All this “Peak Oil” hoopla lately has once again got me thinking a lot about alternate fuel sources. Whether or not civilization as we know it is about to radically shift, using less of our non-renewable resources just seems like a good idea, so I’ve been racking my brain to come up with viable alternatives.

Last June (on my birthday, apparently) I posted my first idea for a renewable fuel source, but it alone wasn’t enough to make much of a dent and thus didn’t get the attention I feel it deserved. I still stand by the idea — I just feel it needs to be supplemented with additional renewable sources.

With that in mind, I’m now about to rock the world by combining three existing renewable fuel technologies into one super hybrid, using only one readily available renewable resource.

The main source of this hybrid power scheme is an extremely prevalent substance found nearly everywhere humans are present, one which we take great pains to eliminate from our daily lives. Yes, I’m talking about excrement — or “poop,” if scientific terms aren’t your cup of tea.

“Sure,” you might say, “there are people already generating methane from animal excrement and people generating steam power — and, by extension, electricity — from burning dried animal waste, so what’s so ‘world-rocking?’”

Well, my new technique allows for ethanol extraction as well as the aforementioned steam and methane. To see how wonderful a fuel source ethanol is, one needs only to take a look at the readily available, attractively priced fuel in Brazil.

Sure, opponents of ethanol-as-fuel tout the fact that even if we used all the corn we currently eat — and therefore would no longer be able to consume — for fuel production, we wouldn’t be able to power all our cars. That’s very true; growing additional corn would actually have a negative impact on the problem.

However, I’ve overcome this hurdle; my plan requires no additional corn to be grown, nor a reduction in the amount we eat. Wondering where the ethanol is coming from? Well, my new process extracts all the undigested kernels of corn you see nestled in your excrement for ethanol processing, allowing us to generate ethanol from it after we have eaten it.

Sure, your excrement alone might not have much impact, but imagine if it was mixed in with that of all the people in your town. All that poop would have quite an impact indeed. With only minor changes to our municipal sewage treatment plants, we’d be able to start generating methane, steam-powered electricity, and ethanol from our excrement.

Rather than simply flushing this valuable resource into our nation’s rivers, we could be generating surplus energy to supplement my already proposed reclamation system to push us even closer to total independence from petroleum.

Come on, America; let’s “get our shit together” while we still can.

One of the things I’ve been most proud of in my life is that I’ve lived it relatively vice-free. I don’t smoke, I rarely imbibe alcohol, and I never drink to excess¹. Save for a few periods of my life where I had a mental and physical dependency on NyQuil², I’ve lived relatively drug-free.

That said, I’m ashamed to admit that I’m now hopelessly addicted to another green substance. That substance is Coca-Cola’s Vault, a rehash/relaunch of their popular yet discontinued Surge beverage.

I was never very excited by Surge, but I’ve discovered that Vault has immense power over me. Since its release, I’ve been drinking unhealthy amounts of it, finding myself unable to turn it down. If I’m not drinking it, I’m thinking about it; every half-filled yellow-green bottle lying on the side of the freeway enrages me at the thought of someone wasting a single drop of that glorious elixr. “Just say no,” indeed.

Three weeks ago I decided not to buy any more. Yet every Monday morning since, I’ve stopped and picked up copious amounts of my cruelly delicious master on my way to work. I’ve even found myself eager to get to work most mornings, thinking of the dwindling stash of Vault in my… achem… vault. Then comes the consumption; whether I’m the consumer or the consumee is still up for debate.

If only I didn’t have a moral opposition to 12-step programs³, I might be able to kick this stuff. Seeing as I do, however, I think I’ll just “crack open another Vault” instead.

2: I’ve found myself still taking the NyQuil after the last traces of my illness were gone, justifying it by treating it as a “preventative measure.”

3: I may post about this in the future, but the short version is that 12-step programs require you to not only acknowledge a belief in a higher power, but also admit that you need said higher power to solve your problems for you. They’re careful to not say just which higher power you have to pick, but you do have to pick. If you happen to believe that there’s no such thing as a higher power, you have to recant your beliefs in order to complete your program.

The state routinely forces people to enroll in 12-step programs as a mandatory part of a DUI sentence. Thusly, it’s a government establishment of religion — which is not only unconstitutional, but wrong too. If you don’t see how that’s wrong, just imagine for a second how you’d feel if you were a deist and were forced by the state to admit that God doesn’t exist.

This post was written in July of last year, but my theory came up in conversation recently, so I figured I’d dredge it back up for those who didn’t see it back then. I’ve reworked bits of it so that I sound a bit more coherent.

