Tag Archives: politicians

Moon Painting

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Several days ago we ran a post titled Cloud Cutting http://www.bigshotsnow.com/cloud-cutting/ where we showed off our new weather modification process we have developed here at *The Institute. Using full disclosure you should know that we have “Applied for a Patent, Trademarked it , Branded it, and are protecting it by (American) gun-toting thugs”, who help us convince patent stealers to cease and desist. We have some of the best thugs in the world right here in our own country and they are all certified pure-bred American thugs with no ties to any other country. Period, End of Story. So rest easy only our real American thugs will call on you if you try to steal our patents. The Institute prides itself on buying American and keeping our hard-earned American money working here at home.

What happened was we forgot to tell you about one important aspect of our new technology. It is also as new and revolutionary as our Cloud Cutting program. We have named this new process Moon Painting. We know it’s not a very original name and doesn’t have that new pizzazz that some of our other high-profile programs do, but we wanted this new process to be identifiable by everyone, even if you have trouble analyzing new ideas or English is your seventh and final language. ( Hey we’re not knocking non-native English speakers. We applaud you on your efforts and thank you for trying). Half of our interns do not speak English all that well. In fact many of them do not have a discernible language of any sort, we communicate with them by American sign language and flash cards and loud yelling. It is a fact that if  you yell loudly at them in a language they do not understand they will many times nod as if understanding your meaning and go away and do stuff. Sometimes it is even what you want them to do. Sort of.

But back to the important topic at hand, Moon Painting. Here’s how it works. The moon comes up many times after dark during the month and always it is the same old boring white. Boring being the operative word here and white being the accepted moon color for ages. Our surveys show us that frankly, the majority of you are sick of it and would welcome a new color. This was electrifying news to us as we had been secretively working on the now released Cloud Cutting program, which was only financially viable during the day. We needed another revenue stream that would fill in the rest of day, the dark part, with money generating ability. It was then when someone at one of our interminable staff meetings, we forget who, yelled out “Hey, what about the freaking moon, eh? It works at night. We should like, work on that.” He said ‘eh’ again, which is so redundant the 100th time you hear it that we have chosen to omit it from now on, we don’t care how many times he says it.

But how to paint the moon? What we needed was a “long Throw” projector. Hitachi, NEC, Christie, all make a long throw projector but we needed a very Looooong Throw projector. Like 238,900 miles long. We tried daisy-chaining a bunch of them together to get that extra reach, but that didn’t work. We tried using big fat mirrors the way the huge telescope at Arecibo works but that didn’t work either. Then one of our senior staff members who spends way too much time on Craig’s list found an old used Hubble telescope that had returned not to bunged up to Earth that we could buy really cheap. Like $260 bucks cheap although we had to pay for shipping which added like a humongous charge to it. Those folks at the Post Office even made us come and pick it up. They refused to deliver it and were snotty about it besides, which is something we intend to bring up to the Post Master General the next time we’re hobnobbing at the White house.

So, we built our own. That’s right, our very own long throw projector. After all we had our old unused ShopSmith woodworking tool, an intern with most of his fingers intact, and the hearts and minds with the collective will to do the impossible to make it happen. Yes we used the Hubble as our core and also three of those Hitachi Cp-WU8461 at ten grand a pop, our second largest expense, and using our own proprietary procedures that we’re not at liberty to disclose, built an adequate but serviceable projector. We say adequate because it does have a few wrinkles to work out yet. We use Thomas Edison’s largest light bulb ever made which is 14 feet tall, weighs eight tons, and shines like the dickens to provide our light force. We could point it at you out there in the heartland or even farther but we don’t want to put your eye out. This thing is bright. You can actually see the last one (we bought the last dozen of these bulbs they had in storage) at the Edison Museum and Memorial Tower in Edison, New  Jersey. However big as the bulb is it only lasts for about 26 minutes at full power and about two and a half hours at half-strength which produces a washed out color that isn’t all that appealing. At full strength though Virgil, it’ll flat paint that moon any primary color you want. See actual image of moon being painted above. This was taken just two nights ago and we were able to keep that moon painted nearly 8 minutes before that old Edison bulb blew, taking out the mounting ring at the back of the projector, bending the mounting tube on the Hubble’s rear flange and the wall behind it. Scared the bejezuz out the operator and most of the county below the proving grounds down there on the flat lands. The lights below the moon are from the interns’ village where the substitute interns live and wait for their rotation up here at The Institute.

