Earthquake?
Grab your Go Bag.
Tsunami turns into a hurricane?
Find your Go Bag.
You ran out of ranch Wheat Thins and celery with peanut butter and two armed robbers just broke into your house, possibly wielding automatic weapons?
Go Bag it.
Rika, what’s  a Go Bag?
Silly reader, a Go Bag is a shady duffel bag full of cash that you [...]

So, as we all know, Dr. Pepper is definitely the greatest beverage in the world.
I mean, what can’t you do with Dr. Pepper?
You wake up every morning and say “I want a Dr. Pepper!” Just because it is so awesome!
You get to school, and are sitting in the library with nothing to do, yet so [...]

A bucket list: The list of everything you think you must do before you die.
Everybody really has a bucket list, they just don’t all write it down onto a physical list. Nevertheless, all the people in this world will think of something and just know: they HAVE to do that before the end of their [...]

IMF? You heard a little about them? Nope, I’m not talking about the International Monetary Fund. I’m talking about the Impossible Missions Force. Word on the streets is that they’re screwing up our economy- and Greece’s- because they’re too busy blowing up buildings, fancy Italian sports cars, and paying for Tom Cruise’s- er, Ethan Hunt’s [...]

Several people are confused about what The Nearby Future is about.
“I was confused,” one reader told me before I karate chopped him in the face.
“What is this site all about?” Someone else asked before I drop-kicked them over three and a half continents.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to our website. It literally speaks [...]

High school reunions, time capsules and Facebook are all great at reminding us how much we’ve changed over the years, and how our “when I grow up I want to be…” statements have changed. Several times.
It’s a magical moment when you uncover a photo, video, memory or person from your past that meant a lot [...]

Ladies and gentlemen, there are several things that are known to cause apocalyptic situations:

Evil dictators
Nuclear warfare
When good TV gets canned

When Glee, the show with barbed wire wit and snappy music numbers, and Chuck, the action-packed spy thriller/comedy with an endearing romantic angle, both encountered cruel and unusual hiatuses, the world went into shock. This shock [...]

It’s not just Stephen Colbert who is wagging his finger at others.
Beijing recently blamed consumers for their pollution.
Really Beijing? Consumers are your friends. If you can’t find environmentally friendly ways to manufacture your products, that’s your problem.

Picture by “jaaron” via Flickr

Meanwhile back at the ranch, the FDA is getting in over it’s head. Despite the [...]

First of all, I wanted to apologize for not picking a theme. Now I would like to give you my excuse: life got crazy. Rika is a crazy person who can run on almost no sleep, but I sure can’t! Also I usually don’t write that often.
So the theme of this month is “things that should be [...]

Ladies and gentleman, here at The Nearby Future, we would love nothing more than to run rampant with glitter and turn our homepage into a tinsel-y mess of fantastically sparkling pictures that resembles a Christmas tree decorated by a four year old.
But we don’t.
We consider glitter on a homepage a sign of weakness.
Or desperation.
But what [...]

So apparently I am not allowed to say the “P” word so instead of what ticks me off, I’ll write about what “bugs me”. (Plural = “Buggers”) (I know used quotation marks *gasp*)
Buggers:

People steal your book and threaten to read the end and then tell you.
Random things not in the correct order, like books not [...]

What is your pet peeve?
Mine is the phrase, “pet peeve”. That ticks me off. What does it even MEAN? Pet is an animal. Peeve? What kind of word is that!
So whoever is the GENIUS on the staff who coined that phrase for this week ought to spend a whole hour blowing up 99 red balloons [...]

So today my thoughts began to wander.
What do you call nightmares during the day? Daymares?
Oooh. Deep.
All puns aside, what I really wanted to talk about was growing up. Whether you’re 9 or 90, we’re always growing. With each and every day we learn so many new things (whether we realize it or not). We look [...]

Yep. It’s the inevitable post about our new layout.
Isn’t it funny how bloggers always love to update you on how the website has changed, when probably you readers don’t care?
Alright, it’s not funny. Kind of like getting hit by a Dodge. Ironic, but not funny.
Right. Abandoning metaphors.
In other news, the staff contest is ending so [...]

Here’s a radical idea for you: what if there was no time?
Considering that timing is everything and time is money, where does that leave us? Broke and without anything?
Turns out, this idea might not be as radical as you think. I was reading the Discover magazine today, and I found an interesting passage:
“There may be [...]

