Scare America
by Andy Turudic

It seems scaring people has had an extremely early start this season. Here's my list of 40 things, in no particular order, to scare yourself, relatives and friends with, this time of year:

1. More layoffs and earnings warnings starting up again. It'll make those 80 hour work weeks look like it was vacation-time for those lucky enough to continue earning a wage.
2. Higher interest rates coming. Bankers need to pay for their fill-ups and lattes.
3. Governments continuing to fiscally party like it's 1999. Having failed to scale back spending and projects with the decrease in the tax base, they may be paving an already-good road towards a tax revolt.
4. Mr. Bush is looking out for us by proposing to "allow" us to manage our Social Security. Sort of like the way they let us "manage" our 401k plans.
5. Constitutional amendments that don't lay a basic foundation of law. I'm planning to collect signatures at the mall on a petition for a constitutional amendment that allows everyone to get one Mulligan in life, no matter what it is they've done.
6. The US Air Force is taking war to space. Our Space Shuttle fleet is safe, since it appears to be permanently out of range of the battlefield.
7. Antimatter bombs. Bugs Bunny rumored to be working on an anti-antimatter bomb and wants a grant.
8. Our inability to get the Orbiter back into space, but a guy who epoxies Styrofoam and fiberglass together for a living can, and does, pull it off three times in nearly as many weeks. NASA should move from Florida to the Mohave Desert where there are no hurricane excuses.
9. People who spend $1,000,000,000 of other peoples' money to get a $400,000 a year job.
10. Bureaucrats, like NASA's chief Sean O'Keefe, and lawyers won't let volunteers become heroes. When can I go up to fix the Hubble for no pay other than living expenses for myself and family while I train and do it?
11. Mining the moon to get H3 for, ahem, fusion power. Seems we're not content with having just one litter-box in the solar system to poop in, or with bombs that can't split the planet into "ours" and "theirs."
12. Universities that want to keep their foreign-tuition revenue machine running when there are no jobs for domestic workers. The good news is that fewer crooks will be getting MBAs.
13. Tiny bolts that hold airline seats in place. At a survivable 60 g, can these really hold 700 pounds of meat and seat?
14. It seems anyone can separate plutonium these days to build an A-bomb. It's either that or a potato battery you need to help junior build for the science fair this year.
15. Fuel-cell powered laptop computers being brought onto an airliner. Molotov laptops will be the next form of civil unrest in Redmond.
16. A smart car sized for the American market. I want the one with the racket-making Cummins 6-cylinder, direct-injection, 600-ft-lb diesel -- with category-3 hitch, winch, 8-inch lift kit, and brush guard, of course.
17. Nuclear bombs to bust deep underground bunkers. Digging holes and filling them in is a such a long-standing government pastime that all the R&D in the world won't succeed in replacing it with a singular device.
18. Subcutaneous cooking of live people with 95-GHz microwaves. With the soon-available handheld unit, you'll be able to see the game over the Cheesehead sitting in front of you.
19. Cops on Segway Transporters at Chicago's O'Hare airport. The police model can stack 6 honey glazes on each handlebar for maximum productivity.
20. 70-year-old blondes with no wrinkles. They spend 50 years trying to lose fat, and now compensate surgically for its disappearance.
21. Stores near the airport gates that sell stuff the TSA just confiscated from you. Brookstone removes Junior Cyclotron kits from its shelves but keeps the stainless steel nail clippers.
22. Assault weapons are legal to buy in stores again. There goes my advantage in a home-defense firefight.
23. Pamela Anderson joined the horde of people "writing" a best-selling book. Canada's educational system must be proud of its product.
24. Lead-free electronics. A surplus in Pb means we can make more, and cheaper, bullets to fire into other peoples' soils.
25. Outsourcing. You'd think a fluffy job like CEO or CFO, where large CAD files are not exchanged, and where salaries are the highest, would have been the first to go.
26. Fewer hobby magazines. Nowadays, you can build a robot, monster truck, or chopper-Harley without leaving the recliner: remote, please!
27. Chinese bolts and screws. Do you want to find out about this one at 40,000 feet or while building your doghouse?
28. Beheadings. Since France is a key capital equipment vendor to Iraq, you'd think they'd donate something out of their basement to make the gruesome act more humane.
29. Fusion cuisine from the kitchens of unemployed technologers. Is it really patentable to put peanut butter and tuna together in novel combination?
30. Wife killing. Was a time a guy just went to a lawyer who bargained him down to a life sentence of a different sort.
31. North Korea. Southeast Asia wants the massive WMD disparity, and resulting instability, that the Middle East enjoys.
32. Health care costs. Outsourcing our doctors might either fix this, or buy a new 600-Series Mercedes for the HMO CEO's wife.
33. Eighty pound weaklings occupying exit row airline seats. The saving grace is that after deducting their water content, they mash down to a few inches' thickness if they truly cannot open and chuck that 20-kg hatch out of the plane quick enough.
34. Designated handicapped seating in European airlines' business class. While on the surface it appears to treat the less mobile of our society with a compensatory luxury, the cold hard fact is that this seat is the furthest seat count away from any exit.
35. Ralph Nader. Since retro cars are fashionable, maybe someone could talk GM into bringing the Corvair back to give this guy something to do with all his free time.
36. Bush's bulge. They should have installed it in his pants to show the world he's got equipment.
37. Motorcyclists on cell phones. As if enough bikers aren't called by their Maker via red-light runners.
38. Consequences of music downloading in the land of the theoretically free. Sen. Orrin Hatch now wants to nuke Canada, eh?
39. Paternoster lifts. See dictionary under "guillotine".
40. Mandatory National Service (aka draft), without exception, of ALL 18-26-year olds was, until very, very, recently, an active bill in Congress. Blame the Internet, not the popular media, for disseminating awareness of the pending law during this election and forcing its defeat.
    

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• Andy Turudic