Howard, you see, is comically rolling around in the children's pool, whilst the lady of the house notes wryly, "And he's the one who hates to take a bath."
In case you're not familiar with the hilarious Howard Huge comic strip, this is from Howard's Wikipedia entry:
The comics star Howard, an enormous but lovable dog (a gentle giant, perhaps) and his family and neighborhood kids, and include such classic scenarios as Howard getting leaves all over the carpet or wagging his tail, thus negating his great poker face. Generally speaking, Howard's being large causes him to encounter inconveniences not normally faced by average-sized dogs. He is known to have been called a "maroon," as in "That Howard Huge.... what a maroon!"I admire the ability of the wikipedist to almost completely conceal his disdain.
I tried to find a sample Howard Huge comic strip, but a Google image search for "Howard Huge" yielded this photo of model Sophie Howard and I completely forgot what I was looking for.
Once I had finished reading the entire (aptly titled) "Laugh Parade," I moved on to the magazine's more substantial features. I found particularly fascinating an article that purported to explain "Why America's Future Depends on Space." In it, noted astronomer and poultry expert Neil deGrasse Tyson argues that China is overtaking us in space.
At first I thought, well, they need it more than we do, right? They have like 8 billion people, and that's a lot, even if they are half the size of normal people. But then I realized that noted astronomer and heavyweight champ Neil deGrasse Tyson was talking about outer space. The article notes:
"During a recent trip to Beijing, I expected to see wide boulevards dense with bicycles as a primary means of transportation. Instead, I was surprised to see those boulevards filled with top-end luxury cars, while cranes knit a new skyline of high-rise buildings."Can you believe that? Not only do the Chinese now have automobiles, they have cranes capable of knitting a skyline. Here in America we can't even get the pigeons to stop shitting on our top-end luxury cars, while over in China they've trained waterfowl to fabricate buildings out of yarn. I imagine these buildings are more impressive from a distance than close up, but still.
Evidently the knitting cranes were a fortuitous by-product of China's space program. The history of space exploration is littered with such happy accidents. For example:
"When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, a blunder in the design of its optics generated hopelessly blurred images.... Eager astrophysicists [Is there another kind? -- Diesel] wrote suites of advanced image-processing software to help identify and isolate stars in otherwise crowed, unfocused fields... Meanwhile, medical researchers recognized that the challenge faced by astrophysicists was similar to that faced by doctors in their visual search for tumors in mammograms.... The medical community adopted the new techniques being used for the Hubble to assist their early detection of breast cancer. Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope."To demonstrate just how vital this research is, here is a photo of a healthy adult woman's cleavage.
As if the threat to our nation's cleavage weren't enough, there are lots of other benefits associated with space exploration. Like, for example, it makes us feel really good about ourselves.
Noted astronomer and French navy admiral Neil deGrasse Tyson relates:
"The most popular museum in the world over the past decade is the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. It's an American legacy to the world. But, more important, it represents the urge to dream and the will to enable it. These traits are fundamental to being humans and have coincided with what it is to be American. When you you go to countries without such ambitions working within their culture, you feel the absence of hope. Due to all manner of politics, economics and geography, people are reduced to worrying only about that day's shelter or about the next meal. It's a shame, even a tragedy, how many people don't get to think about the future."That's right, it's our duty as Americans to dream big dreams and do the cool stuff that less fortunate cultures don't get to do. As Jesus once said, "The poor you will always have with you, but you should build some kickass museums." I believe, from the bottom of my heart, that this attitude truly coincides with what it means to be an American.
Noted astronomer and Toronto middle school superintendent Neil deGrasse Tyson states that only 7/10 of one percent of American tax dollars goes to space exploration. That's a scant $15 billion, barely enough to pay for $15 billion worth of ridiculously expensive space crap.
"Couldn't that money be better spent on education or research to cure all manner of cleavage-related illnesses?" you ask. Nay, I say. Nay. For then we would know exactly which problems we were solving with our money. It's much more exciting to throw money at an incredibly impractical project in the hopes that we'll make a colossal error eventually resulting in a small -- but very real -- positive effect in some unknown area.
I'm still trying to decide what massive impractical project to undertake while I'm president. Perhaps I'll build the first intercontinental vacuum tube messaging system, or democratize Iraq. Whatever it is, it's going to be big. I mean, really, really big. If only there was some way to illustrate the truly unprecedented scale of this project.
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Humor-blogs.com supports sending a man to Mars by 2010. I'm thinking Jim Belushi.
Labels: Exemplary Police Work, Politics
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