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Know that crappy Jimmy Fallon/Drew Barrymore movie Fever Pitch? The one that got lots and lots of free advertising by having to “change the ending of the movie” to coincide with the Red Sox unexpectedly winning the World Series? Well, all that noise about having to quickly fix the movie is all a sham, possibly going as far as involving the rigging of the World Series itself. I haven’t quite been able to put together all the pieces, but there are quite a few interesting elements involved.

During the weeks before the movie came out, I saw all the actors on show after show, talking about how amazing it was that the Red Sox actually won, how no one expected it, and how they had to actually change the ending of the movie. A huge deal was made out of this. “We were glad they won, but we had to hurry to come up with a new ending,” and other things like that were said. It was almost as if they were going out of their way to make a big deal out of it — almost too big a deal.

The first reason this didn’t wash with me was that I happen to know the movie is a remake. I have seen the original, which happens to be a really excellent movie. Like in the remake, the main character is a man obsessed with his favorite team — Arsenal, another real-life team that had not won a championship in forever — and eventually has to choose between the woman he loves and his lifelong obsession with a failed team. The climax of the movie takes place during Arsenal’s monumental real-life 1989 victory, a victory which he is now able to share with the woman he loves.

The big obvious question is: if you are going to remake a movie about a man who is obsessed with a losing team that has a completely unexpected victory at the climax, why on earth would you have the team not win in your new version? The claim that they had to “hurry to come up with a new ending” is preposterous. The “new” ending is now the same as the original movie’s ending — not to mention the fact that the book the original movie was based on ended exactly the same way as well. Nowhere was it mentioned that this movie had previously been made. Article after article about the the effect the Sox victory had on the production, but not one thing acknowledging that it wasn’t an original screenplay. This was practically a cover-up.

Now lets move on to Stephen King. In his “back page” column in Entertainment Weekly, he reported the same story about how his friends the Farrelly Brothers had to hurriedly rewrite, re shoot and re cut the ending in record time because of the Red Sox win. He then also mentioned that thankfully his cameo didn’t get cut out. Yes, Stephen King is in the movie. One of the the things I find most interesting about King is that he is a huge fan of movies and books. He watches and reads everything, frequently acknowledging that films are remakes in his EW commentary. There’s simply no way that he hadn’t either read the book or seen the original movie, yet he still helped spread the idea that they “came up with a new ending,” completely omitting the detail that it was a remake. Why would he do this? Because he was in on it, that’s why.

At the same time Fever Pitch was coming out, Stephen King had a book out about being a life-long Red Sox fan — one that would have had little interest if the Red Sox had not actually surprised everyone by winning, but instead sold tons and tons of copies due to all the people who just had their obsessions validated. He just happened to pick the only year in history that his book would have made crap-loads of money. (Of course I mean other than the normal crap-loads of money he makes when he publishes anything.)

So in addition to Stephen King and 20th Century Fox, who else would profit from advance knowledge of the Red Sox winning the series? Wait a second, did I just say Fox?? Fox had the broadcast rights for the World Series at the time, and stood to make tons and tons of money by stretching out the series to 7 games, having the Red Sox finally pull it out. The Fox connection also came in handy while shooting the movie at the games. They actually couldn’t shoot during the game due to league rules, but the camera operators at Fox would occasionally point the HD cameras at where Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore were sitting. It was then no problem to acquire that HD footage to splice into the movie during editing, thus nicely side-stepping the league’s “no filming” policy. The scene where Drew and Jimmy ran out on the field was against rules as well. They didn’t have permission, and according to Drew, they were trying to bribe security into letting them go out until they finally just ran past security onto the field. Of course the Fox camera operators were there to catch it in all its High-Def glory.

Not even going into possible mafia ties and illegal gambling facilities and bookies, there were quite a few people who stood to make quite a bundle off of this. I don’t necessarily think that Fox faked the World Series just to promote their movie, but they definitely took advantage of it. To me, the questions still remaining are: who set it up, and who all was in on it? As someone who doesn’t follow baseball, I don’t know if there were any fishy calls that could point to crooked officials, or whether or not the Yankees would have to be in on it as well.

Even without all the information, it seems pretty clear to me that something funny went on.

Howie Mandel vs. Penn Jillette on Faith.

or, How I Missed Out On $1,000,000 On Deal or No Deal (2:41 MP3 from Penn’s (awesome) radio show.)

This is a really great behind-the-scenes story by Howie involving a contestant’s Faith, which of course culminated in Penn railing about his particular brand of militant Atheism. I think Howie countered Penn rather well, coming out on top.

EDIT: Spelled Howie’s last name correctly this time and added a little bit more of a description.

EDIT again: fixed typo. Posting first thing in the morning is a bad idea, apparently.

Like the rest of the blog-o-sphere, I’ve decided to observe a moment of silence to honor those whose lives were affected by the events of September 18th, 2001.

I ask that you take a moment to reflect on that terrible day, and perhaps post some thoughts/memories on your blogs if you have time.