"Diamonds are forever, Mr. Bond."

So I picked up a Dr. Pepper for the first time in a while yesterday, and discovered that they've once again updated their packaging. The new can advertises that "Dr. Pepper" was established in 1885, when it was most likely peddled by snake oil salesmen as "Doctor Pepper's Marvelous Cure-All Elixir," and could supposedly cure rheumatism, typhoid, influenza, and could even be used for the treatment of various Indian attack-related injuries. I can see the ads now: "Out here on the frontier, I perty much only need three thangs: ma gun, ma Bible, and a six-pack 'a Doctor Pepper's Marvelous Cure-All Elixir!" (notactuallyproventocureanything
sideeffectsincludelossofsleepnauseaandinsomecasestoothdecay). The new can design also advertises that Dr. Pepper is made from "an authentic blend of 23 flavors." Apparently somebody recently told the Dr. Pepper people about the existence of Mr. Pibb, Dr. Thunder, and various other off-brand alternatives, and they're desperately attempting to prove their product's superiority. "Oh, hello Mr. Pibb. I notice that you've been making a pop that's very similar to mine. You probably think you're pretty clever, but what you don't realize is that mine is an authentic blend of 23 flavors! How many flavors are in your little soda? One? Two? Yeah, that's what I thought. Clear out the substitutes, there's a new Sheriff in town. A sheriff with an AUTHENTIC BLEND OF 23 FLAVORS, biatches!" Ok, sorry. I have no idea why I'm writing about this.

Moving along, I'm thinking of putting a link onto the blog that will let you donate money to me, since a lot of other sites seem to do this. Of course, all you get for donating to them is the satisfaction of paying for a site that you'd previously been viewing for free, and maybe sometimes they'll throw in a "bonus membership street team" phrase, where they'll give you a t-shirt (but only if you donate more than $25 or something like that), and you get to feel outright smug about donating to the site. It's like the Good Book says, hombres: "Why waste your money on what is not bread? Your wages on what fails to satisfy?" For donating to The People's Republic of D.Cous., you won't just get a t-shirt and a smug look on your face every time you view my blog. You'll get no t-shirt whatsoever, and the look on your face won't be smug, no. It'll be outright distorted by a twisted maniacal grin, knowing that you have helped me get one step closer to 50% world domination. Total domination might be in the works, we'll see, but first I need some money. My plan is so simple that it's absolutely brilliant, and I'm only telling you about it because I need the money to implement it, and because you read my blog I trust you. I'm going to create a shoe. A pair of shoes, really. I haven't run the computer simulations yet, but it might have to be a very big pair of shoes to get the desired effect. It might even have to be several small pairs of shoes. As I said, due to research funding limitations, this plan for 50% world domination is still very much in the planning phase. Where was I? Oh yes. Shoes. Intrigued yet? Yes, I'm aware of the many questions that must be racing through your capable mind right now. How is D.Cous. going to achieve 50% world domination by making shoes? Does this have anything to do with Dr. Pepper, and if so, what? Is anybody watching me right now, or is it ok to pick my nose? I'll answer those questions in reverse order, for dramatic effect: Thirdly, yes. You're always being watched, and no, you probably shouldn't pick your nose in front of them. It's rude. Secondly, no. The bit about Dr. Pepper was just to get the casual Republic of D.Cous. reader to stop reading. The frontier was settled, the railroads were built, and the Indians were relegated to reservations and casinos by 1885, everyone knows this. No one must know about what I have to say. No one except me, and you, and of course Reginald. I'll be the brains of the operation, obviously, you'll be the financier, and Reginald will (as always) be the silent partner. Now then, to your first question. As I said before, I'm going to make a pair of shoes, or perhaps several. Some field testing and computer modeling will need to be done to determine the size and quantity of the shoes, once the funds start rolling in. Now comes the important part, the part where the shoes give us the power to rule 50% of the world: They will be made out of chocolate. Shoes made out of chocolate, my friend! Half the world is already within our grasp, we just have to get our hands on it before the Wal Mart people do. But I'm getting ahead of myself, and perhaps you're starting to lose interest before I get to the really important part. Combining the powers of shoes and chocolate is still only 2/3 of my plan for 50% world domination (50WD), and 2/3 of 50% is only... let's see... carry the two... anyways, it's less than 50%. Yes friends, there is one more element to 50WD (not to be mistaken for WD40, which was actually a miserable failure as a world-domination plan, but turned out to be a pretty good lubricant), without which the first two elements combined are a mere novelty item: Diamonds. That’s right, diamonds. A lot of diamonds. Enough diamonds, in fact, to coat a pair of chocolate shoes in a sparkly glow of unstoppable power. The power to control any and all women on earth, Mr. Bond. Faced with that “super-cute” pair of diamond-coated chocolate shoes, women’s brains the world over shall be like so much putty in the hands of a capable sculptor (not that I can sculpt per se, it’s just a simile). There may be a few minor brain explosions as some women try to figure out whether to eat or wear the shoes, and if they wear them what outfit will they go with, but I think most women will stop before then, stopped in their tracks by the mere concept of a diamond-coated chocolate shoe. They’ll be so blown away it may even take them a while to notice the second shoe. We’ll have complete control over every woman on earth within minutes, which is, if my math is correct, roughly 50% of the world’s population. Of course, once you control all the women, you’ve pretty much already got control of the other half of the world, but I’m getting ahead of myself again. The key elements here are money, money, and money. “Great,” you’re thinking. “I already KNEW I could win women over with money.” That’s as may be, my friend, but I put it to you that Plan 50WD will win over every woman in the world far cheaper than any alternative heretofore considered.
The bottom line is “give money to the People’s Republic of D.Cous.” You won’t be directly helping refugees or orphans or even starving beat poets (I personally guarantee that no money donated to the Republic shall ever go to starving beat poets). Instead, you’ll be helping me achieve world domination, in exchange for loosely defined “gratitude” at some undetermined future date (and that’s a promise you can take right to the bank), after I’ve established myself as supreme leader of earth, and we’ve blasted at least one other planet out of the solar system just for the heck of it. Come on, you know you want to.

