Crisis of the Overwhelmingly-Long Acronym Battles of the Latter 21st-Century (COOLABLTC)

In the latter half of the 21st Century, use of acronyms had reached the breaking point. There were simply too many acronyms that, while describing largely different things, used the same sequence of letters. For example, there were at least 50 for DVD by the year 2046, 49 of which enjoyed common household use. Communication between media, business, research, and academic sectors became impossible, and in some cases led to outbreaks of violence (see the Lawyer-Dentist war of 2071).

A working group was formed in 2076 to attempt to check the growth of acronyms in the world. The IRS/DDS/PhD/CEO/CBS/FICA/Disney Acronym Working Group (IRSDDSPHDCEOCBSFICADAWG) drafted what would, in 2083, become an ISO standard specification. Namely, that each new acronym must be unique when compared to the master list of acronyms provided by the Acronym Advisory Board (which was comprised of experts from the DHS, FBI, CIA, FDA, LDS, BBC, QVC, CVS, STP, STD, and PCP). The inception of the AABMLA ultimately served only the interest of the richer corporations--the ones who could send representatives to the working group. These members of the working group made sure that they were allowed to keep their acronyms, resulting in higher recognition of their products (i.e., CBS, the television network, won out over CBS, the Corporate Brain Scientists).

In another sense, the IRSDDSPHDCEOCBSFICADAWG's implementation of the AABMLA only exacerbated the real problem. New acronyms only had the option of becoming longer and even harder to remember. QXKJJCRUBSS, OCCRTBSSGN, SOIENSOIHDFHSH, and OISLKHDSLTHOEISLKHNCSOIWEULNGNAL are but a few examples. This trend led legislators in 2091 to pass a bill barring the use of acronyms entirely unless they made cool words. The 22nd Century ushered in an era of common use of such acronyms as FUDGE, BRINE, JUMBLY, TURDBISCUITS, GOATHATS, and STREETEATER.

Guaranteed to make you throw up

Jimmy Jone #9 is NOW. Stuart gets assigned a project, and Jimmy and Ron go to the county fair. Stuart's professor in this issue is Dr. Edwin G. Hapford. Please also note that the comic reaches 100 pages with this issue, and I work in my first Back to the Future reference.

You know, that show where the girl could stop and start time by clapping?

On this day in 2033, Google, Google Earth, and Google Print closed up shop forever. After this day, there were no longer updates of new satellite photos, no more books were scanned, and all of Google's web-crawling spiders were turned off. A year later, the domain expired and quickly became a post-porn site, featuring pictures of women with photoshopped "googly" eyes.

After their deaths in 2064 and 2069, respectively, the personal diaries and correspondence of Larry Page and Sergey Brin were released to the public. It was in these documents that the original impetus behind Google, and many of its subsequent programs, was revealed.

Page and Brin, during their years at Stanford, got caught up in an argument of whether "Out of this World" came on before or after "The Munsters Today". They realized that the only way to ever figure this out was the possibility that someone, someday, might post a fansite dedicated to late-1980s television show line-ups.

After getting the Google search engine in place, Sergey Brin visited his parents in Adelphi, Maryland. While looking through his old toys, he wondered if his favorite soccer ball (upon which he had drawn Jimmy Carter's face) was still on top of the house after being kicked there by his pal Scotty from down the street. His mom still wouldn't let him get on the roof ("In the old country, we were blessed if we had a roof! Walk on a roof! You should sooner walk on a priest! A roof, my God..."), so Brin decided that he'd need to make his own Google plane to get up high enough to see the roof of his house. When Brin mentioned to Page that he was thinking of making a plane, Page ridiculed the idea, saying "Planes are for sissies. You're a sissy!" Thus the inception of Google Earth.

The Google Print collection's purpose was to help Larry Page figure out what book it was he had reas as a kid where this old guy gets all these cats who then proceed to kill each other. As he had spent the summer after high school burning down every library he had visited at that point in his life, he knew it wouldn't be a simple task to track down the book. His solution? Create a full-text searchable digital library of every book ever published.

It turns out that September 13th, 2033, was the day that Page happened across the book "Millions of Cats" in the world's last remaining B. Dalton Bookseller (in Manassas, Virginia). This being the last piece of info that either Page or Brin really cared about knowing (Super Steve's Line-Up Webatorium had been created in 2022 by Steven Petrillo, a botanist from New Jersey) Google's wide array of services, which at that point included Google Hardhats, Google Cheeses, and Google Massage Parlors, was shut down the very next day by Brin and Page.

Disoriented

Sometimes I'll check the news feeds from your time. It's a good way to remind myself that humans in the future do not become dumber over time. To remind myself, in other words, that we've only really cared about celebrity news stories for hundreds of years now. There's lots of parallels, and the introduction of alien species into the human media consciousness served only to increase the magnitude of gossip out there. But I digress.

One of the things I noticed the other day was the increasing worry over China's surplus of trillions of dollars' worth of US currency. The concern centers around the possibility of China's exported goods and services becoming more expensive, as well as the threat of China releasing all that moolah into the public sector as response to any aggression from the US government.

Let me assure you that your fears are misplaced, people of my somewhat recent past. The Chinese government is much more sneaky than your journalists and economists think. You see, what they ended up doing with all the money was this--they started paying reasonable wages for labor within their own country. This took innumerable workers from US-run sweatshops where, in earlier times, laborers worked for wages well below US averages (while well above local averages). This meant that US companies had fewer options for outsourcing labor to cheaper resources (the entirety of Mexico would abducted by the Glornians in 2055). As manufacture of goods was forced to localize more and more to the American mainland, decisions were made all around to limit production to the most necessary of items: clothing, musical instruments, bug zappers, etc. One of the major losses of this time period was that production of little vending machine toys--you know, the ones in the little plastic capsules--halted almost completely. Jumbo sticky hands are now a highly-valued rarity, as many early archival collections were destroyed by archivists' inability to refrain from playing with them.