Pith and Substance News! |
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| Written by Bryan Q. Denton |
| Sunday, 02 September 2007 19:00 |
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This month in Apocalypticish Doom: Your Morning Ritual! Every morning of every day, millions of people around the world are contributing to the eventuality of the end of all things. Even YOU may unknowingly be contributing to the deterioration and inevitable implosion of planet Earth. You coffee-drinker. You bastard. Available on The Internets is a website that can, through the power of mathematics, look into the futures and calculate how much waste you create per annum by examining how much coffee you drink a day. According to http://www.dzignism.com/projects/coffee.waste/, if you drink just one cup of java a day, you can create 3.25 pounds of waste a year. Need a coffee in the afternoon in addition to the poison you suckle each morning to break through that two o’clock wall? You, my environmentally challenged friend, annually create 6.5 pounds of waste. Three-cup-a-dayers (TCAD) might as well fly a legion of crop dusters over the Amazon rainforest releasing toxic poisons, as just one TCAD creates 9.75 pounds of waste a year. Drive-thru access to coffee has exacerbated the everyday harm caused to the kittens, puppies, baby seals and the lesser cute species (homo lesscuterous) that populate our marked planet: automobile-drivers spend several months every year idling in drive-thru lines, patiently waiting for their morning fix, killing our planet to appease their selfish caffeine-related needs. What of the other coffee drinker? The bring-it-from-home-er (BIFH-er)? The BIFH-ers of the world, so-called conscientious coffee-drinkers, are almost worse than you, you loathsome ender of life-as-we-know-it-er. BIFH-ers’ particular exercise in conscientiousness has led to the inception of an indestructible army of the un-disposable: portable mugs. Mug-carriers walk through life in a high-and-mighty fashion, delighted in their better-than-thou-ness, ignorant of the harm they are inflicting upon kittens, puppies, and beautiful, beautiful baby seals. They might as well be releasing the contents of an oil liner onto a school of dolphins. Probably baby dolphins. Or like, really, very, cute-and-elderly dolphins who were war veterans and have spoon collections in the oceans. Luckily, the amount of environmental harm reaped by coffee-drinkers will cause planet Earth to purge itself of us (and everything else) in a magnificent implosion, one which the other planets will be talking about for millennia to come. Especially Pluto. (Pluto was not cool with us recanting her status as a planet.) There are those who posit that this apocalypticish doom is not inevitable; that, by changing our consumption patterns, we can alter the course of fate, negating the harm we have already done to Earth. These people, these hippy sympathisers, would have us drink hot coffee from our own (scalded) cupped hands. Better that we go out with a bang than change our consumption thusly.
Last night a graduate student from a prestigious Canadian post-secondary institute bludgeoned four hours to death with the Internets. When asked where the time had gone, she replied only by whimpering and mumbling something about a thesis chapter being due in a couple of hours. Later, after a sedative had been administered, she noted she had spent the time on YouTube, entranced by lonleygirl15, salad fingers, a dramatic hamster and entire episodes of So you think you can dance. Zoë River, a Religion scholar of 23, was inspired by the bludgeoning to completely change her Master’s thesis, despite being only one chapter away from completion. After her run-in with the Internets, Zoë decided her original thesis, “An Historical Analysis of the Development of Protestantism in Canada,” would be better used as kindling for a particularly large marshmallow- and freshmen-roasting bonfire at a local Greek party. Incapacitated by stress, Zoë did not actually attend the bonfire in person, but instead took caffeine pills to aid in the creation of her new thesis proposal entitled: YouTube: the Devil? Following the assumption that idle hands are indeed the devil’s plaything, Zoë’s new ethnographic work will focus on the extent to which the popular internet site YouTube may be construed as evil. It is anticipated that Zoë will be awarded SSHRC as well as an additional $100,000 fellowship from the University for this likely groundbreaking piece of literature. When her parents were informed of the good news, they looked mildly confused and asked Zoë what she was going to do with her MA degree. Futurist Prophesizes the World Will be Owned by Just 3 Corporations by 2025 Futurist Noah Tradamus anticipates that most of the world will be owned by just three corporations by the year 2025. The “monopoly trend,” as it has been dubbed, began just after the Second World War when corporations that had benefited financially from exceptionally fruitful monocle, top hat, and artillery contracts began buying smaller businesses to eliminate competition and corner their respective markets. In the 1960s, these monopolies started creating new names for their subsidiary and sister companies, adjusting the optics of the monopoly trend to curb potential hippy insurgencies. By 2000, it had became difficult to buy products created independently of these monopolies. Indeed, it has even become difficult to buy independent produce at farmers’ markets, as corporations are permitted to set up apparently independent grocers stands in many such venues. The businesses leading in the monopoly game cited the attainment of free parking as the cornerstone of their entrepreneurial successes. Although the corporations of the world are currently owned by a wide variety of stakeholders from across the globe, it has been prophesized that ownership will be solidified when three hotels are constructed on Park Avenue, despite the owner having spent a brief stint in jail. Regardless of the prophecy, or perhaps ensuring the prophecy is realized, consumers continue to purchase products from monopolies, even where independent alternatives exist. Former hippies cling to the hope that citizens of the world will come to their senses and change their consumption patterns, and have started a protest campaign to that end. The protests feature men, women, and children “of the future” garbed in the top hats and monocles, depicting the apparent inevitability that the monopolies of the near future will set fashion trends as well as all other consumption patterns.
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Grad Student Bludgeons Four Hours to Death with the Internets
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