Of Rugged Rocks and Ragged Rascals...

Ah, rainy days. The perfect time for relaxing on the couch with a cup o' tea (or coffee, I'm an equal opportunity enjoyer of hot beverages, except for that no-good hot cider nonsense) and that Jules Verne book I didn't quite finish on vacation (icthiological terms are tricky in french, by the way). That's not actually what I'm doing on this fine rainy day, but it still would've been a good way to spend it, all other things being equal. I also enjoy driving in the rain, something I did actually get to do, running an errand or two. It's funny the things you miss when you don't have them. Last summer I spent a month in France travelling mostly by train and on foot, having a fantastic time, and by the end of the trip I missed driving. I'm quite happy to have finished my studies at Hillsdale, but aside from missing friends and professors and such (which I'd expected), I've begun to miss the odd little things. I miss having free, unlimited access to JSTOR (an online archive of academic journal articles) and the Oxford English Dictionary, and a super-cheap subscription to the Wall Street Journal. Perusing the internet during lunch the other day I stumbled accross a nearly 50-page economics paper, and was sorry not to have the time to read it. A few months ago I would've had the paper in hand with a deadline to write a paper, give a presentation, or take a test on it (none of which I enjoy), fully ready to stay up late into night with a cup of coffee (sorry, no tea for late-night studying) and my trusty notebook and highlighter, listening to Miles Davis on my headphones and doodling in the notebook while my mind tried to wrap itself around the theory. Don't get me wrong. I loved France, and I want to go back some day. I also loved college, I just don't want to go back. I finished. I took my four years of classes, made my mistakes, did a few things right (but not too many, gotta keep expectations low), and graduated. In fact, before my diploma arrived in the mail a few weeks ago I was irrationally paranoid that I would receive a call from the Hillsdale College registrar, telling me that I would have to come back to take one more PE class, or another semester of English. I liked English, but I got slightly disilusioned by my freshman litterature class when it occured to me that at least half of the works we were reading weren't originally written in English. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be reading Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, and Augustine (quite the opposite, really), I'm just saying that putting them in a class called "English" is a bit of a misnomer. Sure, we read some Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Coleridge as well, so there were smatterings of English litterature in the English class, but still. Ok, I don't even know why I'm ranting about that. It's not even something I feel at all strongly about. I'm sorry world. They're called "English" classes because they're taught by members of the English department, or perhaps because they expect your papers to be in something at least recognizeable as the English language (by the way, I don't see myself missing writing typed, double-spaced, one inch-margined expository prose any time soon). Well, there you have it. Another post devoid of paragraph breaks or discernable direction. I'm sorry, but not so sorry that I won't do it again, as I am likely to do. Have a good rainy day if it continues to rain, and a good sunny day if it doesn't.

No alarms and no surprises, please.

Ah, back to the helm of The Republic. I must say, it's been a very dreadfully long time, and I wouldn't blame you at all if you're not reading this, as there's a very good chance that you're not. What have I been doing with myself during my hiatus, you might ask? Well, don't bother, it's not really anything to write home about. I did go on vacation with my family and my girlfriend and her family (for those of you keeping track, that adds up to 1,023 people), up on one of Michigan's six lakes named "Long Lake." 'Twas a wonderfully relaxing time, and quite a bit cooler than this 95-degree madness that I've come back to, and I kept my longstanding vacation tradition of sitting on the beach reading for hours, taking occasional breaks to eat, sleep, and mingle with friends and relatives.

