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History repeats itself
By HOWARD TROXLER
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 26, 2001
Howard Troxler, Columnist
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Well, thank goodness for the 2101 Super Bowl, which is arriving just in time to take our minds off the news. Sometimes it seems that things get worse and worse with each passing year, and it makes you yearn for the simpler times of, say, a century ago.
For example, let's compare the innocent charm of that classic star, Eminem, or the legendary Madonna, to the filth that's out there today. And kids today! All they do is wear their virtual-reality masks and badger their parents for money, like the world owes them a living. Has it ever been more grim?
Oh, well. Thank goodness for small blessings. We should be grateful that the courts have almost finished settling the 2096 presidential election, under the terms of the constitutional amendment that ended popular elections and threw the decision directly into the courts. In the compromise that abolished the Electoral College, small states remain entitled to the same number of lawyers as the large states.
The good news is that the total time spent in lawsuits during this presidential race was 49 months, which is down slightly from the average over the past two decades of 50.25 months. That's also slightly shorter than the NBA playoffs, by the way.
In related political news, U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., announced his retirement this year at the age of 198 to "pursue other interests." Despite his full, rich career, Thurmond is best known as the pioneering first recipient of a full-body transplant.
Also on the science front, experts announced this week that global warming might finally have reached its peak. The prediction was based on measurements taken at the University of South Florida's campus, located on St. Petersburg's famous 9th Street Beach.
The University of 16th Street, At Least The Part South of Gandy, which is another of the state's 294 state universities, revealed this week that it was making great progress in cloning the palmetto bug. The insect was declared extinct 50 years ago but is being recreated from museum specimens. "We never knew how much we'd miss those little fellers," a spokesman said.
Water officials in the Tampa Bay area announced that 2100 was the driest year on record, and promised to start cracking down on water-use violators "any year now." So don't look for those century-old watering restrictions to end.
A full 99 years after work began, construction resumed this week on the so-called "Malfunction Junction" in Tampa. The delay was blamed on a programming error in the construction robots, which caused them to stand around in orange vests staring at the large holes they had dug.
This week also marks the official closing of the Florida Flash, the state's 90-year-old system of high-speed rail. State officials said the old-style "bullet train" was no longer needed with the advent of personal jetpacks.
Created long before Florida split in two, with the northern half renamed "Disney," the train was intended to link Tampa Bay, Orlando and Miami. The train's right-of-way now will be converted to green space under glass, air-conditioned to bring the average temperature down to a chilly 85 degrees.
Left standing will be Turanchik Park, at the Tampa end of the line, commemorating that grim day in 2012 when the entire opening parade of the Olympics succumbed to heatstroke and the remainder of the games were canceled.
So, enough of this news! Let's all enjoy the spectacle while we can, before we have to get back to the grim reality of our two-day work weeks. Gotta pay the bills, you know.
Today's Odyssey
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