Water, water, everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

When English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner around 1797, he understood the concept of thirst. Soon, we may understand it better than we want to.

Over 70 percent of the earth is covered by water, of which 98 percent is in the oceans, making it undrinkable because of the saline. Until technology advances, the amount of energy needed to turn salt water from the ocean into drinking water is far too great. Only about 2 percent of the planet’s water is fresh and 1.6 percent of that is frozen in the polar ice caps. Rivers and lakes account for only about .036 percent of the potable water and aquifers contain .36 percent. That leaves the rest of the water in the air as clouds or in us, as we are 65 percent water.

Aquifers are in trouble and water shortages are already common in many countries. The earth moves water around naturally through evaporation and rain. We move the rest of it just to stay alive. Industry swallows water as if the supply is limitless. Agriculture sucks up massive quantities of water from one place and redistributes it to another place in the form of vegetables, meat, fruits, etc. Humans guzzle water worse than cars guzzle gas. We don’t just drink it; we flush it – over and over, without regard to the resources needed to filter that waste. Sanitation is a large part of the 400 billion gallons we use every day.

Since the oceans are undrinkable and we’ve polluted most of the rivers and lakes by various definitions, the small amount of water available for human consumption is small and has to be treated to decrease toxic pathogens. Disease from tainted water is one of the world’s leading causes of death. In the natural cycles of our biosphere, when we pollute one water source, it affects another source. Eventually, our water pollution goes into the 65 percent of water that is in us. Add naturally occurring droughts to the mix and the potential for disaster rises considerably.

The 1970’s era icon used to be $42 million. Now if you want to ride the rocket (or rather just sit in it in your backyard) the price has been reduced to $28.8 million. 

This fall, the old orbital workhorses will go on sale once they quit flying. So far the space agency has gotten 20 responses. That was before they went on sale. The Smithsonian will get Discovery, but you can still pick up the Atlantis and Endeavour for nearly half off. I went to my bank and asked about a loan. They said I didn’t qualify.

I can see what a museum would do with the shuttle – duh – but what would, say, a Wall Streeter who made out like a bandit (literally) do with one of these things?

I can see one renovated into a yacht or an RV. I guess the RV would be a little big for the highway, but hell, that’s half the fun. Sink about 30 big V-10’s in the belly, crank it up and head to the Grand Canyon with the family.

Perhaps you could plant it at the end of a cul-de-sac and put shutters on the shuttle and have a space party every week. It’s a shame it takes so much power to make it actually fly. It would be so much cooler to see the shuttle cruising over a stadium, painted with the Goodyear logo than a blimp.

Me? Being from Alabama? I’d slap some big, knobby tires on it and turn that beast into a monster truck and hit the circuit. The shuttle would bury Gravedigger, crush Big Dawg, flatten Bigfoot and bite Black Widow simultaneously. Can you see King Crunch or Goliath looking in the rearview mirror at the space shuttle bearing down with thrusters redlining?

If Jan Gabriel, the man who’s voice made the echoed phrase, “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!” so popular, had not died on January 12^th, imagine what he could have done announcing ads for the shuttle?

Yes, they misspelled “usefulness.” But the misspelling fits the definition like my cell phone fits into dead zones. That is wrecknology in action.

I have a friend who managed a body shop in Texas. He told people he was a wrecknologist.

A guy I worked with in New York used Wrecknology to describe any oddball, weird electronic device created with no logical purpose. Define logical purpose. What may be illogical to you is a life-altering gadget to me. One man’s pain is another man’s technology – or wrecknology.

This discussion brings me to some recent additions to electronic consumer culture that may fit this type of Edisonism (the proclivity to invent things – I made that up).

Jeff Johnson (our digital guru here at the River) said something a while back that puts the conversation into context.

“Think of the most outrageous thing you can imagine humans ever inventing,” he said. “Then go see who’s already invented it on Gizmodo.com.”

JJ is usually right. So let’s surf.

Been waiting for that 3,803 piece Lego Deathstar? Charge up the Visa and set it to $400. Gizmonodo will lead the way.