Yes, we’re amidst an economic crisis.
Yes, something must be done. Priorities must be reshuffled.
But panicking is not an option.
Just a glance at Buisness Week or the NY Times shows that, although times are tough, people aren’t throwing their hands up helplessly and calling it quits. (Well most of the people)
The recession is just like Monopoly. [...]

First impressions. They matter. The first thing that comes out of your mouth when you say something has the strongest effect because things we tend to say first are the truest.
In politics, this is especially true. Do you think our President has room for “do-overs” if he messes up on his speech? No. When speaking [...]

In case you don’t know me yet, I’m the newest member of The Nearby Future.
So I just finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird and was asking myself why it is considered such great American Liturature. I mean, really, what makes a book award winning anyway? This book definitely had some suspenseful scenes (particularly the end)  [...]

You know to question the motives of a pro-high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) campaign when it’s run by the HFCS companies themselves!
http://www.sweetsurprise.com is a website centered around the health benefits of what is probably the worst sweetener out there.
From the cute little videos about people who are conveniently unaware of the health problems associated with [...]

This year The Nearby Future staff has written a collective 48,747 words! Here are your favorite articles from staff members with the most page views (not counting Jala, because she writes pages, not posts).

Rika’s best articles: “Corn“, “Stress: Side Effects Include…”, and “The World is Not Coming to an End“
Calister F. Well’s best articles: “When [...]

For the record, I only got a LiveJournal because I thought the layout looked awesome.
http://writeonrika.livejournal.com/
Basically, it’s just a pointless, mundane, and slightly eloquent journal about everthing from de-motivational posters to lazy people and cats.
Long story.
Example:

 
See? You don’t get why I put that poster there. Inside joke, actually. That’s what my LJ is about. Most likely [...]

Don Blakenship of Massey Energy is pushing for coal. (Because he manufactures it) When trying to convince us that people who say coal is not the way to go, he calls all of the non-coal believers out there communists, atheists, and enemies.
Oh, here’s the quote!
“Turn down your thermostats? Buy a smaller car? Conserve? I have [...]

Hey guys! I’m a new member to The Nearby Future! Call me Cal
Ok so Christmas is coming up and I want to know what your doing. Any random thing. Special traditions? Going anywhere?
*my first post*

Picture props

So, it’s Bloggers Unite for World Aids Day, and guess who didn’t have an article prepared!
Alright, alright, it’s nothing new but this is such an important day that I though I’d do some work and copy and paste some stuff about said day.
This is directly from the Bloggers Unite website:
HIV/AIDS has been a global epidemic [...]

During the creation of my 120 paged literature piece, I stumbled across an important question.
Is there a website out there that lends a hand to all of us leap-year impaired souls out there who can’t for the life of themselves remember when it is a leap year?
Why yes!
http://isitaleapyear.com/

When I’m sitting here, attempting to type out a 50k word novel, the last thing I think about is peace while I’m trying to decide which character to kill off first. I rarely think about it as I terrorize anyone within a fifty feet radius of my writing space to give me a chapter title, [...]

With the exception of one issue, I believe Obama will be an intelligible president.
Unfortunately, that issue is about abortion, one of the most delicate arguments out there. And I happen to be pro-life, so I was a McCain supporter.
But really, Obama is voted in so all of the McCain supporters should put aside their ludicrous [...]

I’m a supporter of the McCain/Palin ticket because of one issue: life. I’m pro-life because I agree with the saying “It’s a child, not a choice.” I don’t give a flying fig newton about their other issues because at this point it’s becoming harder and harder for the government to fix the mess our world [...]

We never hear about Biden in the news. We’ll keep it that way.
Palin is getting ambushed by the media. From numerous satires about her wardrobe and her claims about being an average American, to people saying that she’s not experienced, she must be feeling the pressure.
A specific tidbit in the news today caught my eye.
[...]

Every day we hear about the suffering of people in places like Myanmar and Darfur. Almost all the time the issue of human rights come up. If human rights are so elementary, so basic, then why haven’t we straightened it out after all these years?

To understand that, we must look at the most elementary place in all of our lives.

School.

For twelve years of our lives, (and often times more than that) we sit in classrooms and listen to instructors. Debates fuel over our rights in school, the rights of the instructors, and the rights of what gets shown in classroom- basically, everything. Each side argues relentlessly on every issue, from cafeteria foods up to school calendars.