Beau Elliot
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Probably, when you live in a universe in which you have commercials about how to avoid commercials, things are going to get crazy, hazy, and funny.

So just when you thought Donald Trump was the funniest and craziest guy on the planet this side of Attila the Hun, along comes a guy who’s even crazier, hazier, and funnier than the Trumpster. (It rhymes with Dumpster, for those of you who couldn’t be bothered with poetry. Or something verse.)

Yes, we’re speaking about Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon turned Republican presidential candidate. Turns out that in the crazy, hazy, funny cosmos, Carson is the consummate pro. The Trumpster is a mere minor leaguer. It’s probably the difference between having a medical degree and the business savvy necessary to go through three bankruptcies.

Take, for example, Carson on the Big Bang (while remembering that practically every scientist who has some knowledge on the subject agrees that the Big Bang created the universe around 13.7 billion years ago):

“What you’re telling me is, if I blow a hurricane through a junkyard enough times, over billions and billions of years, eventually, after one of those hurricanes, there will be a 747 fully loaded and ready to fly.”

As Lawrence Krauss. the director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, pointed out in The New Yorker in September, that statement displays no knowledge of the Big Bang at all. And, as Krauss notes, it’s an argument frequently employed by creationists against evolution, where it doesn’t apply, either.

I don’t know about you all, but I don’t want the resident of the Oval Office to be a person who disagrees with almost all the physicists on the planet. Of course, it could be fun to watch. But then, so are gruesome wrecks in auto racing, if your sense of fun is particularly ghoulish.

Then there’s Carson on climate change, which, of course, is not happening. At least it’s not happening in his corner of the universe, which I assume does not include any beachfront property.

Asked about climate change in Baltimore in May, according to The New Republic, Carson said, “Is there climate change? Of course there’s climate change. Any point in time, temperatures are going up or temperatures are going down.”

Um, yeah. Except fluctuations in local temperatures have more to do with weather than climate. I mean, it’s warmer in the day than it is at night, but that has nothing to do with climate. Though it is change you can believe in.

Apparently, Carson got a degree from the James Inhoff School of Geoscience, which teaches that if it snows anywhere in the world, there is no climate change.

In that same appearance in Baltimore, Carson also asked, “Gravity, where did it come from?”

I always thought gravity came from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and often wondered, in idle moments, what in the world people did without gravity before 1973.

Maybe there was an app for that.

Crazy, hazy, and funny — sounds like a great time. We should all go there sometime. It’s great this time of year, I hear.