As Gulf Coast residents prepare to do battle with yet another tropical menace, a few questions may come to mind. For instance, why in this era of polio vaccines and internet pizza delivery have we not found a way to prevent hurricanes? I mean, they’re just large masses of condensed water vapor with some snazzy visual and sound effects.

Well, it’s not like science hasn’t tried. According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, artificial attempts to dissipate hurricanes have included everything from dropping a tarp across the ocean to block evaporation to blowing the things to hell with nukes. Unfortunately, as hurricanes are made by God when He is really really angry, nothing that man has constructed can stand up to them.

Until now.

Instead of attempting to destroy or dissipate a hurricane, we should instead try to block or redirect them to locations nobody cares about. The simplest way to accomplish such a task would be to build a giant wall in the path of the hurricane.

Now I know what you’re thinking: What is Nick smoking today, and where can I get some? But I assure you that I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and I think an Anti-Hurricane Wall could help prevent trillions of dollars in property damage, not to mention countless lost lives.

The best place to start testing an Anti-Hurricane wall would likely be the Gulf of Mexico as it’s home to vital oil refineries and lots of people dumb enough to live below sea level. Here’s how an Anti-Hurricane Wall would work in the Gulf:

1. Build a giant wall between Florida and Mexico. The wall would have holes near the bottom to allow sea traffic and dolphins to travel through it freely.
2. The wall would be made of tough anti-hurricane materials such as plywood and bungee cords.
3. When a hurricane reaches the wall, it would run into the wall and would—much like a person or rambunctious kitten impacting a wall—fall down and start crying or something.
4. Eventually the hurricane would give up and go home or at least to some other country that can’t afford an Anti-Hurricane Wall.

See, isn’t that simple? Of course, building an enormous Anti-Hurricane Wall the size of the Gulf of Mexico would present a few challenges:

• The wall would need to be about 500 miles long if built from, say, Key Largo, Florida to Cancun, Mexico.
• The wall would need to be about five miles high as that’s about how high the outer portions of a hurricane tend to reach. Sure, the eye of a hurricane can reach almost twice that height, but if the surrounding part of the storm can’t get by the wall, neither can the eye.
• Building a 2,500 square mile wall in the middle of the ocean could be quite expensive. Even if we used some 10% off coupons at Home Depot, it would likely cost around, oh, $100 billion for the 70 billion square feet of plywood and other materials needed to build this thing. But considering that Hurricane Katrina did over $80 billion in damage by itself, this thing could pay for itself in a couple of years.
• Insurance companies could probably be convinced to pay for some or most of the wall as they’d stand to save the most from blocking hurricanes from making landfall.

Of course, there are a few negative consequences to building the Great Wall of the Gulf of Mexico. For example, I don’t think Cuba would see much sunlight ever again, and they might not like that (especially since they’d be on the wrong side of the wall). Plus some people would argue that the only wall we should be building in that region is across the U.S. border with Mexico, though I would argue that hurricanes are at least a little more dangerous than illegal immigrants. Oh, and heaven forbid a hurricane managed to knock down the wall; the ensuing tidal wave would likely wipe out the entire Gulf Coast, but let’s not dwell on the negatives any longer.

Depending on the effectiveness of the Gulf Coast Anti-Hurricane Wall, I would later recommend constructing one off the U.S. East Coast since, well, that’s where I live and I think I deserve giant protective walls as much as any Texan or Louisianian. So start calling your senators and representatives today and ask for Anti-Hurricane Walls before it’s too late. Oh, and let them know that plywood’s on sale at Lowes this week: buy 5,000,000, get 5,000,000 free!

Whether you’re a fan of the young guy and the old guy or the really old guy and the mildly-attractive girl, there’s little denying that this coming presidential election will bring about either a great deal of change or a great deal of everything staying the same and getting worse, likely both. Both major candidates have outlined how their administrations would tackle the big problems facing our economy, and each has fully convinced me that if we elect “the other guy” that our nation will suffer from a nationwide financial collapse not seen since that tower of one-dollar bills I was constructing fell over when the air conditioning turned on.

Or maybe things won’t be that bad. It’s really too soon to tell. But what it’s not too soon to tell is that a great deal of money-related dilemmas will go unaddressed regardless of who we elect. Here now are some of those issues in no particular order.