Our plan is to have the kinks worked out of our projector by the end of October, hopefully in time for Halloween. There are plans for many novelty projections on the moon such as a Smiley Face, Peace Symbol, Ying-Yang symbol, caricatures of your favorite or most disliked politicians, the list is endless. Plus some corporate advertising, we got to make this thing pay for itself someway. For more information or pricing please send Self-adressed stamped envelope and six dollars American money, preferably gold or silver certificates, to Tell Me More, The Institute, Northern Colorado. Please allow six to eight weeks or an even longer undetermined amount of time for delivery.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind.

The Institute and The Incredible Role It plays In Horticultural Stuff Yesterday Today And Tomorrow

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We, The Institute, have been accused and nearly slandered by some people out there who ask us outright “What do you do with all that incredible grant money you don’t get from the United States government? Do you waste it? Do you use it for immoral purposes? (I can’t believe they would ask us that us that so I won’t dignify that with a response) Do you ever use it for horticulturaly enriching the lives of the citizens and taxpayers of this great country of ours? And so on.

Well we take great umbrage at those people who ask us stuff like that and if we were vindictive we’d wish that all of them would perish in great huge awful pain from like a space explosion or falling into a volcano, or having to sit through a few of those caucuses that are happening right now, but we’re not, so we’ll answer one of those questions.

We’ve chosen the question directed at the horticultural aspect of our work here at The Institute. The Institute’s vast land holdings in other countries and even here on The Institute’s grounds are filled to the brim with every type of horticultural experiment, both good and bad, that you could possibly imagine plus some more to boot that you couldn’t think of in, like, a million years.

Let’s just take one example of an incredible horticultural breakthrough that has been made by our team of dedicated, underfed and misused technicians, groundskeepers and PhD’s that are the backbone of our horticultural pogrom here at The Institute. This is our latest patented, trademarked, copyrighted, DNA controlled, addition to the Pea family, “The Purple Pea ™” patent not pending due to forgetting to apply but will soon, maybe, plus © in Panama, the Iberian peninsula, and China, the not communist part.

What makes The Purple Pea ™ so unique? It’s coloring for one. It’s purple. All other inferior peas are green and always will be no matter how long you cook them. When your children’s children are playing “Kill ’em All ver. 6.8.7” on their Xboxes on Ganymede those boring peas will still be green. Our Purple Peas™ will be purple, and Royal Purple as well. Why? Because purple is the color of Royalty and if you have to eat peas why not feel good about it. Purple will also distinguish them from the other tasteless, odorless, bland but boring vegetables on your plate.

 Another benefit of Purple Peas ™ is the ease with which they can be harvested. Plain government funded peas have to be harvested by someone bending over and pulling the individual pea pod from the lowly bush it is attached to. This is hard. Many Americans simply refuse to do it. “Let them rot.” they say “I’m not bending over.” So other individuals must be found, sometimes at a very low rate of cost, to harvest the nation’s peas. This seems un-American. Or maybe just wrong. We don’t know. Here at The Institute we try to stay out of politics if we can. (Except for saying don’t vote for that one comb-over guy who looks and acts like Mussolini).

With our new improved Purple Peas ™ the harvesting is so simple even politicians could do it if they really had to work for a living. The peas grow on a tree at eye level so that no bending over is required, which may improve our unemployment numbers because real Americans could be put back to work harvesting Purple Peas™ at a huge rate of cost. According to our resident economists, who have issued a policy statement regarding lowering our unemployment rates, that states and we quote, “That would be good.”.

Here’s how it works. The Purple Pea™ trees bear the pods and as the pods grow they turn purple which is an aid to recognizing them, and soon become stuffed to their very seams with bright round, very Purple Peas™. At just the right moment these pods unfurl  in a corkscrew manner, allowing the Purple Peas™ within them to roll along the side of the pod gaining speed and burnishing themselves to a lovely shade of Royal Purple. Harvesting is as simple as placing a pot or pan or 55 gal drum under the flow of cascading Purple Peas™ and stand back. Watching the pots and pans fill up and seeing them be collected for shipment here and abroad is a pure joy. The most difficult part of the harvest is standing in a place where one doesn’t get hit in the eye by one of these Purple Peas™ rocketing off the pod into the harvesting vessel.

One of the niggling little problems of our new and improved Purple Peas™ is getting people in the United States accustomed to the taste of the new pea variety. Unfortunately they taste like eight day old scallops and have the consistency of previously chewed earth worms. Our taste tests in sub-Saharan desert countries have not indicated this to be a problem, but their diet is different from what we here in the states are used to. This is preventing us from getting approval from the Food and Drug  Administration to sell these on the open market but thankfully that has not affected our road side stands or food fair operations.

So rest assured The Institute is still tirelessly at work developing new strains of most of our common foodstuffs and hope to have new and colorful products out soon. Watch for our patent not pending, copyrighted, trademarked, Purple Peas™ at a food venue near you.

