Piled Higher and Deeper

O my little Droogies, the trooth is painful, which is why we must laff at it. Laff laff laff. More to lafff about right here, courtesy of the magazine named (increasingly oxymoronically) Scientific American. Your ever-pessimistic author always on the lookout for the good news in the Decline and Fall of Human Civilization:

• 2,000,000 plastic bottles are discarded in the U.S. every five minutes
• 450 mountaintops have been removed, decapitated, in West Virginia and other southeastern states in the past 3 decades to mine coal.
• "Let this be our national goal: at the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need."
  —President Richard M. Nixon, State of the Union address, January 30, 1974
• If rising carbon dioxide levels increase global temperatures by one degree Celsius, the resulting air pollution could kill an additional 1,000 people in the U.S. and 20,000 people worldwide each year.
• Of the European Union, Japan, China, Australia, Canada and the US, the United States is dead last in fuel efficiency. (China beats us in fuel efficiency — gotta luv it.)
  

SOLID GOLD ART!

A GREAT ARTISTE has unveiled a solid gold statue of model Kate Moss -- the largest solid gold statue since antiquity -- at the British Museum, no less! Given that it is solid gold, and given that it is the largest gold statue of Kate Moss in two or three thousand years, it's probably the GREATEST WORK OF ART since . . . something Larry Flint or Bob Guccione. Certainly better than any of those dead things by Damien Hirst.

What? Do I hear a question? "What about Da Vinci, Picasso, Rembrandt?" All dead dead DEAD! And if they were so great, why didn't they work in SOLID GOLD?!

The BBC has all the exxxciiiting details, plus photos of the masterpiece in its most innntriiiguing pose.

Did I mention that it's SOLID GOLD! Fifty kilograms -- 110 pounds for sorry non-metric Americans like me. . . . Makes me think of those Solid Gold Dancers.

I have an idea for a LARGER GOLD STATUE -- GILD KATE MOSS! (Gild, not geld, . . . please read carefully.)