1. Lazy people make more money than me. Neither the Republican nor Democratic candidate has outlined plans for rectifying the horrible monetary atrocity that is Joe Stevens (name changed to protect the real idiot, Scott Phillips). You see, Joe works three offices over in a similar role to mine. He started at the job the same month I did. Yet Joe makes 20% more money despite only doing half the work I do because he’s as dumb as a brick. More important than gender-equal pay should be intelligence-equal pay—all the smart people get paid a lot more than the stupid ones.
2. Candy store child beggars. Every time I go to the candy store now, there’s always some little punk kid in there who comes up to me asking for a dollar. Since I rarely carry any cash, I can usually honestly say “Go f*** yourself, punk” without feeling like a jerk. But the real question is this: Why don’t these kids have a dollar for candy? Our candy industry must be in tremendous peril if kids don’t have candy dollars. Either major financial subsidies for chocolate farmers are needed, or the government must consider issuing “candy grants” so that these kids can get their freaking gumballs and lemon drops.
3. A tiny sandwich at college costs $7. My wife recently transferred schools and was horrified to find that a quick-serve sandwich that she could make for about 50 cents at home was on the school cafeteria’s menu for $6.99. That’s almost seven dollars! And that’s almost 10 dollars! Whoever is elected to lead this country must take a firm stand against profit-hungry universities and tell them “Dammit, don’t be chargin’ no 50 bucks for no two pieces of bread with a slice of baloney!”
4. American cars still suck. The new President needs to tell American automakers to stop sucking, perhaps by issuing an executive order to Ford that it must make every car as awesome-looking and well-equipped as the Batmobile.
5. People are still retarded with their money. Despite the recent and ongoing recession scare, most Americans haven’t learned a thing about financial responsibility. I propose that the next President increase the income tax to 90% and use the money to buy people the things they really need first—affordable housing, a college education, and a car that isn’t a Mercedes when you’re only making $15,000 a year. And yes, I’m advocating Super-Big Government at this point because most of the country has proven that it’s as responsible with its money as a five-year-old in a toy store.
6. Deal or No Deal is still around. Presidential veto, executive order, secret assassination—something to get this piece of crap game show off my television. Seriously, why are people so fascinated with this show? It’s just a guessing game with large dollar signs. And speaking of television…
7. Yet another year without a new Star Trek TV series. By my estimates, each month that the world goes by without a new Star Trek television series being produced, our nation is losing upwards of $500 trillion dollars in generated revenue. Our new President must command Paramount to produce a new Star Trek series. Oh, and make sure former Trek producer Rick Berman gets sent to Guantanamo Bay or something so he can’t screw this one up too.
8. Rampant prostitute inflation. While the U.S. inflation rate is hovering somewhere between 3% and 5%, several important staples are skyrocketing in price at 20-50% per year—things like gas, milk, and especially hookers! My buddy said that the same whore who used to charge just $100 an hour just upped her prices to $150 an hour last week. That’s a 50% increase right there! The Federal government must do something quickly to help ensure that the rich and poor alike have equal access to street walkers, or our nation may fall into another Great Unsexed Depression.

I urge you to e-mail both major candidates and insist that their economic plans be revised to address these burning issues, lest their prophecies of financial turmoil if we elect “the other guy” should come true!

Over the course of the last several months, I’ve been conducting an informal study on when the best time is to go grocery shopping. The purpose of this study was to determine exactly when one should go grocery shopping in order to obtain the best combination of fresh produce, smaller crowds, fast service, and cheaper prices.

In order to make this a genuine, science-y study, we decided to make the comparisons between shopping trips as standardized as possible. So for each time period, our crack team of scientists (i.e. they were on crack at the time) went to a series of grocery stores and purchased the same five items at each location:

1. A gallon of milk
2. A loaf of bread
3. A roll of toilet paper
4. Five red delicious apples
5. The trashiest news tabloid available

Today, the Punny Money Analytical Institute of Lasers and Mathematics is proud to announce the results of this study. Here is a sample of the results broken down by time of experiment.

Tuesday at 6pm

Tuesday at 6pm was determined to be the worst possible time to enter a grocery store due to a variety of factors. Tuesday evening appeared to be a popular time for homemakers to give cooking dinner from scratch the one-finger salute and instead opt for a trip to the nearby grocery store’s hot food bar.

Upon arrival at the grocery store, our scientists discovered that parking spaces were a rarity—scooped up by rabid soccer moms and agitated businessmen within 2/10ths of a second of becoming available. Three scientists and one Nissan Sentra received minor injuries on one trip during this testing period.

