Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

It is now possible to take a cruise ship through the Northwest Passage, thanks to global warming and Crystal Cruises​, as long as you are willing to plop down a minimum of 22 grand for the trip, plus an extra $50,000 for “emergency evacuation” insurance.

This, we assume, is in case you hit an iceberg, of which there are still many that haven’t completely melted in the Arctic, and which cruise ship operators have been very touchy about ever since that Titanic thing. If the Crystal Serenity goes down, the US Department of Defense is ready to rescue the passengers and is practicing to do so at considerable cost to the taxpayers. Yes, your tax dollars are being spent to assure the safety of these bloated eco-snobs, who plan on enjoying golf, gourmet dining and fine wines right until the moment they crash into an ice cube the size of Delaware County, PA,* whereupon brave and well-trained rescue squads will fish them out of the Arctic waters and chopper them back to land.

“Why bother with that?” you might ask. “They’re just going to dry them off and send them back to their day jobs, which for most of them consist of making my IRA disappear.”

That’s a good question, for which this column has no real answer. We have cruised, however, in Alaska if not the Arctic, and are anxious to provide insight on how to behave on board.

We had an unlimited drink package on our voyage, and I assume for a minimum of 22 large, which is more than ten times what we paid, the cocktails are free as well, so your first job is to stay drunk. I don’t mean to boast here, but this was almost effortless for us.

On our voyage we stopped at a different Alaskan port almost every day, and we took the option of stumbling off onto the shore just to enjoy the novelty of paying for our drinks. There were a multitude of other activities offered, all by cheerful vendors who were no more attached to Alaska than we were—they just moved there for the summer to sell us souvenirs.

On the Northwest Passage cruise, the passengers aren’t going to get much of that, as there are no ports to call on, due to the fact that the passageway was covered with ice year-round until enough of us drove enough Hummers to induce it to melt. There is one port on the way, the far northern village of Ulukhaktok, whose members are being trained by the Canadian government, at expense to Canadian taxpayers, on how to host a cruise ship carrying four times the number of people that live in their village.

This training consists mainly of fitting the word “Ulukhaktok” on a t-shirt, if our experience is any guide. Plus they could invent some boring local lore to mumble at the passengers as they drive them along the featureless tundra. Also they could throw up some zip lines between the icebergs and offer to help the tourists paddle around in kayaks so they could enjoy the thrill of being crushed by ice floes.

The original adventurers who tried to find the Northwest Passage before it existed did this, along with being frozen in the Arctic ice over the winter, being chased by polar bears, and dying of starvation after they ran out of spoiled whale blubber to eat.

The Crystal Serenity, on the other hand, chases polar bears. A passenger on a previous Arctic expedition described it as follows:

“I think that’s why we kept getting closer and closer even as they tried to swim away, crossing a cove and scrambling up a cliff. There were people on the cruise—a minority, to be sure—who later criticized the decision to follow them. Polar bears, they pointed out, often go up to a month without finding anything to eat and can ill afford to waste precious calories paddling away from people, even if those people only want to share pictures of them on Facebook.

But I’m not sure we had a choice. … If we hadn’t seen any polar bears, I think there might have been a riot.”

I can see his point—I would hate to have to tell my grandchildren “Yes, your grandmother was lost in the Great Polar Bear Riot of ’16,” but polar bears, on the other hand, make their living waiting around holes in the ice for seals to come up for air, and then bite their heads and drag them onto the land to devour them. I think it’s safe to say this is, at the very least, unpleasant for the seals.

The less ice there is, the fewer holes there are, so the polar bears are in danger of following the dodo into extinction anyway, and chasing a few around with a 900-foot cruise ship probably isn’t going to make much of a difference to them, long-term survival-wise.
​
Plus, imagine the hearty flippers-up we’re getting from the seals.

*191 square miles

​Now that we’ve put the Olympics in the rear-view mirror, it is time to review them, and there’s nobody better than me to do that, since my viewing of them consisted of eyeballing them indifferently on the TV on the way to getting a beer out of the fridge, which means that if I had a compact fridge in my home office, like the one I keep hinting around about getting for a birthday gift,  I wouldn’t have seen any of the Games at all.

But I don’t, so I can tell you what I did find out about the Games. The first thing was being surprised that they were held in the first place, since the various news sources I regularly checked on the Internet assured me that Rio was a diseased swamp whose waters were crammed full of untreated sewage, floating garbage and unidentified corpses. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a place full of nice, new, clean Olympic-sized buildings.

I also learned that some members of the American team were capable of making the simple, pleasurable act of whizzing against a dark service station wall into an international incident, complete with arrests and sponsorship losses, which reinforces a lesson so many men learn too late and that is, if you want to have a smooth path through life, there is only one time to take your penis out of your pants, and that time is never.

