I know: I took some time off from this sort of thing; I hear about that a lot. Two reasons.

First: I’ve got other stuff going on; NotS has never really been the fulltime job it probably should be. That said....

Second: it’s a bit hopeless, in fact. It’s not that I never encounter anything dumb enough to report and, more importantly, opine upon; it’s that, given the world as it’s rapidly becoming, I have serious doubts that I could finish typing a single article before  three more painfully retarded stories hit the mainstream news. NotS is not, I suppose, mainstream, since there’s not a lot here about puppies being cute and nuns being somehow useful to the planet.

All that out of the way, I just ran across this, from TimesOnline.co.uk, about merit badges for Guides. If you happen to be in the US while reading this, and are therefore not entirely aware that there are other countries out there, the Guides are sorta like GirlScouts, or Brownies, or Nick Cave Groupies. You get the idea.

Granting that I’m not a huge fan of merit badges in the first place, inasmuch as I regard it as a useless waste of materials to print up a reminder that you didn’t fuck up tragically [inasmuch also as it takes a lot to get me to regard anything as a waste of material on a planet where oxygen remains a fairly recent form of air pollution], you’ll never guess what they’re handing out merit badges for. Unless you’ve already noticed the image to the right of the following paragraphs.

That’s right, Kids: a merit badge for safe sex. Oh goody.

Let’s talk about that for a moment, before we get into the idiocy inherent in handing out little patches over it.

Once upon a time, there were these certain sorts of diseases which, if you were really lucky, you could get by sticking your dick into someone. Which is to say that there were other ways to get them; but those ways were globally regarded as being less fun overall.

For the most part, the diseases were pretty boring, by modern standards. You could kill them by taking a few pills derived from mould [this being not a NotS about antibacterial agents, I won’t expound on the attrition of any doctor talking to me like I never went to college but did suffer a bad case of brainloss recently and therefore couldn’t guess that failing to take all the penicillin prescribed might somehow result in a Bad Thing]; there were a viral affliction or two, which even now lack actual cures, but that was little more than a sad fact of life on a planet routinely hit by rogue asteroids—you could live with them.

Then, in the eighties, a new superbug began appearing in the news. The mainstream news. Those invenerable fucktards rushing to alert You to the dangers of touching a doorknob anywhere west of Venus. And that led to this big thing about Safe Sex  and Bad Heroin and whatever else. Because, really, we had to hear about a damned immunicidal virus to form a disparaging opinion about smack.

A fun fact I learned, comparatively recently. Now, today, in the twenty-first century, about one in a thousand people, on average, are wandering around with AIDS. One per thousand. That angers me: I coulda played Russian Roulette another seven hundred times or so, given those odds.

Okay: of chicks who’d sleep with me, call it another fifty times. If I suddenly got all fastidious. Look: this isn’t about that. Let’s move on....

So, here’s the thing. We—and I use that pronoun loosely—are now handing out little starstickers to kids who regard the eighties with the same squinty disbelief as the generation leading up to them have always thought of the sixties. Except that, where we wonder what strange, alien civilisation actually made a big, lifestopping deal about watching people trying to get into orbit without blowing up on all three channels at once, The Kids Today are marvelling, in general, at the archaic practise of randomly fucking every third biped on the street without thinking that, just maybe, you were meeting Typhoid Mary. Okay? In essence, We’re handing out merit badges for remembering not to get halfway to orbit before exploding.

It’s like the adverts for Coca-cola and Jeezuz. Do we really need to be reminded anymore? Are natives of Antarctica wandering into civilisation, having not heard that brown, fizzy sugarwater is yummy, that a terrorist was executed for 613 forgotten sins, and that throwing your dick into someone with more tracks than a shippingyard might be, like, a Bad Idea? Really? Someone deleted that EMail without comprehending the content? We need Patricia Quinn’s lips smacked onto the original pocketprotector to belabour this point?

Okay. That this website exists at all suggests that, probably, we need this sort of thing. And that’s what’s got me a bit nonplussed while three new reports of The Latest Antics of Homo plebeians are ReallySympleSyndicating their ways into Firefox an AltTab away.

But not this time, damnit. This time, I’m getting all proactive. Probably. While admitting that I’m not entirely certain what exactly the definition of proaction is; I think it might have something to do with whimpering more than voting; I dunno.

So. Here we go. My Proposed List of Merit Badges for 2008: 

• Selfawareness above and beyond Expectation while Not Managing to Behead Oneself
• Cognitive Prowess in Memorising Which Way the Switch Goes to Make the Lights Happen
• Excellence in Grokking the Notsmart Ungood of Hairdryers in the Bathtub
• The Pyooleetsir™ for Banging out a Selfdeprecating Article Regarding Dumb Things [I’m framing mine]
• Official Authority on Not Eating Live Worms

• It's been brought to my attention that GirlScouts should be able to bypass the aiming stage. Too bad: my meritbadge; my rules.

  Mesmerising Ability to Unzip, Aim, and Piss in the Correct Order
• Did Notice That TransFormers Was a Painfully Stupid Film

Apart from TransFormers probably being trademarked somewhere, I’ll look into shirts and bumperstickers with these accolades later, if I happen to care that much. If so, I’ll probably get a medal for it, too.

Of course, that’s just my opinion; and I’m wearing it on my sleeve.