New Findings Suggest Italians Prefer Justice over Science

Italian courts have sentenced a group of Italian scientists from the Italian Risk Assessment Bureau to six years in Italian prison for not telling Italian people to be worried about something that statistically wasn't going to happen, leading experts to conclude that Italian people will continue to serve their idea of justice even if it is at odds with reasoning and logical faculties. Local expert Ovaltine Goose-Shredder is ambivalent about the verdict. “This is an alternately great and horrible day for science, horrible because this perversion of justice is making me sick, but great because watching the Italian people bypass the logic humans use to guide decision making so they could satisfy their revenge drive could potentially point to the missing link.” he said Thursday. “The scientific community has had their theories about the Italian's place in the evolutionary ladder, and we've been waiting for them to make this kind of unevolved decision for a while.”

The specific perversion of justice, Goose-Shredder points out, is that the probability of a massive earthquake shaking Italy is exactly as high now as it was when those scientists were asked to convene for a short while and waste their time discussing tremors, as the earth has an estimated 3900 tremors a day. “Tremors are not a predictor of greater seismic activity. If scientists put any stock in tremors there would be 3900 earthquake warnings a day. Stack that against the average number of earthquakes measuring above 6.0 on the richter scale per day, like the one that hit Italy in 2009 and caused 309 deaths, and tremors would predict large earthquakes exactly 1.2% of the time. Out of 100. That's a horrible score, and something that is right only 1% of the time should be ignored. That's called science.”

Despite the reputation dashing verdict, the news has piqued the international interest in a country that barely even crosses the minds of people eating pizza and put Italy on the forefront of daily conversations. “I feel like I have a real understanding of them now,” citizen Danny said late Thursday outside Piero's, “Watching them playing the class bully because they think their amateur hindsight is more valid than an expert's foresight really makes Italy make sense. No kidding these people have fascism in their history, sided with the Nazi's and elected Berlusconi. ”

While most of the world is shaking their head at the decision, the head of the Catholic church is not. In a statement made early Thursday, Pope Benedict XVI praised the court's decision, saying “Fuck yeah ya went biblical on poindexter maFUCK.” He then turned his back on the crowd to begin slapping a mural of Copernicus being burned at the stake and screamed “We don't need no water” several times. At this point his hat fell off because everyone who has figured out that a hat with a high centre of gravity needs an anchor point at the bottom gets accused of sciencery and chased out of the Vatican. Witnesses say that he has the whitest hair of any human ever, and that people should start throwing water balloons full of purple hair dye at him because damn, that would be hilarious. Just imagine him walking up to the Queen with purple hair. She would, like, gasp at the impropriety. At least 15 people said exactly that after the Pope's hat fell off.

Phoning it in: Imagination as the Ultimate Evil

I've been mixing Nyqil and scotch again. I would call my cold remedy a “Sweet Dream” if it didn't induce waves of nightmares where your legs don't work and Grandma has a knife. It's an attrition remedy, something that stirs up all the evil viruses in you and pushes them out your skin. That's where those nightmares come from, all the evil swirling, so even Grandma in her wool sweater, the one place where the world always feels soft and shapeless and bearable turns over and it's just as out-to-get-you as any other midnight mugging in a Staples parking lot. You wake up soaked in sweat feeling like you've been dragged across asphalt and you have to get up for an hour so your bed dries out and you don't catch your death, but that's the evil leaving you. It's why you feel so fantastic, so Sound of Music-ey when you get over an illness. All the evil has been sweated out and you can run amongst the other humans to throw all the beautiful ideas together, and it feels like harmony as you walk down the crisp autumn streets. It feels so good to be doing something. This will edge out into the usual ambivalence by about 2pm on your first “cured” day, once you remember what life looks like, but getting over a cold rules, is what I'm saying. Feeling good feels good.

I'm blaming this one on kids. It's the kid's fault. There was a family function this weekend with a bunch of sub-4-year-olds running around. I drank some of the imaginary tea, which turned out to be a very real cup of rhinovirus. The kids don't go to school yet, so I don't know how the cesspool of germs they cart around is so potent, so beyond anything my adult body has encountered. As we age, it's not as if were exposed to fewer contagions, what with public transit, workplaces, bars etc. We still get into situations where we're packed together breathing a lot of other people's air and touching the same doorknobs. We just have the immunity for contagions, so we get sick less often as we age. So how do the bugs children have seem to be stronger? Why can't I fight them? How is it that an adult's defences are useless against a pint sized attack?

Is it the childlike creativity? Is it the imaginary tea? Is this the trap? The play, the interaction as the place where the bugs are introduced. Part of being an adult means being allowed your own personal space. It starts at the point where you become too heavy to pick up, so your parents can't sweep you up in their arms whenever they like. That's the beginning of personal space. As we learn that we can actually have our own space our growth in size means the tantrums we throw to enforce that personal space start ramping up into dangerous territory. We stop getting our toys out of a shared chest and start getting our personal controller that only we touch for the duration of the mario-kart session, and obviously video-games mark the end of a shared, imaginative play. The point where play becomes rote, more a matter of re-spawn than re-imagining, and we all become wirelessly connected, sharing the experience but none of the germs.

