Going Over the Fiscal Waterfall in a Pork Barrel

Well, it's nice to be back. For those who didn't know, Grainiums was on hiatus. And while this moment in a blog post seems a little early for a parenthetical aside, we're going to have one.

(Hiatus is a Latin word translated as being a gap or interruption in continuity. It is derived from the past participle "hiare," meaning "to gape." To gape is defined as "to stare wonderingly or stupidly, often with the mouth open.")

That pretty much sums up what I've been doing for the past several weeks. But I wiped away the drool oozing from the corners of my mouth and set myself back to the ol' grindstone. Looking back at all of the events that occurred during the hiatus, nothing screamed "stare stupidly" more than the government's handling of the country's financial woes.

The United States was facing a two-headed monster on January 1 - tax increases and budget cuts. Fortunately with a deadline in effect, it meant our legislative bodies would burn the midnight oil to come up with a solution. At least I assumed the government was burning a petroleum product because the price of gas went up during this period. Facing public backlash and battling through partisan devisiveness, our elected representatives, in the tried and true, American get-to-it attitude, got half the job done. They eliminated the tax increases. But what about the budget cuts? This is going to be a tough one for them as there are lots of marquee funding choices on the chopping block. Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, education. Hard to find things to cut from the budget, although it shouldn't be that difficult to at least find a starting point...

College humor - Punking a rattlesnake
with a fake squirrel.

The U.S. government gave two California academic institutions - San Diego State University, and the University of California, Davis - $325,000 to develop a robotic squirrel to help researchers at the schools study "the nuances between predator and prey" of the California ground squirrel and rattlesnakes. The robosquirrel, when placed in the proper environment and confronted by a real rattlesnake, is designed to wag its tail back and forth to simulate what a real squirrel would do in a similar situation.

(Spoiler Alert: That's all it was built to do.)

And that's all it did, because apparently that's what squirrels will do when threatened by a viper. Okay, that and it seems that real squirrels also have the speed and agility to dodge a rattlesnake strike, animated behavior that I guess doesn't quite fit in a $325K budget. So if the rattlesnake struck at the robotic squirrel, the chances are relatively high a bite would occur. However, the robosquirrel shares one other characteristic with a real squirrel besides a wagging tail: both have immunity to the effects of rattlesnake venom. This would be like me getting a government grant to buy you a bag of marshmallows to throw at me, but instead of me it's a cardboard cutout that looks like me. There's also no mouth, but there's a speaker where my mouth was so you can hear me warn you not to throw the marshmallows at me. And either a) you're so stupid you don't throw one, or b) you throw one and it hits the fake me because the fake me can't move, and it doesn't hurt.

The ground squirrel is not the only member of nature's crash-test dummy army. There is a robot lizard that does territorially-defensive push-ups, a robot female sage grouse that uses a spycam to collect data on male sage grouse's courtship behavior, and the fake cockroach soaked in pheromones to study cockroach peer pressure. Public funding for cockroaches...wearing musk.

I'm alright, nobody worry 'bout me.
Why you gotta give me a fight, why
don't you let me be.

Interesting ideas to kick around the campus coffee shop, but increasing our financial debt $325,000 for a study using a taxidermy squirrel that only wags its tail? By comparison, the gopher used in the movie Caddyshack - the one used to generate behavioral "nuances" between a rodent and a golf course groundskeeper - was also relatively cheap to build and operate, but at least that little fucker could dance...and to the tune of almost $40 million at the box office! So in essence, we don't need government funding directed toward post graduate work on rodents adding to our fiscal deficit. We need government funding directed toward film comedies with dancing rodents turning a profit! Watching a flash mob of dancing hamsters won't completely cure the country's debt woes, but it'll help us laugh while we pay it down.

SDSU defended the grant in part by pointing out the components to make the squirrel only cost a few hundred dollars. The rest of the $324,000 and change went to fund the 4 graduate students and 30 undergrad students participating in the project because, you know, we can't expect college students or their parents to pay for tuition, and hobbies aren't covered through student loans. Not that all scientific studies don't deserve government subsidies. I think discovering how diseases are transmitted between species is very important because that kind of knowledge has a practical application to humans. However, I've come across a few rattlers in my travels, and the last thing I think I'd do is "drop trou" and shake my ass hoping to keep them at bay.

And what of university officials and professors claims that a study of this nature has helped in understanding human behavior? Judging by public disbelief and outrage generated by their government funded shopping spree at Radio Shack...success!