Yes, Axes & Alleys creators, Scott and Jeremy (with our extra-special friend Lauren) will be appearing on the Discovery Channel’s “CashCab: After Dark.” You know, the sexy, late-night, CashCab…

It’ll air Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 6pm on the Discovery Channel. Be sure to watch it!

Bob Thompson’s Tool Shed (Tuscaloosa, AL)
Constructed of solid plywood and 2” x 4”s, Bob Thompson’s tool shed is ignored by all those in Blackwarrior County and throughout the state of Alabama. Not only is Bob’s shed poorly constructed, it’s also full of mold, mildew and the occasional raccoon. The back wall is rotting and it smells really bad. Besides, he doesn’t even keep many tools in there anymore. After he threw out his back, he hasn’t done much yard work. Don’t be fooled, the bag of rotting leaves in the corner isn’t a nascent compost pile, he just forgot about it last month.

A Mail Box (The Bronx, NY)
There are many millions of mailboxes across the United States, but on the corner of West Reservoir Oval in the Bronx stands a pinnacle of non-wonder. Covered in graffiti, and often used as a urinal by the homeless and itinerant, this mailbox truly is a blight. Claimed as a tagging area by both “Rasor” and “Ginx,” it’s best to not put your mail in this box.

A Pile of Loose Gravel (Cairo, Egypt)
Over two meters in height and weighing almost a ton, this pile of gravel stands outside a hotel construction site in Cairo. No, it’s not just gravel; it’s also loose dirt, soda cans, cigarette butts, candy wrappers and other trash. It belongs to Mr. Mohammed Saddeg, a day-laborer on the site. If you dig too deep into the pile, you might find a scorpion, so be careful.

Tire Swing (Kent, UK)
Though the British would likely call it a “tyre” swing, people on both sides of the pond can admit that the swing is really not wondrous as at all. For one thing, it’s always full of old, gray rank rain water and secondly, the steel belts stick out due to wear and can poke a child or even rip his or her clothing. Sometimes there are insects.

Empty Lot (Augusta, GA)
It is full of weeds and features not one, but two, old rusty shopping carts. A victim of heavy erosion, the lot mostly just features dirt surrounded by a poorly constructed chain link fence. Actually the fence is kind of pointless as a barrier, since it features a prominent eight foot hole. There are also several 2 x 4s lying next to a mud puddle. One weed has a flower, but it’s a brown, dried out flower.

Rusted Out Chevy Nova (Rome, Italy)
Legend has it that the Chevy Nova once belonged to a Mr. Luciano Travetti, who abandoned it after realizing that the tow-away fee would be equal to 200,000 lire. After he purchased a new car in 1982, Travetti merely left the old car parked on the street where it accumulated not only rust, but also nearly two hundred and thirty different parking citations.

Stack of Wet Cardboard (Shangai, Peoples’ Republic of China)
Behind the factory that manufactures Robotron™ action figures and playsets, stands a pile of cardboard more than twenty three feet high. Soaked my many summer rainstorms, the cardboard has become structurally weakened and has begun to smell. As the local truck from the Peoples’ Refuse Collection Army has yet to come by, the stack continues to grow and a’molder.

Nary a month goes by when Axes & Alleys does not receive some complaint about point number two in our September 2003 article “Helpful Hints for Protesters.” Many such letters are clearly from formerly gruntled puppet constructioneers, but a significant proportion seem to have come from a portion of the population who have had the felt pulled over their eyes. Ran Jirui responds.

“Papier mache puppets will change the world.”
- Sam Waterston, New England Blue Blood

“Grotesque effigies paraded down the metropolitan streets of the Western industrialized nations have solved monetary crisis after monetary crisis.”
- Hugh McCulloch, former Secretary of the Treasury (1865)

“I changed my tax initiatives because of them puppets.”
- George W. Bush, President Emeritus, United States of America

Look like fake quotes, don’t they? That’s because they are. And they always will be. You will never hear any of those people or anyone vaguely important say anything remotely in agreement with a positive view of puppetry vis a vis global change. In fact, on a graph with puppetry at one axis and global change at the other you will never see any positive movement because such a graph is impossible to create due to lack of data.

