I think Jesus was messing with us

April 13, 2090: Neanderthals become extinct again

http://www.reason.com/news/show/131717.html

The road to cloning the first Neanderthal was a long and rocky one. First, there were the Christians, who had their hissy fit about scientists trying to play God. As fate would have it, they were all raptured in 2028 (2,000 years after the death of Christ, not his birth, DUH). A reporter who happened to be on the scene was able to ask Jesus a few questions before He left again, among them His opinion on the Neanderthal cloning issue. "Hey!" He responded, "I miss those little guys. Yeah, bring 'em back!"

Then, there was the major moral problem: should we bring a new species into a world with as many problems as this one has? We have enough trouble making sure all the humans here retain their basic rights--are we sure that we could offer them fully to a new species, one that we know nothing about?

By 2034, all human rights violations, genocides, wars, and variations on inequality in the world had come to an end. This came about due to the fact that everybody really wanted to see a live Neanderthal. Video footage of Jesus telling you to do something is very compelling.

It took a few tries to get them right. Initially, the plan was to use a female chimpanzee as the host for a Neanderthal DNA-inseminated egg. In fact, this produced perfectly healthy Neanderthal babies...which were invariably strangled to death by the chimp mothers immediately after being born. Strangely enough, the same thing happened with the first human test mothers to carry Neanderbabies to term (note to scientists: DO NOT USE SCHIZOPHRENICS AS TEST MOTHERS. BAD IDEA ALL AROUND).

The first Neanderthal baby was born on May 22, 2038, at a cost of 27 million Ameros. Marissa (the scientists wanted to call her "Nene"; stupid scientists) was healthy, progressed through grade school fairly uneventfully (she had a little trouble with math), went to a community college, and got a job working in an apartment rental office in Ames, Iowa. Though she had hundreds of suitors, it was Marissa's choice not to marry.

The case of Marissa seemed to work so well that plans were made to create an entire Neanderthal race of about 10,000 persons. These were done at a much lower unit price, totalling around $500 million in cost (note to scientists: Play God Wholesale!). This was in 2064.

The warning signs were minor and easily overlooked to begin with...not being able to keep secrets well...chewing on anything plastic...peeing in the corners. "Okay," we said, "they're a little unpredictable; they're just a little slower, we have to patience with them."

Then they reached their teenage years. Ripping off their clothes (and those of others) whenever they got emotional...chewing on human babies (never hard enough to break the skin, but still)...setting fire to any business with "soft" in its name. "It's a phase," we said. "Their hormones are just running wild because their pubertal stage lasts longer."

However, by the time that batch of 10,000 reached the age of 25, we realized the full extent of our mistake. The Neanderthal, it seems, is the quintessential annoying person. Hanging around after parties long after everyone else had left, farting in elevators, using a paper towel to open the bathroom door on their way out of public bathrooms and then dropping the paper towel on the floor, repeating that same stupid phrase that they find funny over and over again--LOUDLY--in restaurants, getting up 50 times during the course of a baseball game to go pee, chewing on ambulance tires, scratching themselves ALL THE TIME, trying to friend you on Facebook (still around!), even after you ignored the request a dozen times, listening to the hockey game on the radio in church (still around!), jaywalking, pissing on everything, writing bland sitcoms, instigating riots, taking two newspapers (still around!) from the box when they only paid for one, stealing wheelchairs from cripples, making prank phone calls, and the SMELL....

Humanity as a whole realized why the Neanderthal went extinct in the first place--they were just too much to deal with. Our ancestors simply neglected to tell us that they got rid of the original Neanderthals; they assumed (and with good reason) that they'd never come back.

On March 28, 2090, World Facilitator ("leader" was too loaded a word by then) Jacques Smith gave the imperative to the world: "Let's just fucking kill them already. I'm not even kidding."

It took until April 13 to root them all out. The last to go was Marissa, who we had all honestly forgotten about until then. We would have killed her too, except for the fact that we felt kind of guilty about doing it--she hadn't caused any problems herself. It turns out that she had been stifling her Neanderthal urges her entire life. In her case, this was fairly simple to do, because for the first part of her 52 years on Earth, there had been no other Neanderthals around to encourage her, or to go along with any crazy ideas she herself came up with. By the time any other Neanderthals were around, she had socialized and learned that her urges weren't how humans did things. We let her live (quote from World Facilitator Smith: "Yeah, okay, fine"), and made the decision to only have one Neanderthal on Earth at a time. This way, we still got the nostalgia factor of having a Neanderthal, as well as a reminder never to create them en masse again.

P.S. Boning a Neanderthal always results in a human baby, no matter what, so the one-at-a-time thing was a pretty foolproof plan. Except for the Neanderthals, you know, having to go through that "I'm the only one of me on the planet" brand of not fitting in. They all identified with Gonzo in Muppets from Space.

Cliffhangers galore

On this day in 2015, an international ban was drafted against internet memes involving pirates, ninjas, monkeys, robots, zombies, or raptor Jesus, in the hopes of spurring creativity amongst stagnating community websites such as www.iahwm.com ("I'm a Hippie with Money"--based on an Andy Griffith quote from the movie "Pray for the Wildcats"), www.lipbalmsworld.com, www.lolchinchillas.com, and www.gnarfgnarf.com.

New memes suggested by the ban draft included sumos, inventive facial hair styles, Liberace, beatniks, short-order cooks, and doctoring photographs of popular celebrities to make one of them look like a ventriloquist doll.


Also, Jimmy Jone #11 is up now.

Enjoy your sandwich...while you can

On this day in 2130, the phrase "the best thing since sliced bread" was officially retired from the English language. Despite--or, perhaps, because of--its everyday household use, there had long been no consensus on what was, indeed, the innovation wonderful enough to push sliced bread from the top spot.

That all changed when iMicroSony unveiled its new androids, which were so perfect in their execution that they could not be differentiated from real humans (yeah, it took us that long to get robots perfect, I know). The only behavioral difference that could be spotted was that the androids would pour oil into their right ears about once a day, and even this wasn't a surefire visual test--you see, ear-lubing had become the new heroin by about 2085.

The androids were very popular in Jewish circles. Horowitzes, Feinbergs, and Kleins were buying them up left and right. Having a non-human entity in the house was a handy way of getting things like cooking and cleaning done on Shabbat.

Of course, it was time for the "sliced bread" idiom to die, anyhow. After the French sided with the marauders from Xylon-6 in 2094, everybody stopped making fun of them. Largely because of that, we started to realize that their culture did have a lot to offer. Everybody switched to eating baguettes, and no one had eaten any sliced bread since the turn of the 22nd century.


By the way, Jimmy Jone #10 is up.

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.

Needles to say

Dr. Vernod Jammenswythe of upstate Jamaica realized, through meta- and 'pata-analysis of drug testing studies over the past 130 years, part of the true cause behind the so-called "placebo effect": namely, that the sever short-term presence of metal in the human body was able to produce substantial emotional, physical, and psychological changes. In other words, the needles used to inject drugs (medical or illegal recreational) were what made the difference. Later investigation showed that the needles themselves release small particles (named metalloids, after their discoverer, Lloyd Yorkson) which attached to wishful thinking hormones (hopetrons) released by the brain. Based on the nature of the hopetron, the metalloids would morph into whatever was needed to achieve the result desired by the needle recipient--be it a change in mental state for druggies, or cures for diseased patients.

This led to a complete overhaul of drug companies and widespread demand for lower hospital bills. Ultimately, this meant that pharmaceuticals had less money to dump into advertising, which in turn left popular periodicals wondering what to do with the 20 extra pages per issue.

This day marks the publication of the original analysis by Dr. Jammenswythe in The Lancet, August 2084.

What is hip?