Also, Mark Phelps has more gold medals than the flour aisle at the supermarket.

Apart from that, I noticed that the world has way too many countries in it, and the Olympics have way too many events. The Summer Games claim to have competitions in only twenty-eight sports, but that is horse poo of the highest order, as “swimming” is listed as only one sport, and everybody knows that there are at least eighty or ninety different swimming events for both men and women, including a couple different competitions in the butterfly stroke, which no one actually uses if they are really trying to swim someplace. It’s true. If you are watching a ship sink, and people are madly swimming for their lives, no one is using the butterfly stroke. Check for yourself if you don’t believe me.

So why do we need more Olympic sports? Because they’re there, and people want to be able to sit in front of their TV’s and chant “USA! USA!”  as the American Olympic Forces whomp the crap out of Tonga.

Here’s my list of the Top Ten New Olympic sports, selected for the same reason all the current ones have been selected—people do them, and some people do them way better than other people. I have also thoughtfully predicted the region of the world likely to dominate each sport.
 
Parallel parking: No cracks here about not having a women’s team. Although it may be easier to make than the men’s team. Predicted champions—people who do their Christmas shopping in Manhattan.

Chaw spitting: The truly gifted in this field are always missing a few teeth. Kentucky in a good position to dominate.

Air hockey: They already play the ice and field versions, so why not? Predicted champions—anybody with the initiative to take the six feet of stacked boxes off that table they have in the garage.

Synchronized scratching: If done well, graceful and balletic. Predicted champion—one word—Zika!

Bumper cars: The sparking! The charging! The whiplash! The perfect competition to switch over if you feel death by boredom approaching while you’re watching sailing. Predicted champion—some kid from Ohio whose neglectful parents let him spend way too much time in cheap carnivals.

Thumb wrestling: Yeah, it’s stupid, so it’s bound to be dominated eventually by Asian countries, just like ping-pong.

Bar fighting: There are no rules. Let’s face it, Australia needs a sport it can excel in.

Anything with cats in it: We need more cat videos. Winners—cats, but they won’t care.

Beer can relay race: The same as the regular relay race, except with brews instead of batons. This would not necessarily be a better, neater or faster kind of relay race, but the sponsorship opportunities would be huge. Predicted champions—people who are willing to hand their beers to other people, so nobody I drink with. 

Twister: The only Olympic sport with men’s, women’s and coed teams. Winners—every swinger couple you know.
​
There you go. I could think of more, but then  I would be even more resentful if none of my suggestions were taken seriously. The only for-sure new Olympic sport in 2020 will be Pokémon Go. You can take that to the bank.

Normally I grow my own tomatoes with varying degrees of success. I did not get any planted this year so have to look for them elsewhere. Since they are in season the farmer’s market seems like a target rich environment. There are two in the nearest little town to me. It’s a rare liberal bastion in NC.

So I brought this up to group of lesbian friends-for a reason I don’t know  I have a lot of lesbian friends, except for the obvious sexual  attraction to the same gender we share. Probably more likely we go the the same bar like everyone else does cause it’s the only cool bar in town. The lesbians go to ogle Christina the barkeep, who is a crazy beautiful blond with the most perfectly aftermarket boobs ever implanted. She’s also a total sweetheart and yes I go to ogle her as well. She spent good money on them and wants folks to notice.

So the lesbians react to my farmer’s market question in hushed tones and diverted eyes. There is a war on with the farmers and the lesbians are clued in. Pretty sure most of the lesbians are not actual farmers but most have enough land to grow some things.

The town has built a really nice spot for the farmers to display their stuff on Saturdays, and there is a hipster playing guitar poorly and you can pay more than you would at a Whole Foods for a tomato because it’s organic. There are also organic bales of hay. Far as I know hay is what grows in your field when you don’t plant anything else. My lawn is organic.

So the 2nd Farmers Market was relegated to the parking lot of the Home Depot for a while, stuck between the illegal day workers and fix-it dads trying to figure out the best way to cram a dozen two-by-fours into a Prius. They had clearly lost the farmers market battle and had to be embarrassed by it but they circled the wagons and decided to take legal action to get back to the cute spot by the river. They prevailed and now all the women with long grey hair in a ponytail (also a common look for the men vendors) can push oddball veggies at you under a common roof. But clearly the tension is high. A single aggressively handled rutabaga could re-ignite the conflict, in the opinion of this observer.

