GIVE US ALL SCIENCE GRANTS!

Do you know things that everybody else does? Of course you do! We all do. Want to turn your storehouse of the readily obvious into big money? Become a scientist! If that sounds like an awful lot of hard work and many years of post-graduate work, well, guess again! Check out the science pages lately and some of the studies being released by "eminent scientists and medical researchers." We see all sorts of mundane observations being published as if they were revelations and the reaction here is this: How can I get in on this action?

Check out the one in the New York Times recently pointing out the fact that even in this modern world of unprecedented participation across a broad spectrum of the work force by women, that men and women are still different from each other. Who would have known? Pretty much everybody, Einstein, but that's not the point. They even had some bozo calling himself, and get this one, an "Evolutionary Psychologist" to add academic weight to a report that basically mirrors the casual observations of men, women and children ever since Adam and Eve started noodging each other. A what? No, no one else has ever heard of an Evolutionary Psychologist either, but who's to say there is no such thing if you paint it in gold letters on your office door and print it in a scientific report? And who can deny that men and women differ substantially? Well, no shit, Galileo! But it is a beautiful scam, no?

So, it's time to get busy and cash in on this extreme lowering of the scientific limbo bar. The subject need not be earth shattering, like the whole Big Bang conjecture business where you have to invent a new branch of mathematics to explain yourself, although that might help when people disagree and then you can say they didn't understand your advanced equations. But that's too much trouble when you can simply write a paper about being left-handed in a predominantly right-handed world. Just call yourself an Investigative Forensic Digitologist or a Theoretical Leftician and you're halfway home. Then you just trot out the old saw horses about scissors, baseball gloves and learning to write and you're a scientist, pronouncing the universally known as if it were the Holy Grail.

You might want to stick your nose onto the "science" of politics too, call yourself an Investigative Demographologist and sell your services to one political party or the other, doesn't really matter, they've both got lots of dough to throw at a "study" that agrees with them or disagrees with their opponents. You could write a paper on how being "sassy" and "naive" and "living near Russia" translates into potentially Lincolnesque statesmanship. You'd be sitting pretty until November. Or you could point out the obvious that one of the candidates happens to be a really smart black guy, just in case that's escaped anyone's notice. There's no point to make there, but anything having to do with race seems to be a big-ticket item, attracting a lot of competition, too, denying your made up facts with their own fantasies. Mention the other guy's advanced age and incipient Alzheimer's and you've got yourself a bidding war for your services!

Me, I'm steering clear of political controversy and doing an exhaustive study of why some people prefer chocolate ice cream and some like vanilla. Well, just because they do, you say? Exactly! But as an Experimental Tastebudologist, I will apply to the government and major foundations for large research grants to explain exactly why some people prefer one over the other. Then I'll make stuff up, maybe even attribute ice cream preferences to specific personality traits and start a scientific controversy like that whole dead dinosaur deal. There's a bunch of jokers that have been making a living off that one for their entire careers, and there's no way to check their theories either! Controversy spells money, so be sure to include something really stupid in your research to give other wanna-be scientists an opening to start an academic war within your chosen (or invented) field of study.

See, it really doesn't matter if you just made up your scientific discipline. I figure that within weeks of my vanilla/chocolate manifesto, competing studies will pop up like ants on an ice cream cone that hits the sidewalk that will challenge my findings, forcing me to apply for bigger grants to "prove" my theories. Naturally I'll pocket most of the dough and simply throw an ice cream party, invite a bunch of children, hire a clown and a balloon animal guy and we'll all have a real good time. Nothing not to love there. After all, it is only ice cream and everyone knows some people like chocolate and some people like vanilla for no particular reason. Why waste money on a lab and research assistants when you know the outcome already? Take it from a Doctor of Theoretical Vanillistics. Competing theories welcome. Line forms to the left, behind that laughing and smiling kid with the freckles and the balloon and ice cream on his shirt.