Sheesh, what a month. Or, rather, wasn't a month.

Last month in the future doesn't technically exist. In 2271, Vermont native Johnny Hipsash single-handedly took control of the US-Russian goverment (he lost his other hand in a boating accident). During his 45-day term, he changed the month of August to Hiptember. As if that weren't enough work for Hallmark, American-Russian Greetings, and other calendar manufacturers, Hipsash decided to make Hiptember 61 days long, eradicating the month of June in the process.

Hipsash made other...shall we say "interesting" executive decisions in his time as Hipperor (no, I'm serious) such as:

Hips were no longer called "hips"; rather, "love-handle" became the official term, enforced by the government. This fit well with the newly-sexy-grandma crowd: it was very hip (excuse the pun) to have one's love-handle replaced.

The hippo became the national bird.

His entire cabinet was made up of guys named Otis.

Lemon-meringue Tuesdays at all animal shelters (don't ask).


For generations after, the word "hippie" carried the meaning of being either authoritarian or jingoistic. What you consider "hippies" were too stoned to notice that they lost their group identity. At any rate, we for some reason never got around to changing the calendar back. Which makes it really hard to send messages back through time during the month of June. Our htm-mail chute almost always sends back the error message "Ain't no June, dunderhead".

Otto Sync

What you see as the unknown and unknowable future, I know to be incontrovertible history!

On this day in 2066, aging biophysics professor Nate Streuyn put the finishing touches on his last, and perhaps greatest, invention. Although Streuyn would have wished for a statelier name, his Flasher soon became a household word. The Flasher made use of the recent advances in the field of photomechano-feedback research. The technology used to make the Flasher would later take a prominent role in both astrophysics and agriculture. In the short-term, however, it found success--as well as the public's favor--as a handy after-market gadget that could be attached to any automobile. It's use? Simply to make one car's turn signal rhythm match up with that of the car in front of it. What was once thought to be a minor driving nuisance turned out to be much more: after the advent of the Flasher, "Road Rage" ceased to exist everywhere except Vermont, automobile accidents dropped 70%, and kids in the backseat no longer felt the need to scream and punch each other.

Moreover, this one change got people hooked on their appliances being in sync with their lives. By the beginning of the 22nd Century, the average person could enjoy:

• Telephones that won't let calls through until you're out of the shower and at least 78% dried off.
• Ipods which increase or decrease the tempo of the music you listen to based on how fast you're running, so your footfalls are always on the beat.
• Microwaves that actually do cook food faster when you watch them.
• Not having to read Cathy in the newspaper anymore.
  

Take me to your lawyer

On this day in 2077, Earth receives its first officially recorded visit from extraterrestrial life. Coming down in flying saucers that looked pretty much as Kenneth Arnold had described, the Martians were relatively peaceful and friendly. Their gift of the Hwnsig bird/frog finally took care of the Kudzu problem, which had turned most of the Southeastern United States into a dreadful forest that only the most toothless of hillbillies dared enter (and that was usually to try to salvage the remaining boxes of Goo-Goo clusters). With the words "I don't care who started it, I'm finishing it", the Martians removed the Gaza strip and transported it to the far-flung Yumble Nebula (incidentally, the Jews got there first and are still regarded universe-wide as the best astronomers and physicists around).

The Martian's gift of kreenx did accidentally kill the president's top advisors, wife, children, dog, Uncle Lew, his 7th grade social studies teacher, and half of Manhattan--it turns out that Martians have tougher stomach linings, who knew? The history books do tell us, however, that they were later (October 3, 2098) able to look back on what happened and laugh.

Many became angry when, on the third day of the Martians' first visit to Earth, they revealed their true motives in coming. The Martians had come to sue the estate of Steven Spielberg for copyright infringement, given their striking resemblance to E.T. They ended up making a pretty hefty chunk of change (in 2053, the U.S. government officially switched from using coins to small chunks of metal) off of merchandising, as their arrival sparked a renewed interest in classic alien films and memorabilia.

