How to Remain Entertained When Nobody Is Around and You Have Nothing to Do

1. Start a new religion. You’ll need to select a god, or gods, and you’ll also need to come up with some sort of theology. Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to find some followers. Create a website, print up some brochures, and consider putting up a billboard. Go someplace where there are a lot of people (a university, a shopping mall, Wal-Mart) and pass out your brochures to passersby. Be sure to tell them all the terrible things that will happen to them if they don’t join your religion. Once you get enough followers, build a huge warehouse, call it a church, and spend all the money you get from your followers on building improvements.

2. Do some political canvassing. It’s an election year, and canvassing is a great way to meet new people. Most canvassers work in the evening, when people are eating dinner, which means that most people are home and ready to talk to anybody who comes to the door. First, find a candidate you think you can support. After that, learn as much as you can about your candidate’s opponent so you know what bad things to say about that person. Then, start knocking on doors! Tell people why they shouldn’t vote for your candidate’s opponent. Remember to point out that the other guy took bribes from Jack Abramoff. Don’t say anything about your candidate, because he doesn’t really have anything going for him.

3. Go on a road trip. Some people are convinced that we’re running out of oil, so you better take a good, long road trip while you still can. Use as much gas as possible, because there might not be as much next year. Maybe rent a Hummer. Hop on I-80 and drive from New York to San Francisco. By taking the interstate, you’ll avoid all the small towns and trees and mountains and weird people along the smaller highways. You don’t want that.

4. Get addicted to the internet. Find a forum or a blog where you can talk to people and just start typing. You’ll be addicted in no time, and you won’t need to find anything else to do. You won’t even need friends anymore, because all of your friends will be online. Sure, they’ll just be words on a screen, and you’ll never know for sure if you’re talking to a 50-year old man or a 19-year old woman, but that’s just part of the internet’s charm.

The reality we can all agree on

On The Colbert Report the other night, during a segment called The Wørd, Stephen Colbert gave a wonderfully insightful and hilarious monologue about “Wikiality,” the “reality that we can all agree on.” He spoke about how as long as a majority of people think something is true, it is true. What people believe to be true is more important than what actually is true, and those people who stick to the facts are branded as crazy.

During The Wørd, Colbert asked his audience members to go to the entry about elephants in Wikipedia and write that the elephant population had tripled in the last six months, thus demonstrating that Wikipedia allows for a democracy of knowledge in which anybody can determine what is and isn’t true. In response, a huge number of people rushed to Wikipedia and made the change to several different articles about elephants, thus causing the Wikipedians to put protections on the articles and ban certain people from editing them.

On forums such as the Colbert Nation message board, one can see how the fans felt about these Wikinazis (as Colbert might call them). A number of Colbert Nation members are calling on one another to vandalize Wikipedia articles, adding false bits of information that have been mentioned on The Colbert Report. Others asked that Colbert put Wikipedia “On Notice,” as Colbert does with seemingly random things that upset him in some way.

I noticed very few, if any, comments about the actual meaning behind Colbert’s monologue. Colbert's actual subject matter wasn't Wikipedia: it was the society in which we live. The fans were in awe of Colbert’s power to disrupt a popular website, but they completely missed his point: that people in our society actually are just coming to a consensus about what is true without paying close attention to facts. Colbert mentioned (truthfully) that the percentage of people who believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction had gone from 36 percent to 50 percent in 18 months, despite the fact that this has never been shown to be true.

Euphemisms, deceptions, and truthiness have turned truth into an enemy, and Colbert is acutely aware of that. As he stated on the first episode of The Colbert Report, “we are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.” He’s trying, in his brilliantly satirical way, to get the truth out, but it seems that large numbers of people are missing his point. The day after the Wikiality incident, the big news was that Colbert had a huge impact on Wikipedia. It was one of Colbert’s best Wørds to date, and the story should have been how painfully true it was and how dangerous that truth is for our society.

Obese Americans eat healthy diets

A recent survey has shown that most obese people in America claim that they have healthy diets and that they exercise vigorously on a regular basis.

In related news, a recent study has shown that most obese people in America think that Twinkies are healthy and that getting up to change the TV station is vigorous exercise.