Let’s be honest: you’d rather wrestle a polar bear naked than fill up your tank with gas, wouldn’t you? The cost of gas – I meant you would be naked, not the polar bear – take away their fur and they’re pretty much naked, anyway, right, so – wh…what was I talking about?
Oh. The cost of gas. Right. It’s totally out of control, and it continues to rise. As the price of gas goes up, alternative sources of energy become more and more inviting. One alternative source of energy that gets far less attention than it deserves is dead people.
It’s not like we’re not all aware of the basic principle: how many times have you heard of – or possibly even spoken of yourself – a dead person turning in his or her grave? All we need to do is connect these spinning dead people to turbines to generate electricity. Put cemeteries on the power grid, and, depending upon how mortified the dead people in them are, you could generate enough electricity for all sorts of uses, including powering electric cars.
Which, granted, after a brief flurry of interest, no longer exist.
We’ll work around that.
How would this work on a practical level? Consider Mexican revolutionary Che Guevara. How do you think he would feel if he found out his main claim to fame today is as a t-shirt and coffee mug icon? I think he would spin fast enough to be able to power approximately10,000 coffeemakers for a year.
Or, how about Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician whose work, especially on what he called the “universal machine,” was an important inspiration for early research into computers? Do you think he would be delighted to know that his ideas are now being used by millions of people throughout the world to kill zombies in massive multiplayer role playing…thingies (MMRPTs) and trade sexual fantasies with people they’ll never meet? I think he’s probably spinning at a rate that could power all of the computers in the world for 100 years.
There is a poster in the Bloor subway station dominated by an image of Michael Therriault as Gollum with the headline “Lord of the ring tones.” One ring tone to bind them, one ring tone to get them on a conference call? J. R. R. Tolkein must be spinning in his grave fast enough to generate enough power to light up all of the theatres in North America for a year. If the ad campaign moves to Europe when the show does, you might be able to include all of their theatres, as well.
President George W. Bush likes to compare himself to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. That must be good enough to keep the lights on in London for a year. On the other hand, he likes to compare himself to President Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s spinning is probably strong enough to keep New York lit for a year. Hmm… Perhaps we can get the two dead leaders to compete to see who can generate the most electricity. If we piped Bush speeches into their graves, we could probably generate enough electricity to keep several cities on both sides of the ocean going!
Who do you think would generate more electricity: Vincent van Gogh, whose paintings now sell for $50 million or more even though he only sold three paintings in his lifetime, or; Leonardo Da Vinci, whose masterpiece is now at the center of a poorly written, paranoid conspiracy thriller? You’re right: both dead men are better than nuclear power plants, so which of them spins faster is really irrelevant.
All of this is small potatoes, when you can imagine pissing off a whole group of dead people. For instance: put an amendment in the American Constitution making it illegal for gay people to get married. An amendment curtailing the rights of citizens in a document that’s all about ensuring the freedom of citizens? With the energy generated by making all of the founding fathers turn in their graves at the same time, the United States could end its dependence on foreign oil once and for all!
The best part of this energy plan is that it costs virtually nothing and it’s already well underway. All we need to do is convince the powers that be to put some research money into the project so that we can get the technology perfected – you think oil companies would be cool with that?