Unattended Landscapes

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Listen up America! we have just discovered a huge and growing problem in our favorite National parks. That problem is “Unattended Landscapes”. That’s right, some of our most desirable sought after landscapes, the very reason many of us go to these National parks, are being left unattended. Look closely at this image and you will see that there is not a single attendant anywhere. We even went down there and looked around the corner at the river and yelled a lot to see if anyone would answer and there wasn’t a soul.

This particular landscape happens to be on the Firehole river in Yellowstone National park, a park known for its attention to wildlife and the comfort of its visitors, and we found that not only was this portion of the landscape unattended but there were great huge stretches of the river that did not have a single person watching it. We were stunned. What is happening here? We pay enormous taxes to run this country right and we find that there are huge gaps in the allocation of that money. At least as far as protecting our scenic treasures goes. What is that money being used for? Sneaky, stealthy new bombers that we can send to wreck other people’s scenic areas? What about us. What about our important problems?  Where are the concrete attendants shacks? Where are the white hybrid cars with the big national park stickers all over the doors? Where are the attendants? Where are the klieg lights to turn on to see if anything is messing with our landscapes after dark? This is shameful. Is this happening in our other National parks as well?

This is a question we intend to pursue and we will get to the bottom of this situation. There are the makings of a national disgrace here and we’re not going to stop until we have examined every national park, scenic highway and byway, every national monument, state, county and local park, all those scenic areas on federal land that are visible from the highway, anything that looks landscapey, until these areas are fully attended and protected. We believe the problem of Unattended Landscapes is going to be our next national crisis.

Some of you may be saying “What’s the big hairy deal, some of these places have been unattended for a long time.” Well our response is “Yeah, So what ? What are you a communist?” There’s lots of reasons we need to attend to our scenic areas. Things have changed since Teddy Roosevelt was around. We’ve got more people now and some of them are bad. We’ve got people who want to mow down all the shrubbery and drill for oil in the middle of the Firehole river and there’s terrorists that want to sneak in and blow up a tree or something. We’ve got no idea what can happen. Some of these scenic places are irreplaceable. You don’t just go in there and stand them up willy-nilly wherever you feel like it.

We know that some of you may have already noticed this situation and perhaps even begun acting on it but we need everyone to support this important movement. We cannot leave our God-given scenic areas to the happenstance of nonchalance. Get involved. Volunteer. If nothing else go to an unattended scenic landscape and park your car and watch these places. Be an attendant. If you’re unable to spend weeks or months at a scenic site, write your congressman. Send emails to politicians running for office, find out their viewpoints about this problem, then vote your convictions. We’re going to. Several times if it will help. OK then, this is our month to attend to a particularly scenic site along Highway 287 here in Colorado so we have to go. Remember, Pay Attention, Do Your Part, and Be Involved, it’s the right thing to do.

The Thing About Badgers

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The thing about badgers is that they do not make good house pets. I know this is a surprise what with all those slick ‘adopt a badger’ ads you see on TV. The close-up of their beady little bloodshot eyes, the slow motion shots of the badger running towards its supposed loved one, the way it seems to want to be cuddled and held. However many people have found to their dismay after the fact that badgers, although taciturn and often grumpy, also have many other unsavory habits that tend to make them an undesirable pet.

Unfortunately they don’t have good prospects to be your new best friend because they are not genetically predisposed to be friendly loving creatures. Their background  includes being related to polecats, weasels, and wolverines and we’ve all known people who have been raised by weasels and how that didn’t work out. Breeding shows. I know that is a harsh statement but you will see as you read further that this condemnation is usually proved true. If it makes it any easier to accept think of them as being like politicians, they seem ok until you elect them and then their true colors come out.

First in a long list of problems is that they are very short. Squatty, actually. While shortness is not a bad habit in itself, it is what one does with that shortness that causes a problem. Several unfortunate pet owners have stated that everything was fine with having a badger for a pet until they introduced them to the household cat. The badger feigning friendliness quickly grabbed the unoffending tabby, and being short, easily dragged it under the heavy divan in the sitting room and made a short meal of it amidst much contented grunting and snorfling. There was the usual screaming and caterwauling from everyone involved of course, as the men in the family tried unsuccessfully to lift the heavy couch to rescue the poor feline. But this was too little, too late as badgers are known for taking hasty meals. Besides losing fluffy, what seemed to bother the new owners of the badger the most, was the unrepentant attitude of the badger after the fact. It was if the badger didn’t care.

Another problem is their reticence towards public speaking. It is difficult if not impossible to get a badger to make a speech or even carry on a casual conversation. They will sometimes answer a question with a single syllable grunt or a high-pitched squeaking sound if the question surprises them, but if you’re looking for a witty dinner companion do not choose the badger, they will constantly disappoint you.

