I'll be in Vermont - Buffalo you later!

Well, looks like I'm headed back up north and won't be posting for a few days.  Settle down, they're not throwing me in the slammer again - I'm going to Vermont for the weekend for a cousin's wedding.  What is this "Vermont" you speak of, you may ask?  Well let me pull out my best Craig David impersonation and fill you in.

Vermont is more than just a cold, hippie-filled state shrouded in a permanent cloud of weed smoke.  If you look on the map, it's the one that looks like an upside-down New Hampshire, right next to the rightside-up New Hampshire.  Vermont is an extremely diverse state whose largest ethnic groups, in order, are French-Americans (23%), English-Americans (18%), Irish-Americans (16%), German-Americans (9%), American-Americans (8%), Italian-Americans (6%), and Scottish-Americans (5%).  The state's largest city, Burlington, is also home to small refugee communities from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, who moved there after being informed by Tom Petty that they don't have to live like refugees.  Vermont is most famous as the birthplace of great Mormon leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and the setting for the classic film "Super Troopers."

Here are some notable facts about the "great" state of Vermont (notice the quotation marks around "great"):

State beverage: Schlitz, 6 of 'em at a time (source: "Super Troopers")

State pastime: 1) syrup-chugging, 2) "cat game" (source: "Super Troopers")

State bestiality fetishes: tie between bears and chickens (source: "Super Troopers")

State movie: "Super Troopers"

State food: Ben & Jerry's ice cream (source: common knowledge)

State mineral: talc (source: Wikipedia)

State plant: marijuana (source: common knowledge)

State bird: hermit thrush (source: Wikipedia)

State musical artist: The Grateful Dead (come on, they're hippies)

Favorite blogs: 1) "Stuff White People Like" (see ethnic breakdown above), 2) "The Marijuana News Blog" (see state plant) 3) "Buffalo This" (this one always seems to make the list)

I'll see you on Monday, or if I don't, I was probably sucked into the dreaded black hole of hippiedom..........or a black hole created by the Large Hadron Collider.

Stuff Hippies Like (#3)

The third part in our series of blatant rip-offs is dedicated to dirty, stinking, tree-hugging, acid-dropping hippies. Here we go with some stuff hippies like...

Weed
This is not news to anyone. Let's move on.

Long, weird names

Do you have a friend who is dirty, smokes a lot of pot, wears tye-dye, is vegan, lives in San Francisco, and is named Rainbow Sunflower Stevenson-McGee-Smith-Jones? If so, there is a decent chance that that person is in fact a hippie. The truth is that hippies love long names and names that have to do with peaceful natural phenomena. Flowers, birds, rainbows, and characters from "My Little Ponies" are popular choices. Hurricanes, tsunamis, and supervolcanoes are not. Hippies also will always hyphenate last names because they do not want to conform to the sexist convention of just taking the father's last name. If hippies are not allowed to interbreed with other types of human beings (which they rarely do anyway), the string of hyphenated last names will grow exponentially with each generation and cannot be stopped. Seventh- and eighth-generation hippies often have trouble in school, not just because they smoke a lot of pot, but also because it may take them up to half of the time alotted for a test simply to write their names at the top.

Living in a van down by the river

If there are two things hippies love (besides weed), it's spray-painted, bumper sticker covered vans and being close to nature. The threats of Matt Foley, motivational speaker would sound like the dream life to a hardcore hippie: a peaceful, natural setting where he/she can spend his/her days in a hallucinogenic haze playing Grateful Dead songs on the guitar and avoiding the evils of society such as red meat, urban sprawl, and productive activities.

Pointing out problems, but not actually doing anything about them

If you know a hippie, he/she is probably always saying things like, "Man, we need to stop the corporations. They're taking over the world." or, "Dude, global warming is out of control. We've got to, like, stop polluting the air and stuff." or, "War is bad, man. We need to get out of the Middle East and just let them, like, go with the flow."

Statements like these may lead you to believe that hippies are ardent social activists. This used to be the case in the 1960's, but today's hippies are a different breed. A typical day for a modern-day hippie might go something like this:

11am: Wake up, smoke a bowl.

