See Your Future... Be Your Future.
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| Giant sequoia trees at Calaveras Big Trees State Park in California. We have a lot to learn, and trees can help us. |
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| April 15, 1912 edition of The World newspaper. Headline, "above the fold," as people used to say. More than 1,500 people died in the Titanic disaster. |
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| We have another winner: 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long of Georgia is a young guy with a bad beard. He shot and killed eight people at Atlanta area Asian massage parlors a little over a week ago, apparently because he is a "sex addict," and being a sex addict bothers him. But he's not the only one who's been doing mass shootings these days. |
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| Studies show that being thankful for things will change your life. Ready? Me, too. |
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| Elephant in Kruger National Park. Southern African elephants are the largest land animals, and thought to be among the most intelligent animals, on Earth. They face serious ongoing threats to their continued existence. From us, naturally. |
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| Mug shot of Rush Limbaugh after a 2006 arrest for possession of more than 2,000 pills obtained under fake prescriptions. Opiate addict, outrageous hypocrite, science-denier, racist, sexist, all around ignorant blowhard (and garish tie salesman), Limbaugh embodied many of the things that went wrong in the United States. He was also one of the most popular radio hosts in American history. |
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| Christopher Thomas Knight, aka the North Pond Hermit, in custody of beefy Maine game wardens, April 2013. Knight spend 27 years without human contact in the Maine woods. But did he really? |
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| Unfortunately, you don't usually get this kind of early warning when you have high blood pressure. But if you do, one way to beat it is by drinking hibiscus tea. |
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| They be some COVID-19 cowboys in Texas. Texans were early adopters of the Great Reopening of America, once again proving that big hats do not equal big brains. If I were modeling these styles, I would look equally as sheepish as this man does. |
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| Unidentified old man lays on the ground and bleeds from the head in Buffalo after tough guy cops half his age pushed him down. |
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| Unless she's diabetic, the above sweet gal probably had a different kind of "pee" in mind for her tramp stamp. But no matter. Tattoos are meant to be fun. |
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| Just a typical day in Wuhan, China. Man relaxing in a local park, not a care in the world. Little does he know that medical experts are actually worried this time. |
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| Lil McGill gets stoned and engages in some carpentry. Barbie loves how her new Dream House comes out. |
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| Hurry up and wait. On May 22, 2019, dozens of people endure the hours-long line to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Up here, in the so-called Death Zone, climbers are confronted by temperatures as low as 50 degrees below zero, high winds, and dangerously low levels of oxygen. |
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| When I was a young man, I worked briefly with the elvish Doug Osheroff, a Nobel Prize winning scientist who taught me something about myself that I didn't know. |
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| Your mind is like a powerful magnet. |
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| Thee Optimist knows all about The Law of Attraction. Yes he does. |
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| A wild seal dog. Well, not really. Just somebody's dog wrapped in a blanket like a burrito. |
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| French toast is delicious! But it can take a while to make, especially when you get distracted by, uh... other things. Watch video below. |
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| Ray Kurzweil is among the smartest humans. He takes great joy in making predictions. The things he predicts appear to make him happy, but they are not good things. |
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| Wasp. Ever get stung by one of these things? I have. Ouch! Okay? I thought I was having a heart attack. I never want to be stung by a wasp again. And since all the bugs are finally dying off, I just might get my wish. |
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| Alex Chiu has been selling his magnetic immortality rings online since the early days of the internet. He's still at it, and is staying young forever. |
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| Artists are forever seeking ways to unleash their creativity. Altered states of consciousness are one way to do it. And sometimes the results are better than expected! |
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| A little voice inside my head said, "Don't look back. You can never look back." |
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| Donald Trump as Pinocchio, the wooden puppet who dreams of becoming a real boy. The Donald is wrestling with the the Truth, and the Truth is losing. |
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| Rod Coronado has spent six years in prison for his actions on behalf of animals. |
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| A young woman cries at a Beatles concert in 1965. Hordes of weeping, screaming female fans were a prominent feature of the early Beatles years. As they were during the early Frank Sinatra years two decades earlier. And the early Elvis years. And the early One Direction years. And the early... you get the idea. |
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| For homeless outreach workers, hardcore alcoholics are some of the most difficult people to get off the streets. |
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| Gaze upon this lovely, glowing white person. Now say bye-bye. |
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| Remember Chemtrails? This was the early-2000s era conspiracy theory that there were mysterious government airplanes in the sky, spraying chemicals. Some people thought they were dropping poison to cull the human herd. Others thought they were exposing us to mind control drugs. Still others thought they were putting aerosols in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into outer space in an attempt to slow down global... never mind. |
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| Gil Scott-Heron, one of the fathers of rap music. He said a lot of things. One of the things he said was: "All the dreams you show up in are not your own." |
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| I thought I'd put a graphic here illustrating how industrial Carbon Sequestration is supposed to work. But it was too complicated, and frankly, boring. So instead we have a screen capture from the 1971 Japanese film, Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster. It's just as well. Godzilla has about as much chance at saving our bacon as Carbon Sequestration. |
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| The sun is our enemy. We can't turn it off, but we can make it dimmer. |
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| Remember this guy? Michael Avenatti, the man who fell to Earth. |
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| The United States is about to get its first full-fledged fascist President. Everybody is excited, one way or the other. As the situation unravels, and the future we were all looking forward to rapidly disintegrates, an interesting question has arisen - where does that Nazi Trump salute really come from? |
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| Send in the clowns. Scary, ignorant people like Marsha Blackburn are almost funny, except they vote on things that affect our lives and the future of the human race. Well... wait a minute. I guess that is kind of funny. |
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| There's no such thing as Global Warming. Right? |
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| I made an innocent post about chimpanzees and bonobos on this blog. Two years later, some men's rights activists became offended by it. And they thought I was a woman... |
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| A woman stands on the Palestinian side of the Gaza Strip wall in Israel. Could the Donald build a similar wall between the US and Mexico? |
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| This was Harambe. He was a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla who lived at the Cincinnati Zoo. He was shot and killed, ostensibly to save a small boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure. Here's an idea not getting much play - why not shoot the boy and save the gorilla? |
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| At the end of each year (starting now), we present Thee Optimist Awards to three (or more, or less) people who made a name for themselves through some combination of overconfidence, stupidity and breathtaking ineptitude. In other words, people being people. For 2015, the winners are... |
