Because Eric and I are Drunk Dumbasses

WBUL Cartoon and Podcast

Over the past week I've also been working with WBUL- the radio station here at USF, in doing a kind of political commentary spotlight for their website, to go along with a cartoon. This is partly to ease me into radio work, and also partly to spiff up their website.

In any case, here's the cartoon, and the audio can be heard at http://wbul.usf.edu/podcasts/jeff-sheridan-depression

Partisanship

This is my response to the recent trouble with bipartisanship on capitol hill. The GOP, reeling from being the minority, and of course from losing the presidential election to Obama, met the Economic bailout bill with extremely negative sentiments.

Approved at $787 billion dollars, the stimulus calls for 64% in social programs aimed at creating 3.5 million new jobs (traditional economy-stokers such as road building and infrastructure repair) green jobs, alternative energy, and 15.9 billion goes to schools and education. 36% will go towards tax cuts.

The republican opposition to the plan says it spends too much on unnecessary programs, advocating bigger government and more debt. Perhaps they've forgotten Bush’s famed $1.35 trillion tax cut package of 2001, which begs the question- how did we get into this mess again?

Anyways, The republicans acted really weird when this bill was proposed, and went so far as threatening to draft their own version of the bill. They never did this, but at one point Rush Limbaugh went as far to say that the Republicans need to shut down Washington every vote to prove a point.

As far as I'm concerned, the only point that is being proven is that the GOP are a bunch of hotheaded idiots who can't accept defeat, so they've decided to not work with Obama. It's one thing to disagree, it's quite another to completely ignore a proposition.

Veggie Garden Article

We were interviewed about a month ago about our garden at the botanical gardens. Here's the story.

Booger Eaters

It's 4:21 pm, February 16th, i'm sitting in Starbucks in the USF library watching a well dressed young woman with a gaudy huge green necklace pick her boogers and not-so-secretly eating them.

She did this twice.

I wish I had my camera.

Gabby And I Made Our Own Bread!

I made my own bread today, and it was quite a badass experience.
Yeah yeah, call me boring, but I've been on this self-sustaining kick, learning how to grow vegetables from seeds, getting around by bike, making my own bow and arrow, and learning how to knit.

So, here's the recipe. The one below is different, because I added some other stuff.

1/4 cup milk
5 teaspoons sugar (or 1 1/2 tablespoons and I used natural Sugar in the Raw)

2 teaspoons Honey

1 egg
1 teaspoons salt
5 teaspoons butter (or 1 1/2 tablespoons)
1 package active dry yeast (you can get yeast near the flour at your local grocery store)
3 cups all purpose flour
nonstick cooking spray (I used melted butter and a tablespoon of olive oil)


Basically, add in the yeast with 1/4 cup warm water in a bowl as well as 1 teaspoon of sugar, stir until it's not lumpy, and then let it sit for 10 minutes.
After this, add in the butter, sugar,honey, and milk. Stir in lightly, then throw in the egg and 2 cups of the flour, gradually adding it in as you stir.
Use a flat surface, cover it lightly with flour, and then start kneading the dough. It was awesome. After this, start punching, slapping, and pounding the dough for roughly 10 minutes, gradually turning it into a ball at the end of the ten minutes.
Now, throw in a bowl, cover with a towel, and let sit for an hour. Go have sex or masturbate, and come back.
Save your bodily juices for basting of the loaf later on. They'll add a nice glaze.
.. erm.. uh.. *Ahem*...
Come back an hour later and pound the shit out of it again. 10 minutes.

At the end of this round, though, make it nice and flat, and roll it out to fit the loaf pan you're using. I used an empty wine bottle. It worked just fine and dandy.

Throw it in the pan, and leave ANOTHER DAMN HOUR WHAT THE HELL. (don't forget the towel)

Put it in the oven at 400 degrees F, and bake for 30 minutes.

When you take it out, remove it from the pan immediately. It should be nice and yummy.

Here's the finished result!

