Here you go. Puzzle. Fun.

What TV show does the image represent? Or, let’s do this Jeopardy style. Okay, here is the answer: The TV series represented by this image.

Clock’s a’ticking… Doo doo doo doo doo doo dooo, doo doo doo doo dooo do do do do do, doo doo doo doo doo doo dooo, do do do do do do dooooooo…

The black helicopters are coming! They’re here to pack us all into swine flu internment camps!

Or something.

What was it in the 90’s? The black choppers were going to move suburbanites into the cities or something so that the suburbs could be reclaimed for nature preserves or something?

Anyway, I think they’re after Speedy. See how he turned the world upside down?

Well, the Illuminati aren’t going to take that sitting down. They’re sending their minions out in black helicopters to go after him!

Seriously. Don’t sneeze in your sneeze on your sleeve or sneeze in your arm. Not only is it disgusting, it may not be very sanitary either.

Consider this… The flu virus can survive outside the body for a few seconds to as long as 48 hours (according to the Mayo Clinic) or 2 to 8 hours (according to the CDC).

So, what happens when you sneeze into your arm? Well, any flu virii are going to be hanging around for as long as 48 hours. At any rate, there’s a good chance they’ll hang around the rest of your day.

That means if you rub or bump against anyone in the hallways, on the subway, in the office, at the lunch counter, etc., you could be spreading the flu around.

The CDC recommends covering your mouth and nose with a tissue when coughing or sneezing. Then, properly dispose of the tissue. Washing your hands would also be an excellent idea.

What happens if you sneeze into your hands? Well, most people will wash their hands. But, if you sneeze into your arm or sleeve, how long will it be before you wash your shirt? You’ll probably wear your shirt the rest of the day, no? Carrying the flu virii around with you. Disgusting.

Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but, to me, carrying around the flu on your arm all day doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do this flu season.

Okay, so it was in Photoshop and it’s obviously not real, but I did make money nonetheless. It’s just not good for anything except, maybe, say a blog post picture.

But, you know, if you want to make money–for real–you might look into starting your own office cleaning business. It’s easy and you could make good money–real money. Not Photoshop trickery!

And, if you buy the eBook my site is promoting there, I can make some real money too. So, it’s a win-win all around. So, learn more about your own office cleaning business right now.

Look! It’s a pumpkin with a vintage striped pattern! Yay!

This might be the lamest blog post ever.

But, it has:

1) Pumpkin

2) Vintage

3) Stripes

4) Awesome scary-ish background

What’s not to like?

Who do you think was the most influential person in history?

Many would say Jesus. Others might pick a different religious figure. Some would think of someone like Charles Darwin. Maybe Einstein. What about Newton or da Vinci? Thomas Jefferson? Thoreau?

The list could go on and on, like a menu. Bronte, Washington, Emerson, Lake and Powell, pickled onions, cheese, jalapeños, black olives, green peppers, pickled pig’s feet, crab legs, shrimp pot pie, peanut butter, squid, ketchup, spicy hot mustard, cold cut salami, hot sliced butter, coffee, garlic, padlocks, warm rye bread with cold butter, brushed nickel door knobs, twisted pretzels with cheese and hot slaw.

We could delve further into things by a cursory study of the effect of butterflies on rib eyes, haphazardly dive-bombing moths heading straight into the fire that’s roasting marshmallows on the camp site where the previous summer pickled eggs were not enjoyed by anyone. Served with a slice of gentleman’s fine Italian leather gloves, purpled minestrone soup would hit the spot.

And that is why we could possibly consider Benjamin Franklin as one of the most influential people in all of history.

Keep up the good work!

Did that make any sense to you? Of course not. Yet, in a high school history class, that kind of stuff would have gotten (and did!) right past the teacher.

Seriously.

We had a teacher that would base his comments on your essay on the length rather than the actual content. Some students caught on and began to do stuff like list menu items instead of writing anything. I don’t know how long they got away with it. It was quite some time, as I remember.

Eventually, the teacher learned (I think) to watch those students. I hadn’t been among them. I did write my essay questions with real content. Yet, even after he was “onto” these other kids, he apparently did not do the same with everyone. I answered an essay question once and, when I was finished, there were two blank lines left on the page. Rather than leave them blank, I wrote something like this: “I have two lines left to fill so I’m just going to write about these two lines that I have to fill in order to fill up these two lines so I won’t have two blank lines.”

