Energy solutions search stops at moon

  Doug Lief Lief is a fourth-year English
student who is cleaner burning and better for your engine. Email
him at [email protected].

Lately, gas stations have been lucky for every extra nine-tenths
of a penny they can scrounge up. But is America’s dance with
Sweet Lady Crude winding down? In the past, the government’s
idea of an alternative energy source was “more
oil.”

Seeing as the OPEC nations feel about us the same way we feel
about David Arquette (occasionally tolerable but on increasingly
thinner ice), we must turn to the great minds of the world and say,
“Hey nerds, sorry we beat you up in middle school, but we
could really use your help.”

There is a mass concern in our daily culture over a small
faction, a rebel group fueled by an overdeveloped religious
fanaticism who perpetuated an aerial assault on a symbol of
national power, costing thousands of people their lives. Their
leader is a mysterious soldier from a backwards desert land where
lawlessness is the norm, resources are scarce, and smuggling is a
way of life. I am talking, of course, about Star Wars.

The reason I mention this is that according to an article a few
weeks ago on CNN.com, one man’s vision of alternative energy
may give us the orbiting Death Star we’ve always dreamed of
““ the Moon. For thousands of years, Man has yearned to use
the moon against himself, and now thanks to our energy crunch, we
may just have the chance.

Illustration by JARRETT QUON/Daily Bruin Professor David
Criswell of the University of Houston proposes that we build plants
on the moon to collect solar energy, then transmit it to Earth in
concentrated microwave beams. Quoth CNN, however, “He
conceded that some people might be concerned that the system could
fall into the wrong hands, possibly transforming the gentle
microwave power beam into a new type of weapon that could blast the
Earth from space.”

My memory fails to think of a previous instance of the phrase
“blast the Earth from space” on CNN. I found the
proposal extremely disconcerting for two reasons. First, Criswell
was the name of a phony prognosticator from the ’50s and
’60s who would go on the “Tonight Show” and make
predictions like, “Within the next twenty years, ankles will
be obsolete,” and who hung around with wunderkinder like Ed
Wood.

Second, does it bother you that our alternative energy solutions
are now coming from “Moonraker?” That’s a bad
James Bond movie, even for Roger Moore. If we’re going to
create energy solutions based on the movies we might as well start
with Soylent Green. Or, we could go to Tosche Station to pick up
some power converters (note to non-geeks, that’s the most
effeminate line in the Star Wars series, except perhaps for some of
the stuff from the Attack of the Clones trailer).

My other favorite new source of alternative energy was in
another article on CNN.com (which actually ran the same day as the
other), which is quite literally, the biggest
“chicken-shit” idea to come along in years. Apparently,
“liquefied, cooked and sterilized by heat and intense
pressure, it [chicken manure] can be blended with diesel to power
an engine with no significant difference in performance.” It
is worth noting that University of West Virginia’s Professor
Al Stiller, who developed the poopcooker, can’t really
explain how it works.

This makes Al Stiller one of the most inventive minds of the
21st century. This is the same kind of blinding light from God I
associate with the invention of beer. Think of how complicated it
is to make beer. It’s a combination of barley, malt and hops
which must be put into metal tanks and fermented and simonized five
times, exposed to a radioactive isotope of vanadium, stirred,
pumped through an artificial heart, chilled, purged, distilled,
pressurized and incubated in a marsupial pouch, or so goes my
understanding.

But they’ve been drinking this swill since the Middle
Ages, so either somebody had to have the biggest series of
accidents in history, or actually think of this process and do it.
This kind of impossible complexity is the sort of argument made
against evolution, which points to the conclusion that in 844 AD
God appeared to the Monks of Llywylyydyn (Welsh for Pabst) and
said, “Yea, have a cold one on Me.”

Yes, it seems with a little time and mental instability you can
make an energy source out of anything. That is why I propose an
alternative energy solution of my own. When was the last time you
felt the power of the mandolin? At the mention of the word, do you
not feel the pulse of the fury of the mandolin? Hear the strings,
feel the roar, mandolins are loose!

But proceed with caution, for the mandolin master pulls the
strings, and he will tolerate no carelessness of pluck or
strum!

This brings me to my final energy source: crack. Crack allows
wackiness, environmental considerations, availability and low cost.
I know what you’re thinking. “Doug, where can I get
some crack?” Quit asking me that. You see, Timmy (for the
sake of brevity you’re all named Timmy), the oil producing
nations are holding back the development of cleaner burning fuels
like crack and alcohol, yet experiments with these substances at
numerous universities yielded highly positive and addictive
results. Write your congressman. Crack fever: catch it!