Heads are gonna roll... onto a scale

Remember when, as a little kid, you'd ask your parents some off-the-wall question and then be annoyed when they tried to answer it rationally? "Mommy," you'd say, "wouldn't it be fun if an elephant let you crawl up its trunk and it would swing you around?" And mommy would say, "No, you'd probably suffocate and die." And you'd say, "No! No! I mean, if you didn't suffocate and die." And mommy would say, "But that's what would happen." And so it would go.

Last night, I discovered that I'm now the rational-minded mommy. My girlfriend asked me, just hypothetically, how much I thought my brain weighed, and I responded by Googling it and finding the answer. That bored her, because she was more interested in the guessing than the actual answer. So, I rebounded by turning brain weights into a game. I found this site (but don't go yet!) and quizzed her on which animals' brains weigh more. I thought it was a fun quiz, and so I've sought out some sloppy quiz-making html to recreate a little bit of it for you here.

Ok, here we go:

Permalink: 11:42 AM | Comments (5)

Table scraps:

♣DANCIN' SHOES, START dancing! I'd love to see what happens about one second after this picture is taken. Normally this would be one of the "And then, there's this" pictures that I tack on to the end of most Table Scraps, but it just struck me as so funny that I had to put it up top. This came from this Flickr group, which I got via LYD. And now, on to the rest:

♣THREE FUN VIDEOS: Johnny Cash visits Sesame Street, animated balls make great music, and a roach learns how to drive.

♣JACK BAUER KILLS a lot of people, but who's keeping count? This site is. It's a spectacular display of tedious time-wasting -- what with the full list of all five seasons' victims, their method of death, details of the weapons that were used, and pictures and videos to go with it all -- but I'm mostly surprised by the low body count. For example, Jack's only killed 32 people this season; in season one, the total count was just 10. I'd have expected way more.

♣YES, YES, IT'S so very impressive that, while being mugged, David Copperfield managed to hide his belongings and make it appear as if his pockets were empty. But come on. This is the freakin' guy who claims to be able to fly and make buildings disappear. Let's see some real crime-fighting pizzazz! I want the robbers to burst into flames, or Copperfield to levitate above them, or something besides slight of hand. He might as well have done a card trick for them as well.

♣A MAN ROBS a woman, and runs. You run after him. It seems heroic and all, but what happens when you catch up to him?

♣BRING THE NOISE, folk-style. That was sent to me (and probably a zillion other bloggers) by a PR guy at Random House, which makes me a bit loathe to post it. However, I just can't resist goofy, slow covers of hip-hop songs; it's quickly becoming one of my favorite genres. Although, of course, this one doesn't come close to Ben Folds covering Dre.

♣IF YOU HAVEN'T had enough of the Harvard author plagiarism story, here's a great round-up of stories and blog posts on it. (via Universal Hub)

Permalink: 12:24 PM | Comments (5)

When a cigar isn't just a cigar

Near the back of Boston’s Weekly Dig, like the back of many alt weeklies, there are pages of blatant escort ads. They’re typically the same size, each rectangular ad half-filled with a picture of a nearly nude woman. The women’s identities are frequently obscured, sometimes because the photo is a close-up of her ass and other times because her eyes are blocked out, government censor-style. Sexy!

In the margins, equally weird and covert promises are made: The woman “speaks Greek,” say, or she’ll offer a GFE. A friend, for reasons I'm not completely clear about, knows how to decode these things, and gave us a little lesson on Sunday. “Speaks Greek,” according to him, means anal sex. GFE is “girlfriend experience,” meaning there’s all the cuddling and kissing you can afford. BBBJ means "bare-back blowjob," or oral sex without a condom. It’s pretty amazing that these girls are so openly advertising an illegal activity, but I guess that’s what all the code’s for. "No, no, officer, we're just a translation service for visiting Greek businessmen."

I thought about this code yesterday when I came across a weird posting on Craigslist headlined, “Lonely Boy In Atlanta Misses His Caramel Latte Nubian Queen.” In it, Lonely Boy promises Lady Starbucks that their distance will soon be eliminated, and that “I'll have chips and salsa and a big pork chop waiting for you. And I'll always have barbecue sauce in the cupboard...” If this isn’t a whole load of weird sexual innuendo, I can’t imagine what else it is. The “big pork chop” part seems pretty obvious, but what of the rest? Barbecue sauce in the cupboard? What the hell? It’s all Gree-- I mean, uh, it’s all foreign to me.

