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."

This column can confirm that legendary-in-his-own-mind-rocker Ted Nugent survived another weekend.
 
Nugent was said to be resting comfortably at his home in Florida. The subtle lyricist who composed “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang,” and “Yank It, Crank It,” was reported to be suffering only from a mild recurrence of herpes.
 
“Nothing even close to fatal,” said a spokesperson for the Nuge. “I know you guys want to see him dead, but Ted is alive and well. Sure, he’s the type of stringy-haired old white guy who looks like a poster child for the opioid crisis, but he doesn’t even take drugs. We’ve already lost a lot of talented musicians to overdoses. Ted doesn’t want to be one of them.”
 
Well, he’s already not a talented musician.
 
“Bite your tongue! How many hit songs can one man write?”
 
Way more than the Nuge has. Look at Prince, or Jerry Garcia.
 
“But they’re both dead. Ted has time to catch up.”
 
But Ted Nugent only writes about his penis and how it likes vaginas. Isn’t he worried about running out of material? I mean, Sir Mix-A-Lot had a hit about liking big butts. Isn’t that an artistic path the Nuge would like to explore?
 
“No. Ted doesn’t like big butts. He’s likes skinny, underage trailer park ass.  And he’s never going to have to stand in some purple rain to get lyrics for a song. He’s probably got his genitals in his hand right now, and they are inspiring him. This is the man who wrote “Wango Tango.” Don’t you think he has another sensational hit in him?
 
Maybe “Wango Bango?" Although “Skinny, Underage Trailer Park Ass” might work, too.
 
“Huh. Those are not bad. You don’t mind if I pass them along to him, do you? But in the meantime, Ted is not dead.”
 
All right, strike out the drug overdose. Couldn’t he have a hunting accident?
 
“The Nuge practices extreme gun safety at all times. I know he talks about shooting liberals and reporters constantly, but if he does get around to doing it, the safety is going to stay on until the moment he needs to blast away at them like they were rabid coyotes, and then it is going to be quickly thumbed back into position.”
 
People who note Ted’s history of pooping in his pants to escape the draft, so he wouldn’t get shot at like he was a Florida high school student, sometimes think that the only thing Ted has guts enough to shoot off regularly is his mouth.
 
“And what’s so bad about that? Actually shooting liberals is still illegal. But if some random schizophrenic is inspired by the Nuge to do it, then the liberals get dead with no legal problems for him and it’s all good.”
 
So, Ted is comfortable with inspiring the mentally unstable to do violence?
 
“Why not? Trump does it all the time.”

One of the blessings of life in this modern world is its abundance of people and things not to give a crap about.
 
It was not always this way. When we dropped out of the trees and started on our way to this era where everybody gets at least three thousand cable channels, opportunities for apathy were scarce. Our place on the food chain was not yet fixed—there were plenty of large, toothy animals who regarded us as snack food. You couldn’t be indifferent about them, because that might result in you getting chewed to death, which has to be one of the most uncomfortable ways to kick the oxygen habit.
 
Hunting and gathering required a lot of attention to detail. Whether you were hunting mammoth or squirrel, you were using spears and arrows you had to make yourself, from local plants and rocks. Even if you were just picking berries, you had to make sure they weren’t the poisonous kind, and you had to pick enough for the whole clan, otherwise you weren’t getting any squirrel. You didn’t have time for daydreaming. You couldn’t think to yourself, “Someday, all the nuts and berries of the wild will be used to create a whole bullshit industry, and they will call it homeopathic medicine.” You were too busy.
 
One of the first things civilization gave us was the chance to not give a crap about stuff. The first thing most civilized people chose not to give a shit for were other people. It’s not likely the Pharaohs gave much thought to how many slaves fell off their pyramids before they were topped off. The Romans mixed Christians, gladiators and lions together for entertainment purposes. There was not much regard for the feelings of those getting sliced or digested.
 
Then the Roman Empire dropped like a mixed-martial arts fighter getting kicked in the face, and the Dark Ages began, at least in Western Europe. Art, literature and science continued to flourish elsewhere, while the ancestors of most white Americans lived through several centuries of illiteracy, feudal rule and Black Death. If you have white supremacist friends, never remind them of this, because they don’t want to hear about it.
 
