by Adam Carolla
Stamps used to be a big deal. We’d unveil them at press conferences, debate whether to put the fat or the skinny Elvis on them, kids proudly displayed their stamp collections. Now, if you gave a kid a stamp, he’d put it on his tongue and then complain because he didn’t trip out.
Well, the cherry on top of the wasteful retard sundae is that hundreds of thousands of these pointless stamps were recalled and destroyed because they depicted “unsafe activities.” And what extremely dangerous activities were these kids participating in? MMA? Russian roulette? Jumping Snake River Canyon on a motorcycle? Nope. Doing cannonballs and headstands. I guarantee every guy who is in a wheelchair from doing a headfirst dive into a too-shallow pool wishes he had done a cannonball instead. If you pushed me off a bridge, I would go instinctively into cannonball mode. That would be the safest bet. But a kid can’t do a cannonball? That’s a rite of passage.
Or the kid doing a headstand? The problem with that one was that she was doing it without a helmet. I think we all had that neighbor kid who did a headstand without a helmet and caught on fire. It’s literally burned into our psyche. Right? Fuck no. Who needs a helmet for a headstand? I would argue the helmet would get in the way and cause more injuries than it prevented.
And as far as the government goes, do we have money or don’t we? We’re always talking about budget problems but we can literally burn hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stamps. If this were a business with a real bottom line, people would be shit-canned for this. But since it’s the government, they’re playing with house money. There are no consequences.
The government spends a shitload of our tax dollars telling kids to do cannonballs, and then spends even more changing their minds because they’re a bunch of pussies. Please, let’s have the government shut down again like we did in 2013. I bet we wouldn’t even notice except that we’d get less junk mail.
2
THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
I’m an efficiency expert/weirdo, and I will bring this quality into the White House with me. I see a lot of wasted energy in this country and I’m not going to waste any time addressing it.
People see me going around constantly flipping off lights and think I’m OCD. No, I’m just turned off by lights that are turned on unnecessarily. It’s not about wasted money, it’s just about waste. Whenever I see someone throwing out food, I just picture all the energy that went into making that food being lost—the diesel in the farm equipment that picked it, the energy in the fertilizer and the whole fertilizer plant, the truck that brought it to the restaurant, the BTUs used to cook it, and the electricity for the heat lamp at the shitty restaurant. All gone because you couldn’t finish your taco salad.
That’s why I love race cars. There’s nothing that doesn’t need to be there on a race car. It’s all to make it run faster, or to cool it down so it can run longer, or to provide downdraft. It’s all about faster, smoother, more efficient. Every time I go downstairs in my house, I bring something that needs to go to the first floor. It bothers me to make a bunch of trips up and down the stairs. Even when I’m pissing in a urinal, I lament the loss of that energy. That stream of liquid that comes from my cock could be harnessed. That’s why my first directive to the Department of Energy will be to put miniature hydroelectric waterwheels in every urinal. It will even be part of my campaign slogan: “A natural-gas car in every garage and a waterwheel in every piss pot.” The urinals at the Super Bowl alone could power all the lights and Jumbotrons in the stadium. I even want a device invented so that I can power a flat-screen TV on the interior lid of my coffin with the energy from my decomposing body. Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I don’t want to watch Access Hollywood.
When it comes to wasted energy, if I come home and the space heater is buzzing in the kids’ room while they’re at school, I go ballistic. If that heat could be channeled to someone who needs it to boil pasta, I’d be fine with it, but the idea of heating a room that no one is in boggles my mind. I run into this all the time at home. My family puts the kill in kilowatt. I went into the kids’ room the other day and the lamp on their end table was on. So I had to do the move where I reached up under the shade like I was some sort of lamp gynecologist. Here’s how this usually goes. The light is on, so you have to look down the barrel of the lampshade at the blinding shaft of light while you feel around, and you burn your hand on the bulb in a fruitless attempt to find the switch. So then you think, “I’ll go down to the base.” You feel the base and still, nothing. So you pick it up, spin it around, can’t find anything, and then decide that maybe the switch is three feet down the cord. I hate that shit. I have stayed at hotels where the switch for the lamp was a yard down the cord behind the desk. I shouldn’t have to move furniture or slide on a mechanic’s creeper to turn my light on. Switch placement should just be uniform. It should be at the base. That way you’re not searching down a cord that’s tucked behind furniture and you’re not reaching up a lampshade like some perv copping an up-skirt feel on a teenage girl at the mall.