12pm: Eat a bag of Doritos.

12:30pm: Phish jam session on the guitar.

2pm: Drip acid, then sit on a rock and stare out over the river for 6 hours.

8pm: Smoke a bowl, pig out on some vegan food.

9pm: Smoke hookah while talking/singing with other hippies about problems in the world.

1am: Smoke weed, pass out in front yard.

Note that none of these actions actually contribute anything toward solving any of the problems that hippies love to bring to your attention at every opportunity. However, even modern-day hippies may feel especially motivated a day or two out of each year and may in these cases go so far as to attend a peace rally holding a sign with a creative slogan such as "STOP THE WAR!"

Bummed about the LHC? Try some THC.

Now that we've covered the extremely fascinating buffalo phenomenon in some detail, I would now like to move on to a somewhat less important issue that I consider to be a slight bummer: there's a chance that this machine CERN is building in Europe is going to cause the entire planet to get sucked into a black hole, or something like that.

I'm talking of course about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The point of this thing is to determine what shit is made of by slamming together large hadrons, which are one of the main basic components of shit, at near light speed. (Clarification: by "shit" I mean stuff in general, not actual fecal matter, although fecal matter is indeed one of the countless types of shit out there.) Hadrons are sub-atomic particles, protons in this case. As for the "large" part, that beats me because something that's smaller than a hydrogen atom seems pretty damn un-large to me. Maybe the next time a girl expresses dissatisfaction with the dimensions of your junk, you can use the LHC to convince her that the item in question is in fact fairly large ("At least it's not subatomic!"). One of the big ticket items they're looking for is the "elusive" Higgs boson, a goofy-ass sounding particle that many scientists theorize gives mass to certain things, including EVERYTHING IN THE F***ING UNIVERSE. If it really is true that we're all nothing more than big walking piles of Higgs bosons, then getting sucked into a black hole may not be such a terrible fate after all. I could not imagine a more depressing revelation.

So when they fire this thing up and start testing, probably sometime between August and October 2008, one of six things is going to happen:

1) A micro black hole is created and it swallows the planet, killing us all.
2) A stable form of strange matter is created and converts the entire solar system into strange matter, killing all of us in the process.
3) A wormhole is created, which may serve as a portal for beings from the future to send something back through time, possibly to kill us all. The wormhole would be microscopic, so the thing they'd send back through it would probably be more like a self-replicating killer nanorobot and less like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

4) Something else crazy happens, killing us all.

5) Nothing happens, so they build a bigger atom-smasher, which kills us all.

6) We find out what shit is made of and unlock a few more of the great secrets of the universe. We live to fight another day.

So out of six possible outcomes, only one leads to an outcome that doesn't involve us all being killed. It doesn't meet Meatloaf's standards (which would be 4 out of 6 in this case), but apparently the scientists at CERN don't consider an 83.3(repeating)% chance of the planet being destroyed enough of a threat to stop them from firing this bad boy up for the off-chance that they might be lucky enough to see a couple of Higgs bosons, the Boson Red Sox, or Boson the clown. Furthermore, something you might find particularly disturbing is the fact that most experts out there believe that micro black holes WILL be created by this thing, but believe that they pose no threat to us because they'll instantly evaporate via Hawking radiation. This theory comes from this one time at band camp when Stephen Hawking left a cup full of black holes on the table and came back a couple of days later only to find that the black holes had vanished into thin air. That story should put your fears to rest - if the black holes evaporated last time then there is no reason to doubt that they will evaporate again.

So we could be on the brink of the end of humanity, which you have to admit would sort of suck. In fact, I would go so far as to rate its bummification potential somewhere between that of the Steelers failing to make the playoffs and DICKipedia refusing to recognize my brilliant contributions to the science of creating a sentence solely out of the word "buffalo." Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it either, so it seems the best thing to do is accept our fate and blaze up a fat blunt while we're waiting for the black hole or nano-Schwarzenegger from the future to put the ultimate smackdown on all of us.