Life as we know it to end soon.
Say you want to go backpacking and you kind of think about taking your uncle Fred's cast-iron wood-burning stove along because you like flapjacks.
Forget for the moment that the stove weighs 400 pounds and won't quite fit in your pack, even though your pack is a Kelty Tioga that you bought in 1983, and they said it could haul anything.
Also forget that you might be stupid.
For right now, let's focus on more important things, like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency saying that Uncle Fred's stove, and other stoves like it can't be used no more, even in Uncle Fred's cabin.
They're doing all this because they like meddling, and they just about have ran clean out of other ways to meddle, so now they're going to come on their black mountain bikes in their shiny stretch pants and confiscate your onliest way of making breakfast.
What does this mean, really?
For one thing, maybe more backpackers will try the FrickStove, recently patented by Elias Horff. It looks like a two-pound coffee can. Inside is a powerful spring and a spool of heatproof and fireproof titanium wire. You just pull on the wire until the spring is wound (takes only an hour or so), set your pot on the top, and flip the switch.
From then on, environmentally-healthy friction from counter-rotating plates inside the stove creates heat, and that creates super-heated air, which shoots out the top of the stove like an F-22 on full afterburner, and your noodles are cooked in seconds.
It's mostly silent too, except for an occasional friendly sonic boom if a stove should tip over. In that case its massive thrust vector can power it into the upper atmosphere at supersonic speeds. (One early FrickStove prototype was clocked at Mach 2.17 on a cool day with light southeasterly winds in early autumn – data about production models is still classified, so we can't tell you that.)
Hey – maybe it's worth a look.
Meanwhile, back inside the Beltway, the pointy-headed EPA has banned production and sale of stoves used by about 80 percent of real men. You know – men who enjoy inhaling "airborne fine-particle matter" at a rate of over 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air. No real man knows or cares what a meter is, let alone a microgram, and most of them are just fine using a bit of fine-particle stove scale as seasoning.
The whole deal is govmint encroachment, and most of us don't like that, expecially when it comes to having safe streets and highways, fecal-free food, and socialist, tax-supported police and fire departments, which would be privately owned in a true free-market system.
Rumor has it that next year the National Socialist Park Service will require all overnighters to carry a change of underwear and wash their armpits daily. We all know where that might lead.
Srsly: