#1
Dollywood
I just learned that I am going to Dollywood next year. (For my readers in the UK, that is Dolly Parton’s theme park in Tennessee.)
I don’t know exactly what is there, but my assumption (which I do not care to confirm or deny) is that all the rides are based on her songs…
I am especially looking forward to the “Spiders and Snakes” ride. And while I don’t know exactly how they turn “Jolene” into a ride, I am certainly eager to find out!
#2
Atlas Returns
SPOILER ALERT: Do not read this next item if you have not yet read Atlas Shrugged.
For those of you who have, you know that in the last scene, Dagny and Galt agree that it is time to go back and rebuild the world. It occurred to me that that ending is calling out for a sequel. Let’s title it…
Atlas Returns:
Dagny, John, Francisco, Hank, and the rest of the gang leave Galt’s Gulch and return to the outside world. They rebuild America using their preternaturally productive abilities. Everyone in America is grateful…
For about five minutes.
Then our heroes discover that human beings haven’t changed. They’re still the same short-sighted, ungrateful louts they’ve always been. The lazy and envious still seek unearned benefits, and the power-hungry are more than happy to use force to deliver those benefits…so long as it keeps them in power.
Disgusted, the gang creates a new Galt’s Gulch and never comes back.
(Maybe a third book in the trilogy—call it Atlas Away—sees them build a rocket and bail out from Earth entirely…)
#3
Not ‘half.’ Not ‘some’…
I have, for years, been channeling Flyguy in the 1988 comedy film “I'm Gonna Git You Sucka” and saying that the left is wrong about everything they espouse—“Not ‘half.’ Not ‘some’.” But EVERYTHING they espouse. I know that isn’t technically true, but it is danged close, and every week, another data point comes in in support of this contention.
Enter lightbulbs.
Remember when you were a planet-destroying monster unless you used compact fluorescent bulbs? I have had people look at me like I was insane for saying things like, “I prefer the light of incandescent bulbs, and don’t use many CFLs in my house.” I mean seriously—looking at me as if I were quite literally mad.
Then we came to discover that in addition to producing an ugly, cold, depressing light, CFLs contain mercury that inevitably ends up in the waste stream, poisoning the ground beneath their disposal site when they inevitably break. (And, newsflash—recycling them requires trucks and machinery, all of which emit that dreaded element carbon.) Studies also showed that they produce a kind of radiation that is hazardous to anyone standing close by.
Lefties were SURE than you were an evil monster for not using them…right up to the point where these horrible bulbs were shown to be the real evil. Now, of course, you are an horrid monster if you don’t use their replacement: LED bulbs.
These too produce a terrible light. The streetlights in my neighborhood cast a warm, yellowish glowing light. Or at least they did…until the power company came last month and replaced them with the LED Lights of Misery. Now our entire neighborhood is subsumed in lugubrious blueish-white light. Nighttime walks through the neighborhood are no longer events of wonder; they are marches of despair through a pallid charnel fog.
And now, evidence is mounting that LED lights may also cause eye damage and contribute to macular degeneration.
They’re not wrong about half. Or some. They are wrong about all of it. Everything the left foists on us is wrong, dangerous, or downright wicked.