Price of Dirt Soars 800 Percent Leading to Shortages, Widespread Rioting

Record oil prices and rising sea levels have driven the price of dirt up 800 percent since January, leading to worldwide shortages and mass rioting. Agencies across third world countries have reported a significant breakdown in the social order as bandits and militias raid dirt farms and forcefully intercept dirt shipments from relief organizations as the world braces for a global catastrophe.

"It's like nothing we've seen before," DIRTFAM director Clod Mudman said Friday. "These countries, more than any others, depend on dirt for their livelihoods. This is truly a crisis of epic proportions."

Dirt riots have become commonplace in Egypt, Yemen, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, and Senegal, and Mudman predicts the situation is not likely to improve.

"The dirt farmers have no way to protect their crop," Mudman said. "And it's becoming impossible for us to get dirt to the people who need it most."

People in the third world depend heavily on dirt for both food and housing. Haitian dirt, for example, is considered a delicacy and is in particularly high demand. Dirt is also the number one building resource in the third world, raising concerns for the future of structure-building in these countries.

"It used to be that they could at least, as a last resort, burrow into the ground like mole-people to get out of the elements," Mudman said. "But with dirt going the way it's going, it is looking more and more like we are going to have to go back to caves at some point."

Nguyen Ngnu, of Thailand, is on the verge of doing just that. Ngnu, a 33-year-old father of nine, sold chicken beaks at a local market before the dirt shortage. As dirt became scarce, Ngnu was forced to sell his chickens and most of the family's possessions.

"There is no more dirt," Ngnu said. "Where is the dirt? The government says to be patient, that there will be dirt but how long can we wait?"

With no more dirt to raise his chickens on, and as a result no beaks to take to market, Ngnu and his family are facing the dirtless future.

"We have no food, our floor is down to bedrock," Ngnu said. "When we had a dirt floor at least it could be leveled and not digging into our backs as we slept. Pang, our oldest, is out searching for a cave. When he finds one, we will go."

In the meantime, Ngnu and so many others like him find ways to cope without dirt, but they are running out of time. Mudman estimates that, without intervention, dirt distribution among the third world could fall as much as 75 percent in just the next year. If that happens, look for dirt-based violence to dramatically escalate, he said.

"It's up to us, who live in dirt-rich countries, to find a solution," Mudman said. "We have plenty of dirt to spare. In America alone we waste more dirt in a day than many of these countries produce in a year. For the cost of a single mud bath, you could feed dirt to a small village for six months. Something to think about."

NordSense Solutions: Teen Pregnancy

So many problems, so little time. Today - teen pregnancy. Already, I'm sure some of you are wondering, "Is teen pregnancy really a problem?" I guess it really isn't, unless you are a teen and you don't want to be pregnant. So I guess a better description of the problem is "unwanted" teen pregnancy. Apparently "unwanted" teen pregnancies are on the rise again (after experiencing a sharp decline during the "Britney is preggers" years when getting knocked up by some no-talent creeper was the "cool" thing to do, everyone has now seen how it made her go bean bags and, like those incredibly annoying little fluffy dog-rats they all bought a few years ago to be like Paris, their pregnancies just don't seem as "cute" anymore and are starting to make them smell funny).

So what is the answer? I'm glad you asked: Childhood obesity. Now, some of you might say "But isn't childhood obesity yet another growing problem?" And you might be right. But if I learned anything from law school it's that there isn't a single problem that can't be made into an opportunity (usually an opportunity to blame someone and make money). In this case, I think childhood obesity is the perfect opportunity.

It should be obvious by now that sex education, abstinence education, and every other kind of education has failed to prevent unwanted teen pregnancies. The fact is, teens like to have sex, and they like to have sex because it is fun. So how do you stop teens from wanting to have sex? Easy- make it less fun. Or even better, not fun at all. And what's the easiest way to do that? Make sure that as many kids as possible, by the time they are teens, are morbidly obese. We are already off to a pretty good start. But we can do better. The more teens that are grossly obese, the less likely it is that any of them will become pregnant unintentionally, or really, pregnant at all.

It goes without saying, as anyone who's joined the "deuce, deuce-and-a-half club" knows, that sex with someone who is morbidly obese is a lot more work than fun. Statistics have even shown that most people, given the choice, would rather build a deck than have sex with a morbidly obese person. Sure, building a deck sucks and it's a lot of work, but at least when you're done you have something you can use, and the only maintenance you need to perform is some painting every so often. But have sex with someone who's morbidly obese, and he or she will undoubtedly want you to feed him or her afterwards, and, like a lost puppy, you'll now have a new best friend, except it will be a new best friend that costs you $500 a week in groceries.