What you’ll find if you correlate the data on purchase of materials for the making of papier mache puppets expressly for use at anti-globalization protests is a net effect of jack squat. Even the disposal costs of such grotesqueries (as the esteemed Mr. McCulloch would put it) are less than the utility of water-soluble beer can.

In the context of the aforementioned point number two, “2. Puppetry will not create a workable interest rate,” let’s take a look at a photo of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America:

Now, I’ll give you Donny Kohn might show up to a meeting with a sock-puppet in tow or put a papier mache manikin on the top of his Volvo, but no one listens to him anyway. There isn’t a single other member who would even look at a puppet if it was wrapped around a 50 grand note stuffed in the panties of a stripper with an economics PhD from Harvard dancing on a conference table at the Bear Stearns offices on Wall Street.

There are only three times in history when puppetry of any sort has affected anything of any consequence: Sun Tzu saw a shadow puppet play performed in what is now Thailand sometime in the 6th century B.C. which informed the final chapter of The Art of War on the use of spies, Wegbaja of Dahomey was inspired to construct a palace at Abomey around the 1650s by seeing a master puppet maker at work cementing the continuing success of that African empire, and most recently the Good Guy forces withdrew from the Aral Sea campaign as a result of the deformed representations of President Armstrong and corporate magnate Daniel Bester shown in cahoots at massive anti-war protests around the world.

Otherwise puppetry as an instigator or influencer of anything at all relevant to the grand movements of history is bunkum, a porpoise in the produce section, a flight of towels wending their way toward Saturn, three policemen in a submarine, your father wearing electrified nipple clamps at a rodeo, like smoking a cigar underwater, making love to utilitarianism, begging the question at the porn industry awards, a chair with a wart; in short, utterly ridiculous.

Humanity has thought up a lot of bad ideas. Some lost a few investors a little bit of money and some wrought disasters far-reaching enough to destroy a major civilization. Some bad ideas are only obviously bad in hindsight; others cause the observer to wonder what, or if, the people were thinking. Sometimes you’re lucky and you recognize a bad idea for what it is beforehand, and sometimes you’re unlucky and realize it only just after that point of no return where you’re forced to watch helplessly as the calamity unfolds. No matter what though, people love bad ideas; we’re drawn to them, we can’t shake them and we sometimes cling to them desperately long after we know just how bad they are.
So here, in no particular order, are ten of the worst bad ideas yet unleashed upon humanity.

“Black Slavery”
What do you do when you find a whole new continent that needs to be farmed, but shipping peasants over from Europe would be prohibitively expensive and no one really wants to come over anyway? You enslave the new land’s population is what you do. Except, in this case, the population has already been wiped out by virulent diseases you brought over. What you do then is you find another continent, vastly expand its slave trade and ship slaves over to the new continent to be the backbone of your new agrarian economy. Turns out someone did this back in the 16th Century. It worked well and at the time seemed like a good idea; except that after a couple of centuries all the areas without slavery and rich, cash crop agrarian economies compensated by industrializing. And, hey, y’know what? It turns out that industrial regions can wallop agrarian ones economically and militarily. Plus, after slavery is over, all the former slaves end up sticking around as an angry underclass gifted the delights of racism and it takes another couple centuries before anyone’s anywhere near equal. Sure, you colonists got someone to cut your sugarcane for you on the cheap and you’re dead now, but was it really worth that crap economy, social unrest, and mass slaughter of your descendants? Probably not.

“Operation Barbarossa”
It’s 1941. You’re Hitler and you’ve just conquered Europe. The end of the war is in sight, in fact, and all you have to do is turn your full military might against the one enemy you have left and finish them off for good. Luckily for you, that one enemy is the United Kingdom; broke, ill-prepared, militarily weak and ripe for the plucking. But instead of a quick and easy victory, perhaps the greatest victory in the whole history of warfare, you (Hitler) decide you (Hitler) have an idea. A bad idea. Invade Russia and fight a two front war. In fact, it was such a bad idea that you (Hitler) yourself had warned against it in Mein Kampf. In the end the bad idea costs thirty million people their lives, loses the Germans the war and cedes Eastern Europe to the Soviet Empire leading to the Cold War and the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction. That’s a bad idea.