The Middle Ages were not a fertile time for apathy to flourish. People were mostly starving, which focuses the mind. They wanted to be priests and nuns, so they could eat.  Career choices like those require enthusiasm. Occasionally they would celebrate a good harvest by burning a witch or a heretic, but these practices also aroused strong emotions, both in the burners and the burnees. 
 
Someone named Gutenberg eventually got around to inventing the printing press, though, and the media was born. Not right away, because first they printed a bunch of Bibles for people to argue about and start religious massacres over, and Jesus and massacres always prompt powerful feelings. One day, however, someone decided to start printing the news. Others printed poetry. This remarkable turn in human history was the beginning of true apathy, because now you were made aware of stuff you couldn’t care less about. “Who gyveth a crap about the Hygh Prynce of Upper Scungya?” you could say, and toss the newspaper aside.  Or you could think to yourself “Thys poem stynketh lyke horse stool,”, as you put some bard’s scribblings down with disgust, never to think of them again. The invention of the letter “I” only accelerated this trend.
 
But even the most prescient of these early apathists could not have foreseen the explosion of crap that we could remain completely indifferent to in the current age.
​
We’ll cover that in Part II.

One of the most significant pieces of legislation to emerge from the last session of the Texas Legislature was a law permitting the hunting of feral hogs from hot-air balloons.

Feral hogs are a big problem in Texas, destroying crops and property. It has long been legal to shoot them from helicopters. This column has noted before that senior citizen gun enthusiast Ted Nugent has bragged about engaging in the practice of gunning down hogs from the sky and leaving their corpses to rot on the prairie, a hobby that well may put a dent in the feral hog population, but also supplies ample food for coyotes and flies, two other species Texans are not so fond of.

Hunting from helicopters has its issues, though. Feral hogs, not being nearly as stupid as Ted Nugent, quickly learned to run away from the sound of a helicopter, and pursuing them at speed made it difficult to take aim. Thus, the hot air balloon solution. A hot air balloon is very quiet. Even the hissing of its propane burners cannot be heard from the ground once it gains a few hundred feet in altitude. It’s also very stable, since it goes with the wind instead of into it. A man can relax with a sandwich, a six-pack and an AR-15, and bullet hogs all day long without fear of his aim being spoiled by the buffeting of his aircraft. When he is out of ammo or propane, all he needs to do is find a flat spot (of which there are many in Texas) to land on and hope that his wife remembers to come out and pick him up.

The surprising thing about the Texas Legislature legalizing hot-air balloon feral hoggin’ is that it was not illegal in the first place. Nobody was doing it, but not because it was against the law. Texans were using their hot air balloons like we Californians use ours, to rise a thousand feet into the sky, enjoy a bottle of champagne and a purty sunset, put it back on the ground and go have sex with our date, because that’s one of the unwritten rules of romance in our era—if you take a date on a hot-air balloon ride, they more or less have to put out when you’re back on terra firma. If you don’t believe me, ask Abby.

So, what the Legislature was really doing was reminding the hot-air folks of Texas that they could be up there shooting hogs as a prelude to romance. Nothing says “I love you” like dispatching a few new souls to Hog Heaven in between sips of bubbly and your date, who was probably quivering in terror at being way up in the sky without being surrounded by a nice safe airplane, will probably forget her fears and join you enthusiastically on your mission of killing a few of God’s perfect creatures, and then not even making bacon out of them.

Or she might not—girls can be tricky that way. Even if you have to go out ballooning on your lonesome, though, you should be doing your duty by the state of Texas. Kill some of those damn hogs. As long as the wind blows you towards them, instead of towards El Paso.

Oh yeah, there is that. Next thing the Legislature will legalize will probably be importing and restoring Stukas so Texans can just strafe the hogs like they were Russian infantrymen.

Why doesn’t the Nuge own one already?

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past two weeks, possibly you haven’t heard about Pokémon Go, a trailblazing cell phone game which insists you actually go outside and pretend to find and capture imaginary creatures, as opposed to regular cell phone games where you just sit on the recliner next to a beer, a bag of Doritos and some cheese dip and pretend to find and capture imaginary creatures.

