Flu Shots

A (rather nosey) friend of mine recently asked via email (I have no idea whatsoever why this medium was chosen) whether or not I was vaccinated for H1N1 (I'm not sure if that's the swine or bird variety, but as you'll shorty see, I don't give a fuck.) Yes, I'm aware this is old news. But I literally got this email yesterday, sue me. She's the one who fucked up.

Here's my response:

No. I did not get vaccinated. I am not an infant. I am not over 70. Sure, I got the flu, which sucked, but I survived. Just like the last time I got the flu. In fact, I have never not survived the flu. Imagine that! H1N1 is no more deadly, or sickly, or sniffly, than any other flu. Healthy people get over it. Vaccinations are -- by and large -- a money making scheme created by companies with a vested interest in vaccine sales. If the drug dealers can drum up enough panic each "flu season", they can push more product. (The product, by the way, just gives you a little bit of the flu and leaves it up to your body to eradicate it.) Thanks, Tamiflu, my body does that anyway. For free.

So there's your prudent advice for the next global pandemic. Just contract the damn thing and deal with it. If you die, surely you would've anyway, seeing as how you're a frail, sallow excuse for a human being.

Take It From An Eye Doctor

I was going to go to Med School but then I realized: YouTube is full of insightful, dedicated educators, peddling knowledge free of charge.



I don't know if you watched that whole video, but if you decided to sit through it out perverse curiosity like I did, you're probably thinking, "Wait a second, if all the mass in the universe can be collapsed into the size of a bowling ball, and we're all made of energy and vibrating strings, and a cell doesn't really have any mass, and the definition of disease is 'we have transformed our energy state' then... HOW THE FUCK DID THIS WOMAN GET A FUCKING DOCTORATE IN MOTHERFUCKING OPTOMETRY!!!??"

Hooray Science!

Back in the day people used to invent stuff. They used to ponder life. Remember Socrates? "The unexamined life is not worth living." Well, we've come a long way; unfortunately, we've gone a long way in the wrong direction. So now, instead of studying the earth and cosmos, cataloging species and discovering the miracles of science, we drop minty candies in sugar water. It's not an experiment, per se, since we know exactly what's going to happen...

But for fuck's sake, when you put candy in soda it rains liquid sugar!! It's like miracle. A gooey-coke-geysery-miracle. Yay! Let's videotape it and take lots of pictures. And we'll all wear blue ponchos, and put it on YouTube. Maybe we'll make the top ten, and oh, sweet Jesus, I'm all sticky now... and wet... and... man, what the hell are we doing with our lives?

Mars Bitches

April Fools joke? A nod to Dave Chappelle? I'm guessing the former, but either way, somewhere, somehow, Carl Sagan's rotting remains just got a boner.

It appears Virgin and Google have teamed up to send 20 earthlings to Mars, beginning in 2014. And not just any earthlings... YouTube-earthlings. But don't take my word for it; take it from the big, British virgin himself, Richard Bronson:


As you can see, this will not be a joy ride. The goal is colonization. Permanently. On Mars. They've even picked the future "Plymouth Rock" of the Red Planet: the Lunae planum area of the north side of Kasei Valles (wherever the fuck that is.)

Overall, I think it's a great idea. With one glaring exception. Is it just me, or is YouTube the worst possible place to advertise this? Shouldn't they be flyering Harvard, or MIT, or you know, like NASA, or some shit? What caliber of space traveler do they think they're going to attract from YouTube? The most popular video this month (with over 4 million views) is the trailer for Ben Stiller's new movie, "Tropic Thunder". It's not like these idiots are watching lectures about particle physics. Those videos have like 12 views. Collectively.

I don't know about you, but I don't want the "Leave Britney Alone" kid to be the first human on Mars. Come to think of it, I don't want anyone to go to Mars based on a 30-second YouTube video. Imagine some aliens land on Mars and see our YouTube colony! We'd be the laughing-stock of the entire galaxy. Maybe even the Universe.