At this point, I should point out that a lot of my essay question answers were relatively short and to the point. Well thought-out, I think, but short.

Of course, I didn’t have the “benefit” of listing the lunch menu to make my answers appear longer.

You also took your paper to the teacher and he’d review them while standing there.

So, there I was, with the teacher holding my paper in his hands. He waved his pen down the page as he read the answers. I saw him waving his pen over the last answer. I saw him waving his pen over those last two lines. I expected him to say something about those ridiculous two lines that I filled up with nonsense.

Instead, the response I got was something like: “Nice long answer, Dan.”

Yeah. I’m pretty sure he never read any of it.

So, blogging is a lot like that high school history class. No one reads what I write here either. LOL.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, if you were reading this, it would be in a letter or a newspaper. And, probably since I couldn’t afford to send a letter to everyone, especially not on a daily basis, and since newspapers wouldn’t (and couldn’t) publish everything submitted to them, you would not be reading this at all.

Recorded human history goes back about 5,000 years. Humans were around thousands of years before that, but any previous written history is long lost and for a long while there was likely no recorded history at all.

Look back at the past couple hundred years and compare them with the thousands that came before them. For a long time, human development was fairly stagnant. Many, many years would go by before we would see something new.

This is partly due to the fact that, for a long time, ideas had no value. You could buy and sell goods; they had value. But, ideas were free for the taking. If someone made something, others could freely copy them. As a result, what incentive is there in creating new things when you have a family to feed and there is more value in goods than in ideas?

We often credit the ancient Greeks with the beginnings of modern civilization. The Greeks invented coined money, thermometers, tumbler locks, among other things. The Greeks also had a patent system, where the inventor of a new device had exclusive rights to it for a period of one year.

The modern day patent system came out of Venice in the 1400’s. The first patent in what is now the United States was issued by Massachusetts in 1646.

The other factor to consider is that, for the vast majority of human history, people were ruled by systems of government that did not favor the individual. The individual was considered the subject or even the property of the government, often a king.

There was often no upward path either. If you were born a peasant, you stayed a peasant. Odds of you becoming the king of your own land were slim to none. With no hope of advancement, there is little drive to achievement.

But, then we come to the New World. In the American colonies, the colonists had more freedom, being far from the crown. In the 1700’s, Ben Franklin invented the Franklin stove, the lightning rod and the concept of mail order.

When the British government became too oppressive to the colonists, they rebelled. And won. Instead of setting up a monarchy (some troops wanted to make George Washington their new king), the colonists set up a democratic republic. The nation would be self-ruled.

There would be no monarchy to dictate what they could and could not do. And the federal government would have limited powers–powers designed to protect essential freedoms rather than power to rule.

So, for a long time in the United States, people had a wide latitude of freedom. And look where we are now!

Refrigeration was invented in 1805, with improvements in the mid-1800’s and early 1900’s. The early 1800’s also saw the invention of the circular saw, dental floss and the profile lathe. The electric telegraph was invented in 1831. Later came sewing machines, the wrench, and the electric relay. In the mid-1800’s, there was ether anesthesia, the rotary printing press, vulcanized rubber, safety pins, rolled toilet paper, the burglar alarm, the can opener and the web printing press, among many other inventions. Later in the 1800’s, there came the motor cycle, the paper clip, barbed wire, tape measure, vacuum cleaner, paper bags, pipe wrench, clothes hangers, fire hydrants, sandblasting, fire sprinklers, electric dental drill, mimeograph, airbrush, phonograph, carbon microphones, the cash register, metal detector, electric fan, electric iron, fountain pen, photographic film, skyscrapers, dish washer, drinking straw, escalator, radio, zipper, tractor, pneumatic hammer, remote control, the flashlight and more!

The early 1900’s saw assembly line production, the mercury vapor lamp, the hearing aid, air conditioning, offset printing press, airplane, electric washing machine, paper shredder, headset, auto pilot, electric blanket, gas mask, the supermarket, silica gel, polygraph, adhesive bandage, radial arm saw, bulldozer, masking tape, cotton swabs, garbage disposal, freon, electric razor, sunglasses, particle accelerator, and many more!