It’s more than the petty annoyance of not being able to find the switch. It’s the fact that we were illuminating a room that no one had been in for several hours. Worse is that no one was going to be in that room for several hours more. Had I not noticed it, more energy would have just gone into the ether.
This is a chick problem, by the way. They all have the “save the whales” gene and the “save the dolphins” gene but not the “save the kilowatts” gene. Maybe we need dolphin-shaped lightbulbs. I bet Cameron Diaz, despite all her “save this” and “save that,” right now has a closet at home with a light on and the door closed.
First Lady Lynette can just skip this next section and we could avoid my being the first president to get divorced while in office. Lynette will not commit to an iron. She just has this weird hot stick with a diamond-shaped head that spouts steam. It’s basically a miniature iron attached to a handle the size of one on a toilet brush. She doesn’t even have an ironing board, so when it comes time to do the collars on my dress shirts before I go on O’Reilly, I’ll find her sitting on the floor steaming the collars on the carpet.
And that was where I found the iron-stick one day when I came home, sitting on the carpet. Unfortunately I did not find Lynette sitting on the carpet with it. I passed by it three times looking for her to no avail. Sadly I had to go and check to see if it was still plugged in. Even more sadly, I was right. I touched the iron part and it was hot. So I unplugged it immediately. But just as immediately my waste-not instinct kicked in and I rushed to the closet, grabbed a couple of shirts, and pressed the collars to milk every last kilowatt out of the iron before it cooled down.
The part that bothered me much more than my wife leaving a hot iron on the carpet was the fact that it doesn’t have a little light to tell you it’s still on. Shouldn’t the thing that can burn down your house have a built-in diode to warn you of that possibility? Irons are some of the least stable objects around. A dwarf could fart and knock over an iron.
Just add little LEDs to stuff to let us know the wattage is still flowing. All electrical equipment produced in this country must now include this feature.
The one that really drives me nuts with this is the ceiling fan. I have several in my house. I’ve got one in the bedroom, one in the office, and one in the workout room. I love them so much I’m thinking about having one installed in my car. But I never know when the thing is on or off. A lot of other items in the house—like the toaster oven or the coffeemaker—have a little red light to let you know if the juice is still running. With the ceiling fan, you only have the noise. So when it comes time to leave the house, you have to pull the chain and guess. You give it that one tug. (Ka-chink) “I think it’s off, but it’s just slowing down. Maybe one more.” (Ka-chink) At this point the ceiling fan goes into turbo mode. Birds are getting sucked into the vortex. So you then overcompensate and pull it three times but then it’s back to where it was when you decided to start the retarded fan
dance. Eventually I do what we’ve all done, I grit my teeth and say, “Fuck it. I’m gonna put my hand in there. I don’t care if I burn out the bearings or lose a pinky.” I even give it a little push back just for good measure to see if it recoils.
And why does it even have a speed that does nothing? Are we in a 1930s southern courtroom or shooting a Don Henley video in the eighties? Just give me the medium and high settings. I bought this device to move air. I doubt it can do that when it’s rotating slower than the Earth.
While I’m on rotation, fans, and waste—what’s up with oscillation? I don’t understand the point of oscillating fans. You lie down on the sofa for a midsummer’s nap, turn the fan on, but forget there’s a button which makes sure the air is only blowing on you 8 percent of the time. Why do I need an option to make sure that the potted plant in the corner and Grandpa’s urn on the mantel get as much cool breeze as I do? You’re wasting 90 percent of the energy used to run the thing to blow the papers off your dining room table. There’s no other place where oscillation is what you’re looking for. There’s no such thing as omelet oscillation. You don’t take a bite of the Denver omelet, then pass it around the table.