This is supposed to turn our nation from fat couch potatoes into supple adventurers, but don't hold your breath is my advice.

Of course when you wander around in the world you can find real things, and dead bodies and stabbings are two things Pokémon Go players have already happened across when they were searching high and low for Squirtle. In Bosnia, they have been warned against searching for these adorable digital beings in minefields left over from the last war there, lest they find themselves playing Pokémon Go Blam.

The neighborhood I currently live in is incredibly dull, and it hasn’t been enlivened by anybody searching for Pokémon as far as I can tell. Dead bodies, stabbings and minefields are also things that don’t happen much around here. These things are good, but the lack of Pokémon is better, because they would only remind me of yet another fortune I have thrown away.

Pokémon was a card game at one point in the previous century. I found out about it when my son, who was around seven at the time, introduced me to it when he returned from a visit with his mother with a bag full of the cards. Despite my extreme lack of interest in Pokémon, I played the game with him many times, losing every time because of the aforementioned lack of interest and also because of my boy’s quick ability to alter the rules whenever the Pokegods seemed to favor my hand.

His collection grew to hundreds of cards at one point because he constantly begged for them and I was an indulgent father and also the cards were cheap. I didn’t mind them. They hurt a lot less than his other obsession, Legos, when you stepped on them, for one thing, and when you lost one, also unlike Legos, the whole collection didn’t look stupid, or at least more stupid than it had in the first place.

But, thanks to Go, I am now wishing I had kept those cards, because they are worth a fortune. A First Edition Shadowless Mewtoo is now worth a hundred and fifty bucks. At one point I am sure we had seven or eight of them. A First Edition Shadowless Venasaur goes for a nifty 900 simoleons. I am nearly certain that was the one I spilled milk on and spinelessly threw down the trash chute so I wouldn't have to listen my kid whine about me ruining it.

Oh for God’s sake, I hear you saying. What’s a Shadowless Venasaur anyway? Worth nearly a grand, is my reply. You don’t have to like it. Spell check doesn’t like it, either, but if I still had one, it would pay off my current credit card debt.

And then there’s Pikachu, the Jon Snow of Pokemon, omnipresent and impossible to kill. 500 smackers in mint condition. I could have papered a wall with Pikachu at one point, so many of him lay amidst the filthy toy debris that littered my days of single fatherhood.

None of them remain. Between leaving Hawaii, moving back East and then returning to California, I managed to discard every one of them. Most were stained with McDonald's sweet and sour dipping sauce (my boy's favorite) or stuck to juice boxes or their edges were curled from much sweaty fondling, so they were less than mint condition and likely still not worth much. I comfort myself with that thought.
​
I’m sure some people were advising me to buy Microsoft when it came out, but I never paid attention to them, but I am equally sure nobody was saying “Hey, buy Pokémon cards and keep them away from your kid. They’re your retirement someday.”

Wish they had. For now, I’ve got to go back to work. 

If you regard watching yick-a-doos stumbling around in the forest pretending to hunt Bigfeet as rousing good entertainment, which I certainly do, have I got a show for you.

Destination America, a cable TV channel that mostly features travel and real estate shows for people who don't trust the government enough to let it issue them a passport, has a subdivision called Monsters and Mysteries in America, previously noted here, and I am now happy to report that they have raised the bar considerable with their new series, Mountain Monsters.

This show stars a specific cast of Bigfoot hunters, who plunge into the wilderness every week seeking to kill or capture a Sasquatch. They are like a Seal Team Six for Bigfoot, without the physical or intellectual qualities of Seals, or anywhere close to them. They could have called the show Fat Guys in the Woods, except there already is that show.

Each member of the team has a sub-specialty, which is noted when they first appear on screen. There is Huckleberry (Security), Buck (Expert Caller) Trapper (Team Leader), Wild Bill (Expert Trapper) and Willy (Trap Builder). It is a good thing that we are made aware of the skills each man possesses, because none of them are ever in evidence during the course of the show, especially those of the trapping variety, despite the fact that three of them have the word "trap" or "trapper" built into their noms de guerre or résumés. They build a Bigfoot trap or two every show, all of which uniformly fail to catch a Bigfoot. There is a reason for this.*

It is also handy for distinguishing between them, because all of them dress as if they purchased their clothes exclusively at a Goodwill store in deepest, darkest Arkansas, and they are mostly morbidly obese, except for Buck, who is extra morbidly obese, and Wild Bill, who is merely potbellied, and is humored by the rest of the team for that and his outstanding lack of teeth and intelligence. Bill's pals relentlessly scoff at the man's minuscule marble count even though none of them appear to be any smarter than a side of refried beans themselves.