Want a pistol grip on your Novint 3D Haptick Joystick?  Need to shave your back? Want to fuel your airplane with coal? Wondering when you’ll be able to cook images from the Internet onto your slices of bread in the morning? Your toaster has come in. Gizmodo piles up the tech devices faster than Gemalto merged DVD tracks to SIM cards. The ones mentioned above are old news now because it changes radically every day. As Mick sang, “wrecknology waits for no one,” or something like that.

Perhaps laser guided toenail clippers and holographic country music videos don’t get your electronic juices flowing. Keep clicking. There are every-day-practical-business advancements hitchhiking through the marketplace looking for a ride.

Toss that bulky business projector. Toshiba and 3M have both launched LED pocket pico projectors no bigger than a cell phone. Connect your iPhone to the Pico, link up to your website and spray that new biz presentation on their office wall without ever checking a bag for the airline to lose. “One less thing,” to quote Forrest Gump.

If your business is storm chasing, you’ll want a ‘Smurf” (stepped-frequency microwave radiometer) strapped under your wing to increase, say, your hurricane accuracy rate by 30%. Every percent counts.

Remember those recent panicky news stories about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider? Some people were freaking out because they feared the massive super collider (under Switzerland and France) would whip up a black hole on earth.

Before we could wrecknologize such a black hole, however, a hacker group calling themselves the Greek Security Team wormed deep enough into CERN computers to nearly turn off the entire shebigbang. No problem. CERN scientist responded with a YouTube rap song.

I feel much knowing those guys are on top of the antimatter.

Speaking of physics, on March 19th, NASA picked up a huge gamma ray burst from a collapsing star. The light from the explosion took about 7.5 billion years (or 3 years before John McCain was born) to reach earth and was so big it was visible for 40 seconds with the naked eye. That’s long enough, as Jon Stewart said, to realize Fred Thompson looks and sounds exactly like Foghorn Leghorn.

On an aside, does the term “naked eye” bother you? Everyone’s eye is naked unless your asleep.

Anyway, this gamma burst – known officially as GRB 080319B to those with huge telescopes or naked eyes, alike – was the most powerful ever recorded by humans and, if it had happened in our galaxy, would have (according to Penn State astronomer David Burrows) dropped the earth into “nuclear winter” (a feat our current energy policy will take at least four more years to accomplish).

So while flight attendants at American Airlines are filing complaints about passengers using the new in-flight wireless network to surf porn, you can party anywhere, anytime with Porta Party or Toilet Tunes  (look them up if you don’t believe me).

Not sure why anyone would invent those or things like the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit (portable, instant pole dancing kit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDxiTBFJ0wg), but 7.5 billion years from now, humans won’t care anymore because hurricanes will be the size of South America and the North Pole will look like Hawaii.

Surf’s up Iditarodders!

Craig Venter, of Rockville, Maryland has already sequenced the human genome in 2000. Now, according to the journal Science, this one-time C and D student has reached beyond the surly bonds of earth and fought the envy of academia, designing and building, from scratch, a genome. In case the enormity of that statement went over your head like it did mine – he just created life.

I don’t know about you, but very little of my day is spent thinking such deep thoughts. Balancing my checkbook is like mapping the Amazon rainforest for me. So when it comes to actually creating genomes, I’ll just be in the back, listening to my iPod. Call me if you need me.

Some say it’s God’s double-helix job to create life. Others knew it was coming eventually. Fact is; we mess with genetics all the time. I doubt God is really that impressed with our lame efforts at trying to get his job since he’s been messing with genes for million of years. But a lot of humans are very impressed. Some are just jealous. Many are angry – as usual.

Lest we get too balled up in the religious and moral issues involved, keep this in mind: Companies like DuPont, for instance, use synthetic biology every day to make polyester for carpets, clothes and plastics. Yeah, that’s how this “deeply troubling” creation of new life gets played out in reality – on the floor, in a nice Berber that resists stains.

