“The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I’ve ever seen that I didn’t have to clean.”
~Erma Bombeck
Some corporations must think we’re real suckers. Take the people who make trash bag liners. The things cost a fortune, yet what do we do with them as soon as we get home from the supermarket? We throw the darn things in the trash!
Bathroom cleansers – there’s another. Talk about flushing money down the toilet.
Well, it’s time to fight back. In this episode of “Do It At Home, America!” Lester & Charlie uncover the secret savings of keeping your toilet bowl clean with nothing but common household objects – 1970s style!
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Now, This Week’s Poll!
It was heartening to see so many in the media rush to point out that, in the immediate aftermath of the horrific explosions at the Boston Marathon last Monday, so many people — runners, cops, spectators — rushed toward the chaos to help the injured, despite knowing that anything could happen next.
We’re gripping tightly to the thought that so many people didn’t hesitate to help, given what so many right-wing lunatics were rushing to do instead. It took only minutes for the first conservative conspiracy theories to start pinballing around the Internet. Too many conservatives are twisted enough to take any tragedy — from Boston to Newtown to Aurora — and turn it into an opportunity to prance.
Was there a Facebook page set up to memorialize the victims two days before the explosions went off? Is Obama behind this? Family Guy? Unbelievably, the first question Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick received at the news conference after the attack was “Was this another false flag staged attack to take our civil liberties?” (Note the clever use of the word “another” in that question, presupposing that there have been others.) The governor was quick to respond with a terse “No.” We agree with Rex Huppke, writing in the Chicago Tribune, who gave the governor credit for restraint for not answering, “No, you idiot.” We can think of a few other impolite words Patrick could have said.
And it wasn’t just the conspiracies that were turning our stomachs. A FOX News guest, Erik Rush, helpfully tweeted — before the FBI even had any suspects — that Muslims were “evil” and we should “kill them all.” A Wall Street Journalist tore Obama apart for daring to make a statement instead of parroting John Boehner’s “moment of silence.” (Though we’ll admit it’s helpful whenever Boehner decides to shut up.)
Patrick Dollard, a contributor to Breitbart News, wasted no time tweeting his claim that “GEORGE BUSH KEPT US SAFE FOR 8 YEARS.” Who is he blaming that whole “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US” memo fiasco on? Jimmy Carter?
We suppose, given what happened after Newtown and what happened after Aurora (and countless other tragedies), that we really shouldn’t be surprised. And social media and the 24-hour news cycle are just making things worse.
Or was it always like this, and we just weren’t paying attention? Let’s take a quick trip into the recent and not-so-recent past and try to figure out: What conservative conspiracies have we missed over the years? What do YOU think?
Quick Programming Note:
Find out how you can be part of Lester & Charlie’s new book project!
Click here: Please Stand By
Now, This Week’s Poll!
God bless Ron Paul. Really. He’s terribly worried about your kids. Worried that they’ll complete their education and still not understand the biblical principle of self-government. Or know how to defend the free market. Start a home business. Operate their YouTube channel.
Those are just a few of the bullets in Paul’s recently launched curriculum and strategy for putting just about every child into home schooling.
Now, we have nothing against home schooling. Public school isn’t for everyone. But, in the wrong hands, home schooling can produce bizarre results, as we discussed before regarding a confused home-schooled girl who was terrified that legalized gay marriage would lead to ducks taking over the world.
Gotta give him credit though: Paul also wants kids to know how to “write effectively,” “understand mathematics” and “understand basic science.” Those are admirable goals! Still, it’s hard to ignore that Ron Paul himself once called global warming “the greatest hoax in hundreds of years.” Maybe understanding basic science doesn’t involve listening to actual scientists.
So where does Paul land on the scale? He dismisses school textbooks as being “dumbed down by committee.” And many are, especially those textbooks that are written in Texas and teach things like bible-based math, how the Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution and tell kids how and why to avoid dirty, smelly hippies.
Paul wants home-schoolers to step away from textbooks and focus on “primary sources” – presumably things like the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Not a bad idea in general, but take the Constitution: you can’t just toss a copy at a fifth grader and expect him to understand it – not without the context of a couple centuries of interpretation by the courts. Without the context, it means anything the kid wants it to – leading to things like, well, Rand Paul.
Will the Paul curriculum catch on? Will home-schoolers be lugging the Rosetta Stone into their living rooms to share with their little brothers and sisters at Home Show & Tell?