There’s also the withdrawal. This is one of my few hypocritical moments. Even though I constantly rail about wasting electricity, I’m hooked. I had my bedroom ceiling fan going full blast all summer, but when fall finally hit L.A.—usually two or three days before Christmas—I still needed it to sleep. That whir helps me nod off. That and several tumblers of Mangria. Is there some sort of ceiling fan methadone that Dr. Drew can prescribe—Fanax? Maybe I can just hire someone to stand next to me and make that hmmmmmmm sound?
It’s not just affecting my sleep; it’s affecting my marriage. Lynette is not a fan of the fan. When I turn it on anytime after September 1, she makes a noise that is the opposite of the soothing whisshhh of the fan. It’s an exasperated uaaahhhhhh. I tell my wife that I need the ceiling fan on to sleep, and ask her why it bothers her if she’s under the blanket. She’ll be bundled up under a duvet with a postage-stamp-sized piece of her face exposed and complain, “My forehead is cold.” I’m skeptical of this. There are no nerve endings up there; you could put a cigarette out on my forehead. I have to explain to her that I’m a junkie, I’m hooked on the sound. All those white-noise makers they have at Brookstone don’t have the right ambience. They have the sound of waves crashing on rocks, which I guess is good if you’re Tom Hanks in Castaway and you can sleep on the beach. Or they have the babbling brook or rain forest. I don’t know about you but I rarely sleep next to a babbling brook. (By the way, Babbling Brook would be a great name for a female cattle auctioneer.) I need more realistic sounds, the ones I’m used to, to lull me to dreamland. We need the ceiling fan sound on a white-noise machine. It would save millions of kilowatts. (And let’s get rid of the term “white noise.” I don’t even know what that is. I just assume it’s a bunch of attorneys repeating the phrase “at the end of the day.”)
One last complaint about chicks and electricity. We’d never have to build another hydroelectric dam or dig another coal mine if women would stop blow-drying their hair. Blow-dryers are deceptively energy draining. You could use one of those things for ten minutes or keep a porch light on for ten years. I know it. Next time your wife is blow-drying her hair, take a walk out to the power meter and see it spinning like a dreidel.
Not only does it use as much power, it makes as much noise as the engine of a 747. No wonder most women can’t think. They spend a significant portion of their lives with a deafening device deep-frying their brains. Think about how many hours they spend heating up Aqua Net and blowing hair dryers into their faces. When that hairspray hits the heat it becomes weaponized. Forget secondhand smoke, heated-up hairspray needs a PSA. I think the reason we don’t have an equal society where women get the same wages as men and they’re all engineers and other unrealistic stuff is because they spend all that time on their hair and not on the brain right beneath that hair. Don’t get me wrong; if guys did this we’d be in the same sinking boat.
And this is why all hairdressers are flaky and nuts. They’re all on their third marriage, believe firmly in guardian angels, and their best friend is a macaw named Blue Man who doesn’t judge.
But again, think about how much power gets sucked off the grid for hair dryers. Twenty minutes every day, times 75 million women. That’s why I think President Obama missed an opportunity. He should have forced Michelle to go full Shirley from What’s Happening!! with her hair. If Michelle just let her hair go natural, all the women of color would follow. Hell, maybe even some Jews and Italians. This could bring the races together. Italians, Jews, and blacks could all dunk their heads in a pool, let their hair dry in the sun, and say, “We’re not so different after all.” I secretly suspect that this is why the African American community is not so fond of swimming. Black chicks spend so much time straightening their hair they don’t want to fuck it up in the (public) pool. But more importantly it would end the scourge of hair dryers and we’d never have to deal with the fucksticks in the Middle East again.
FOSSIL FUELS AND ALTERNATIVE ENERGY
Here’s what pisses me off about the constant “debate” we have in this country about natural gas and fracking. We all agree that we don’t want to pour our collective cash into the giant ashtray that is the Middle East, correct? I’m pretty sure we’re all on the same page that dumping all of our money in the hands of people so they can have Beyoncé perform a private concert for their son and think it’s a great idea to throw acid in the face of twelve-year-old girls for having the audacity to read isn’t a great plan.