Inside the store was no better; check-out lines often extended back into the shopping aisles, making it difficult to locate and obtain the toilet paper and magazine. However, most fresh items were still relatively fresh, and dishes at the hot food bar were being continuously replenished.

Average Shopping and Checkout Time: 24 minutes
Average Checkout Price: $15.37
Average Product Quality: Fairly good, though most news tabloids were previously leafed through by customers waiting in long lines.
Pros: Hot foods were freshly made. Several dinnertime meal specials were available.
Cons: That bitch who had 14 items in the 10-item-or-less lane. Who does she think she is?

Thursday at 2pm

Most grocery stores were discovered to be eerily empty at 2pm on any given weekday other than Friday. Our scientists determined that this may be due to people who have real jobs (unlike grocery store scientists) typically are at work at 2pm on a weekday afternoon. The only exception to this rule proved to be people who work at grocery stores, as not only were the stores devoid of most customers, but it was pretty damn hard to find more than one employee in the whole place. This resulted in seven times the normal wait for assistance in locating hard-to-find items.

In some instances, as few as half a dozen customers in a store at 2pm proved to be overwhelming to the lonesome store clerk, sometimes resulting in multiple customers being queued in the only open checkout line for 15 minutes or longer. The typical customer shopping at this time was an 80-year-old woman doing her shopping for the next 5 years and paying by personal check.

At the same time, shopping aisles were easy to navigate, and most fresh items were still fresh from being stocked earlier in the morning. If anything, selecting the trashiest tabloid available was difficult because many new ones had just arrived at the stores only hours earlier.

Average Shopping and Checkout Time: 26 minutes
Average Checkout Price: $16.08
Average Product Quality: Decent, though that one old lady must have molested every apple on the stand before deciding to get oranges instead.
Pros: Empty store. Great time and place to have a laser tag fight if you could manage it.
Cons: Most of the store staff was likely in the back room watching soap operas.

Friday at 1am

Just 11 hours after the Thursday afternoon shopping excursion proved enough to produce an entirely different shopping experience. Of the grocery stores involved in this experiment, only two were open this late (24 hours a day, in both cases), so the results only take into account averages from those two stores.

Weekday late-nights proved to be just as futile a venture for those requiring customer assistance as shopping on a weekday afternoon but for entirely different reasons. That’s because late-night grocery stores are typically manned by stoned teenagers. In fact, in one instance, our grocery scientists determined that they could have walked out of the store without paying even after loudly announcing “I am stealing all of the items in my cart” within three feet of several checkout clerks, all of whom were busy gazing pensively into the lasers of their checkout scanners.

There was no such item as “fresh” food at 1am on a weekday night. After all, most stores restock later on in the morning, so pretty much everything had been sitting out for at least 20 hours at that point. Most produce shelves were bare, save for a handful of midget unripened bananas and bruised apples. The only available milk gallons typically expired within the next 3-6 days instead of the usual 10-12 days. And for some inexplicable reason, the toilet paper just wasn’t as soft as it is during the day. For this reason, several more marked-down items were usually available.

Fortunately the shopping aisles were all but deserted, and the stoned teenagers had some sort of pre-programmed, almost robotic ability to scan items twice as fast as normal.

Average Shopping and Checkout Time: 10 minutes
Average Checkout Price: $14.97 (or zero, if they’d gone through with it)
Average Product Quality: Miserable. The oranges were, in fact, browns.
Pros: A lightning-fast shopping experience.
Cons: Produce you wouldn’t feed a hobo. Plus, it’s one in the freaking morning and everyone else with any sense is in bed.

Saturday at Noon

This is not the time you want to go grocery shopping for five measly items, our scientists determined. In addition to the normal crowds of weekday evenings, most parents also bring their school-aged children along, and most of these children would have rather been in school than being dragged around looking at candies and toys their parents won’t buy for them.

Checkout lines were always horribly long because the typical customer on a Saturday afternoon is there to buy most of the next week’s groceries. Navigating shopping aisles was like tip-toeing through a mine field of screaming children and other once-a-week shoppers.

Item freshness varied, as some produce appeared to have been restocked that morning while many others would likely sit there unreplenished until Monday morning. Specialty departments, such as Meats or the Bakery, were unmanned. Most of the tabloid magazines were starting to look raggedy.