Permalink: 08:15 AM | Comments (0)

The young and the restless and big-haired

Wait, Cookie has a personal life? Enough to write a blog about, even considering the extremely low standards a life must meet in order to be blogged? You mean she’s not just a prop in a bright sweater, acting as a foil for Dagwood’s crazy antics?

I didn’t even know her name until I looked it up, and I’ve been snidely reading the damn strip for years. But I like this idea of Cookie leaving the purview of the fourth wall and going off on her own, coming back occasionally just to take part in the family’s zany moments. This might be a blog worth reading.

April 1: Today I asked daddy if he’d like to take a nap, and he said no -- because he’d like to take two! Oh, that daddy!

April 17: OMG! You know that guy Todd from my geometry class, the one that’s really cute but I’m always too nervous to talk to? Today at lunch, he came over to me and said, “Hey, I hear you give great head. Want to come over to my place, do some heroin and then act as my sex slave?” Oh, that Todd! I told him I’d do it tomorrow.

April 18: This morning was so funny! Daddy’s carpool was sitting outside the house honking the horn, and meanwhile daddy was quickly scarfing down his breakfast. He ran out so fast, he almost forgot to open the door! Oh, that daddy! After that, I went over to Todd’s place. The heroin was pretty good, but then he took out some handcuffs and I must have blacked out. I woke up this afternoon on the side of some road, in a pile of my own vomit. I hope it comes out in the wash -- I was wearing my favorite sweater!

April 24: I’m confused about Todd. We’ve gone out on a few more dates, but they often end with me waking up somewhere scary and having to call a cab. I think he likes me, but I can’t tell. I decided to ask daddy what he thinks -- but he was asleep on the couch! And it wasn’t even bedtime yet! Oh, that daddy!

Permalink: 12:21 PM | Comments (3)

Feeling bad for feeling good

If I’m looking for a new book to read, someone will invariably suggest one of Jonathan Safran Foer’s. This I cannot do. I will not do. It’s not the books’ content, or even the author. But in a way, it is the author. It’s the author’s age. He’s young. I don’t even know how young, but young, and that’s too young for me. It makes me anxious to read a book from someone of my generation. It’s hard enough reading a top tier magazine or newspaper article from someone my age, but a book is out of the question. It’s too long, too deep, too much of a reminder that the best I’ve mustered so far is a one-page appearance in a book of monologues, and with a piece I never intended as a monologue anyway. I’m just petty and childish that way. I can’t help it.

That’s why, when a young writer gets busted, I struggle with schadenfreude guilt. I shouldn’t feel good about this. How horrible. How horrible for us all! Young talent tainted by immature mistakes! And yet: vindication. A Faustian deal exposed. The curtains pulled back on a cheater, someone advanced not of their own accord.

Oh, the jerk I am. I go through this every time. This time: The Harvard sophomore with a sweet book deal gets exposed by the student newspaper, and it offers plenty of examples. (Via Puritancity.) I am captivated. I am repulsed. And now, I guess, I have a better reason not to read her book.

Permalink: 11:25 AM | Comments (4)

Investors, beware

From Boston.com's state newswire page:

Hey, at least we know storage demand is up. (And yes, they were two different stories (top, bottom).

Update: They fixed it. Now the top story has the clunky headline, "EMC shares rebound from slide despite flat first-quarter profit"

Permalink: 05:01 PM | Comments (0)

For its encore, it'll beat me with an ugly stick

You know who I always thought were extremely handsome individuals? Prince Harry, Tony Blair, Oscar Wilde and Ruud van Nistelrooy. They're suave, they're charming, they're... oh, hell, I admit, they're a homely bunch of bastards. And to boot, I didn't even know who Ruud was until last night. But according to the celebrity look-a-like program at MyHeritage.com, these are my homely bunch of bastards. So back off!

I gave it this picture of me:

And it gave me these four top results:

Honestly, Oscar Wilde? It's good I stopped when I did; in another minute, the site might have started insulting my mother.

I found this derranged little toy at AlwaysAnna.com, where Anna claimed to be completely horrified after it compared her to Mira Sorvino, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Hillary Duff. You know what, Anna? I think I'd have been less insulted if I was compared to those three girls.

What a mistake. My first attempt with the service was to find celebrity look-a-likes for Scott McClellan. The results didn't lend itself to any funny jokes -- or maybe they did and I'm still too sick to recognize them -- so that's when I offered my own face up for chuckles.

Oscar fuckin' Wilde. Go to hell.

Permalink: 12:01 AM | Comments (5)

Because tissues are my best friend

I think I have the avian flu. Well, ok, probably not. But I do have a hell of a cold, and have taken down a bottle and a half of DayQuil since Saturday. This has left me with little energy and even littler creativity (and, apparently, command of grammar). So here's the only thing I could think of that could make my cold a fun blog post: I've taken a picture of my tissue-filled trash can and turned it into a jigsaw puzzle. Enjoy!

