You can be vegan if you want but the other 99% of the world isn’t and never will be.  Right now, somewhere in the world, maggots are crawling around in a caterpillar’s brain, eating it from the inside.  Somewhere else, a whimpering puppy is hiding from a pack of coyotes who just killed its mother.  Somewhere else a lion is eating an antelope.  But look on the bright side!  Somewhere else, a bear is starving to death, scared and alone and cold, because it doesn’t have anything to kill.

And if they could, all they would say is:

1 - I am hungry.

2 - I need to shit.

3 - If you die tonight, I am going to eat your body.

“Darn it, I don’t know what to do.  I just hacked into a global warming research institute looking for evidence that global warming is a hoax.”

“And what did you find?”

“Not a thing.  In over 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents I couldn’t find anything that proved these scientists were lying or part of a conspiracy.”

“Hmm.  Well, just tell everyone that you did.  Tell them you found a smoking gun and that they can write off all climate science data as fake now.”

“Will that work?”

“Yes.”

The internet has given us a wonderful new way to instantly compare our lives to hundreds of people with the push of a button.  Scan through the newsfeed of all your friends from the last few hours.  Somebody is having a better day than you.  Someone just got a more exciting career opportunity than you did.  Someone is posting pictures from a party you didn’t know about.  Why?  Because you suck, that’s why.

Bill Watterson’s daily strip was a genius work of art that helped define the childhoods of a generation, but he’s retired forever now along with his zeitgeist-twin Gary Larsen.  Their work has now largely been supplanted by internet comic strips, which celebrate terrible art and an even more terrible inability to tell a joke.  Meanwhile, the comics that actually make it to newspaper print seem to be actively reveling in their status as self-parodying dinosaurs.

Cathy is still “ack”-ing.  Hagar is still horrible-ing.  Garfield perhaps gets the brunt of it but honestly, the rabbit hole goes much, much deeper.

Scientists used to think that the universe would end with a sort of “reverse Big Bang”, with the force of gravity sucking the Universe back into itself in a final, fiery death.  The human mind can accept such an event — perhaps even, from the ashes, a new Universe could grow (scientists called that cool idea the “Oscillating Universe Theory”).  Alas, recent evidence indicates that this is not the case.  The universe is expanding, and will continue to do so, faster and faster.  Galaxies will drift further and further away from us over time until we can’t even see the stars in the night sky any more.  Then, slowly, as energy saps away into the endless void, we will become nothing but cold, dead hunks of matter.  And we’ll just be like that.  Forever.