Let’s get genetic about the process. Down in Tennessee, scientists have tinkered with billions of nasty little E. coli bacteria genes (yeah, Mr. Gutwrench), altering how the bugs digest sugar from corn. This reconstituted E. coli gumbo gets genetically wiggy in big tanks, resulting in propane diol, a polyester used in composites, adhesives, laminates, coatings, moldings, novel aliphatic polyesters, copolyesters, solvents and antifreeze, to name a few. In you and I, E. coli results in something much more unpleasant than polyester.

Many people cite deep moral, ethical and religious issues with life altering genetic engineering. Ironically, however, those same people wear the very product of such altercation to church, come home, walk on it in their homes and then use it in one of the thousands of plastic devices they own. When genetic alteration looks like your Aunt Wilma’s bad polyester jumpsuit, it’s still scary, but in a different way.

I saw the movie, “I am Legend” with Will Smith as the last man (and his dog) on earth and I saw Charleton Heston in “The Omega Man” that spawned it. Genes gone wild is a popular scenario for more than a few recent movies. Certainly some genetically-altered bug could sneak off the grid and turn the world into a zombied petri dish, however, after meeting food poisoning up close and personal, I’m more worried about the original, unaltered E. coli bacteria in that hamburger I just ate. If we can turn E. coli into shag carpet instead of four days of intestinal hell, I’ll buy three football field’s full.

Are we playing God or just doing what God gave us the brains to do? Is it sacrilege or progress? Depends on whom you talk to.

Mention the words “stem cell research” and you could find yourself in a fight over right and wrong. But unless my science teacher lied, one of the greatest, life-saving advancements in human history – penicillin – was discovered (by mistake) when Alexander Fleming started tinkering with biology, chemistry, cells and genetics.

Organ transplants and heart bypasses, elicited similar outcries of “man playing God.” Ironically, many of those same people are alive today because of transplants and heart bypasses.

When science first postulated that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, it was considered an evil concept. People went to prison and were killed. Almost every advance in science and medicine has been greeted with some form of negative ethical or moral pronouncement from one group or another.

Flying was wrong as was space travel and putting a man on the moon. The computer and Internet upon which you are reading this sentence has been described as a tool of the devil by more than a few people – most of them in a blog on the Internet.

Personally, I don’t know how to sequence my own genome or splice a cell and I am still a little vague on the formulas for turning diarrhea bugs into antifreeze and plastic molding, but if we can genetically engineer a way to turn stupidity into cheap gas, I promise you, God will be smiling.

RING

“Hello.”

“Hey, it’s me.”“Hey you. What’s up? I was thinking about you and me going to that movie “3:10 to Yuma.”

AD FOR SEVERAL MOVIES SHOWS UP INSTANTLY ON YOUR SCREEN.

“Oh, I’ve heard it was good but I am a bit hungry. What if we go get something to eat first?”

AD FOR SEVERAL LOCAL RESTAURANTS POPS UP ON YOUR SCREEN.

“Chinese? Mexican? Italian?”

ADS FOR EACH TYPE OF CUISINE RUNS ACROSS THE SCREEN WITH EACH WORD SAID.

NOTE: About now I should tell you that a company called Pudding (started by two ex-intelligence officers in the Israeli military) is beta testing a new web-based phone service that listens in on your conversations and tailors ad content to your words. So if you talk about movies and food, the ads pop up about those two things.

“I was thinking about that new restaurant over on the east side.”

ADS FOR SEVERAL EAST SIDE RESTAURANTS SHOW UP.

“You mean Bush Street Grill?”

ADS FOR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AGENDA SHOW UP ON YOUR SCREEN. ADS FOR BILL MAHER’S SHOW POPS UP WHEN YOU SAY “GRILL” AFTER YOU SAY “BUSH.”

“Yeah. I’ll be by in an hour.”

ADS FOR WATCHES APPEAR.

“Whoa, Captain Jack…”

PIRATES OF CARIBBEAN AD POPS UP. SMALL CAPTAIN MORGAN ADS SLIDES ACROSSBOTTOM JUST FOR GOOD MEASURE.

“I need to put on some make-up, so give me a little more time.”

ADS FOR MAC AND REVLON FILL YOUR SCREEN. PLASTIC SURGERY DOCTOR ADS SLICEACROSS TOP AS TIMEX AND SEIKO ADS AD START FIGHTING IN THE CORNER OF YOUR SCREEN.

