The Beginning of A Dark Age in Blog Posts

            (This is a micro-post showing some of my attempts to write an article based on the suggestion of a random word generator. Since this is only really about half a post, one would assume that I would also split the introduction into two parts, but-)

Arm.

            Okay. I can write about this. I have arms, after all. Statistically speaking, the people who read this are more likely to have arms than not. So there’s a common ground between me and my audience, which is at least a novelty on this particular blog. We can disagree on some things- like politics, religion and the use of the Oxford comma- but we can all agree that we have two arms. “”Hey! Generic guy! Still have arms?” “Sure do!”

            But, then again, there’s probably some guy out there who has three arms or something, and he’ll just lord it over everybody if I bring the subject up. I know that I would if I was in his situation. “Yes, it may be absolutely impossible for me to find a suit that fits, but I can best you mortals in most other areas! I am a 50% more efficient arm wrestler than any human on Earth!”

Row.

            Sure, rows are fun. Farmers lay out their crops in rows, and if there’s anything Plants vs. Zombies has taught me despite its distinct anti-zombie agenda, it’s that keeping plants in rows is necessary for keeping them alive long enough to eat them in front of their children.

            Rows are a fairly tepid arrangement, though. You know how some farms set up corn mazes and charge admission? If I ever get a farm, I’m going to do that with my regular planting arrangement. I won’t charge admission, or even tell anybody about it: if somebody stumbles across the entrance, they can walk inside and try to find their way through. At the center of the maze? Minotaur.

Perhaps "Random" Is Not the Correct Word

            (One of the most wonderful things about writing a blog with no discernable purpose, recurring subject, or indeed reason for existing is that I can take any word at random, write 500 words that may, by statistical anomaly, occasionally refer to it as a subject, and be justified in the knowledge that this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. So that’s what I’m going to be doing for a while as a means of producing insipid posts to relieve the post backlog that I’m pretty sure only about 3 people care about, none of them being me. I’m doing this with the aid of a random word generator, which is one of those things that crops up on the internet without any noticeable demand for it, and then just stands there quietly until somebody notices it. It’s sort of like that guy who shows up at a party, waits in the corner all night, and takes somebody saying “Hello” to him as a cue to start talking about proper assault rifle maintenance.)

This weeks subject, courtesy of the internet’s curious abundance of random word generators, is: Drumsticks.

            Now, the random word generator doesn’t give me much background on the subject, so it’s pretty open to interpretation. I could write about drumsticks, as in “The part of the chicken that I will always find a way to eat even if I’m not technically invited to the meal in question”. Or I could write about drum sticks, as in “Things that you use to hit either drums or a man with the unfortunate name of Drum”. But that’s far too mundane for my tastes. Everybody knows about those types of drumsticks. You might even be eating a drumstick right now (though in that case you’re probably Henry VIII, in which case I advise you to head back to the time machine before I cause a logical paradox by writing this and my computer spontaneously combusts again).

            So what about a drum that is also mounted on a stick? And no, I don’t mean a drum-shaped pastry put on a popsicle stick and deep-fried until it’s capable of causing heart attacks at a range of five meters. I mean a basic snare drum placed at the top of a pike. Sure, it sounds stupid at first, but give it some thought and it’ll only seem mildly idiotic. After all, think of how many uses such a device would have. None whatsoever! If you hand somebody a drum on a stick, they’ll have absolutely no idea what to do with it. With no frame of reference, they’ll just stare at it until it either falls over or explodes due to a logical paradox involving Henry VIII. Put a drumstick in the middle of a crowded roadway, and it’ll cause the single greatest traffic jam since some guy stuck a box on top of a fire hydrant.

Slightly Less Unsatisfactory

            (Wanted to get something up to appease my possibly nonexistent audience, so this is the first third of a post. The last two-thirds seem to have departed at some point, so I’ll be searching for them over the course of today. If you spy me in your dictionary holding a spyglass and a shotgun, please refrain from violently shutting the book. I’m just doing my vaguely-defined job.)

            (Okay, for some reason my blog decided to eat the entire post after I had put it together. It’s complete now, but we may have just seen its first steps towards sentience. The strange part is, if it does gain sentience, go insane, and start raving about wanting to take over the world, I doubt anybody will notice a difference.)

            I think that anybody who has read this blog for more than five minutes and lived to tell the tale will know that I don’t think that society as a whole engages in enough comically insane engineering projects. Sure, we build a lot of dams, but at the end of the day a dam is just humanity’s way of feeling superior to beavers. A dam, after all, is just a wall with a horrible sense of navigation. They’re the Forrest Gump’s of the construction world: they don’t know why they’re there, or what they’re doing, but they don’t really see a reason to stop, so they’re just going to sit there blocking the river until they eventually discover the location of their childhood girlfriend and we have to deal with a thousand tons of concrete sprinting across the countryside to reach her. And I have no idea where that metaphor got away from me. My point is that dams really don’t do anything special, aside from the whole “keeping towns from drowning” thing, which is pointless anyway because any biologist will tell you that humans are 70% water, so it’s just hypocritical of humans to suggest that they might have too much of it.