I'm sure a lot of "planning" went into this and whatnot, but maybe they should call the whole thing off. I'm not comfortable with KevJumba in space.

The Glass Is Half Full

Introducing: the machine that can turn a "50 gallon drum of urine" into potable water.



Oh, and it could eradicate 50% of human disease, too. That's pretty good, I guess... as long as you're an optimist.

[Via: The Colbert Report]

Bats Perish, And I Know Why

Today the New York Times ran a story called: "Bats Perish, and No One Knows Why." I guess 90% of the bat population has died off in the Northeast, and eco-batologist-types are worried the world is about to end. Worst of all, no one knows why this is happening... no one... except me.

Here are the facts: Bats hang out in pitch black caves year-round. When they leave their dreary, subterranean dens, they seem to keel over and die. Why am I not surprised?

First off, bats are just about the weirdest looking thing left on the planet.

Yikes. It's furry and translucent. That's a winning combo. The truth is, weird looking things inevitably die off. Take the dodo bird, for instance. It looks like an albatross raped a pigeon. EXTINCT. Or the woolly mammoth. Some people say Native Americans killed them off. Nope. They're just ugly. Think about it, what's uglier than an elephant... that's right, an elephant covered in shaggy, brown hair. EXTINCT.

As for bats, I'm pretty sure it was Darwin who said, "animals that look like miniature-pterodactyl-mice will perish." It's probably on page 1 of that book he wrote that Creationists hate so much. The only time furry, translucent creatures get any ass is when they're in dark caves. It's a lot like how drunk people--who would otherwise find each other revolting--hook up in dimly lit dive bars. If you can't see who you're banging, it's hard to object.

And that, my friends, is why bats have lasted so long. It's the caves. Plain and simple. If they keep leaving their caves, venturing out into broad daylight, they will inevitably, and steadily, decline as a species.

Flying Cars

Why is it that every time someone says "in twenty years we'll have flying cars" they're fucking wrong? I don't get it. We've been talking about flying cars for like 100 years, but we still don't have them. We have planes. We have cars. What's the problem? Scientists have even bred Napoleon Dynamite's favorite animal, a liger, but somehow, they can't put wings on a car.

This clip, from the 1958 Disneyland episode "Magic Highway USA", explores the future of the American highway system. It turns out, in the last 50 years, we've done exactly nothing to make our highways cooler--no automated vehicles, no color coded lanes, no car escalators, no cargo rockets--nothing! What the hell is going on here?



The two biggest highway innovations since 1958 are probably E-ZPass and those little ridges on the side of the road that make your whole car shake like an F5 earthquake when you drift over them. And guess what, highways still look like this:


Thanks, E-ZPass. Way to put the "boo" in tollbooth. This is why we need flying cars; there would be no traffic. Sure, we'd have the occasional mid-air collision, and shards of debris falling from the sky... but we'd get used to it.

There's one thing that I will never get used to, though: lies. In 2005, 60 Minutes ran a story called "Flying Cars Ready To Take Off". But it might as well have been called "Fuck you, America!" because I haven't seen a car in the sky. Ever.

In fact, the newest car making headlines is the Tata Nano, which is so far from a flying car it makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty ice-cream scoop. This thing makes minivans look cool. In fact, it's basically just a MINI-minivan, which goes to show, we'll never make a flying car. If making a minivan more mini is the best thing to happen to cars this year, then I'm afraid the closest we'll ever get to flying cars is The Jetsons--which reminds me, we could use some robotic maids, too.

Oh Heavens

If you took the book of Genesis, a Babylon 5 script, and L. Ron Hubbard's diary, and threw it all in a blender, the resulting pulp will more or less resemble the Mormon creation myth.

It's that awesome.

While the Mormon version doesn't make half as much sense as Darwin's theory, it's at least twice as funny. Which evens things out in my book.

