“I got this idea for a movie!”
“Not another vampire who sucks the sap of only endangered species plants, please, Bob.”
“No, really, you gotta hear this! Heck, it might even be real.”
“Whaddya mean by that, Bob?”
“I mean this whole Copenhagen thing! World leaders getting together in secret to plot the destruction of world industry!”
“Copenhagen’s meetings are wide open, Bob. It’s on the news everywhere. And did you ever notice that most of the world leaders there are capitalists, and that they owe their election to other capitalists, frequently of the oil-drilling and coal-mining sort?”
“That’s what they want you to think!”
“Well, I think that way whether they want me to or not, Bob. Money, you know? I love it. I follow it. There’s no money in controlling climate change. If there were, I’d be Copenhagen right now.”
“You’re missing the point! These guys are meeting to take the money away from guys like you.”
“Pierre, here at the restaurant, does a pretty good job of taking money from guys like me, in return for a good arugula salad and a chunk of rare roast beef.”
“That’s not what I mean!”
“I think you’ve got another crazy idea that won’t make a good movie. I’ll let you talk through the arugula, Bob. When the roast beef comes, I don’t want stupid plots that won’t sell on the table — so it better be good, or we’ll change the topic.”
“Okay, here goes: Mad climate scientists create a scare about global warming, and everybody gives them their money, and they the rest of the movie is about the chase to catch them before they get to a secret beach in the Maldives or Marshall Islands where they’ll hide forever in their secret lair.”
“I’m not impressed yet, Bob. Why would anyone think a climate scientist would be so power hungry?
“They meet in Al Gore’s mansion. Al Gore’s the power-hungry villain!”
“Al Gore? He lost an election to George F. Bush, for cryin’ out loud. Nobody would believe that.”
“You mean W — ‘George W. Bush.'”
“Have you seen what the stock market’s been like lately, Bob? No, of course not. You don’t own stocks in regular companies — gun makers and gold dealers only — but after what happened to my portfolio, I mean F. He’s George F. Bush to me.”
“C’mon, it’s ripped from the headlines!”
“It’s about as exciting as the crossword puzzle, Bob. That’s not a movie — it’s a new sleep drug. I couldn’t sell it to a religious group trying to make a movie about Charles Darwin, even if we dressed Gore up as Darwin. Even they’d see through the plot, Bob.”
“Archie! It’s a great movie! Think of the special effects!”
“Think of the NoDoz concession. Theatres don’t have ’em. Climate scientists taking over the world is like the Joffrey Ballet as the perps on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. It’d be like getting toe-shoed to death.”
Oh, c’mon, Arch. I got half the screenplay already done!”
“Well you need more research.”
“What?”
“Maldives. Marshall Islands. They’re the poster islands for climate change. They’re the first nations to go as the sea rises. All the geeks will know that, and so they’ll laugh at your movie. Geeks laughing at you isn’t good box office.”
“We can do it like Superman! You know a Fortress of Solitude somewhere in the ice.”
“No ice would kinda make that plot device not work, wouldn’t it, Bob?”
“Oh, c’mon. No one really thinks the ice is disappearing!”
“Bob — remember our agreement?”
“What?”
“Beef’s here. Shuttup.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Oh. Yeah.”
“Okay, Archie. How about this: There really are gods, and hysteria makes them happy.”
“Hysteria. Yeah. There’s value in that.”
“No, I mean it. Hysteria makes the gods happy, and so then they do good things for people.”
“Like what?”
“Well . . . like . . . like cleaning up global warming. Yeah, that’s it! Blind hysteria makes global warming go away!”
“Nobody’ll believe that, either, Bob. If that worked, global warming would have been gone ten years ago. Shuttup and eat your beef.”
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 