We're gonna need a bigger olive.

Do you like crazy visionary science ideas? I sure do. There’s this company in Florida, Algenol, that’s working on a way to breed cyanobacteria to live in salt water, soak up sunlight, and poop out a mixture of ethyl alcohol and water. They’re getting about 8,000 gallons of liquid fuel from one wet acre annually, about 20 times more than the same acreage in corn ethanol. Promising, right? But there’s danger lurking. If a rogue scientist were to splice in some juniper DNA, and the bacteria escaped, I can visualize the inadvertent conversion of all the world’s oceans to gin.

Accordion to the latest surveys.

According to the Nielsen numbers, jazz accounts for about 2.3 percent of U.S. record album sales, making it even less popular than classical musical, which posts an impressive 2.8 percent. Rock gets 34.5, R&B 17.5, country 13.8 percent. Country is more popular than this number indicates, I think, but mostly you listen to it on the radio. In your truck. With your dog. The same research shows a category called “hard music” getting a 10.2 percent share. I don’t know what this means. Hard to listen to? If that’s what they mean, why don’t they just straight up say polka?

It's just business.

If anybody suggested you could save money by fueling your car with human blood, I’m guessing you’d question their ethical compass, as well as their internal combustion cred. But look: by the best numbers I can find, over 60 percent of immigrant detainees in this country are held in private prisons. So the more people we lock up, and the cheaper they can be fed and housed, the more money these corporations make. How is that even sort of okay? And who the hell buys that stock? Seriously, a pimping meth dealer hitman could claim the moral high ground here.

Except caffeine, the Neve 1073 of drugs.

There is this thing called “circuit bending,” where you take some sound-producing electronic object and interfere with its guts to make it produce noises its designers never imagined. When the bender is expert or lucky, really amazing results are to be had. More often, though, instead of getting a modified Speak & Spell to spout fluent Klingon, you get unpleasant skronks and squeaks, sadly similar to every other device you’ve putzed with. It’s not so much bent as broken. Sort of like mind-altering drugs; straight out of the box is as good as the thing is ever going to work.

Surf's up

I don’t want to be accused of sowing the seeds of panic in a time of global anxiety, but I feel the need to point out that we are facing a pretty severe hovercraft gap. The Russians, the Ukrainians, the Chinese and the Greeks have these enormous Zubr-class landing craft, which are, I swear, the coolest-looking boats you have ever seen. Imagine a 200 foot long inflatable raft with a chubby battleship on top and three hella big round fans on the back. There is no better way to take up to 500 fanatically loyal shock troops to the beach.

Going to be huge.

The World's Largest Wind Chime is in Casey, Illinois. I saw that on a sign, but did not stop. It's going to be dangly metal pipes, right? This is not an interesting world’s largest thing, even though I admit to an interest in world’s largest things. Here are other not particularly interesting world’s largest things: World’s Largest Soda Straw (plastic sewer pipe), World’s Largest Condom (weather balloon), World’s Largest Pocket Hankie (bedsheet) and World’s Largest Bedsheet (tarpaulin). Also, here’s a tip for travelers. Don’t waste your money to see the World’s Largest Grain of Sand. It’s just a big rock.

misty whatcha call your memories

I have a problem with a couple things people say. The first is when they say “I need closure.” Because you don’t get closure. Everything that happens stays in your head and you’re never going to close it out permanently. I can still make myself squirm by thinking about some terrible thing I said to somebody a half century ago. The best you can do is create workarounds, is all. Then people will say, “I’m a survivor,” which would be okay if they added “so far.” Because your survival is purely temporary. Sooner or later, you’ll be getting that closure.