But by and large the biggest problem and by biggest we mean freaking huge with having a badger around is their tendency towards drunkenness. If you think badgers are a handful sober try having them around when they’re hammered. In the wild you can often find drunken badgers sprawled out around the edges of an orchard where they have eaten fermented fruit for its alcohol content until they pass out and become nuisances of the first order. Often fighting, and scratching rude messages on the apple trees, they show a total disregard for others personal property. Farmers often have to circumnavigate their orchards in the morning, dragging the besotted creatures to a safer place to sleep it off so they don’t get run over by the farm machinery and gum up the works. Alcoholism and homelessness in the badger population is a huge issue in States that have large fruit crops such as Washington for its apples, and Wisconsin because it has cheap beer, to name just two.

In the home it becomes a more personal problem for the owner of these pets as they will raid the liquor cabinet and consume everything in it, often just before you plan to have a large party. They are particularly fond of fruit liqueurs but will even drink your most expensive Cognac, badgers don’t care. If nothing else is available they will drink beer having no problem pulling the caps off the bottle with their strong forearms and long claws which act as built-in church keys. The real problem comes when they wake up as they have ferocious hangovers and are completely unmanageable until much later in the day. It is best to simply coax them outside with an empty liquor bottle and lock the doors.

While it may seem like a good idea to have a badger as a pet it often doesn’t work out. Don’t be fooled by those slick TV ads where they show young children holding a homeless, bedraggled looking badger with the message of ‘give a badger a home, make a friend for life’, or ‘save this animal from a life of misery in the heartless out of doors’,  or ‘Open your hearts, open your home’ (and open your liquor cabinet) is often the hook used to get you to take in a seemingly innocent badger. Remember, the thing about badgers is, they don’t make good pets.

Missed Payments

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What you see here is a sad story. That’s rain out there on the plains and its falling pretty good where its falling and that’s a good thing. But you’ll notice it isn’t falling everywhere, there’s empty spaces between those rain spouts, and that’s the sad part of the story.

Out West here water is more important than anything else. Its more important than politics, religion, money, although all those things play a part in managing it. It’s the actual water itself, the wet part, that is important. There’s been wars fought over it, laws made controlling it, lives ruined for lack of it. It’s a big deal here.

Water is becoming scarcer and scarcer every season and so it’s becoming expensiver and expensiver every season. The powers that be have set up what is called, ‘the Rain Commission’, which is made up of the usual suspects and they’ve managed to set the price on rain. The price being determined by how much rain you want, how long you want it to rain for and how often. And by how much the R.C. can make off it by establishing their regulatory fees. They say its expensive maneuvering those clouds around and timing the rainfall, so if you want rain now, you’ve got to ante up and they aren’t fooling. Get out the big bucks and if you think the price is going to go back down again you’ve been listening to those oil boys too long.

You can own water here and keep it for yourself if you’re a ruthless greedy bastard. Politicians get elected and unelected over it by deciding who gets to use it. We’ve even got a law that says you can’t catch the rain that falls off your roof and use it for your own selfish needs unless you want to go to jail. That rain has to run down unimpeded to where the people who want to control it can get their hands on it. They collect it in big ponds they call reservoirs and fence it off and the people who live around them can’t even swim in it, or go boating on the top of them without the rain owners permission because they own the surface rights to that stored up rain. Consequently bootleg water can be a big business if you’ve got the stomach for it and you can dodge the Rain Commission’s regulators. They’ll disappear you if they catch you dealing water. But folks have a way of working around  things like that. That’s why you rarely see those plastic water bottles littering up our highways out here. As soon as someone sees one it is snatched up and guess what goes in it. Yup, rainwater. You’ll see people out behind the 7-11 passing money over and loading those plastic bottles into their trunks.

Which brings us back to the sad part of our tale. If you look again at that rain falling out on the plains you’ll see that there are spaces between the rainfalls, we mentioned that at the beginning of this story. In the old days, before the ‘Rain Commission’, that rain that’s falling out there would have been a solid unbroken sheet of water running from Denver in the South to Cheyenne in the North. Everybody would have gotten some. And it was free water, a gift from the heavens to make those farmers lives easier. Now you got to pay for that rain. The politicians and the greedy rain owners have put a price on it. They’ve commoditized it. The spaces where the rain isn’t falling are over those poor farmers land that missed their rain payments and so now they don’t get any. No pay, no rain. It’s going to take a lot of trips to the back of the 7-11 and a lot of those plastic water bottles to make up for that lost rainfall for those poor folks. Crops don’t grow themselves, they need that water. There’s going to be a lot of unhappy farmers out there. It also looks like there’s going to be some more politicians out of work soon. I wonder if they’ll take up farming. Probably not.