07/01/2003 - 7:58 p.m.

Packed in with fertilizer and fuel oil

I have just seen two things that have slightly ruffled me. The first was an advertisement that Thespian Playworks is accepting admissions. I can't do it anymore, but that's not the problem; under the picture of a girl with spiked blue hair and eight visible peircings, the advert read: "Express yourself. Write a play. Finally, a way to make a statement without having to ask your mother's permission."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Everytime my mother sees anything I write, she instantly assumes it's attacking her or people she knows. All my life it's been like that. My seventh grade English teacher thought I was writing metaphoric death threats to her through my stories. I'm serious. There's nothing safe about expressing yourself, however you go about doing it.

The other was a NOVA episode about remote controlled spy and fighter planes. This stuff makes all and any science fiction I've read seem crude and laughable. Of course, most of that stuff predicted flying cars and video phones, and instead we got SUV's and mobiles. If things keep up, we're going to be having wars in which no one is present. Everyone will be huddled in underground bunkers as satellite linked, solar powered, remote control planes go against each other on the surface. The nerds with their Battle Bots are slowly taking over the world. That's a scary thought.

Oh, and you've all heard that it's impossible for a bumblebee to fly, yes? Well, they appear to have worked out the proper equations now. Rather than flying like an airplane does, the way that an insect moves through air is on rather the same principle as a swimmer moves through water. This means two things- we can have flying bug like machines, and swimming bug like machines.

However, the US has made an industry out of military technology. This means that everything costs money, because people want it to cost money. When the Americans went into space, they spent a small fortune developing an "anti-gravity pen" if you will (as seen on Seinfeld). When the Russians went, they took pencils. The Americans could've done that, but they didn't, because nobody was making money on the pen technology that way. I saw one of those pens in a store the other day: $119, on sale.

This is the same reason that solar power is not being allowed to catch on. Solar power is terribly unlimitable and pretty free. At this moment, there is a great big solar powered sort of observation device (I don't know what all it does) up some 12 miles orbiting the earth. It's been up there for about four months because it doesn't need refueling, and it can go higher because it's lighter. It's cheaper, but there's only one of them. Why? Certain government officials haven't got anything to gain by solar power. Their money is invested in oil. I'm not naming any names here though (BUSH!).

And yet, with all of this stuff up there in the stratosphere, we can't seem to find a certain Mr. bin Laden. It occurs me to that perhaps no one is looking anymore.