All have beards that have never been shaved, trimmed, colored or combed. Every week, this astonishing collection of fashion fouls launches themselves into the woods, armed, in the back of their all-terrain truck and stumble around until one of them gets hurt, usually by a Bigfoot they just missed cornering in some desolate barn or corn crib. There are many loud noises and infrared camera shots of the team blanching in fear as they fancy themselves surrounded by Sasquatchi. I am dead solid certain the guns they bear are not loaded, otherwise they would certainly end up shooting themselves or each other. They seek Sasquatch-related clues from other backwoods denizens, surly, terse men who all have one thing in common—they have Bigfoot problems like Nicki Minaj has booty.

In the episode that I watched, Buck fell on his butt for no apparent reason except for the pull of gravity and ended up in the hospital, while the rest of the crew nearly overturned their ride driving over boulders in the dark.

All of this is presented as heroism, and the viewer is left to decide which of the Mountain Monster Men he'd rather share a foxhole with. In my opinion, one's as good as the next.

As long as it's a pretty good-sized foxhole.

*Bigfoot doesn't exist

In this world riddled through with conflict and injustice, the most hated person in it is suddenly a dentist from Minnesota.

Rising far above the competition of cruel dictators, mass murderers, government sanctioned torturers, ISIS, Boko Haram, cop killers, killer cops and all the other evildoers running amuck even as this is being typed is Dr. Walter Palmer, a general dental practitioner from Minneapolis.

Palmer's crime is that he went to Africa and killed a lion named Cecil. Cecil was a popular lion. He had a human name, which many lions don't, and a distinguished mane. He wore a stylish radio color. Apart from that, there was little to distinguish him from other male lions, who generally let their females feed them, sleep up to twenty hours a day and are really only keenly interested in fighting with other males and then killing their cubs afterwards. Most of them have ancestors who dined on Christians.

That's all true, I hear you saying. But there are plenty of human males like that, and while they may not be the most well-regarded members of the population, nobody advocates doing away with them, unless they actually carry out the offspring-killing bit, or do in fact eat Christians.

Plenty of people are advocating killing Dr. Palmer, however, including many people who otherwise regard themselves, and are regarded by their friends, as sweet, kind, loving and generous. His Facebook page filled up with death threats. Already over 100,000 people have signed a White House petition to have him extradited back to Zimbabwe, where the killing took place.

And Zimbabwe wants him. They are seeking that extradition. Nobody who has ever been served papers really enjoys the process, but when you suspect that crisp knock on the door is from someone who wants to haul you back to Zimbabwe for some bush justice, you're damn straight you don't answer.

Why are lions so much more popular than dentists? Make no mistake about it, they are. Otherwise, there would currently be a Broadway hit called "The Dentist King," a medieval hero remembered as "Richard the Endodontist-Hearted," and a beloved classic movie featuring a character known as "The Cowardly Dentist."

You never hear people singing "In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the maxillofacial surgeon sleeps tonight," because it doesn't scan and nobody cares.

Nobody likes going to see the dentist, but going to see the lions is regarded as a general good time, because we usually do it at the zoo and cram ourselves full of overpriced junk food while we're doing it.

The question is, why are huge predatory cats that kill mercilessly only when they can't steal food from other animals or snack on a rotting corpse generally regarded as more benevolent than dentists? It's true that lions don't kill people very often, but then, neither do dentists.

The answer is that while people don't often feel they are being preyed on by lions, they often feel that they are being preyed on by dentists, as anyone who has ever had to pay cash for a root canal can attest. "It's going to cost WHAT?" they splutter, spitting the contents of the little sucky tube all over their dental bibs.

And when the dentist replies with something in four figures, they have to repress a strong urge to spring on him from ambush and sink their fangs into his neck. Only the fact that they have such bad teeth no doubt keeps some of them from doing so.