(Puzzle creator is here, which I got via Blog About Town.)

Permalink: 08:15 AM | Comments (5)

But does he have "small penis" written on his crotch?

This car was in front of us yesterday, and I was so overwhelmed by the lameness of the vanity plate that I snapped at least eight photos. No surprise: It was driven by an overweight middle-ager, his hair slightly mussed from the open window. Maybe the "ML CRISIS" plate was already taken.

Permalink: 10:46 AM | Comments (5)

Table scraps:

♣YOU THOUGHT ONLINE dating was sketchy already? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

♣I RARELY WANT to get out of bed in the morning, but tomorrow I'm going to hop out with glee. Or, well, maybe not glee. But I'll at least be thankful that, unlike this girl, I didn't sign up for a 12-week non-stop bedrest study from NASA. That link is to her blog, and here's a good interview with her.

♣KIDS, SOMETIMES YOU have to make hard decisions. Batman's got the details. (And if that's a little too touchy-feely for you, Batman's got some kick-ass onomatopoeias.)

♣HERE'S A SHOUT out to this week's New York Times Magazine, which had two really interesting pieces in it: One about what's happened in El Salvadore since it banned all abortions, and one about why nobody wants to live in northwest North Dakota. The second one's particularly impressive because, had I been commissioned to write it, I would have been tempted to just type "Because it's northwest North Dakota" and then file the thing.

♣72 MORE HOURS and a gazillion more terrorists to kill. Yes indeed, the very best show on television, 24, has been signed for another three seasons. Chloe, drop those donuts and get back to your station.

♣STAND AND DELIVER! Apparently there’s an exorbitant number of urinals in women’s bathrooms at American universities. In a surprisingly lengthy column on the subject, a female math professor suggests this has something to do with colleges’ timid acceptance of gender equality. “Do urinals in women's rooms signify that the university is hedging its bets in case it decides to turn back the clock?” she asks. Although she doesn’t specify which bathrooms she’s talking about (dorms? classroom buildings? cafeteria?), I’ll answer for the dorm bathrooms: It has nothing to do with gender equality, and everything to do with fluctuating building usage. As student bodies grow, schools change who’s living in what parts of their dorms. For example, I was in an all-male floor my freshman year; a year or two later, that floor became all female. With rapid swapping like that, changing the bathroom plumbing is a pretty unnecessary expense.

♣AND THEN, THERE'S this.

Permalink: 08:14 AM | Comments (1)

No good deed goes unpunished

Jared Paul Stern, the gossip columnist busted for trying to sell a billionaire "protection" in the New York Post, has a hilarious new excuse: He was pitching his services as a media consultant and "their conversations included advice on how to deal with the tabloid's gossip-drenched Page Six." And to boot, he was being charitable: "It was a little bit of a quid pro quo," he told the Washington Post.

I love this excuse: Just a little bit of professional advice, and free! It's the perfect way to turn guilty into generous, and greedy into giving. Too bad those before him didn’t think of it.

• Ted Kaczynski, the unabomber: “Just ask yourself: Is the postal service safer because of me? My methods may be unusual but I think we can all agree that, while I pitched my services as a mail screening-method tester, we all became better for it. And hey, I’ll even pick up the bill. Consider it a little first-time customer bonus. But my buddy with the anthrax is still waiting for his payment.”

• Dick Cheney: “An accident? Hell no. I was pitching my services as a gun safety advocate. This vice president gig isn't going to last forever, so I need to start exploring career options. And really now, don’t we all now have a better idea of what happens when you shoot someone in the face? I’ll tell you what: It’s my treat. I won’t even charge him for the birdshot.”

• John Allen Muhammad, the D.C.-area sniper: “Did you see how accurate those shots were? There was a reason: I was just pitching my services as a gun accuracy tester. Real-world environments are expensive to devise, and I worried that guns weren’t designed with wind and distance in mind. It kept me up at night: What if the wrong person were to get shot because of some poor accuracy testing? I assure you, this was a labor of love.”

• Brutus: “Et tu? Et me! I was just pitching my services as a political scientist. A little bit of quid pro quo in the lessons of regime change. We as a society are going to learn a lot about this, and you know it. When the first textbooks come out, I’ll personally see to it that Julius’s family gets a free copy. It’s the least I can do.”

