Why aren’t there policecats.  You know, cats trained to assist in the enforcement of law and order.  I only bring it up because I’m trying to find ways my cats can actually make me some money.  Cats are expensive, after all, and it’s time they pulled their weight.  And believe you me, there are a couple of them that have some weight to pull.  So, yeah, I was thinking:  Policecats.

“Put down the gun, sir, or my cat may scratch you.  She has been known to inflict quite painful scratches that really are irritating.  Please be advised that cat scratches may lead to nasty infections.  Sir!  You have been warned!”

Yeah.  They could do that.  What do you suppose it would pay?

I believe in never eating sandwiches that you buy from concession stands that have been wrapped in cellophane – the sandwich, not the concession stand.  Seriously.  You don’t know where that meat came from, or just how long it’s been sitting there behind that glass.  As far as that goes, stay away from microwaved Burritos.  They are nasty.  And yet we eat them.  It would be great if we could know exactly what it is we’re eating every time we ate.  In fact, that should be everyone’s mission in life:  To know exactly what it is they are eating every time they eat. 

That, in turn, will cause us to think about where lots of things come from.  For instance, where does the plastic that’s on the dashboard of your car come from?  I’m serious.  Who made it?  Where do they live?  How do they get home?  Are they happy?  Do they get paid enough?  Are they being exposed to nasty chemicals that they take home on their skin and infect their newborn daughter with so that she dies before she even turns six weeks old, but nobody really knows why?  And do they make the dashboards cheaply?  If so, is that why we bought the car... because it was cheap?

I mean, if you really knew it was a blood diamond, would you buy it?  Even if you could get a flawless stone for half the price of one that is of no where near the quality?  Is that the sort of thing you’d want to give to your fiancée?  Is that the sort of thing you’d want your fiancé to give to you?  Would you wear it?

It all leads to the central idea:  Always know the consequences of your actions.  At least, try to.  You really need to know what’s in that fertilizer that you’re spreading on your lawn.  Sure, your grass is green, but what about that creek at the bottom of the hill?  Ever wonder why the pond it drains into is so disgusting?  Why it’s completely covered with algae and you haven’t seen any of the ducks that used be there in a long time?

Don’t make excuses.  You really need to know.  You need to be educated.  And, sorry, if you’re not, it’s no one else’s fault but your own.  Read.  Look.  Listen.  Think.

Don’t depend on common sense.  The whole idea of common sense is silly, anyway.  I mean, who wants to be common?  And how smart are the common folk that you know?

And stop trying to justify everything.  It’s not okay to invade other countries because they have stuff we want.  It’s not okay to suppress other people because we know what’s best for them, even if they don’t.  It’s not okay to let our neighbors beat their kids because how they raise their children is not my business.  Of course it is.  Isn’t that the sort of thing you found so reprehensible when you were younger?  What happened?  And it is not okay to feed your kids cheap, high calorie food (like those sandwiches wrapped in cellophane) because you can’t afford expensive food.  If you’d just learn something about food, you’d find that you can create very nutritious meals cheaply... but not easily. 

Admit it.  Mostly we’re dealing with laziness.  We don’t want to know what’s downstream.  We don’t want to know what the government’s really doing.  And we don’t want to know what’s really in that sandwich.  But I can guarantee you this:  If we all did know what was really in that sandwich, they’d stop making them.

Do they make a children’s Koran?

Is there a Vacation Koran School?

Are there people out there who now want to kill me simply for asking these questions?

Are there people out there who would want to kill me if I didn’t?

The Holy Grail Press is pleased to announce that it has added Mr. Mandrake Chapman as its new Research Editor.

Mandrake, aside from being a talented writer himself, is a Professional Grant Writer, specializing in Educational Studies.  Mr. Chapman holds the distinction of being the only person to take every course offered by Cambridge and never actually to have graduated.  He received his Associate’s degree from Fairfield Junior College in Crossgrove, Illinois, in 1994, and then went on to join its faculty, where he is renown for his studies in Educational Philosophy and Toxicology.  In his most widely recognized experiment, he concluded that, whereas it is true that children learn better when a teacher has fewer students, when the student to teacher ratio drops below one, learning becomes negligible.

Currently he is collecting an oral history of why people hate their jobs in an attempt to prove his hypostasis that people hate their jobs because actual work is loathsome.  The Holy Grail Press is in the process of publishing Mr. Chapman’s selected interviews.

And, of course, who hasn’t benefitted from Mr. Chapman’s pre-graduate school landmark research that cold beer inherently tastes better when you’re on a tropical beech?  That, in turn, became the foundation of undoubtedly one of his most controversial claims:  that women truly do become more sexually attractive with increased alcoholic consumption. 

Says Mandrake, “It’s not so much writing the grants as implementing them.  Some studies can take up to ten years to implement.  And, of course, there’s a stipend.  It’s not an easy job.  It does require a lot of travel.  For instance, in proving that students actually learn more if their regular teacher actually submits lesson plans to a substitute while he or she is gone, it was necessary to determine if there was a difference in the quality of lesson plans if they were written at various altitudes, like the Swiss Alps, or at sea level, such as Tahiti.  A good grant will allow for travel.”

As a pure scientist, though, Mandrake is less concerned with the actual utility of his findings than the process of scientific inquiry.  To him, it is a need to know.

The Holy Grail Press is delighted to have Mandrake on our staff. 

We’re expecting fire and brimstone in our Northern listening area, with accumumlations up to six inches.  In the sourthern portions expect hazy skies with a chance of supher and intermittant fire.  By tomorrow morning we should expect an accumulation of up to four inches of ash throughout the entire listening area, though locally it could be more heavy, and drifing may occur.  Tune in tomorrow morning for possible school and business closings.