Overwhelming

Our mayor, governor and archbishop have just returned from Rome, where they and other area luminaries spent the better part of a week trying to convince the Pope and his gang to come to Philadelphia. This is in connection with a real big family celebration hoo-hah slated for the not too distant future.
It seems that the hoo-hah all by itself will supposedly attract a few hundred thousand Catholics to our fair city.  But add the Pope and voila! we get a million. And as our emissaries hung about around the Holy See, the number of potential visitors climbed - first to one million and a day or so later to two million.

"Glad to be here, hope you are too!

A few hundred thousand steaming asses yearning to be free is one thing, but two million? In the span of less than a week? We have had a good number of several hundred thousand crowds before but two million guests is more than we have hosts.
Where will they stay? Hotels around here are already booked for this deal, and the ones in the burbs can fit only a small fraction of such a horde. So even if they just sleep in parks, or stay awake all day and just wander around, where will they excrete? How many Port A Potties are there? Can we get them by rail, like the Bakken crude coming our way from one of the Dakotas, in mile long trains? Has anyone thought what could happen if our sewer and sewage treatment facilities overflowed? Is there enough food? Those guys in clashing plaid suits at city hall should be working on this stuff now.

Could happen on a street near you

Like many big cities, ours is short on cash, so perhaps we could utilize this opportunity to haul in some much needed revenue by charging folks to leave town when they are all done their huzzahs?
Just a thought...

Dumb and dumber

I quote below from an unrecalled source-

"A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation.
The survey of 2,200 people in the United States was conducted by the NSF in 2012 and released on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago.
To the question "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth," 26 percent of those surveyed answered incorrectly.
In the same survey, just 39 percent answered correctly (true) that "The universe began with a huge explosion" and only 48 percent said "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals."

Add to this the number of our fellow citizens that believe that the Loch Ness monster (which does not actually exist) proves that cowboys could have ridden dinosaurs. This makes me sure that my feeling that we are getting stupid as a nation is correct.
I blame this on glowing screens. First came television, which early in its history was touted as a wonderful educational tool. It turned out to be a real stack of crap, a thoughtless void that deadens the mind. Then we got the internet, touted in much the same way. It too turned out to be a mostly useless pile of garbage, the most popular selections being god and pornography, neither of which do much to improve one's thinking.
Thinking is not really hard, but since, for the most part, we don't have to, we don't. Thus we become stupider day by day.

Hate Filled Bits of Evolutionary Garbage

Sometimes bits of information coalesce into brilliant ideas.
Here is one of the info bits, from niece Betsy. Betsy does social work in Denver, and has discovered over time that whenever she has to extract kids from abusive homes in which a dog is present, the dog is always a Chihuahua. Not sometimes; not often, but always.
Another bit of info: from elsewhere I learn of neighborhoods in Arizona and perhaps other places, being over run by packs of these mongrel creatures.
A third bit: my Abby is going on a cruise after she graduates college. I know this because I am paying for it, otherwise I would just wonder where she is.
From these bits, a brilliant idea:

CHIHUAHUA HURLING CRUISES



Communities with too many of these hate filled bits of evolution's garbage could capture them and supply them to cruise operators, claiming they are sending them to beautiful places. Once on board, passengers would be able to sign up to hurl these doglets into the ocean. Toss out some chum, and when the sharks begin circling near the ship, and heave ho the rat dogs. Points could be awarded for hurling style and distance. Catapults or bats could also be used. It could, possibly, become a recognized sport.
Remind me to write about Rat Eatin' Frogs someday...

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