Doomsayers, Zombies and the Edge of Apocalypse

I'm not one for doomsaying prophesies. But I can't get enough of them, either. I am so pessimistically optimistic about the demise of western civilization that for the past few years I've naturally been getting ready for the end of our culture as we know it. That's not to say that I buy into all these theories and hysteria about aliens or Christ coming back, or the switching of the magnetic poles, or all the planets lining up with the plane of the core of the milky way galaxy, or solar flares disrupting our electronics, etc. Have I just contradicted myself? Do I love them because I think they're interesting or because a shred of me wants to believe it will come true?
But there is something to say about becoming self sufficient, and being able to say you're ready to survive on your own without supermarkets and Walmart to meet all your primal needs.
In the end, you're going to have to improvise. You've gotta let go of every single possession you have.
And these doomsayers, they prophesize the end of existence, but really, it's not the end, it's the beginning. Nothing really ends. Ages and epochs overlap and there's definitely a transitory period where one shifts into the motif of another. These changes are something very old, very primal, and something that's wired into our very structure.
So on one hand, people are screaming "THE END IS NEAR!!!" and on the other hand people are yelling "THE BEGINNING IS HERE!!!" and who do you choose to be with? Where do you stand?
Anyways, let me reel in some of this slack before I lose whatever it is I'm trying to talk about in the first place.
Zombies have come back. They first appeared on the scene in the 1960's and 70's, and then they trickled out of the mainstream. Now, in the 2000's, they're back again, not-so-coincidentally at the forefront of cultural change, as they were 40 years ago. Why?
The concept the zombie, a primal, hating eating machine, incapable of individualistic thought beyond eating, easily represents the masses at large. A flesh eating killing machine. If you want to get all hokey-spiritual on this, one could imagine chakras, the points in the body in which energy is expelled and received. In chakra or color meditation, people are seen as having a certain color, or aura about them. This may or may not apply to ones openness, though it's definitely been noted that those who have completely inhibited or cut themselves off from innate feelings and desires are surrounded by the color grey. Now, imagine people you've seen who work in cubicles from 9-5. Or how about the ones who spend even longer there, thinking they have to waste more of their day to gain more in the long run. You could liken these people to bordering on grey. They've lost touch of all their old desires. At the grocery store, they do the supermarket shuffle, slowly staring at things they need. The come home during the weekends and don't do anything but sit in front of the tv- because they think they need 3 days of doing nothing to have the energy to go back to doing nothing. Zombies, anyone?
In Dawn of the Dead, they were swarming all over the mall, because that's where those humans first sought comfort- in the same routine they've always known. Imagine, if mass hysteria were to break loose, where would you go first? What would you do?
And then there are the survivors, fighting off the zombies. They know how they act. They know how to defeat them. Unfortunately for these guys, they're all getting killed, but lets ignore that fact for a little bit.
So, have Zombies come back because we're on the cusp of another cultural change? I think so. So many things are coalescing, it's hard not to admit to oneself that in the next 10 years, some serious shit is going down. Beyond the fact that the U.S. is not only spending 320 million dollars a DAY in Iraq, or that they've now passed more than a trillion dollars in economic-recovery bailouts, or the fact that this recession-depression has sent shockwaves and ripples throughout global financial markets- we have massive climate change occuring (Snow caps are melting, Polar Bears are eating eachother, water is dwindling, the sun hasn't had sunspots in a year, deforestation etc), this is all coalescing to something big. Something that we haven't seen in our lifetimes, or that any generation has seen for hundreds of years.

And the best part is, I have no idea what it is! A part of me would like to think that this time, that *SNAP!* that the world needs is actually going to happen, and another part of me thinks that perhaps I've just become so in-tune to things that I'm paying attention to the cusp of the cultural wave, where problems and situations have always occurred, since the beginning of time. In that case, the doomsayers are both right as they are wrong. They see a problem, and then they are the first to blurt it out to the rest of the Zombies, and the Zombies all run in the opposite direction, balancing everything out for the time being.
But still! That doesn't seem right. It seems as if there are more of the "non-Zombie" folk now, and that perhaps they're waking the Zombies up from their slumber. What would that produce? Would that produce order? Or would that only usher in more Zombies?
This debate is as cyclical as the cycle of change itself. Only time will tell which is correct. Or I should say, which cycle will occur.

Reality is becoming much more improvisational and up-tempo. Previously, fads and trends could be seen from far off, and everything was moving along lazily, and to many lazy is easy. Presently, the river is getting much more tumultuous as it flows ever-faster down the spiral fractal of historical pantomime. Increasingly, I simply don't know what's going to happen.
I don't know if I should wait around for change or be the impetus for it. I don't know what I should do with my immediate life- whether what I want to do is what I have to do. Orwhat I have to do even is. I do know that I must avoid the mundane lifestyle of the generations before mine. Yet I don't know how to do that without being homeless. I don't know what my generation is striving for. I don't know if I should wish for the steady degradation of industrial civilization as humanity becomes closer and closer to Peak Oil, or if I should advocate continuing it with renewable resources. I don't know if we can make that transition without going through a type of Dark Age in between.


All I know is that one cycle that seems to be diminishing is that of the republican party. That thing is gasping for air (and its oxygen consists of only monetary installments). I can guarantee that it'll be dead in the next few years. Thanks, George W. Bush, for being the impetus for change in America!

(By the way, let's hope "Change" doesn't become one of those buzzwords whose meaning becomes loaded like that of "Terrorism", "Liberty", and "Justice".)