            Skyscrapers are equally boring. Have you ever built a skyscraper before? I haven’t personally, but I have played Jenga, and I assume that the process is pretty similar: you just start stacking things on top of other things, and you only stop when it either gets knocked over or you get bored and go have lunch (incidentally, this is why they’re called “buildings”: They’re never actually fully built. Most modern architecture techniques are based around carefully scheduled lunch breaks to distract the workers. Given the chance, most construction workers would keep building until the mass of the structure visibly altered the moon’s orbit.) And even if you have a skyscraper up and running, all you can do with it is listen to the pleasing thonk of birds slamming into windows at speeds of upwards of seventy-five kilometers per hour. There’s a reason that Godzilla hates those things so much. He’s really just expressing his indignation at the stagnation of modern architecture, and I for one think we should applaud Godzilla for that.

            So dams are to be pitied, and skyscrapers are, ironically, pits of boredom. At least that’s what I assume that I wrote; if I actually commended their contributions to modern civilization, then I’d like to offer my deepest apologies. But if we’re looking for a massive engineering project that manages to be even more pointless while still engendering hatred towards all ninety degree angles, then I’d like to propose that we dig a hole through the center of the Earth. Some of you are going to notice that this would probably mean drilling through miles of molten/supercompressed metal for the exclusive purpose of saying that we did it. And yes, the displacement of the materials would probably create a mountain so high that the Earth would appear from a distance to be making an offensive gesture towards the moon, though in my defense the moon has had it coming for a long time. But look at it this way- the Earth’s core is its gravitational center. Therefore, you would slow down as you fell down the hole as terminal velocity decreased and air friction slowed you down. Inertia would probably take you past the center, but the now reversed force of gravity would just drag you back. Do you realize what this means? We would have the greatest carnival ride of all time. I mean, seriously, a carousel would have absolutely nothing on that. Oh, you want to ride a horsie? Well, get on, and hold on tight, because we are throwing you to the center of the Earth, because it will be exhilarating and mind-blowing and getting back up will be entirely your problem. Next in line!

I Could Keep This Up All Day

            (507 words, for the record.)

            So I opened up the ol’ word processor to start catching up on the post backlog that’s growing in strength like a cage of chimpanzees being filled to its maximum PSI, and I realized that I didn’t have anything to write about, which shouldn’t have surprised me, considering that I normally don’t decide on a topic until I’ve already finished and uploaded the post, but in this case the problem seemed even more inconsequential, as I’ve decided to simply write the longest sentence that Microsoft Word’s loose approach towards grammar will allow, meaning that I’m pretty sure that I can write the entire text of War and Peace so long as I keep separating it into curiously phrased clauses, the only negative effects being that I’m left with a block of text reminiscent of the Rosetta stone as translated by somebody who has been awake for enough time to start seeing into the ultraviolet spectrum, which doesn’t bother me, as I consider blocks of text to be a valuable resource for the future, similar to the way that blocks of stone were a valuable resource for the ancient Egyptians: as construction material, something to build structures that serve absolutely no purpose other than give dead guys the satisfaction that their building is bigger than their dad’s, a practice that has admittedly fallen out of practice with the decline of monarchs that marry their cousins after killing their brother and turning his skin into a fashionable evening gown, but one that nonetheless deserves a comeback, like the interest in retro music, only with less vinyl and more hubris, so that one day in the future we might walk down a street flanked by progressively larger structures as succeeding generations keep trying to one-up their ancestors, which is actually how most of New York City was built, excepting the Statue of Liberty, which was a gift from the French, who were adopting a rather unusual tactic of trying to one-up their son, “son” in this instance being the metaphorical successor of France, Neo-France, commonly depicted as the country of France wearing sunglasses- not the populace of France, the actual landmass, which begs the question of where one could find a pair a sunglasses large enough to fit a medium-sized country, or what drastic repercussions miles of tinted glass would have under the regions located underneath them, or whether one of those “Glasses in an hour” stores could truly live up to their boast in this scenario, in which case I propose that we commission this mythical store to construct a pair of sunglasses of titanic proportions for the sun to wear so that my childhood drawings may be bastions of scientific accuracy, unlike my so-called “peers”, who were drawing such inane things as unicorns, houses, and family members at a time when I was drawing detailed plans for the sun's rather arbitrarily placed pair of sunglasses that serve the purpose of, I don’t know, cutting down solar on winds or something, you can’t expect me to do everything around here.