Hey hey, a paragraph break! I haven't been keeping track, but that's probably only the sixth or seventh in The Republic's long and proud history. Anyways, let's have a little talk about Japanese Beetles. Hmm... On second thought, let's not capitalize the name, it's only an insect. What do we know about Japanese beetles? Well, there's the name for starters: Japanese is an adjective, meaning "Of or pertaining to Japan," according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED for short), so clearly the name indicates that the insect in question is or at some point was beleived to be of Japanese origin. Beetle is of course a noun, for which the OED gives this handy little definition:

"The class name for insects of the coleopterous order, having the upper pair of wings converted into hard sheaths or wing-cases (elytra) that close over the back, and protect the lower or true wings, which most species are able to use in flight."

I'm terribly sorry, but blogger is apparently refusing me the right to indent lengthy quotations, so that's the best I'm going to do. Let the record show, however, that those are not paragraph breaks per se, and should not be counted as such. Anyways, where was I? Beetles. Yes. When you combine the words "Japanese" and "beetle," you get a new definition, one which unfortunately cannot be found on the austere pages of that definitive record of the English Language, but which is nonetheless useful: The Japanese beetle is the most disgusting animal known to man. Anyways, Reens (My sister and landlady) and I returned from our vacation to discover that our neighborhood was infested with the aforementioned green insectoid monstrocities, who were making themselves as comfortable as pigs in the mud devouring my sister's much-cherished garden. Hundreds of them. Thousands, even. A small amount of research on Reenie's part revealed that the two main ways to dispose of the little buggers are to either pick them off by hand, or else purchase and trap them with a pheromone trap. Being more than a bit vexed with the beetles, and in no mood to pick them off the bushes like so many blueberries, it was the second option which my sister took, and hence asked me to set up the contraption. It's a simple device, really: You suspend a tablet of synthesized beetle sex attractants mixed with some sort of poison (it probably takes a pretty weird guy with a PhD to think of this) over a plastic bag with a funnel in the top, and within a few seconds the horny little bastards fly to it from all corners of the yard, and fall stunned into the bag, where they writhe around in a pile having some disgusting bug orgy/feeding frenzy until the smell of dead bugs begins to counterract the pheromones and the bag has to be replaced for more bugs to show up. Grossed out? I know I am, dear reader (don't you hate it when people patronize you in print by calling you "dear reader?" I know I do), but I'm afraid we're not yet finished with this gruesome tale. Remember how I said said the bugs are writhing around in a pile in the bottom of the bag? That's right, the majority of them are not yet dead. Just for a second, imagine yourself holding a tied-off plastic bag containing roughly a pound of writhing beatles. If you're starting to get phantom itches from imagining that those bugs are now crawling all over yourself, welcome to my world. Feel free to leave my world any time you like and go back to your happy place, assuming that there are no Japanese beetles there. What are we supposed to do with this 1 pound bag of garden pests? We notice that there are tiny holes in the bag (as if the bugs are supposed to be able to breathe or something, I don't know. Ask the guys who make beetle sex attractants for a living, not me). So, Reens comes up with the idea of drowning the little buggers in soap water, which, she says, is rumored to be lethal to them. Figures that something that disgusting would have a fatal allergy to soap, I guess, but being more than a little tired of the sight of the beetles, I take the idea step further and suggest that we put a little bleach into the solution, just for good measure. So, we fill a bucket with goodly amounts of soap, bleach, and just a touch of water (for flavor), and dip the bag-o-bugs into it. So far so good, but after a few minutes we decided to check up on the bugs, to make sure that they had truly all died (you must understand, a bag of beetles does in fact float, so it was never completely submerged). Reenie grabbed the still-dry top of the bag and slowly lifted it up out of the water a few inches, which is when a dark, rust-colored liquid began pouring out of the aforementioned holes in the bag, and clouding the water in the bucket below. Unbelievably disgusting. Methinks that perhaps the bleach and soap don't just kill the bugs, they sort of chemically break them down to a brown pulp. I didn't think I'd be able to eat for days, but somehow I managed to have some dinner, although I didn't want to go near anything crunchy.

Anyways, that's pretty much all I can stand to write for now, the memory's still too vivid, especially considering that every day since then I've gotten home from work to see a fresh new pound of bugs in the bottom of the bag I put up the previous evening. I don't ever want to go to hell, because it's probably where I sent all those bugs, and they're probably pissed. I mean, here they thought they were gonna get free love like it's 1967 all over again, and instead ended up being disintegrated by bleach. Serves 'em right. More posts to come soonish, although I can never make any guarantees as to the quality.