Permalink: 08:15 AM | Comments (0)

Chat with me at 1-800-BAD-ACTING

You know why it’s good to have your own blog? Because when you make a one-second cameo in an Internet film, you can freeze-frame it on you, post that image to your blog, and thus make it appear as if you have some sort of meaningful role to play in the whole thing.

You might be thinking: “Is that Jason sitting on his friend Zack’s toilet, fully clothed and talking on his cell phone?” And why yes, that’s very perceptive of you. (And for all of you wondering what my cell phone keypad looks like, the shot directly after that one will answer all your questions. Oh, lucky day!) It’s from Zack’s latest comedy short, The Text Connection, a spoof of a commercial that apparently runs at night in New York City. I've never seen the original commercial, but I thought his take was funny anyway.

I learned one thing while doing this brief shoot: Improv comedy, here I don’t come. I like to think of myself as a fairly quick-witted person, but when Zack put the camera on me and told me to act like I was talking to someone, I somehow became Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live.

Me: Hey! So, uh, how’s it going? Oh yeah? Yeah. Great. Yeah, that’s great. Oh, yeah, I’m just sitting here and, uh, you know, talking on the--

Zack: Now laugh.

Me: Ha ha! Ha ha ha. Ho, yeah, uh-huh. Ha ha.

Zack: Great, we’re done.

Permalink: 09:23 AM | Comments (1)

What's invisible and smells like carrots? Bunny farts.

Is that bunny not over-the-top cute? It's almost intentional. "Ok, bunny, that's enough. You'll manipulate me no longer," says, uh, the guy who wanted to eat that cookie. (Pic via CityRag)

As you can tell, I'm low on blog ideas today.

Permalink: 08:23 AM | Comments (8)

Wash before wearing

Funniest out-of-context quote of the day:

"We're going to make sure we give every T-shirt out and that every one has an orgasm on it," Cortez said.

And it'd be even funnier if "every one" was written "everyone." That'd be a mightly slow production line.

That quote comes from a student newspaper's report on an event called Paint Your Orgasm, in which students were apparently supposed to paint representations of their orgasms on T-shirts. I wish the reporter had taken some photos or at least tried describing some of the shirts, because I can't even begin to imagine what they looked like. Except maybe...

Permalink: 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

Wittle wabbit, medium ware

And on Christmas, be sure to stop by for some reindeer recipies.

This ill-concieved headline/photo match-up comes from yesterday's Boston.com. Thanks to a friend of a friend for grabbing it.

Permalink: 12:15 AM | Comments (4)

To be fair, history was never Johnny's strong point

Oh, snap! No he didn't. No. He. Didn't! Did he go there? He went there. Boo-yah!

This bitchslap on Johnny Hart from yesterday’s Bizarro is easily the best thing I’ve seen in the comics pages in, well, perhaps years. Perhaps ever. How often do we get to see a syndicated cartoonist take a direct shot at another? And of course no one is more deserving of outright hostility than Hart, the comics version of a deep wart. Wouldn't it be great if this happened on the comics page more? Instead of cheesy overlaps like Hagar coming over to Dagwood and Blondie's house for their anniversary party, strips would call each other out like they were on the op-ed pages. Oh, I wish.

Anyway, I don't have anything more insightful to say about this than has already been said in the strip. I just wanted to post it in solidarity. Viva Bizarro, my new favorite comic strip.

Permalink: 12:11 AM | Comments (5)

Atlantic City: Because it's closer than Vegas

I went to Atlantic City this weekend for a bachelor party and some rollicking debauchery. It didn’t take long for the city to show its true colors: As soon as we stepped out of the car, on the third floor of our hotel’s garage, I looked down and saw a used condom. (See above.) I guess someone was parking more than cars up there. Hey-ohh!

I won’t be entering our night into the permanent record of the Internet (the short answers: yes, yes, no, and 5 a.m.), but here are some more pictures from our classy hotel, the Flagship.

When we checked in, they gave us a schedule of activities. As you can see, the day had started out with some adult swimming. Then, lots of kids activities. And the day wrapped up with... romantic adult swim? I don’t know what that is, but I bet you shouldn’t swallow the water.

Behind the sink in our suite, there was this sign. At first, I was surprised at how steep a penalty they level on people who don’t do their own housekeeping. But then I thought: Wait a minute. Who’s benefiting from this? If I'm using any of these dishes, I definitely don’t want the previous occupants of this Atlantic City room to have been the ones to wash them. Isn't that some sort of sanitary code violation?

On a final note: If you happen to be a dancer in Atlantic City named Morphine, get an agent, and get one now. You could be doing much better.

Permalink: 08:45 AM | Comments (0)