The kale market is particularly competitive. I imagine because kale is a weed and grows everywhere and tastes like plaster no matter how one prepares it. The cooking shows tell me all about how  it can be done but guessing even in the hands of a master chef, really good camera work and lighting, it still tastes like the crap that it is.

So anyway I get my tomatoes and pull the kiddos out of the river and hope I don't have to use my tomatoes to defend myself on the way home before we can make some chili with them. It’s a fun morning.

People wonder why aliens never contact us—serious people who have serious theories about us seeming to be alone in the Universe. According to Enrico Fermi, the galaxy ought to be bubbling over with alien civilizations, and it’s not. Then somebody proposed a theory that there is a Great Filter—a stage of existence that all life goes through, and rarely passes. Maybe it’s really unusual for life to consist of more than a bunch of germs in a pond, for example, and you could wipe out 99% of all life in the Universe by pouring bleach on it. Or maybe all civilizations end up blowing themselves up or baking themselves out of existence.

It’s possible—Fermi knew all this, and went ahead and invented the atomic bomb anyway.

Or maybe most planets that support life get thumped by an asteroid way too often for intelligent life to evolve…it’s all they can do to come up with a fresh batch of dinosaurs every couple million years. Or they get cooked by a gamma-ray burst from a nearby black hole the day after their inhabitants just learned to use fire.

By the way, a gamma ray burst would be one of the most serious ways humanity could suddenly cease to exist. They move at the speed of light, so there would be no advance warning, and it would cook off our whole atmosphere in about ten seconds, killing everything and leaving only Jesus sitting in Heaven thinking “Shit—I meant to go back there.”

But let’s not flatter ourselves—it’s entirely possible we’re surrounded by advanced civilizations, wise, powerful civilizations who have taken a careful look at us and decided “Courtesy call on these intercoursers? No way, Jose.”

This is because aliens can watch our TV shows. We’ve been broadcasting at the speed of light for seventy or so years now. Early TV wouldn’t have dissuaded the aliens from popping on by. They would have watched shows like Andy of Mayberry and The Avengers and thought to themselves “These are simple folk. They like to bake, make really obvious jokes, and spy. Load up the mother ship with live-forever pills and world peace machines and let’s contact them.”

Or they might have waited until the original Star Trek and said to themselves, “Holy crap, we need to head on over there and teach these people how to build an aerodynamically plausible space ship. Where are my saucer keys?”

But then our civilization advanced into the era of reality TV, probably just when the aliens were topping of the tanks on their starships for their trip to Earth. They started absorbing the lessons in My Great Big Racist Wedding. Or Too Fat for That Dress. They met the Duggars. They learned many of us were unshaven yickadoos who painted ducks for a living.

They watched a show featuring a man who ran around a big kitchen screaming at people who were trying to cook. “Why doesn’t anyone punch the Dickhead Chef?” they wondered. “If Earthlings were really civilized, someone would open up a can on that mofo.”

It wouldn’t all be negative impressions. The gay aliens would be wowed by Tim Gunn’s wardrobe. Aliens who fish would be on board with Wicked Tuna. But then they would switch to Naked and Afraid and think “Who wants to meet people with such blurry genitals?”

So they’re hesitating. Us watching shows like My Weighing as Much as A Forklift Life, or Fully Grown Men Who Still Build Tree Houses, or I Know Where I’d Like to Stick That Fish Tank is what’s keeping them from checking the tire pressure on their interstellar rovers and buckling up. And when they do show up, they may have nothing benevolent in mind.

They may just want to sucker punch Gordon Ramsay. 

​I decided to do some investigative reporting last week, so I stopped by the Hillary Clinton campaign headquarters in my hometown of San Diego.

It was located in a cavernous warehouse in an industrial park and it was just as I expected—rows of desks manned by political geeks staring at computers and wearing headphones. When I asked who was in charge of the Clinton campaign, though, they just looked puzzled. Finally, they pointed me to a desk in the corner, where a man with the pallor and gut of a perpetual indoor worker was fast asleep.

‘Hrumph,” he said when I woke him. “Is it five o’clock already?”

Not yet. Is that when you go knocking on doors for Hillary?

“Hell, no. Nobody needs to do that. You rescuing a winning lottery ticket from brush fire is likelier to happen that Hillary losing California.”

What are all these people working on, then?

“Making pot legal. That vote’s going to be closer. I need a coffee. Come on, I’m buying.”

We went to a coffee shop and he paid with a credit card. “It’s from the Clinton Foundation. My boss said I could put anything on it,’ he explained.

Wait—isn’t that a campaign law violation?

“Who cares? We’re so over worrying about little details like that here in Hillaryland. Just the other day we got a memo saying we could cc all our emails directly to WikiLeaks. Save them the trouble of hacking us. You want to see the beta version of Hillary’s latest campaign commercial?”

