The State of California’s budget crisis is over, somewhat.
The state has been paying with IOUs. I guess that’s why they need a former muscle-building terminator as governor. In case anybody complains about the IOUs, he can explain things to those girly-men whiners, if you get my drift.
The state now has a budget and the money should soon start flowing (or is that trickling?) again. Nonetheless, there are still big problems in California. The state had to make big cuts to a number of programs, including in the vital areas of health and education. And, even then, California still has to borrow a couple of billion dollars to close the budget gap.
The people of Shalampax, on the other hand, are rolling in cash thanks to revenue from our cult religion and spam companies. Therein lies the solution to California’s fiscal problems.
Shalampax is a painfully overcrowded nation. With 4,242 people packed onto a tiny speck of an island, we all feel terribly cramped. I think you see where this is going.
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As regular readers know well, we Shalampaxians are a tad xenophobic. While the feeling among Shalampaxians is generally, “loaf and let live,” we have a nasty habit of eating any outsiders who somehow manage to land on our island.
We are not the only people who have ever practiced cannibalism. However, I’ve done some research and found that, due to the exceptionally small size of our island, there are more people per square foot here who have at one time or another practiced cannibalism than there have been anywhere else on earth at any time in the history of the planet.
This factoid astounded me. Proud of our island nation’s uniqueness, I applied to have our cannibalistic achievement listed in the Guinness World Records.
So far, I’ve been frustrated in this objective. It seems that the Guinness people won’t just take my word for it. They insist on verifying our record themselves before officially including it in their book and on their Web site. Unfortunately, Guinness has not been able to convince any of its staff to venture out to our island to certify our cannibalism record. Go figure.
On Friday, Toiletoverflowing will hold another session in his much-ignored, intermittently scheduled philosophy lecture series. The topic for this Friday’s lecture is epistemology, which is the study of knowledge and justified belief.
Toiletoverflowing will focus on the question, is knowledge truly knowable or does what we call “knowledge” consist of merely a set of beliefs that we have come to accept as justified? Furthermore, are those justifications based on verifiable, reproducible, tangible facts external to us or have the justifications been built and accepted solely within our minds? In other words, is knowledge and our perception of truth real or only an illusion?
Unlike was the case before his last talk, I have not been able to obtain a copy of Toiletoverflowing’s notes for this week’s lecture, so I can’t comment on its merits. However, I expect it to be one of his shorter philosophy talks as it is widely known that Toiletoverflowing believes that all knowledge, including the knowledge of whether knowledge is knowable, is unknowable. The impossibility of knowing knowledge, if that is the case, raises the question of why he bothers to give lectures at all, but never mind.
Toiletoverflowing does not yet have a room booked for this week’s lecture. However, it will not be the room he had last time, 2B, as it is being used on Friday for the eighth annual Moldyjellybean memorial service. Moldyjellybean isn’t yet dead, but the attendees keep hoping.
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At 3:00 p.m. today, in celebration of Shalampax’s National Military Day, all soldiers in the Shalampax army will ceremonially march in full dress uniform along the third floor’s north hallway. Guns will not be carried as the army doesn’t own any.
The parade will end in the third-floor pub. There, Emptybeerbottle, the only soldier in the Shalampaxian army, will attempt to recruit someone to replace her so she can, in her words, “finally get the hell out of this fucking, joke of an army.”
The best marketing practices do not try to convince people that they need something they don’t need. Rather, the classic marketing model dictates that marketers endeavor to discover gaps in the market—goods, services and/or price points that people need and want, but can’t currently get—and then find ways to fill those gaps.
Shalampaxians typically ignore the marketing model and simply rely on petty—and sometimes not so petty—larceny and deception to fill their larders with lucre, glorious lucre. Emptychampagnebottle has come up with what promises to be a very lucrative way to adhere to the textbook marketing model, without forsaking Shalampaxian business traditions.
Here’s the basis of his idea: Many less-than-scrupulous people have, over the years, evaded taxes in their home countries by concealing their money in tax havens that offer strict bank secrecy.
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Walking the education beat here at Shalampax Speaks has inspired me to start a Shalampax chapter of Mensa, the international organization for very intelligent people.
According to the membership rules of Mensa, only people with an IQ in the top two percent of the population can be members. In Shalampax, that pretty much means if you can spell Mensa and you are able to recognize the difference between your ass and a hole in the ground, you can join.
I qualify for Mensa and plan to become a member as soon as the chapter is established. Seeing as though I’m the one starting the local Mensa chapter, it would be hypocritical of me to not join when I have the chance. Shalampaxians are no strangers to hypocrisy, but I’m going to join nonetheless.
Considering Shalampaxians’ widespread disinterest in joining or doing anything, I expect to be the only member of the Shalampax chapter of Mensa. You might think that this would discourage me, but I welcome the solitude. Without any distractions, I’ll be able to spend my time at the Mensa meetings feeling up my breasts and masturbating, which is what passes for the height of intelligential activity in Shalampax.
