I have my choice for the person I — a would-be pacifist — would most like to punch in the face: The Despicable Man of the Year.

Everything about this man infuriates me. His cluelessness. His selfishness. His power to defy nature; his willingness to defy all sense and decency. Despicable.

The Associated Press: Huge Water Park Planned for Ariz. Desert, By CHRIS KAHN

MESA, Ariz. (AP) — By tapping rivers and sucking water from deep underground, developers have covered Arizona with carpets of Bermuda grass and dotted the parched landscape with swimming pools, golf courses and lakeshore homes.

Now another ambitious project is in the works: A massive new water park that would offer surf-sized waves, snorkeling, scuba diving and kayaking — all in a bone-dry region that gets just 8 inches of rain a year.

“It’s about delivering a sport that’s not typically available in an urban environment,” said Richard Mladick, a Mesa real-estate developer who persuaded business leaders in suburban Mesa to support the proposal called the Waveyard. [mjh: Rhymes with graveyard. It’s about money and an utter indifference to anything else.]

Artists’ drawings of the park show surfers gliding through waves that crash onto a sandy beach and kayakers navigating the whitecaps of a wide, roiling river. Families watch the action from beneath picnic umbrellas. If constructed, the park would use as much as 100 million gallons of groundwater a year.

Mladick, 39, said he wanted to create the kind of lush environment he remembers from growing up in Virginia Beach, Va., and surfing in Morocco, Indonesia, Hawaii and Brazil.

“I couldn’t imagine raising my kids in an environment where they wouldn’t have the opportunity to grow up being passionate about the same sports that I grew up being passionate about,” he said. [mjh: Use your imagination a little more: Move to Hawaii!]

Over twenty years ago, The Beach Waterpark came to Albuquerque. I wrote a letter to the editor about the foolishness of *wanting* — let alone building — a waterpark in the desert. At the time, I heard “Albuquerque sits on a huge underground aquifer that will last for centuries.” Yes, this was the consensus, a view very convenient to development. Not ten years passed before we started to wake up. But even when we slowly get a clue, we refuse to look back at our ignorance as an indication of how much remains. We’ll run out of water, air and earth long before we deplete our ignorance. mjh

PS: Contrast MalDick (sic) to the parents of Malkolm Boothroyd, who are spending a year birding while using as little of fossil fuels as they can. Here is a family that is having a great adventure together in the most positive way. If MalDick got into birding, he’d build the world’s largest aviary and fly everywhere stealing birds from nature. Despicable dimwit.

PPS: Following the bankruptcy of the Beach, a new waterpark is being built in Albuquerque, while the old Beach remains a memorial to our foolishness.