Absolutely. That would be a huge scoop for me.

He played the video on his phone for me. When it was over, he asked “What do you think?”

I think you played me the wrong video. This one had Hillary sitting in bass boat in the Ozarks in cargo shorts and a sports bra. She had a fishing rod on her lap while she beer-bonged a sixteen ounce PBR.

“No, that’s it. We decided that we didn’t need to make any more TV commercials, so we put the crew we already hired to work filming her vacation.”

Hillary’s on vacation?

“Yeah, the election’s so in the bag she decided to take a little break.”

But she’s still under attack. Just last week Rudy Giulani agreed with Donald Trump that she was one of the co-founders of ISIS.

“Rudy! What a great mayor! Let me show you this pic of him. He and the Clintons were at a summer party in the Hamptons a month ago. Long story short, there was a lot of drinking involved, and instead of listening to chamber music, the guests all decided to have cage-wrestling matches instead. Here’s a shot of Hillary holding Giulani in a scissors grip. If you look closely, you’ll see he’s wet himself.”

And you’re keeping this under wraps?

“Not really. We’re just waiting for Huma Abedin to come back from delivering weapons to the Nusra Front to post it to her Tumblr account.”

So you’re waiting until September to mount an all-out campaign for the White House?

“Naw, that sounds like a lot of work. September’s made for slackin’ is what upstairs is telling us. Hillary herself plans to spend the whole month sexting with George Clooney. It was his idea, and what red-blooded woman wouldn’t jump at that chance?”

Maybe not if I was running for President.

“Relax. It’s so a done deal. They can release all the emails they want, link Hillary to everything from the Taliban to putting LSD in GMOs and by the end of the day, Trump will have said something so boneheaded that she won’t lose a single vote. Bet the trend, as the gambling guys say. Didn’t you notice that after they started all those ‘Lock her up!’ chants she let herself be photographed wearing an orange jumpsuit? Talk about an F-you.”

Of course, she actually can’t say “F-you.”
​
“You don’t think so? Wait until the debates is my advice. Orange is the new White. House, that is.”

One of the most worthless politicians ever to crawl onto dry land from the swamps of Florida re-surfaced in the headlines last weekend by insisting that women who contract the Zika virus and are found to be carrying microcephalic fetuses should not be permitted to have abortions.

Marco “Little Marco” Rubio, last seen getting roundly whomped for the Presidency by a man who can only find Florida on a map because he has a golf course there, is running for his old job as a Senator from the Sunshine State. This was upon discovering that the Republican Party would rather nominate an incoherent billionaire with a hooker wife than a stuttering bonehead whose most obvious qualification for the job was that he looked good in a suit.

All right, that wasn’t much of a choice. But Rubio’s best shot at defeating Trump boiled down to implying that The Penis on The Donald was on The Small Side, which got him laughed off the stage, either because America doesn’t care about the Leader of the Free World’s wiener dimensions, or because any of The Donald’s three wives, or the thousand women he’s bedded on the side by waving his wallet at them, or anybody who’s glanced over when he was whizzing next to them in one of his gold-plated urinals, could tell him otherwise.

All Marco, or anybody else who shared that stage with Trump and was subsequently flushed down the electoral drain by him, needed to do to defeat the current nominee was to have, at some point during the debates, put on an expression of sincere bewilderment and say “Dude, why is your face that color?” Trump would have tried to blame his unnatural skin tone on Obama, of course, but even FOX might have a tough time accepting that explanation and The Donald would be back home shortchanging some subcontractors today, instead of insulting dead heroes, encouraging assassinations and engaging in pissing contests with most other Republicans.

Marco was going to retire from politics and do something more useful with his life, like run a sandwich shop or repave driveways, but his friends in the Republican Party begged him to run again for his old Senate seat. Why they thought this was a good idea no one knows, since Trump’s hands had proved big enough to bitch-slap Little Marco senseless in the Florida GOP primary, and another statewide election a few months later might prove challenging to him, but they must have been right, because he’s leading in the polls. Apparently Florida Republicans feel they need a mature swindler in the White House, but a handsome fraud with an IQ the same as the mean July night time temperature in Miami* will serve them well in the Senate.

All this means that people still pay attention when Rubio speaks, which actually is a bigger waste of time than Pokémon Go, and when Rubio said that women shouldn’t be allowed to abort their Zika-infected fetuses, there are two possible ways that could be interpreted.