I understand that everyone on the left wants cars that run on good vibes, but the technology isn’t there yet. That’s their beef with natural gas. They just don’t like the internal combustion engine. They love the word “natural,” but when you follow it with the word “gas,” they’re out. I bet if it had been called “natural fuel” from the beginning and “fracking” didn’t sound like something Darth Vader would do, there’d be much less of an issue. But these lefties need to accept the reality that the internal combustion engine is here to stay, so take your life partner’s dick out of your mouth and let’s talk about the best way to power those engines.
I’m a car guy, so I know that engines can be converted easily to work off of natural gas. They perform exactly the same. In fact, if we switched to natural gas we could get rid of catalytic converters. We’d not only save in gas, but we’d cut $500 from the manufacturing cost of each car and thousands in the disposal of the heavy metals contained in catalytic converters.
Why all the fear? Natural gas is the same stuff that’s coming out of the stove in your apartment. Why not in your car? That’s the disconnect. My Prius-loving Los Angeleno friends conveniently forget that the batteries in those cars are being charged by a coal-fired electricity plant. Fracking isn’t nearly as dangerous as coal mining. I know we all want a perfect, risk-free fuel, but you know what? Shit happens. Nothing can have a zero risk factor. There’s no such thing. So let’s just minimize the risk. One way to do that is to get our fuel from home, not from people who then use that money to buy gold toilets and fund terrorism.
Shouldn’t we have learned this lesson in the seventies? I lived in California in 1973 during the OPEC embargo. I remember sitting in my mom’s VW squareback waiting in rationing lines based on whether you had an odd- or even-numbered license plate. And this was when gas had skyrocketed to forty cents a gallon!
At that same time we had assholes like Martin Sheen chaining themselves to bulldozers with their “No Nukes” message. Like fracking, I think that was a nomenclature problem. “Nuclear” sounded scary. It was the same thing we were constantly being told about how the Russians were going to drop on us, so everyone got paranoid, conveniently forgetting that with nuclear power you can have something the size of a tennis ball powering an aircraft carrier the size of Cowboys Stadium, and uses more electricity, for years with no pro
blems and zero pollution.
So because of all that sky-is-falling bullshit we continue to power our country with the black shit sucked from the ground underneath the worst people on the planet.
Except that we can actually get some of it from the second-worst place on the planet—Alaska.
Alaska seems like the most rough-and-tumble spot in the world. Everyone there seems to be running from something in the Lower 48, whether it’s the law, the tax man, or their ex. Alaska’s where you go to forget your past, especially when you owe your past a shitload in child support. The state motto should be “Love fishing but hate your kids? Alaska.” Forget the Jackass movies. I’d like to do a hidden-camera show where we get a guy with a salt-and-pepper mustache, put him in an ATF windbreaker, have him walk into any Alaska bar or honky-tonk after quitting time, and say, “I have a warrant for . . .” and just watch everyone jump out the window. It’s never “I was born and raised in Alaska, lived here my whole life.” It’s usually something like, “My business partner faked his own death and then tried to kill me, but that was before my wife had her gender reassignment . . .” Basically Alaska is the cold-weather Florida. It’s Florida without the Jews. The state capital should be spelled “Jew? NO!”
I’m not in love with Sarah Palin but I was completely fine with her “Drill, baby, drill!” message. We can do that easily without screwing with the caribou. And fuck the caribou anyway. What did they ever do for us? Can you imagine the horror of living in a caribou-free world? I can and I’m fine with it.
But now we have guys like Mark Ruffalo picking up the blowhard actor/environmentalist torch from Marty Sheen, except Mark is bitching about fracking. Well, here’s my message back to Mr. Ruffalo and all the other actors weighing in on this issue. How about some answers? If you’ve got some ideas, I’m wide fucking open. But until then how about you shut the fuck up. Ten years ago every celebrity was an expert on AIDS; now they’ve all become experts on “climate change.” We should put all these blowhards in front of windmills and power the country with their hot air.