Imagination is the means through which germs infect us, or rather, it manifests in kids who lack the perceived boundaries we grow as adults and spreads through their willingness to play without them. In childhood, play gives us a reason to ignore the barriers that the learned personal space creates later on, and leads to all the diseases that adults blame on children after-the-fact. Since we can't just crush their little dreams by not drinking the imaginary tea, adults play along, and end up getting the sniffles because of it. Imagine that. A world without sickness is a world without imaginings.

I don't know why we allow this imagination thing, because it turns out it's bad for adults as well. There was a study published this week linking creativity and mental illness, and here's another saying that writers as a group had incidents of mental illness in numbers 20x the general population. Imagination, coming back around to make us ill. Who knew that allowing a person's creativity to chase down it's own ideas would cause an anxiety disorder when it dreams up every possible scenario that could kill a human in every situation that person finds themselves in. Among other things that are bad, like schizophrenia causing the strange, outlying thoughts that can inspire originality in art. I've always thought that creativity was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, certain neurons misfiring and accidentally creating the ah-ha! moments that people call imagining. It's bad for us, people, and we have to get rid of it. For the sake of our tonsils and our sanity. This means no more mapping DNA structure, no new movies and no new ice cream flavours. Bacon Avacado will be the last innovation to come out of Baskin Robbins. We're shutting down this creativity thing for good.

Wait, I'm also remembering that I washed the dishes after cake, which means I touched every utensil. The boundary might have broke right there and caused the sickness. Never mind the boycott. Continue your imaginings. It's not bad for you. Just never do anything nice for anyone ever again, because it might make you sick.

Watford Auto Fire Rages into Fourth Week

A fire started by a celebratory cannon-shot is stretching into it's fourth week of existence behind the Watford Arena with the local volunteer fire brigade powerless to combat the blaze. “With all the gasoline and plastics cars just burn too hot, there's no use putting water on it.” Fire-Chief Mikey said yesterday. “And the town residents just keep crashing more cars into it. We lost count at well over one hundred. That was Monday. Last week.”

The townspeople of Watford have been spent the past month crashing cars into the fire and claiming the insurance, trading up for nicer and nicer vehicles. “I'm stopping when I get a Bentley,” One townsperson who refused to give his name said. “I'm slowly building up equity in my car. I started with an '89 Taurus, and earlier today I crashed a two year old G6, with General Motors paying an extra eight months of 'therapy' to cover the carnage!” The anonymous man then skipped away yelling, “Keep rollin' rollin' rollin'!”

Avoiding arrest for willfully plowing a car into a fire is a difficult manoeuvre for the Watfordians. They can't be seen making the car crash, so they start from over a kilometer away with the car pointed at the fire and wedge the gas pedal down with a chunk of wood. If the car hits the fire all evidence of the fraud is burned up, so there is no reasonable means for the insurance company to refuse payout and no crime that the police can accurately charge. By saying that the accelerator got stuck down and that they were lucky to bail out before they died the citizens can also milk a payment from the auto company for lingering mental duress. The auto companies can afford to settle with a few thousand for counseling because they were given tens of billions in taxpayer money not that long ago. “It's called trickle down economics, bitches get paid!” is a common phrase yelled by participants in the fraud, along with the chorus from the 2000 Limp Bizkit classic “Rollin'”. Just imagine about fifty people grabbing their crotches and pretend-steering-a-car-off-a-cliff around a pile of burned out steel shells. Jesus.

Before the citizens started getting their aim dialed in several cars missed the fire and plowed into the concrete facade of the arena. The broken concrete building, strewn auto parts, scattered glass and roaring fire has some residents hoping that a tornado hits the town. “We know tornadoes don't really 'clean' but it might spread out the debris in a helpful manner.” president of the Watford Optimist Club Dave Greene said Thursday, “Like when my eight year old doesn't want to finish his baked beans, so he spreads them around his plate so it looks like there's less. We could go for that right now, but our town is the plate and the beans are car parts and fire.”

Insurance companies are looking for any possible reason to not pay out any money, and have hired the husband of local outragee Sandra to take their case to court. The question to be resolved now is whether the Watford Parsley Festival committee, an organization who's 2011 budget was $43, could be at fault for starting the blaze by firing the cannon that blew up the car, which would mean an organization with no money in the bank could owe hundreds of thousands to the insurance companies, with the money possibly coming straight out of the homes and businesses of local citizens. A now sober Ovaltine Goose-Shredder has volunteered to argue in court on behalf of the town. “Really, anything I can do to fuck up that guys day, I will, your honour.” Goose-Shredder said of Sandra's husband at the Thursday court-date. He then argued that the start of the fire was an act of God. “According to the preacher Firestone, God is in everything, including cannonballs. The guy has been talking for six months straight and on August 21st he specifically said God is in cannonballs.” The Judge found no reason to dispute this, and qualified the ruling by saying that he didn't necessarily buy the God thing but he "really hate[s] insurance companies. Gavel. Gavel. Gavel."