Number one, and the more popular one, is that Rubio thinks God wants you to have a defective child, whom you will have to care for your entire life while you live on welfare or work at Walmart and survive together in a sweaty Florida apartment while Marco Rubio and his friends live carefree, air-conditioned lives off donor money in monstrous houses or beach condos. That is the will of the Almighty, which Marco knows better than you, and he is helping you obey it because otherwise you will go to Hell.

Number two, the unspoken one, is that you need to be punished for having sex. Marco was already on record as needing to punish you for having incestuous sex, or raped sex, by forcing you to have an unwanted child. Now he wants you to be punished for having sex without wearing mosquito repellant. That same future of caring for a tiny-brained offspring in an apartment you share with several roommates who possibly have severe substance-abuse issues for the rest of your life is what you deserve for succumbing to your sex drive. Meanwhile, Rubio can have all the sex he wants, and if somehow his sperm meets an egg, he can afford any number of kids, since he’s an ex-Senator. That means there are all kinds of people who will pay him just to sit around in their offices and look handsome.

And if he does win his Senate seat back, and then his wife has a Zika baby, it's no big deal for Rubio--politicians love to have stricken kids. Whether you're signing up a kid diagnosed with a terminal illness for a lifetime NRA membership or just dressing them up in flag clothing to stand on stage at your speeches, defective kids mean more votes. 

Fortunately, no matter how much Little Marco spouts off about it, abortion remains legal, an important consideration while Zika-laden winds are blowing in from the Everglades. And it will stay that way, even if you, the citizens of Florida, elect him again.

But I say don’t.
​
I think it would be against the will of God.

​*77 

​

Before we get started on the main subject of this post, a shout-out to teen American athlete Virginia Thrasher, who won the first gold medal of the Zika Olympics in her event, the women’s 10-meter air gun competition.

Many Americans reacted with pride to this event. Others reacted by saying “Who cares?” And “Who cares about air guns? I’ve got a closet full of real AR-15’s and enough ammo to last me through a double dose of Doomsdays,” but these people are not aware of the significance of Thrasher’s achievement, as they are Americans and do not know the metric system. A ten-meter air gun is a pretty unwieldy weapon, and it is quite an accomplishment for a teen girl to lift one, let alone hit anything with it.

But it is the Olympics, and it is time for us to get patriotically stoked over winning competitions in sports that we had no idea existed, and to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with sports fans from other nations and shout together our love of competition with them, while privately thinking they smell bad and dress funny.

The other big sport of the summer is election 2016, and while we have spent months detecting the character, or lack of it, in the two surviving candidates, the question of who is better qualified to be First Spouse has been examined far less exhaustively, and this past week the spotlight shone on Melania Trump, who stands to become the first FLILF* since Jackie Kennedy should her husband win the election, but not for such great reasons.

It was revealed that Melania was probably working illegally in the United States in 1995, since nude photos of her, both solitary and locked in embrace with another nude female model person, have surfaced from that year, and they were probably paid for posing for them, since in 1995 the nude selfie posted for free on Instagram had not been invented. Plus, the pictures were taken by a French photographer. Asking women to get naked was not invented by the French, but when Frenchmen do it, in their greasy, unwashed language, women seem to comply unquestioningly.

Which might be excuse enough for Melania, except that her husband has been going on about illegal immigrants taking work away from natural Americans, and there were certainly plenty of legal Americans willing to rip their clothes off and pose for the camera in 1995. Also he's mad about them raping us and being criminals besides. Now it is obvious that Melania was no rapist, just an alluring European with an overweening desire to expose all of her luscious young body to the fresh air of freedom, and get her personal parts next to another liberty-loving young woman’s, probably for cash. That’s the criminal part, because apparently Melania was here on a tourist visa.

Which meant she legally had to get naked for free, and while she probably has on numerous occasions, back then when you were photographed nude and the country gawked at your firm young flesh, you got paid for it. Nowadays you have to do it without charging, and then beg for money on GoFundMe, but it was a better world then.

So Melania is probably lying. I hear you saying “Who cares? All she has to do is keep the White House silverware clean while her husband gets laid by other women just by asking “Hey, baby, do you want to have sex with the Leader of the Free World?” or "You can touch me anywhere except the hair."

​That’s true, but what else has she been lying about? Apparently having a degree in architecture, but that’s something America has never required in a First Lady. And she says she speaks five languages, but since we Americans only speak one, how can we tell for sure? Besides, she comes from a part of Europe that is so linguistically messed up that you have to know five languages just to get all the people on your block to put out their recycle bins on the same day.

But when January rolls around, we are going to have either the first First Dude, a guy who unquestionably knows his way around the White House, including the secret closets where they keep the best interns, or the first First Lady who is a professional nude person.

Great country or what?

*First Lady I’d love to have intercourse with