Faced with the alternatives (i.e. moving to Europe), I think kids will abstain. Obviously, the risk of implementing this plan is that we will see a dramatic increase in unintentional deck-building, but I think that is a risk we should be willing to take. Of course, it is unrealistic to think that we can get 100% of our teens to be morbidly obese. Undoubtedly some parents won't want their kids to become sufficiently obese so as to utterly repulse the opposite sex. But society will soon recognize that these parents are just part of the problem, and they will be swiftly shunned into submission.

It is also unrealistic to think that a lot of teens won't get drunk enough to think that sex with a fellow morbidly obese party-goer would be a "pretty good idea", which leads me to the second part of my foolproof plan: Ban alcohol and legalize marijuana, because, let's face it, there is yet to be a single documented case of "pot goggles". And with pot legalized, the kids can still get their altered-state-of-consciousness fix, but they can get it with piles of brownies, guaranteeing they'll stay grotesquely obese for years to come.

It's not only another win, it's a win-win-win, and another problem solved. You're welcome, America.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Make sure your kids know that they have until age 25 to slim down to "obese" or "mildly obese", otherwise they legally waive most of their rights under the Constitution. I recommend extreme surgery or miracle diet pills, but please consult with a physician. If you can't afford a physician, consult a late-night TV infomercial or just ask the Internet.

Mutant Man-Cows Sadly Still Not A Reality

I was disappointed to learn today that despite scientists' best efforts, the creation of mutant man-cows is still just a dream. Even worse, scientists say the intent of a recent human-cow embryo project isn't even to make mutant man-cows, but to cure disease. Thanks for nothing, science. I mean, if we are inserting human DNA into the egg cells of cows for any other purpose than to create mutant man-cows, then what's the point?

Sure, curing disease is great, and I'm all for that, but why stop there? If we can cure disease and create mutant man-cows in the process, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't. OK, I can see how a lot of people would think that mutant man-cows is something that could only happen in some futuristic fantasy world. But a lot of people also thought that we could never make it to the moon. What if we had listened to them? What if we had just said, "Oh yeah, the moon's WAY too far away- we probably shouldn't even try"? Then we'd be sitting here, having never been to the moon, still wondering what it's made out of and why it's making such an angry face at us all the time.

I, for one, don't want to be sitting here 50 years from now, sans mutant man-cows, wondering what might have been. And don't think this is just about mutant man-cows. If they can make mutant man-cows, you know they can make mutant man-just about anythings. Meagles (mutant man-eagles), Mea Lions (mutant man-sea lions), Malruses (mutant man-walruses), Menguins (mutant man-penguins), and Moxen (mutant man-oxen), are just a few I'd like to see off the top of my head. The possibilities are endless. But if we're not even going to try to make something as basic as a mutant man-cow, the chances of ever see something as glorious as a mutant man-hippo-zebra-fish are about as good as those of Eddie Murphy ever making a good movie again. But take Eddie Murphy's DNA and cross it with a sloth bear's and a gila monster's, see what comes out and put that in charge of a day-care, and you've got a box-office smash.

Unfortunately, some angry people who don't like fun and aren't happy unless they are complaining are whining that creating hybrid manimal freaks would be "unethical". But I think that fusing mankind's superior intellect with the animal kingdom's highly adapted physical features is just the next logical step for the evolution of humanity. Think about it- the vast resource of the multitude of species around us has gone largely untapped. So far we have really only tamed and bred animals to do our work, be food for us, or make us not feel as sad when we have been rejected by the rest of humanity because we are emotionally unstable (see: cats).

But a time will surely come when we will need to adopt much of the animal kingdom's unique abilities just to survive. Whether we need specialized digging abilities to burrow like mole-people away from a Nuclear wasteland, fish gills for breathing underwater after all the icecaps have melted, or antelope legs for running long distances after we run out of oil, it is in humans' best interests to start sooner than later. Sure, laugh now, but we won't be the ones laughing when a battalion of hyena-men from space comes to conquer us and we don't even have an army of flying squirrel-baboon-men ready to fight back. So if we eventually find ourselves slaves to a mutant race of hyena-people from space, don't blame me, blame the do-nothing scientists who wouldn't even make a simple man-cow when they had the chance.