Concept 4b: Recursive Rant in re: Ranting.

When you've written hundreds of microscopic Monday morning essays, as I have, one of your big dangers is repeating yourself. The other pitfall is writing really stupid stuff. It's like, do you want good ideas or new ideas? You don't get both. Some weeks neither. This applies to my meat avatar as well. I've noticed I only have a limited number of droll anecdotes and wry observations. Then I have to change friends. Old friends say, “How come you never call?” and I'm just; “You've heard all my good stuff.” Every couple of decades, I even change cities.

Normal Bean

There's a movie out right now called John Carter, and the critics aren't being kind. The reviewer at the Daily Telegraph called it “armrest-clawingly hammy and painfully dated." Which, I'm like, shut up. This is a movie adaptation of Princess of Mars, written 100 years ago by the same guy who wrote Tarzan, Carson of Venus, and Tanar of Pellucidar. I've read a bunch of them, and they're all pretty much the same, which is to say, hammy and dated. Plus, he's notoriously hard to translate to the screen; that film version of Naked Lunch wasn't much good either.

Universal Cowboys

As the developmentally challenged little brother of jazz, rock and roll has always followed its older sibling around trying to emulate its style and posture, if not its substance. That's why there's noise, the rock analog of free jazz. I don't hate the stuff, but I think it's like sex – most fun for the performers. But what about other genres? Why is there no Free Polka? Or Free Country? Of course, if you put a bunch of pickers in a room and told them to play whatever they felt, they'd probably settle on “Your Cheatin' Heart” in C.

Our goal: keeping you informed.

It's hard not to obsess about Horace, Kansas. See, first I was thinking about Horace Greeley and his terrible, terrible neckbeard, which I've already brought to your attention. If you haven't checked out a picture yet, I suggest you do so right now, then come back and read the final 44 words of this week's rant. Ok, then. In spite of that, he has a county in Kansas named after him (Greeley) which contains an incredibly small city named Horace (pop. 70) which recently declined to consolidate with literally every other place in the county. Bet there's a story there.

Hawaii and West Virginia, if you must know

Oh jeez. A new survey, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, has ranked the 50 states in order of happiness. Out of a possible 100, the happiest state scored 70.2 while the most miserable got a lowly 62.3. Not even an 8 percent spread, four points plus or minus. This may be statistically meaningless, especially since you're actually measuring how the regional culture feels about complaining. North Dakota came in second, telling me that folks in that state will say anything to keep you on the phone. Still, it's a way to fill up airtime and column inches. And rants. Those too.

Back to the grind

Sandstone is a kind of stone that's made up of sand. Hence the term sandstone. The sand, of course, is simply tiny bits of what used to be larger rocks. It's goofy, like matzo balls. Because, why bake crackers of flour and water and crumble them up to make dumplings when you could simply make dumplings from the flour in the first place? It's just the universe keeping itself busy, is all. It would be nice to think that we are the larval stage of something better. I can find no evidence, however, to suggest that this might be true.

When your number's up

I have a cousin who had one of his ears bitten off by a horse. Even if he was the only one-eared man in the world, this would shift the arithmetic mean; the average person worldwide has slightly fewer than two ears. So in at least one sense, the vast majority of us can take pride in being above average. Then there's this: Somebody went to the trouble to figure out that the total weight of the entire human species is well over 400 billion kilograms, roughly one trillion pounds. Of course, a lot of that is fat and gristle.