“You need more than an hour? You’re killin me here!”

ADS FOR FUNERAL HOMES POP ON. YOUR DOGS BARKS AT THE NEIGHBOR’S CAT AND YOU LOOK OUT THE WINDOW. INSTANTLY, PURINA AND MEOW MIX ADS COME ON.THE SYSTEM CAN READ YOUR DOG’S VOICE TOO.

My mother has made at least a hundred thousand biscuits in her eight-plus decades roaming a kitchen. She still makes them. In my family, biscuiting is an art form. One of my earliest memories is watching my mom sift

self-rising Martha White into a mound, hollowing out a crater in the middle, pouring in some buttermilk and poking around until she had a biscuit that was so good coming out of the oven that a man would lose money and be late for work just to eat one.

There were cathead biscuits, drop biscuits, and biscuits brushed with lard. The latter killed my grandfather. It can happen when you eat 12 with pork sausage every morning and chased them with Prince Albert roll-your-owns. Somehow he still only weighed 150 pounds. The biscuits got him.

The basic ingredient: Iron. All good biscuits are baked in a cast iron pan. I’m not sure I would even call it a biscuit if it was not raised and browned in a cast iron rounder.

There were times when biscuits were all my family had to eat – the best news in a long day of low pay and muddy sweat. If you don’t have any money, biscuits are a close second. I’m not really sure what ranks third because a lot of things tie for that position.

When I was in college, I had to write a paper about growing up. My professor was hardly enamored with Southern ways, even though he didn’t mind the tenured paycheck provided for his 3-hour workday at a very Southern university. I didn’t mind his criticisms of Faulkner and Capote and Welty. I rather considered him like an impotent animal at the zoo, trapped in a situation he thought demeaning because he wanted to be selling his verbiage instead of trashing ours. After one of my professors had gone senile in the middle of a class and tossed everyone because he didn’t recognize us, nothing much rattled me academically. I assumed if a person in a bowtie was standing in front of the chalkboard, he or she had gotten there because they’d lost a bet many years earlier. So I wrote about biscuits. The title: “Genetic Biscuits.” It told of my family’s propensity for making and eating them. He was not amused.

He ripped into me like I had stuck a biscuit in the gas tank of his ancient Volvo. I smiled and took my low grade. The next class, I brought in 12 still-warm biscuits – made from my mom’s recipe and wrapped in foil – and gave them to him. He looked like he didn’t know what to do with them. After seeing the A on my final, however, I assumed he figured out pretty quick what to do with them.

At the end of the semester, he pulled me aside and asked about the biscuits. I told him how to make them and I asked why he’d ripped me so hard on my paper.

“Reading about biscuits isn’t as convincing as eating them,” he said. “Once you finished that last paragraph with those twelve biscuits, your story improved considerably.”

Moral of story: Biscuit bribes work.

If you haven’t tried biscuits to leverage a better GPA, buy a cast iron pan and start writing.

I think http://www.yougottabefreakinkiddingme.com is available. So what is it worth?

Maybe I should start appraising people’s names for $15 a pop.

“Hey, Ms. Imabiatch, I’d say your name is worth about two bucks and if I were you, I’d change it. To anything else.”

Seriously though, web domain names have values like your house has equity – especially ones like Sex.com that sold for $12 million a few years ago, or Porn.com at $9.5 million. Geez, What is http://www.freedoobies.com worth?

What will they think of next?

Ask Jeff.

Did you know, (thank you again, Jeff), if you crack open a $5, 6-volt lantern battery, it is filled with 32 standard AA batteries. Yeah. AA’s sell for about $5 for 4. Do the math.

Between the website domain name appraisal gig and loading up on AAs like an E Bunny, I realized that within two days, Jeff has helped me add some fairly enriching knowledge to the extremely important skill sets I learned in college. I was still pretty excited about what a Mentos would do to a Diet Coke, which is old news. So thanks, Jeff. I appreciate the – whoa, what are you doing in there with that cattle prod hooked to your Wii?