There’s only one thing we know for sure: Paul’s fellow conservatives are not likely to be outdone! If the “Paul Curriculum” takes off, other conservatives are bound to jump on the bandwagon. And that’s what has us excited. How will they carve out a space in the homeschooling craze? The mind reels!
So tell us: What text are YOU excited to see in a conservative home-school environment?
(Quick Programming Note: To find out how you can be part of Lester & Charlie’s new book project, click here: Please Stand By)
America has a tradition of some pretty wacky roadside attractions. Like the Sod Museum in Nebraska, the Twine Ball Museum in Minnesota and Washington D.C.’s very own House Science Committee.
Few of these oddities can hold a candle to Kentucky’s famous Creation Museum. The Creation Museum, if you’re some kind of Neanderthal unfamiliar with it, is the go-to place for any young-Earth scientist in the mood to, say, weep at tear-jerking videos of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Or ogle dioramas showing humans and dinosaurs peacefully co-existing. Or hobnob with like-minded museum employees, all of whom have signed a “statement of faith” agreeing that “no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.”
Founder Ken Ham’s Creation Museum has been called “the Creationist Disneyland.” The UK’s Guardian called it “one of the weirdest museums in the world.” (That’s an impressive distinction, seeing as it’s not only competing with said Twine Ball Museum but also with that museum in Japan that’s dedicated solely to instant ramen noodles.)
Sounds to us like the Creation Museum is the perfect mecca for both Bible thumpers and potheads! That’s why we were shocked to learn that this major, multimillion-dollar facility has suddenly found itself taking a crash course in survival of the fittest.
In other words, attendance at the Creation Museum was down 10% in 2012, continuing a four-year downward spiral and setting a new low. Making matters worse, dwindling revenue is jeopardizing completion of Ham’s next big project, a theme park centered around a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark!
Why is the museum’s attendance tanking? Are the zealots getting all the creationism jabberwocky they need from Michele Bachmann, Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal for free?
We’re betting that there are still plenty of certifiable lunatics willing to shell out $30 for a stroll through the Dinosaur Den, ride a camel through the Garden of Eden and sneak into the planetarium to make sure that Earth is still in the center.
So let’s put our heads together and come up with a few ideas that might get them some welcome attention. If we’re lucky, there’ll be enough cash left over to finish building Ham’s Ark Encounter! And we can all say we did our part building a better, weirder America.
Tell us: What do YOU think are some awesome ideas to sell more tickets to Kentucky’s Creation Museum?
Assuming there are no typos in the Mayan Calendar, that the requisite trumpeters are well rehearsed and crackpotsscientists know what they’re talking about, well, then, it’s “adios” on the 21st.
But fear not! Lester & Charlie have made it through dozens of doomsdays. Take a look at this week’s video and learn how to make your own rapture survival kit!
No, that’s not a picture of John McCain‘s long-form birth certificate. It’s a swatch of a clay tablet inscribed about 3200 B.C. somewhere around what’s now the southwestern corner of Iran.
And nobody knows what it says.
Scholars have been puzzled by this and about 1,000 other pre-elamite tablets that stubbornly refuse to reveal their secrets – none of the tablets is written bilingually, like the Rosetta Stone, so there’s no way to compare texts and crack the code by using known or surviving languages. The people who wrote it had no interest in or budget for art, so there are no pictures or doodles for scientists to use to figure out if the adjacent text is discussing cows, kings or corn. Scholars have figured out from a few numbers they deciphered that this society was comprised of a few wealthy leaders and that most everyone else was a worker kept on starvation level rations.
And recently, scholars realized what might be a key reason they can’t decode these tablets: the society had no scholarly tradition, no interest in education, and the writing is littered with typos that undermine efforts to translate the words.
So, this civilization’s memory and accomplishments, if they had any, are relegated to a room full of dusty tablets that no one can make heads or tails of.
Let’s recap. A nation that eschewed bilingualism, had no place for art and didn’t like education eventually died out, doomed to the quiet room of history.
Maybe conservatives in Louisiana should be reminded of this as they cut education budgets, teach kids “Bible Math” and tell our next generation that Jesus ran with dinosaurs; maybe Ryan should keep this in mind when he says that supporting the arts is a bad investment for the country; maybe Jan Brewer should stop having panic attacks when she sees a bilingual sign; and maybe we shouldn’t let Romney shoot Big Bird, try to make the lower classes pay off the debt and stop feeding the 47% of the country that he thinks are moochers.
