Doug Lief Lief is a third-year English
student whose pod bay doors are always open. Reprogram him at
[email protected]. Click
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This is the first column of the new millennium (I can count),
and as I look around at 2001 I am sorely disappointed in this
year’s lack of conformity to the Kubrick film of the same
name. According to that film, not only should we be well
established with space stations in near-Earth orbit as well as on
the moon, but we should also have artificial intelligence capable
of artificial antisocial personality disorder (designed with
Microsoft Dahmer 3.1). As an American, I demand more homicidal
robots. We’ve got 11 months left to get back on
schedule.
We were promised a world full of liquid Schwarzeneggers. We were
promised battles with light sabers and racially insensitive frog
people. We were promised a whole planet of dirty apes. What
happened to the future? We are falling behind.
I’m not saying our technology hasn’t come a long way
in the last century, far from it. I mean, now you can purchase
“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave
Eggers online! Can you imagine? The Internet is amazing! Oh my God
it’s an orgasm of incredibleness! Well, actually it’s a
giant electric Sears catalogue, except with more porn.
As for artificial intelligence, thus far we’ve only been
able to come up with artificial annoyance. When’s the last
time a Furby killed a whole space shuttle crew? The only homicidal
machine we’ve had were those cabbage patch dolls that ate
children’s hair. Those were great! Any kid who would name
their doll
Bethany-Anne-Marie-Jo-Taylor-Lane-Bryant-Suzi-Suzi-Susan-Sue
deserves to have a chunk taken out of their head. Maybe
that’s the next great doll: Baby-Lobotomizes-Herself.
 Illustration by HINGYI KHONG/Daily Bruin The closest our
species has come to ascending to the heavens to touch the face of
God is that now, according to the December issue of Space
Illustrated, Survivor producer Mark Burnett wants to send at least
12 people to cosmonaut training camp at the Russian Star City
training facility. The last trainee standing will “ride a
Soyuz rocket to Mir.” Of course, given the current condition
of the Space Station Mir, the winner would probably be safer
orbiting in the first prize Pontiac Aztec.
While the cast hasn’t been put together yet, sources say
they will definitely include a young goateed slacker, a sassy black
woman, a naked gay man, somebody who loves kids, an old crank, an
ugly girl who mistakenly thinks she’s “all that and a
bag of chips,” and anyone else they happened to miss from the
Real World stereotype checklist.
And in case you’re wondering about the Space Illustrated
swimsuit edition, it was discontinued after the models’
breast implants exploded in the total vacuum of space.
Now, with a Republican administration about to take root, we can
kiss all our hopes of glorious scientific achievement behind.
Republicans won’t spend a dime to put anything in space
unless you can attach a death ray to it. If you think I’m
lying, here for the first time is a transcript the American public
has never heard because I just made it up:
Armstrong: That’s one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
Nixon: Congratulations. You’re on the
moon. Now can you aim it at charlie?
Armstrong: Excuse me?
Nixon: The moon, Armstrong. Can you kill
charlie with it?
Armstrong: No Mr. President, I don’t
think that’s possible.
Nixon: Damn it! You pinko astronauts are
worthless.
Armstrong: Sir I’m not Marxist, and can
you tone down the paranoia? You should be more careful when people
are taping you.
Nixon: Hmm. Be more careful with tapes, huh?
Not a bad idea, Fyodor. And that should be “One small step
for a man” you stinking red commie pinko red Rusky hippie red
freak!
OK, some of that is made up, but the racial epithets Nixon said
on the real tapes are a whole lot worse. Check it out, it’s a
matter of public record now (http://www.nara.gov/nixon/tapes/wgtapes.html).
It’s almost as bad as calling a New York Times reporter a
“major league asshole” in front of a whole crowd of
supporters.
The upshot of all this is that the government will be spending a
whole lot less money on non-essential programs, such as science,
education and saving the planet in favor of things we really need,
like richer rich people. This means that if we want to get to Mars
any time soon, we’ll have to be more frugal with how we spend
our science money.
Some studies are just going to have to go. I read in the
November/December issue of Archaeology that two very similar 350
year-old bottles were discovered; one pulled from the wreck of a
Dutch warship sunk in the Wadden Sea, the other in the ruins of an
English house. The Dutch bottle contained wine, perfectly
preserved. The English bottle contained, “a putrid concoction
of hair and urine.” When I read this I was shocked, then
tired, then hungry, then antsy, then hungry again, and then finally
shocked enough to write about it.
Experts confirmed that while 1651 was indeed a banner year for
wine, most agree that 1653 is a far better vintage of urine. These
bottles are known as (this is true) bartmann bottles, although a
less common dorky Milhous variety is known to exist, which predates
the Krusty the Clown pig scraper by nearly 100 years.
At first the nasty bottle was chalked up to English cuisine and
ignored, until a consultation with a very proper academic British
person, say Sir Humphris Witherbottom Mostgrave Pennywinkle IV,
informed the research team that English food, while inedible, does
draw the line at urine. Organs other than the bladder are still, or
course, fair game (re: haggis).
It turns out that the discovery of the stank-thermos validates a
long-standing theory that such bartmann bottles were buried in the
foundations of English houses in order to scare witches away.
Apparently, burning them alive was not considered a deterrent, much
like the death penalty today. The bottles were a form of
counter-witchcraft, sort of a urethra for a urethra form of
justice.
Records indicate one John Proctor of Salem, Mass., once drank a
whole barrel of grog in order to record, “Aye ye witcherlie
Abigaile, I counter-curse ye for ye hath besaddled I and myne
progenye withe an excesse offe vowels, I caste thee backe to
infernalle Helle! Eeeee!” in the New England drifts.
To learn more about this and other forms of witch repellent
visit www.folkmagic.co.uk. There you can learn not only about the
importance of the bartmann bottle, but bottles full of dead cats
and shoes as well. They’re magically delicious.
Now you may ask, why did Doug go off on such a tangent? Mostly
for cheap jokes, but there is a point to it. Like the bartmann
bottle, we’ve been trapped in the past for too long,
literally and ideologically. We have stuttered in our march toward
our stellar manifest destiny. I want to be a Kubrickian space fetus
from Jupiter, don’t you? We’ll never get there if we
spend all our time hung up on witches and digging holes.
We’ve been burrowing through the earth long enough;
it’s time to sail the heavens.
So Lief Cadets, let’s make 2001 a year to remember. Throw
your bones in the air. Build that bridge to the 22nd century. Turn
your beanie baby into a weapon of mass destruction. The future is
now, so don’t waste it. And above all, eat less
asparagus.