Average Shopping and Checkout Time: 27 minutes
Average Checkout Price: $16.52
Average Product Quality: Varied from good to awful.
Pros: Uh… none really.
Cons: There are a million better things you could be doing with your Saturday afternoon. Everyone’s children misbehave more than your own, especially in grocery stores.

Wednesday at 8am

Bingo. The grocery shopping jackpot.

Specifically Wednesday morning, more than any other weekday morning, proved to be the optimal grocery shopping time. Parking, shopping, and checking out all proved to be quick and simple. Grocery store staff were rested, friendly, and helpful. Most fresh items had been restocked in the previous few hours and were still at their freshest.

Perhaps another point worth noting is that most of the grocery stores examined started their new promotion week on Wednesday, so hitting the store on a Wednesday morning provided the best opportunity to stock up on sale items before they started disappearing from store shelves.

On occasion, the express checkout lanes would fill with people purchasing just one or two items—typically store-brewed coffee and a lunch item for later that day. In these instances, a person with five or more items was sometimes served quicker stepping into a standard checkout lane.

Average Shopping and Checkout Time: 11 minutes
Average Checkout Price: $14.12
Average Product Quality: Freshest and best.
Pros: Super-fast shopping time, and items as fresh as can be.
Cons: Most people leave for work at 8am, so this might not be the best time to go shopping for you.

Our scientists also made another shocking discovery during the course of their investigation. According to several of the grocery store tabloids they purchased, Bigfoot seems to have secretly married Keira Knightley in a wedding ceremony atop the Empire State Building. Stay tuned for more developments in this breaking story, just as soon as our scientists get back from the store.

Think back to the olden days of May and June 2008 when all anyone could talk about were those blasted economic stimulus rebates. The general consensus at the time was, yes please give us money, but don’t expect it to help the economy one bit. That’s because everyone feared that the U.S. population would suddenly grow a collective brain cell and decide to save and invest their money rather than go out and spend it on giant TVs and Nintendo Wii systems.

Fortunately, us U.S. Americans proved to be just as stupid as ever with sudden influxes of cash, and the economic stimulus package seems to have worked exactly as it was planned: the economy grew by 3.3% in the second quarter of the year, pretty much putting a nail in the coffin of recession fears. It seems people really did blow their stimulus checks on skydiving lessons and Hannah Montana concert tickets, once again fueling my fears that any wacky crap I write here seems to come horribly true.

So what’s next for the economy? Is this the “all clear” signal we’ve been waiting for? Can banks go back to giving out $800,000 mortgages to Wal-Mart cashiers? Should you start direct depositing your paycheck at your local shopping mall again? The answer to these questions is a resounding… prossably, a word I just invented meaning both probably and possibly. That 3.3% figure may very well be a fluke, the eye of the hurricane that may soon leave the U.S. economy under 12 feet of water and I.O.U.’s to other countries. Or it might truly be an indication that the worst is behind us.

Either way, there’s little hope at this point that people have learned from their financial mistakes of the last decade or so, so I fully expect this economic crisis will continue to repeat itself every 10 or 15 years. Of course, if you really want to be one of those people who learns from their mistakes, then please make sure you’re walking away from this chapter of American history with the following notes on your cheat sheet:

1. Don’t spend money you don’t have on things you don’t need. If you’re ever tempted to max out your credit cards with a shopping spree at your favorite clothier, please consider wearing the clothes you already own instead. Or just go naked, but only if you’re an attractive woman.
2. You can’t afford that house. You know that huge house you want over there? Yes, that one I’m pointing at right now. You can’t afford the mortgage payments on it. Don’t ask me how I know; I just know. You can afford that house over there. Yes, the one next door to the crap factory.
3. You need to save some money. Remember a few months ago when everyone was losing their jobs and lining up for unemployment and soup kitchens and living under freeway on-ramps? If you don’t, consider yourself lucky. The next time a financial crisis rears its ugly head, if you don’t have a cash cushion tucked away somewhere, you might be one missed paycheck away from being out on the streets.
4. You can’t rely on the government to bail you out every time. There are likely a lot of people for whom those stimulus checks were the only thing keeping them from utter financial turmoil… at least for now. Don’t expect Congress or the President or the Tooth Fairy to save your broke ass every time your bank account is getting empty. Instead, learn to secure your own financial future, and assume for all practical purposes that the government isn’t even there at all—well, except when it wants its tax money.
5. You need to stop listening to what everyone else is saying about the economy and start looking at your own economy. Employment could be as high as 20%, but if you’re in a high-demand job making good money, investing wisely and spending cautiously, you’ll likely be able to weather even the worst of nationwide financial disasters.