There are no film reviews in the future

On this day in 2611, the American Linguistics Institute, Nacogdoches Chapter, retires the phrase "to thumb one's nose" from the human lexicon, as no one had performed this action in over 400 years. This is due mostly to the fact that, in the year 2211, the human race collectively lost its thumbs when an undergraduate biology student posed the following question:

"Wait, shouldn't we be a little bit more evolved than koalas, pandas, and monkeys?"

This may explain, in part, the origin of the Thinkers, a group of scientists and philosophers with abnormally large brains and the ability to telekinetically play billiards, who came on the scene in 2213. Many suspect that they asked "Why do I in particular not have a more highly evolved brain?"

Naughty Professor

On this day, in 2033, the evil professor Sidney Barkash of Squirm, Oregon, dies. Barkash had, unbeknownst to the world, kept the entire nation of France under the control of his Mind-o-Ray device for nearly a century. After being freed from the device, French officials were quick to start setting the record straight on their regrettable past deeds.

In a press release, French president Jacques Portmonteau proclaimed, "Non! We have nevair liked zeess Zherry Lew-iss!"

And robot calzones, too

This day in 2101 marks the first successful time travel to, and back from, the future. This day also marks the advent of such technological innovations as

• Post-it People
• Freeze-ray guns
• Freeze-ray adult novelty items
• Self-setting clocks
• Pocket singularities
• Regenerating cars
• DRM-free toilet paper

Rum Tum Theta is a curious planet

On this day in 2525, a Broadway show is disrupted when an audience member from the Felinthinus Galaxy starts screaming "Blasphemy! Blasphemy! Our history tubes tell a decidedly different story!" Given that no one in the audience understood a word of Felinthinese, many assumed that this was an avant-garde bit used to liven up the show. Reviews are overwhelmingly positive, and CATS remains on Broadway for another 1,000 years.

Married...with Zombies

A mere five months after Dimp Hinkley discovers the key to reanimation of human bodies, the entire cast of Married with Children is brought back for a twelfth season, the first episode of which aired today, 2098. Most American audiences seemed to not yet be ready for a zombie-filled sitcom. German audiences (especially viewers who themselves had recently been reanimated), however, seemed to not be able to get enough of the antics of the Bundys. The show is renewed another 20 seasons.

Anni-elvis-ry

This day in 2405 marks the third anniversary of Elvis's return from space.

You Ain't Nothin' but a...

On March 22, 2402, Elvis Presley is finally returned to Earth by the Zornapses from Planet Q. Cheers of joy soon turned to cries of agony, however. An ambassador from the Andromeda Galaxy (oddly enough, they call it that, too) was visiting a friend of his in Quebec, who decided to take him to one of the shows of Elvis's comeback tour. As it turns out, the phrase "hound dog" sounds much like the second-harshest insult in the Andromedan tongue (the most insulting phrase being "Kilroy was here"). What was initially a misunderstanding escalated into decade-long battles on both the ground and in space, a well-choreographed sword fight on the inner rings of Saturn, a blitz merchandising campaign and, perhaps worst of all, a new generation of Elvis impersonators.

Let her Litter Letters Later

On this day, in 2217, Melvin "Mel" Stanwick of Sector D, Gamma Jersey, makes the first step toward effectively ridding city streets of litter. Ms. Stanwick was able to convince the state government to replace all existing public trash cans with a new design. The design was based on the coin-funnel fundraising set-ups she had seen in the meta-malls of her youth. You know, the ones where you drop a coin in and it rolls in a spiral pattern for a minute before finally falling through to the big jar. Ms. Stanwick made the act of throwing away trash fun again (there was a brief fad in 2156).

Got bilked?

On March 8th, 2023, the American Dairy Association realizes that it could sell more skim milk by marketing it as "Diet" milk. By 2078, osteoporosis is all but eradicated.