“Failing to Adopt the Steam Engine”
Remember in 200 AD when the Roman ironclads sailed up the Yangtze and the Roman Legions conquered the Han Dynasty and set up a new province with the capital in Pekinginium? No, you wouldn’t remember that at all because it didn’t happen. The Romans never adopted the steam engine even though toymaker Hero of Alexandria demonstrated a working model of it in 62 AD. Granted, even with Hero’s steam wheel it probably would’ve taken a few generations before you could take a first class rail coach along the Appian Way, but we’ll never know, will we? Of course, this is one of those bad ideas that was only obviously a bad idea after seventeen centuries of hindsight, but still you think someone would’ve noticed, after seeing steam power being used to move things, that steam power could be used to move things. You know what they adopted instead of the steam engine? Hero’s vending machine. Even that they didn’t use for long.

“Abandoning Vinland”
When your homeland consists of tundra, unaerable forests and a few fjords that are warm for some of the summer months, you’d think you’d jump on the sort of real estate deal the Norse found around 1000 AD. Instead of eking out a desperate existence in foggier, glacier strewn northern wastelands, they could have had New Foundland and New England; both cold, but still almost infinitely better than Greenland. Instead of settling and bringing more people over though, the Vikings decided to stop off for a bit to make use of local timber for ship repairs. Failing to do what 500 years later would get Columbus a national holiday and two state capitals named for him, the Vikings stayed a couple of months and then left, never to return again despite the abundance of grapes. Perhaps they didn’t realize that they had discovered a vast new continent or perhaps they were just scared of Skraelings. Ooh…Skraelings.

“Hunting the New World Megafauna into Extinction”
It’s understandable that after trekking across Asia, the Bering Land Bridge and the Yukon, you’d be kind of hungry. Who wouldn’t be? And apparently saber-toothed tigers, mammoths, horses, gazelles, elephants, giant land sloths and armadillos are like potato chips. You can’t eat just one. So the new Americans, who weren’t quite yet native, killed all the big animals from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Thus the Incas were forced to eat guinea pigs for lunch. Plus they never had horses for cavalry or work teams and making the same out of llamas was just a pain in the ass. What’s worse is that later, all the Americans died from a infestations of crowd diseases likely because they never had close contact with big animals like the Europeans did and getting near llamas was to risk your neck. It’s likely that Urgo and Mathop, as they killed the last of the giant ground sloths, never thought their actions would lead directly to the fall of the Aztec Empire millennia later. The good idea would have been to keep at least a couple of those big sloths around in case of emergency.

“Cancelling Firefly”
After Joss Whedon created one of the big hits of television history, the Fox network picked up his new show: a cowboy western, space opera type thing called Firefly. The network executives, realizing that they gave this guy a slot because he had already produced one of TV’s most memorable shows, decided that he must have known nothing about television. So, they showed a few of the episodes they had paid for, aired them out of order and then canceled it after a few weeks. Of course, since Joss Whedon must have known nothing about writing a television show, he had legions of die-hard fans who made Firefly the most popular canceled TV series since Star Trek. Whedon eventually made a financially successful movie based on the canceled show, and instead of what could have been one of the most profitable TV shows in history, Fox got Oliver Bean, The War at Home, John Doe, Titus, Andy Richter Controls The Universe, Keen Eddie, Undeclared, and Cedric the Entertainer Presents. And Firefly fans, each year, hold conventions and Serenity viewings year after year at which they, incidentally, spend loads of cash.

