kansas: What Wisconsin Said

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