It's a PR problem, as so many things are. Dentists of America, Dr. Palmer is paying for your sins as well as his own. You owe him.

And you can pay him back by letting him hide in your tool shed.

Once upon a time my sitter asked me to watch her dog for a week while she hit the beach. No problem, I said. Had met the dog and he’s cool with me. So Chief racked here and it was all good. Had to be out of town on business a couple of days, though, so I left Chief behind with the now ex-wife who called in a panic. Chief had discovered and devoured two utilized feminine hygiene devices.  What should be done?

I couldn't say. I have little experience in that area.  I've noticed dogs eat whatever they want to eat, providing they can get their paws on it, and live (or not) with the consequences. However one must understand that the dog in question is only very slightly larger than 2 feminine hygiene devices put together, so in a flash of conscience I suggested she call the vet across the street and inquire. To make a long and disgusting story short, Chief dealt with one in each direction (luck or talent?) and remains well to this day.

I am only reminded of this as my house now usually contains 3-5 dogs. I’m certain one is mine. The others just seem to collect here –kind of like a modern day Arnolds' without the Fonz. The "dog  door," which is actually a  screen on the deck my dogs jump through whenever I fix it- is always open.  They are a varied lot but it is kind of an unwritten rule in my very rural North Carolina neighborhood that as long as they are mellow, dogs run free. Seriously, the cat is the bad ass. Sometimes when on a boring conference call I will un-mute during a rousing barkfest just for comic relief for my assuredly co-bored coworkers.

It’s all well and good until the fall when the local hunters get to shoot deer legally. They raise a few dogs a season, and by raise I mean chain them up get them fed and ready to run, truck them in a cage in the back of a pickup to the hunting grounds and then cut them loose to scare up Bambis to shoot. Then they drive away without them, at which point they wander toward my place and the dog occupancy rises.

I’d prefer if you didn’t abandon your dogs but it is your right here in this state. I know you can afford to keep them, though, given the size of your trucks and the dollars you spend on styling outdoor threads and ammo. Ever been to a Cabela’s? Sheesh.

My Milk Bone line item is ever growing.

Progress marches on, and it takes very few prisoners. Mousing around the Internet the other day resulted in my discovery of Ten Horrifying Technologies That Should Never be Invented. They range from artificial intelligence to a vague but ominous plan for engineering, literally, Hell on Earth.

The author, George Dvorsky, is against all of this stuff and he has his reasons, but as I ran my eyes down the list, it struck me that almost all of these horrors are probably being worked on by scientists somewhere even as I write this, which means they are working overtime to engineer the Apocalypse, because it is Saturday. Time travel, for example, is currently being researched and was cited by Dyvorsky as a means of transport we should avoid, because messing with the past means changing the present. We've all seen movies about this, but, really, certain types of time travel should be allowed. What's the harm in going back to the Cretaceous Period and killing dinosaurs? They all got wiped out by an asteroid anyway. Jurassic Park would be a lot more fun and enjoyable if everybody got to carry around a bazooka capable of taking down a brontosaurus, and most of the avid hunters I know would be happy to throw out those moldy old trophy moose and bear heads in favor of mounting a T-Rex noggin in the den, then persuading some of their friends to enter the room in the dark and switching on the lights when they are all standing right in front of it.

Also, it turns out that if we invent time travel, it may not take us to the actual past, but to an alternate past in a parallel universe, so we can totally trash that place and still make it home in time to let the microwave ding us up a dinner in our own, perfectly undisturbed plane of existence. Where's the problem there?

This doomsayer Dyvorsky is against developing machines that can think like humans, because they would suffer as our slaves, and he is against developing machines that can think better than humans, because we would become their slaves. He does not consider the possibility that artificial intelligences, once when they get invented, might just choose to smoke some medical marijuana first thing after breakfast and then spend the rest of the day watching back episodes of Hell's Kitchen, like many of us do. Slavery would not enter into it.

The writer is against autonomous people-killing robots and uploading people's consciousnesses into eternal cyber-prisons, but who isn't? The number one bad idea, however, would be something called "Weaponized Nanotechnology" which Dyvorsky describes as:

Microscopic machines that consume our planet's critical resources at a rapid-fire rate while replicating themselves in the process and leaving useless bi-products (sic) in their wake — a residue futurists like to call "grey goo."