“Excommunicating Galileo”
For some damn reason, the Catholic Church was opposed to the idea of the Earth going around the Sun. Perhaps it contradicted Biblical literalism, or perhaps they didn’t like some upstart astronomer horning in on their monopoly on Truth turf. Either way, they were obviously happy to murder a fellow because he happened to write down what he observed of the natural universe. Galileo was a smart guy. Not only was he smart enough to deduce that the Earth moved around the Sun and that Jupiter had moons, he was also smart enough to recant it all when angry soldiers showed up at his house and told him they’d torture and kill him horribly and painfully if he didn’t deny it all. And what did Mother Church get out of all this? Not much. They shut up Galileo for a few years, but they couldn’t shut up everyone and in the end, five hundred years later, after a long, slow retreat of their power and influence, they had to admit they were wrong. Unfortunately, they also spawned this whole ridiculous pseudo-science concept where some Christians believe they have to deny science if it disagrees with their view of Biblical literalism. Many of the greatest discoveries of science were made by religious people seeking to understand God’s handiwork, but thanks to the Catholics, now many Christians see science as the enemy of faith and happily wander down the path of idiotic superstition.

“Communism”
Back in the 19th Century it seemed, to Marx and Engels, a good idea that the workers should directly control the means of production. It seemed like a good idea to them and to a few others as well. The only problem is that it’s not a good idea. In fact it’s a rather bad idea because the means of production don’t spring from nowhere. Someone has to buy them. Someone has to invest capital in building a factory before the workers can punch in. In fact, the capitalist has to pay for that punch clock before anyone can actually punch in. That works in a capitalist society where you can kill the capitalist after he’s paid for the factory and then take it over and introduce communism. But, it never worked that way. Communism, in fact, only took hold in countries like Russia, China or Cuba, where no one had ever bothered to spend the money to build a lot of factories. That meant that someone had to build the factories and pay for the machines and time clocks, and that meant that the leading communists had to steal from the people to build the factories. Unfortunately, the leading communists made a habit of stealing from the people and the worker’s utopia never quite worked out. Marx may have said a class revolution was inevitable, but it wasn’t. Instead it was just another bad idea. Capitalist workers, on the other hand, can buy a share of that factory they work in. No, really, it’s called a stock. Look into it sometime, Karl.

“Pre-1920s Medicine”
For perhaps millions of years people have been getting sick, injured and dead. For at least ten thousand years other people have been trying to help out the sick, injured and even the dead. But, until about 1920 they were not doing a good job at all. In fact, what they were doing was basically guessing. Just guessing, not even educated guesses, not even guestimates. Just random, shot in the dark, guess work. Needless to say, it didn’t work very well. The main bad idea, beyond just the usual tinctures and potions (which often involved dung), was to remove blood from the sick person’s body. Apparently they had never seen anyone bleed to death. No one from Socrates onward thought that it might be a good idea to emphasize the keeping of blood inside the body. Yeah, everything from stabbing people with needles, to dunking them in water, to sawing off limbs, to running electrodes through them was a bad idea that shouldn’t have required the benefit of hindsight. Someone probably should have perhaps examined a sick person or looked a few feet over to the pile of dead ex-patients before sticking another needle in someone’s brain in another ill fated attempt to cure the common cold. These are just bad ideas and it shouldn’t have taken twenty centuries or more to figure them out.

“That Girl”
You know her. She’s got no job, steals your money, is insane, jealous and vindictive. Chances are she’ll screw you over and then screw your friends and then screw them over. Not only that, but she isn’t that smart, she isn’t that interesting, she’s manipulative, and she cries in public just to get attention. And yet, you can’t help yourself, can you? You just dive right in, time and time again. Even though you know she’s a bad idea from day one, it doesn’t matter because she’s hot and she’s easy. And she’s a train wreck and a terrible idea. No, she’s never brought down an empire, but as far as bad ideas go, That Girl still ranks up there. But, she is hot.

The Effects of the Megafauna on the Fall and Restoration of the Monarchy in Oz

by Jared Diamond

In the majority of his written works, scientist and author Jared Diamond attempts to show how the natural environment has influenced history. Previously, he has, with some skill, shown how distribution of biological resources led to the cultural predominance of Eurasian civilization and also how environmental factors precipitated the downfall of societies ranging from the Mayans to the Norse. Lions, Tigers and Bears tells a similar story; that of the collapse and eventual restoration of the Ozma government and how large animals came to play a crucial role in the unfolding political drama.

