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Jan 29, 2025

40 Studies In Futility: Your EZ-Pass to Total Nihilism

Just in time for Valentine’s Day (see the final entry)

By Ed Goldman

Here are some fun activities you can pursue on your way to irrelevance. They sure worked for me! 

  1. Opening a drug store in a building owned by the Christian Science church.
  2. Managing an apparel boutique in a nudist colony.
  3. Running a combo typewriter/fax repair shop.
Edgy Cartoon

A glasnost half-full?

  1. Presenting yourself as a specialist in de-colorizing classic black-and-white movies. 
  2. Doing furnace maintenance at a cryogenics lab.
  3. Starting a salad delivery service to the White House.
  4. Establishing a real estate practice in a prison yard.
  5. Hosting a backyard cigar “smoker” during a Santa Ana windstorm.
  6. Offering LA Mayor Karen Bass frequent-flyer points while she’s being interviewed on a call-in radio show.
  7. Organizing a bus tour of Tijuana for illegal aliens.
  1. Distributing flyers at a funeral for free dance lessons.
  2. Asking your pool-cleaning clients if they’d mind your working from home.
  3. Giving French cooking demonstrations at a food bank.
  4. Inviting high school and college girls to join a Taylor Swift boycott.
  5. Asking Facebook to cancel your account.
  6. Asking AT&T to give you a specific time for a technician to install your phone line.
  7. Finding a Democrat who’ll admit to having embraced the “woke” cultural movement.
  8. Finding Republicans who say they didn’t vote for Trump and that the January 6 insurrection actually happened.
  1. Locating anyone whose life and family were saved by the COVID vaccine who’ll come right out and admit that Dr. Anthony Fauci deserves some credit. And thanks.
  2. Naming someone you know whose TikTok data and cruising history would allow the Chinese government to take over the world.
  3. Denying you ever speed up when the traffic signal turns yellow.
  4. Pretending you had no idea that while you sheltered in place during COVID, the money you spent on groceries, streaming services and board games wasn’t tax deductible.
  5. Claiming you didn’t get chocked up while watching “Wicked.”
  6. Arguing that former President Joe Biden was simply being shrewd when he turned into a human popsicle in the beginning of his debate with now-President Donald Trump.
  7. If you worked your glutes off to pay back your college loans years ago, saying you think it would’ve been fine for the U.S. to forgive everyone else’s.
  8. Insisting that the women on Fox News are hired for their journalistic chops, not their figures, and that CNN’s reporting doesn’t lean even a smidge to the left.
  1. Feeling that the “woke” movement didn’t help the Democrats lose the November 2024 elections, and that inflation and immigration weren’t really the issues. 
  2. Imagining that this is the first time a U.S. President has been influenced by oligarchs.
  3. Making believe that you’ve always been familiar with the word “oligarchs.”
  4. Fantasizing that you’ve continued to follow the Russian-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars on a daily basis.
  5. Professing the belief that you’re not the slightest bit curious about Ozempic and plastic surgery.
  6. Telling your friends you don’t get their pop-culture references because you never watch TV, preferring to read books every night.
  7. Strongly believing that only kooks and people on the political fringed call radio shows, though wondering why the lines are always busy.
  8. Maintaining that Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus and Larry King were overlooked as latter-day scholars.
  1. Allowing that St. Teresa was probably a good person but privately wondering how she avoided coming down with leprosy.
  2. Intuiting that Whoopi Goldberg has a certain wisdom, empathy and insight, which she cleverly disguises as smugness, superiority and stupidity.
  3. Declaiming that baseball is a highly cerebral, fast-moving sport, that pickleball is the safest one and skydiving is a rational experience.
  4. Articulating that Carrot Top is, and Gallagher was, underestimated comic geniuses. 
  5. Expounding that if Elvis Presley really died in 1977, how come he’s spotted so often?
  6. Stating unequivocally that labor leader Jimmy Hoffa staged his disappearance and is planning a comeback this year, possibly in time for his 112th birthday on Valentine’s Day. 

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).