My father took one look and said, “It’s going to rain.”

About thirty minutes later, it was raining like a cow peeing on a flat rock (which is pretty hard if you’ve never witnessed such a thing). That’s when I first learned that animals know things, even if they don’t know they know them.

Some people use animals to understand the weather. The Associated press recently reported that 84 year-old Paul Smokov forecasts the weather using pig spleens.

“It looks like a normal year with no major storms,” he said. “That’s what the spleens tell me.”

I have seen a pig spleen and it told me nothing except that the pig that used to house the spleen was dead. The AP didn’t report how Mr. Smokov was able to get the pig’s spleens to forecast the weather, but I assume the pigs had previously faced a deadly forecast themselves, indicating my observation was correct.

My grandmother used to predict weather using all kinds of strange practices.

“Clear moon, frost soon,” she said. And she was right.

“Halo around the moon, rain soon,” was another one that usually ended in showers.

Rainbow in the morning gives you fair warning,” she told me once before a frog strangler nearly washed the house away. Seems her weather predictions were always right and always rhymed. I remember something about red sky in the morning, gives a pig fair warning. Okay, that was not exactly right but it involved a red sky and no pig spleens. It’s easier going to weather.com.

My grandfather once watched a cat grooming himself like crazy on the porch and said, “Going be some lightning soon.” Sure enough, bolts were smacking the ground in about an hour.

If you count the chirps of a cricket in a 14 second period and add 40, it is almost guaranteed that you will have the correct air temperature. Try it.

Once when walking through the woods with my uncle, we noticed more rabbits than usual eating. “They know there’s a storm coming,” he said. “They’re getting ready.” He pointed out leaves that had curled on a tree. “See, the trees know too.”

We were drenched before we got home. Somewhere, the rabbits were dry, fat and happy.

Men’s brains are about the size of a cantaloupe, or about 10 percent bigger than women’s brains. But don’t get too excited there, fellas; women’s brains have about 11 percent more brain cells crammed into their smaller brains – and more connections between the lobes. So?

Let me explain that in terms you will understand, guys: It’s not the cubic inches of the engine in your F-150 that are important, it’s the horsepower that the engineers at Ford squeezed into that smaller block. Less weight, more horsepower, you do the math. Seems men are lugging around a big old V-8 block while our wives or girlfriends have a faster 6-cylinder under the carbon fiber hood. Or a turboed four. As far as women having more connections between their lobes, it’s like this: Hook a serious IROC racing transmission to that more efficient engine and what have you got? Uh huh. If Cale Yarborough and Richard Petty knew this stuff, why didn’t he tell us?

Gentlemen, if you aren’t feeling stunted enough, did you know that all human brains begin as females? When we all show up on this planet, women are on top. That’s what Dr. Brizendine says. So when we’re conceived, we’re all loving pink; then at about eight weeks, if you’re a male, your testicles show up and you get fitted for a blue jersey, you’re traded to the other team. Guess what your little boys do during the next eight months – they suck the horsepower right out of their brains to build their plumbing. You still think God is a man? Roll that biogenetical conundrum around in your testicularly challenged frontal lobe and see where you come out. Eve-21, Adam-6.

If all of this is true (and I read it in The New York Times, so it must be) why have women historically been subservient to men? Simple. Pregnancy.

Before birth control, way back in the 1700s and 1800s, women were pregnant as many as 17 to 22 times in their lives. That’s a lot of stretch marks, nipple-sucking and butt-wiping and it will knock a girl down a few rungs on the old “who’s in charge” ladder. Men had the luxury of thinking deep thoughts and running the show. Women were buried in the snot of the next generation.

So now what? Here’s what: It’s payback time. Just yesterday, I noticed my wife is about six rungs up the life ladder above me. My daughter is being trained to climb fast, too. Take college: At most schools, the females outnumber the males 60-40. The women I work with are smarter than I am. How do I know? They tell me this all the time. What does it all mean?

It means while us men were admiring our nads, women were using their brains. Look at chimps, they are the men of the future. If we keep slipping, it won’t be long until women will be visiting us at the zoo while we scratch our hairy butts and fondle the very reasons we got demoted in the first place. Evolution is not on our side, guys.