Diamond begins by examining the history of the realm of Oz and how its unique and tenuous monarchy came to power. Initially four separate sovereign nations; Munchkin, Gillikin, Quadling and Winkie became united by a monarchy which ruled from the city-state of Emerald City. It is through this history that Diamond makes the first and most crucial of his points; that geography made the eventual toppling of the monarchy a near certainty. Emerald City, situated on the central plain of Oz was unable to consolidate complete control over the rough and mountainous terrains in the outlying region. Throughout the Outlands, small societies were able to prosper in isolation and were often ignorant of the very existence of the centralized monarchy.

Furthermore, the cultures which grew up around the central plain were able to travel from one place to another easily, allowing for a cultural fusion of ideas, inventions and economies while the outlying mountainous regions and those beyond the Deadly Desert gave rise to isolated civilizations which could not share in the central plains culture. While the Ozma government could technically claim to rule the Land of Ez or the Dominions of the Nome King, the inhabitants of those lands, due to geography, would continually assert their independence causing a great deal of external stress to the central government. These outlying cultures developed societies entirely alien to the central plains societies; including differing religious systems and different domestication strategies. Thus, it was via environmental factors that Ozma was never able to consolidate complete control over the continent of Nonestica.

This would prove the monarchy’s undoing. Cultural fears of the desert and mountain regions made Ozma unwilling to expand. Without a coastline, and surrounded by alien cultures, the central plain became isolated, surrounded by hostile peoples. Continual attacks by the Nome King as well as by the Wicked Witches, a theocratic sect found in isolated mountainous regions of the West, weakened the power of the monarchy. The Wicked Witches were able to domesticate only one species; a flying monkey, found only in the mountains. The central plains societies were ill-adapted to fighting the soaring simians that would occasionally raid the central plains, further destabilizing the monarchy.

The flying monkeys (Brachyteles ecaudata) allow Diamond to introduce his thesis; the influence of the Megafauna on the collapse of Ozma’s government. The inhabitants of the central plains never domesticated any fauna, and were unable to cope with attacks by the flying monkeys. Thus, the Wicked Witches, with the help of the related sect of Wicked Wizards were able to expel King Pastoria of Oz and send his daughter Princess Ozma into exile. While Ozma was able to return to the throne for a short time, she was nevertheless unable to establish true governmental supremacy over the Land of Oz. After she was captured by the Nome King, the central government collapsed. With the central government non-existent, individual fiefdoms grew up and the influence of the trade unions, such as the Lollipop Guild, grew to fill the void of power in the lands.

Diamond then explores the issue of Megafauna, including central plains societies’ cultural aversion to large, predatory animals. Though the people of the plains feared lions, tigers and bears, it would be a lion, a rare form of forest-dwelling lion, that eventually helped secure a new dynasty in the Emerald City. Following the interregnum, the Scarecrow took control of the throne, though he was a weak monarch who ruled over a society near collapse. Trade had nearly broken down, infrastructure was ill-maintained and despite the numerous enemies on the borders, the army consisted of only one poorly built mechanical soldier. Though the Ozma monarchy was eventually restored, the problems inherent in Oz’s social, political and economic systems remain.

As an afterthought, Diamond presents a warning that societies such as the Land of Oz face important issues in their handling of the natural environment. Geographic pressures created a situation where the central plains people considered themselves invulnerable, while the outlying societies considered Oz ripe for the plucking. Had the denizens of Oz, Diamond asserts, taken a clear look at environmental and geographic factors, their society might not have been driven to near collapse.

While Lions, Tigers and Bears, is a good read, Diamond characteristically meanders through his ideas, stopping for several chapters to explore the evolutionary and agricultural history of meat trees. Indeed, the book presents a new and interesting take on the history of Oz, but generally only explores Megafauna in a few small sections, focusing instead on geology, weather and tectonics as an explanation of the political events in question while completely ignoring the fact that Megafauna in the lands in and around Oz would be apparently normal by Earthen standards. There have been several major scholarly works on political and economic life in the Land of Oz, but none have explored the bio-history of the region. Though Diamond’s writing has its faults, the issues he presents allow a new understanding of a troubled area’s past and possible futures.