You could cram enough of these diabolical bugs into a container the size of a golf ball, flush it down the toilet, and a few hundred days later all life on the planet, including your own, would be wiped out.  If you think the world does not abound with people who are eager to kill themselves and everybody else around them, you must, as I do, skip all the news about suicide bombers and mass shootings. Most nations will do the sensible thing, and restrict ownership of Doom Balls to their governments and only responsible world leaders will threaten each other with the end of all life on Earth, but here in America the clamor for individual citizens to pack their own Armageddon Nuggets will be too much for the government to resist.  Laws restricting them will vary from location to location. In Chicago, they will be illegal but everyone will have one anyway.  In Arizona and Texas they will be sold in liquor stores.  It won't be long before someone flings one into the air to celebrate the New Year, or accidentally sets off the Annihilation Gumball he had concealed in the sofa cushions, and the end of days will commence.

At that point, before the gray tide slurps up us all, I hope that at least one dinosaur hunter has the courage to go back in time and toss his whole bag of Apocalypse Wow into some tranquil Triassic pond, so that gray ooze will destroy the prehistoric planet rather than the current one, and instead of humanity being remembered for having been stupid enough to kill itself off, we will have the comfort of knowing that we had never existed at all.

Don't you love science?

Recently it was revealed that 17 crewmen were removed from duty at a nuclear missile base in North Dakota. Their commanding officer revealed that the suspensions were the result of an 'attitude problem' and complained of 'rot' in the Strategic Air Command.

The commanders spoke of 'turmoil' in the nuclear missile branch of the Air Force and acknowledged the perception that the nuclear mission is a dying field. The best and the brightest young Air Force officers go to great lengths to avoid being assigned to the missile force.

"Sure, I understand that," you say. "You don't have to be a budding Einstein to figure out you don't want to be stuck in a cement hole in North Dakota. I'm surprised they got anybody with an IQ in the triple digits to do the job in the first place."

Apparently this was not always so. Ending the world in a radioactive catastrophe was once regarded as a promising career path. The men in those nuclear silos in the halcyon days of the Cold War were the cream of the Air Force crop. They sat beneath the fields of the Midwest with a smile on their lips and a song in their hearts, optimistic that they would be able to end humanity with a fiery final Armageddon or else they were squatting on the path to making general.

Alas, that world no longer exists. The replacement of the Soviet Union, the only nuclear-armed state in our weight class, with Russia, a country with nominally enough missiles to end our civilization, but with missile troops widely suspected of stripping their rockets of vital components in order to make vodka stills, means that our boys can't sit underground and still hope to make astronaut.

Consequently, the less talented are now in charge of weapons that could wipe out most of the higher life forms on Earth, and, unsurprisingly, they've been caught slacking. Even missile launch codes may have been compromised. The Air Force higher-ups don't say how, but knowing this generation as I do, having fathered a member of it, I suspect they were posted on Facebook.

The Air Force let this happen. The eager and ambitious were replaced by recruits straight off the short school bus. The motto "Peace through Deterrence" was informally replaced by "You got a thumb? We got a button for that!" which was considered superior, from a morale-preserving point of view, to "We're going to put you in a hole in the ground. Stay there."

What's to be done? Sadly, nothing. Sitting in a missile silo with someone you don't know or really like waiting for nothing to happen is never going to replace career choices like being a celebrity, a porn star or even a poorly paid humor blogger. It was tough enough to get people of my generation to do it, even though we were specifically trained to sit around with a bunch of unpleasant people and think about nothing until a bell went off. We called it high school.

In the modern era, which may fairly be said to present the fewest opportunities for boredom in human history, young people that will tolerate endless waiting for the off chance to incinerate humanity and still maintain a level of enthusiasm about it are getting nearly impossible to find. The Air Force shouldn't be surprised that it is digging around the bottom of the recruitment barrel, and when the people they select end up posting pictures of their missile silo on Instagram or pinpointing their ICBM's location on Google Earth and putting it on Reddit, that shouldn't shock them, either.

And it's going to stay that way until people once again see a promising future in ending the world.