We’ve got a situation here, Rutherford, and we’d like you to relay it to the rest of your office. We’ve received feedback from several of our retail clients stating that they are dissatisfied with the performance of our chemtrails, which directly affects their profits and return on investment. As a government branch, they expect our chemicals to be potent and us ourselves to be precise, accurate, and expedient. For many of them, this is obviously their first time working with the government.

“Mommy, fourth grade is so boring! Why do I have to go to school anyway?”

“That’s a very important question, honey! Let’s play a little game, okay?”

“I like games!”

“Okay, repeat after me: Would you like fries with that?”

 “I don’t get it, mommy.”

“That’s what the people who work at Burger King say. They’re working at what’s called a poverty-wage job.”

Dear students,

In light of the recent severe drop in temperature, we here at the university are quite worried that you might freeze to death. We want to make sure that you don’t. And we are going to do that by telling you not to.

Alfred Thayer Mahan is the kind of historical figure who proves that fame and aptitude are not always bedfellows. By the late nineteenth century, he was the undisputed authority on naval history, the man who coined the term “sea power” and lent it enough gravitas to send Congress scuttling toward new battleships. His seminal work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, was the TED Talk of its era—if TED Talks were 500-page treatises on naval strategy, dense with charts, footnotes, and historical examples. Mahan became the intellectual godfather of America’s rise as a global maritime force.

When I heard that Johnny Depp had curated blasting Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes from a rocket launcher, I was, quite frankly, underwhelmed. Granted, the drama did celebrate Thompson’s outlaw gonzo spirit. Depp had commissioned the erection of a phallic looking rocket launcher topped by a double-thumbed fist. Fellow bad boys Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn were among the guests; Lyle Lovett and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band played and sang; there were fireworks and I expect liquor and drugs flowed freely. Still, I shrugged. Fully ten years before Depp’s carefully curated spectacle, my family had blasted our dad’s ashes into eternity. With an old shotgun, from the side of a mountain at sunset. For a lot less than the $3 million that Depp shelled out.