Last week, we told you that teachers in Louisiana were trying to use the supposed existence of the Loch Ness Monster to promote Creationism and undermine Darwin’s theory of evolution. It turns out, however, that the Loch Ness Monster isn’t the only mythical creature making the news these days.
No, the mythical creatures we’re talking about aren’t moderate Republicans. We’re talking about mermaids. In response to inquiries following a show on the Discovery Channel’s Animal Planet, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrationposted an article on its educational website, Ocean Facts, that used “publicly available sources” (like, say, Google?) to assure concerned citizens that mermaids aren’t real.
Apparently, viewers of the Animal Planet show about a fictional mermaid thought they were watching a documentary — and had serious questions about the existence of the mythical half-human/half-fish creatures. “No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found,” assured NOAA (pronounced, without apparent irony, “Noah”), an organization that’s part of the United States Department of Commerce. Aren’t you relieved to know that your government is busy settling pressing matters like these?
Not that we’re against the idea of our government dispelling myths. On the contrary — we’re quite confident that, any day now, they’ll take care of Tea-Party illusions about the effectiveness of trickle-down economics. Until then, however, we at the Lester and Charlie Institute of Forward Thinking are wondering: Are there any other myths you hope your government will dispel? In this age of information overload, there may be more than a few myths out there whose time has passed. So what do YOU think? Tell us!
Have a private comment that you wouldn’t mind seeing broadcast to an international audience in the next Lester & Charlie Newsletter? Leave it here!
Two weeks ago, we at the Lester and Charlie Institute of Forward Thinking reported that Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is pulling millions of dollars from public education so kids can use vouchers to attend struggling Southern private schools that teach things like Bible-based math. This week, we want to give you the rest of the story.
See, it doesn’t end with math based on the Bible — or even curriculum that teaches kids that liberals threaten global prosperity. It turns out that, according to these teachers in Louisiana, the Loch Ness Monster is real. And its supposed existence disproves evolution.
“Youngsters will be told that if it can be proved that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man, then Darwinism is fatally flawed,” reportsthe Scotsman, a Scottish newspaper that should know better than the teachers in Louisiana whether or not the Loch Ness Monster actually exists. The Louisiana teachers’ ultimate goal is to legitimize Creationism and the belief that God — or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whoever — created the world a mere 5,000 years ago. It seems to us that even John McCain is older than that, but we never learned Bible-based math, so what do we know?
The GOP seems hellbent on making sure that American kids learn nothing. We can’t imagine why — unless it’s because they’ve figured out that a less-informed populace is more likely to vote Republican. Or maybe they own stock in FOX News. We wonder if it would be easier simply to put lead in the water — a proven way of lowering children’s IQ. But perhaps they just leave that to American corporations.
We all know that the GOP has mastered illogic. But pointing to the Loch Ness Monster to undermine Darwin’s theory of evolution is simply insane. So what’s next? We all know that they won’t stop there. What’s the next thing conservatives will seize upon to prove their psychotic claims?
Have a private comment that you wouldn’t mind seeing broadcast to an international audience in the next Lester & Charlie Newsletter? Leave it here!
If You Got Here From The Newsletter, This Week’s Poll Is Actually HERE
For almost 50 years, science has been trying to prove (or disprove) the existence of Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle” that explains the dynamics of subatomic particles. The hunt for Higgs boson is, in fact, the main reason they built that 17-mile underground Large Hadron Collider underneath the Franco-Swiss border — the same collider that had people in a panic a few years ago because it was supposed to create microscopic black holes that would swallow up our section of the universe. (Update: That didn’t happen.)
What did happen this week is that researchers breathlessly announced that they may be close to proving that Higgs boson exists.
This is big news. Even we can understand that! The science is, of course, way over our heads, especially when we’re nursing our holiday party hangovers. But as best as we can understand it, proving that Higgs boson exists would mean that our universe actually makes sense. Go figure. After watching the latest series of GOP presidential debates, that’s the last thing we expected.
So what’s next? If scientists can use a 17-mile underground tunnel to find an as-yet hypothetical massive elementary particle that will prove the Standard Model of physics is actually correct, what else will they find? What’s the next mind-blowingly elusive thing that science might discover? What do YOU think?
Have a private comment that you wouldn’t mind seeing broadcast to an international audience in the next Lester & Charlie Newsletter? Leave it here!
