Analyzed & Filed: Humorous Pantries

There are travels & there are journeys. There are trips, sojourns, visits, vacations. There are expeditions, odysseys, peregrinations. One walks, drives, flies, perambulates, is carried, crawls, slides, falls. One packs bags, gets travelers' checks, dresses for the weather, renews a passport, waits in line, waits for vehicles, arrives early, arrives late, doesn't arrive at all, loses luggage, finds luggage, stows away in the luggage compartment. The point is, there are travels. & there are journeys.

It was expensive to own horses in the olden days, so forget about having a segue. Modern humans have no idea really what a chore travel was even as recent as a few days ago. Decades I mean. Months, years. Centuries. The point is, you hardly ever went very far. Unless you joined the army, or were kidnapped by mythical bird-creatures called "Rocs." Otherwise, you slept in the same corner of your hovel until death took into its cold, comfortable arms at the ripe age of too fucking young. & that was as recent as days ago!

When the government invented teleportation, it was deemed too fun & too prohibitively costly for anyone except the most expensive leaders to use. This included, at the time, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser & Warren Beatty, recognized at the time as King Of Hollywood. Alas, teleportation technology was abandoned in the 1980s because Nancy Reagan's astrologer Joan Quigley said so. Only during the Clinton/Blair years was sufficient scientific funding made available, & although no records have ever been kept, the strange reports of Bill Clinton appearing nearly simultaneously at seventeen different barbecue restaurants in six different southern states during one summer day in 1995 cannot be explained in any other way. (To the naysayers: Clinton Cloning was not developed until 1997.)

Will teleportation be the death of travel, or will it enhance the amount of time we stay at different locations? The pundits can't really decide - they're too freaked out by the newest fad in pop science: karaoke cholesterol. For years the people of the world has asked, "Why can't the food we eat sing?" (By which they meant, of course, "after we killed it," as the Edible Songbird Industry remains in existence despite everyone's clear desire that they just go the fuck away.) (That goes for the assholes who eat the songbirds too.) (Let's just call a blanket fuck you over the who motherfucking factory farm industry & get back to the point at hand.) I said people were asking "Why can't the food we eat sing?" Researchers at Brownnose University have come up with something almost as good - food that hums. You can sing along with your meal!

Granted, for now the humming lipid molecules only know the tune to "I Will Always Love You," but remember, the first atomic bomb only killed thousands. Think of what a few government grants & a couple of visits from Jeff Goldblum would do!

We've moved a long way from traveling but there are other kinds of travels which includes digestion. If you squint your eyes & pretend that it's important to you. Therefore, friends, as we near the middle of the beginning of the post-oil era, I shake out my solar-powered candle & bid you a fond how-do-you-do. The ladies may come this way, the gentlemen may keep their seats.