This is good news for the residents of Watford, as they will get to keep all the money that has been paid out and presumably continue to take advantage of the legal loophole a trunk-full of exploding grain alcohol has opened up. Dirtbag Terry has claimed twelve cars so far. “My buddy has an auto wrecking yard, I bought six cars from him this week, but they keep getting burned up.” he said Thursday evening. “Damnedest thing.” When asked what he might do with the money. Dirtbag Terry said that he was going to invest in lottery tickets. “I could buy a lot of Mexico with that talking preacher man lotto. It's at about $8 billion right now.”

Environmental experts are hopeful that the residents of Watford will collect enough money to stop crashing cars into fire within the coming weeks and the blaze comes under control, as incidents of asthma amongst Watford children have raised 4500% since black smoke began choking the town. Any hope that some hard hitting journalism could bring an end to the fire was dashed when I showed up, since Piss-Awesome Journalism has little to do with facts and isn't taken seriously by anyone.

Live(?) Blogging Not Watching the American Presidental Debate

9:00 – I turned on the TV and Mitt Romney was talking right at me. Apparently shifting off foreign oil dependency and having a North American centric energy policy will create 4 million new jobs. I didn't know it took 4 million people to flood an arctic environmental sanctuary with oil. I could do it with just under 1000. There's my bid. Your move, America.

9:02 – You see what politics does to me? I just low-balled America's bid to kill Puffins. I just assumed they would do the worst. Granted, that's kind of their track record, but I don't want to live like this. I don't want to make plans to ruin things more efficiently than America could. I want to forget what a bad person I am, and how fucked this planet is. I'm changing channels, stamped it, no erasies.

9:05 – Matthew Perry has a new show! Chandler was always my favourite. I can already feel the existential dread melting off me. It was really nice of NBC to let Global run a new episode of Go On, even though NBC is showing the debate. Letting another network scoop them with their own show. No wonder they fired Dan Harmon.

9:23 – Holy pathos! This is actually a good show. It's funny, it's got some heart. Dead wife is kind of an easy premise, but you have to start somewhere so I'm always more forgiving at the start of a season. I even gave 2 Broke Girls like 6 whole weeks to get their shit together before ignoring it completely. They were like 3 years late on the cupcake boutique thing and Whitney Cummings is involved. There was no way that could ever be a good show and I still put some time in. I'm so patient! How 'bout me, world?

9:30 – A show about men's questionable parenting skills? Click.

9:31 – Had to cross the debate on a few channels (old time cable, kids). The economy. Ugh, right?

9:34 – Twilight? That guy wolfed out and it doubled his body mass? Where did that even come from? Are they just full of air? How are they creating extra body mass out of nothing? That's not how the world works. You can't make something out of nothing. Next.

9:44 – A TVO documentary about an organic sheep farming family? Sure.

9:47 – Some really pretty shots of people staring at the horizon, but organic farming is exactly as boring as you'd think.

9:52 – Potassium deficient soil. Ugh, right? I'm setting my hopes on 10 o'clock.

10:05 – May have hit paydirt with this farming thing. A girl was talking about how she gave up hoping that there wouldn't be any man made environmental catastrophes, that she couldn't stand to watch the world destroy itself anymore so she moved out to the country to grow her own food. It resonated with the hour-ago me. I'm sick of seeing a world that frequently resembles a hell. I'm sick of listening to some slick proto-human standing up and telling me that they're going to fix something about the way humans interact and make it better for everyone once they have all the power. I'm jaded. I can't see a politician standing up to fix something without assuming they're going to destroy something else. I don't trust. I made fun of how boring it was, but at least the organic farming life is simple and somewhat cut off from all the nonsense that is giving the rest of us psychic brain tumours. I'm not saying I want to move away and farm. Our cities are fascinating places where a lot of people do interesting things and I wouldn't want to be cut off from that. Just don't be surprised if I walk away when you start talking politics.

10:12 – Late night pizza snack? Don't mind if I do.

10:50 – Homemade pizza snack took just as long as I'd hoped. We're mired in analysis now. I always love hearing talking points a second time from someone of dubious pedigree. Like that time I went out to a certified dog breeder to get a golden retriever and had a guy that runs a chop-shop repeat everything he said. It's the cold pizza of listening to things, and people who don't like hot pizza are fucked and need to get off this planet.

11:25 – Just read this back. There is no escaping the debate. The psychic toll was still extracted from my skull. The politicians have our souls. Mercy. Mercy please.