Americans were inventive during the Great Depression as well, giving us the thermistor, strobe light, staple removed, tape dispenser, frequency modulation, black light, pH meter, programming languages, chair lifts, radio telescope, shopping cart, xerography, fiberglass, nylon, teflon and more.

The mid-1900’s brought the blood bank, acrylic fiber, deodorant, microwave oven, chemotherapy, the transistor, defibrillator, mobile phone, instant camera, cat litter, video games, cable tv, barcode, artificial heart, heart-lung machine, automatic sliding doors, radar gun, polio vaccine, hard disk drive, industrial robot, bone marrow transplant, video tape, laser, carbon fiber, integrated circuit, spandex, LED, glucose meter, computer mouse, plasma display, heart transplants, artificial turf, kevlar, hypertext, cordless telephone, compact disc, DRAM, food bank, handheld calculator, crash test dummy, laser printer, smoke detector and more!

The late 1900’s gave us optical fiber, personal computers, eMail, operating systems, digital camera, ethernet, compact fluorescent light bulbs, the space shuttle, the graphical user interface, the Internet, voice mail, GPS, sulfur lamps and more.

All-in-all, there are over 7,000,000 patents in the United States. This is not to say that other countries have been idle, but it is important to bear in mind that, in comparison with centuries past, people in many countries have more freedoms and rights than in centuries past.

All these inventions move the world forward. Without freedom and property rights, people would have little incentive to create new things. Too many people think that inventions come about because of an altruistic desire for people to help others. While that may be the case for some people, most people just want to make a buck. Many immigrants came to this country, not looking for a handout, but looking to strike it rich. In their native lands, their “upward mobility” was restricted. In the U.S., they could develop new ideas and profit by them and achieve things they could only dream of in their homeland. And, for those already here, it didn’t matter whether they were born in poverty, they had equal opportunity to make it. There was no class system to hold them back.

It wasn’t some big government program that gave them any guarantees or incentives to succeed. It wasn’t people voting for the government to give them money or benefits that moved us forward. It wasn’t the government guaranteeing a minimum income, a livelihood or a bailout that allowed us to flourish.

It was freedom. It was liberty. It was the right of the people to own their own property and ideas. It was their own self-determination, self-motivation and drive to succeed and, yes, even a quest for profits, that brought us farther along in the past couple hundred years than in the prior few millennia.

Perhaps the greatest recognition of this is the Statue of Liberty, whose formal title is Liberty Enlightening the World. But, long before Lady Liberty greeted immigrants from Europe in New York Harbor, the promise of liberty was the great hope of all mankind.

Remember that, Liberty Enlightening the World. Look at how Liberty has enlightened the world in these past couple centuries!

Freedom works. Liberty is what gives us all hope. And that’s not something we should take away or change.

In another exciting episode of I Don’t Care Anymore, our hero screams “I’m melting! I’m melting!”

He screams. We scream. We all scream for melting ice cream!

Yay for ice cream!

Melted ice creamy goodness!

Watch this come up soon at the #1 spot in Google for “Melting Scream!” Yay for unprofitable long-tail keywords. Yay! Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip, her yay! Hip hip, oops, my hip is melted! Hip hip, hooray for melted knee caps! Hooray! Hooray! Yay!

It’s been real, folks, but I think I’m going to go have some ice cream! Yay for ice cream!

Peas, out.

Little Too thinks she’s royalty.

Here’s Speedy’s Purple Saturday.

And here is Purple Saturday HQ.

And here is the end of this post.

Imagine a clever image I didn’t feel like creating today in this spot here.

Still imagining?

Keep imagining.

Okay, that should about take up the normal image area. Hey, what do I care anymore? Google thinks I’m a big fat zero anyway.

In today’s yet another exciting episode of What’s Hot Friday? (the first of many, actually), we’ll take a look at some exciting news stuff that’s happening.

In its continuing effort to be more like Twitter, Facebook has introduced Facebook Lite.

Caught up in the 2012 Mayan presumed End of the World hoopla? Here’s an article I wrote on it a while back: “2012 - Surviving the End of the World or the Next Y2K?”

Step aside, Illuminati! Move over, Bilderbergers. Does a cat parasite secretly rule the world?

Have you bought my book yet? The Internet Marketing Backstage Pass? Better get your copy before I run out of, um, digital copies… Yeah. That’s the ticket. And it can be your pass!

Yeah, lame. But, such as it is…