I know two men who are stay-at-home dads. We may have a female president in two years. Danica Patrick just may be the most famous race car driver. I bet we’re only six or seven years away from a woman coaching an NFL team. When you see a girl catcher throwing a guy out at second in Wrigley Field, we’re testosteroned toast. I know a guy who swears he’s going to chop off a testicle in hopes that his brain will gain a few more cells so he can fend off his wife from taking his Chevy Silverado and making him drive the old Dodge minivan.

So after all these years, it looks like size really doesn’t matter, especially when it comes to your cerebruminator. Hey pal, get to the back of the line.

I can hear it now. “They had some layoffs in sales and Kevin got Pluto’d.”

We’re living in interesting times, indeed.

Last week, AOL (mistakenly?) releases the Web search info for 650,000 people. So what were they searching for? A new Internet provider?

Coke and Pepsi gets banned in parts of India for allegedly containing 24 times the safe limits of pesticides. So what exactly is my safe limit of pesticide ingestion?

Grigory Perelman, a hermetic Russian genius, wins the highest honor in math, the coveted Fields Medal and then Brando’s the ceremony by refusing to accept it. That means they’ll soon make a movie about him.

Speaking of which: The Coen brothers are filming Cormac McCarthy’s violent tale, “No Country For Old Men,” in Marfa, Texas, near where the old classic movie “Giant” was filmed. Tommy Lee Jones plays the sheriff. That’s worth nine bucks, a $12 Coke and a slimy bucket of $20 popcorn.

Sony batteries for Dell and Apple laptops are so hot they have to be recalled for posing a fire hazard. Got a new Apple laptop? Ever actually put it on your lap for more than 10 minutes? Yeah. We’re talking a crotch-fired leg roast here. That thing gets hot enough to fricassee your future offspring.

George Mason cans the SAT requirement for students with a 3.5 GPA. Apparently, they can find no compelling reason to believe that students who score well on an SAT do any better in college than ones who don’t. Maybe that’s because it’s a single five-hour test on one Saturday that determines an 18 year-old’s entire life. I hear they’re giving a single high-stakes test next Saturday to see if all American workers get to keep their jobs. Want to sign up?

Online e-textbooks are gaining popularity and Freeload Press (confidence-inspiring name, eh?) is putting them out there for free – with one catch: Ads. If this takes off, what will happen to the
multibillion-dollar a year, budget-breaking, five-pound bricks of verbiage-laden tomes students drag all over campus now? Maybe we can burn them for an alternative fuel. Back in the day, mine alone, if used for fire tender, would have kept me warm for at least a year. And I can use my laptop to fire them up.

Nano-coated pants are finally here and they’re resistant to coffee spills, ketchup, blood, you name it. Just what I need, a nano in my pants. However, blood-resistant business attire may be perfect for today’s brutal, cutthroat, vacationless corporate environment.

Knight Ridder, the gianormous newspaper conglomerate, is no more, imploding in a red-inked fog of newsprint. I read about it online. Which may be the problem.

Paramount fires Tom Cruise for acting badly. On-screen or off? Hard to tell.

But let’s get back to Pluto. Why knock down a stand-up planet like Pluto? Scientists get excited if they find a chunk of ice floating out past Jupiter (like Xena, which sounds more like a hot, spandexed female video game vamp than a planet) but they can’t get it up for our old friend Pluto anymore? We get astrological upstarts like Quaoar and Sedna but turn our back on faithful Pluto, who has been hanging around out in the galaxial back forty since we cobbled together enough thick glass back in the 1930s so we could make a lens to see that far.

Now that Pluto is just a Herbert Hooverish wannabe, I wonder what’s next. Uranus? In today’s heated politically charged environment, it does sound kind of dirty. “Hey, I was just looking at the Hubble and I saw Uranus shining like a big funky melon!” See what I mean. Let’s just wipe Uranus too. Either demote Uranus or at least change the name to Somebodyelsesanus. It’s no worse than Quaoar, which sounds like an ingredient in Barry Bonds diet.