Stay tuned to see what the third quarter of 2008 brings for the economy. And since my prognostications of late seem to come eerily true, I’d like to forecast that July through September will see ridiculous financial growth brought on by me winning every major lottery jackpot in the nation and then spending all of the winnings on constructing the world’s tallest and longest sandwich extending across the entire length of the Mojave Desert (a.k.a. the country’s largest sandwich toaster).

Long-time readers will know that I have a penchant for eating. In fact, I just finished eating the entire country of Denmark. Okay, perhaps not Denmark, but a much smaller country nobody really cares about. Suffice it to say I like the yummies.

Usually around mid-afternoon at work, I’ll get the craving for a snack. Over the years, I’ve dealt with this craving in a variety of ways, including:

• Ignoring it. This is what I do about 98% of the time. Part of this is due to my desire not to gain 300 pounds, and part of it is due to my desire not to lose 300 pounds… sterling. Get it? It’s a currency joke. That would have killed at the World Bank. Anyway…
• Being prepared for it. A couple of years ago, I usually made sure to have a supply of snacks on hand at work for when this craving called. My favorite emergency food supply consisted of a six-gallon tub of assorted snackery including pretzels, cheese puffs, and other stuff with no nutritional value whatsoever. I had to give up this plan, however, as I would sometimes polish off the entire tub in one day if things weren’t going well at work.
• Giving in to the vending machine. This is probably the worst way to deal with mid-afternoon snack cravings. I’ve only done it a few times in nearly five years and always because my brain and stomach just wouldn’t shut up otherwise. I try to keep my wallet low on cash just so I’m not tempted to go the vending machine route at work.

There’s one more snack-attack counterattack tactic that I’ve been employing for the last couple of years: giving in to the communal snack box. Working in a computer lab environment, the head of the lab often goes out and buys snacks for everyone else who works there, usually asking for a small donation put into a change bucket to cover the cost of the snack. For instance, our current “Lab Daddy” purchases boxes and boxes of packages of pretzel bites and requests a donation of 28 cents each time you take a bag to help cover his costs.

It occurred to me earlier today, while eating my sixth bag of lab pretzels in as many days, that this little enterprise is quite ingenious and perhaps a bit profitable. Where does the profit come in? Consider how the normal computer lab pretzel exchange works:

1. Choose your snack. Several varieties are available!
2. Put 28 cents in the Pretzel Fund.
3. Oh wait, all you have are dollar bills.
4. The Lab Daddy just saw you take some pretzels. You better put in something or you’ll look like a cheap jerk.
5. You repeat this each time you go for a bag. The 28-cent requested donation becomes 72 cents of profit for Lab Daddy.

Now I know Lab Daddy isn’t really out to make a profit on this; he’s just being really nice and saving us from having to spend a dollar on the same bag of pretzels in the company vending machine. And despite the “honor system” in place, I’m sure not everyone is putting in their 28 cents per bag. A more sinister person, however, such as yourself, might see this as the perfect opportunity to squeeze a few extra pennies out of your day job. Assuming you have trustworthy co-workers, it just might work too!

Oh, and in case you ever find yourself on the other side of this delicious scheme, here are a few strategies to help make sure you’re not putting extra pennies in your Lab Daddy’s pockets:

• Use exact change, or take more than one. For pretzels that run 28 cents a bag, either put in a quarter and three pennies, or take three bags and hide the other two for later.
• Announce your intentions. If Lab Daddy is watching your pretzel pickup, and you only have large bills, toss one into the donation bucket in plain sight and say something like “That should cover me for the next X bags.”
• Bring your own snacks. This way, you know you’re paying 28 cents a bag for your pretzels. Just don’t forget them at home, and don’t go through them faster than you would the communal stash.
• Open a competing snack shack. Beat Lab Daddy at his own game by starting your own vending service. If necessary, price below your cost to start and you’ll drive Lab Daddy out of business. Of course, if you ever need Lab Daddy’s help with your work, expect him to change your account passwords and delete your files at random.

A word of caution before starting a communal snackateria at your workplace: Be sure to keep it on the down-low. Otherwise you might risk people from other departments sneaking through for a freebie. Or you might earn the ire of your workplace’s vending contractors who could see you as stealing their business; don’t blame me if you leave work late one evening only to be blocked in by 12 Coca-Cola machines.