If you disagree with evolution, that's totally fine by me. At least as long as your version of the "facts" is a hell-of-a-lot funnier and/or involves aliens. But if you're serious, and you try to get all sciencey, you're probably just going to end up looking like a jack-ass... like this guy:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

Yeah! Take that, science. Unless there's a giant outside source supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy--

Oh...

He must have forgotten about that source of energy. Which is understandable... I mean, it's just a GI-FUCKING-GANTIC ball of flaming gas that lights up the sky EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Life Aquatic

I’m proud to say Conventional Stupidity has gone global. This map—of last week’s traffic—proves it. But something curious has taken place. The gospel of stupidity has spread to... Africa?


Wait a second...


That's not Africa! That's... no. It can't be. Has someone has been reading this blog in the middle of the ocean? The answer, of course, is yes. But it’s not what you’d think. I seriously doubt some guy is floating on a raft in international waters checking up on this blog. Which leads me to the following odd, yet strangely obvious conclusion.

My undying devotion to the whale community has finally paid off. It seems my over-zealous support of Greenpeace and animal rights issues naming a whale Mister Splashy Pants has earned me acclaim among the broader whale community. All I can say is, it’s about time.

By the way, if you haven't heard the news, the votes are in. There is a whale named Mister Splashy Pants. And I'm sure if he could speak, instead of making weird whale noises, and blowing water through that hole on the top of his head, he'd say, "thank you."

Old News

Astronomers have to stop calling images from space “new discoveries”. They’re not fooling anyone. This past week, the Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of spiral galaxy M81. It’s about 11.6 million light years from our solar system.


All that really means is that 11.6 million years ago, that’s what M81 looked like. Nobody knows what it looks like now. For all we know, it’s not even there anymore. Thanks for sucking, Hubble.

If I wanted to learn about shit 11.6 million years after it happened, I would just ask this lady to tell me about her childhood.

The way I see it, looking into deep space is like watching ESPN Classic. The game is only exciting for the few seconds prior to the realization that it ended like 20 years ago. Hubble is the ESPN classic of telescopes; it’s the most expensive VCR ever made. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of watching re-runs of the universe. The trouble is, we’re stuck here forever, and some jackass lost the remote.

For Your Edutainment

Darwin's Theory of Evolution, which is almost universally accepted in the scientific community, propounds that all life, from the chimpanzee to the banana, arose from a "primordial soup" teaming with microbes and other primitive life. Over hundreds of millions of years, species began to evolve through a process Darwin called "natural selection", whereby favorable traits--such as not looking like a fucking ape--were more likely to get you laid, and therefore, more readily passed on to future generations.

And since women prefer clean-shaven guys with good posture to disturbingly hairy, hunched-over monkey-men, homo sapiens eventually came out on top. And as they say, the rest is history.


Like I said, it's a theory.

But does Darwinian evolution really make sense? Did we really evolve from monkeys, and before that, from soup? Or is the truth so mysterious, so mind-bogglingly profound, that only a select few can even begin to comprehend it?


Imagine if you took the book of Genesis, a Babylon 5 script, and L. Ron Hubbard's diary, and threw it all in a blender. The resulting pulp would more or less resemble the Mormon creation myth. If you don't believe me, watch the Mormon Theology Cartoon at "GodTube". I swear. It's totally unbiased.

Other than Peter Pan, the Mormon version of creationism is probably my favorite story all time. It has everything: magic, intergalactic warfare, space aliens, and "endless celestial sex" between God and his gaggle of wives. Here's the basics:

God is an astronaut. The Virgin Mary was actually not a virgin. Upon his resurrection, Jesus came to America (yes, the United States of America) to spread the truth among the Indians. Nonbelievers turned black. And once all was well, 1,700 years later, God chose a prophet from upstate New York to discover the true history of the universe so that the Mormon religion might one day stake its claim to the great state of Utah.

Say what you will, but in my humble opinion, you can't make that shit up.

When it comes to the mystery of creation, I'll take the galactic mumbo-jumbo over Precambrian gumbo any day. If nothing else, it makes for better textbooks.