Turn Left for Reality Bypass

Here in Seward, we've had six or eight inches of new snow today, right after the guy across the street spent all day snowplowing his yard.   No, not his driveway - his entire yard.   There is a man who is fed up with winter.   

I overheard a very interesting conversation today at a local coffee shop, touching on everything from General Allenby’s military tactics in the Middle East during WWI , to the Illuminati – who apparently have an ambiguously nefarious plan to reduce the world’s population by 8% by 2022.   (Apparently, the Illuminati are less effective in their nefariousness than they are popularly portrayed, since the US Census Bureau estimates that the world population will add another billion by 2030.)   Also, I learned that under the affordable care act, by 2017 we are all going to have microchips injected into the backs of our necks, apparently part of some sort of nefarious plan to revisit the highlights of the 6^th season of the X-Files.   Or perhaps to drum up some extra business for America's veterinarians.

I love political conversations in rural areas – nowhere outside of a ComicCon convention can you spend an hour having a conversation that bypasses reality on so many different levels.   Like an evening on a farm in rural Scotland where a drunk goat farmer spent an hour telling me about how George Bush (senior) was actually an alien reptile who came from deep inside the Earth – which is hollow, apparently – with these little UFOs that flew in and out through a giant hole in the North Pole.   Which wouldn’t make him an alien reptile, come to think of it, just a regular ol’ Earth-based saucer-flying reptile.   What the farmer was still trying to figure out was whether that made George W. Bush (the president at the time) some sort of hybrid half-reptile alien.  He seemed to think that W’s paternity had some bearing on him being a legitimate president; I kept having to remind him that the US presidency wasn’t an inherited title.      But we were both drunk at the time, so I might be misremembering some of the details.

It makes me want to go back in time and see what the conspiracy theorists back in the 1980s and 1990s were predicting would have happened by 2013, and see how those predictions have worked out.   My guess is, not very accurately...