This Just In!

Shit! My horoscope was right!

Raising the Debt Limit (Explained)

Congress has agreed to a budget for the first time since 2009. We’d praise Congress for this accomplishment if it weren’t one of the most basic elements of their job—much in the same way that we don’t typically gush all over a plumber who managed to avoid blowing up our house.

Still, we’ll take what we can get . . . and in this case, what we can get is apparently a deal that does little to nothing to address the deficit, national debt, or the debt ceiling.

The more we think about this, the more our attitude moves away from “faint praise” toward “sarcastic praise,” so rather than shoving this post full of snide, half-baked, uninformed commentary, we’ll leave you with an informative video that makes it all seem almost funny:

Your Inability to Punctuate is Making Things Worse

A word of advice: don’t ring the bell. Trust us.

Words That Changed the World: "The Drunkards' Chorus"

Lyrics, such as they are, and melody by Mickey MacConnell.

I Forgot My Phone

Courtesy of Charlene deGuzman

Mustaches Make Everything Better. Everything.

Sadly, Bud Light needs more help than even the must luxurious mustachio can give, but at least we gave it a try.

They Say That Statistics Never Lie . . .

. . . but they don’t say that statistics are always particularly smart:

What’s most interesting to us is that teen pregnancy after age twenty-five drops significantly, but apparently not all the way to zero. Apparently there’s at least one forty-year-old teenager out there who missed out on that filmstrip in junior-high health class.

Mustaches Make Everything Better.

The 24-Hour News Cycle Finally Fails Us

But what did he eat? For the love of God, man, WHAT DID HE EAT???

A Field Guide to Typestaches

In honor of Movember—a month-long event that encourages men¹ to grow luxurious, awesomely ludicrous mustaches to raise money and awareness for health issues such as prostate cancer—and in keeping with our own growing interest in typography and our abiding interest in all things silly, we present to you, for your pleasure puzzled disinterest, “A Field Guide to Typestaches” by Tor Weeks:

Please feel free to share, in the comments section, your stories, sketches, and photographs of your sightings of these rare and unusual creatures in their natural habitats.

Poster available for purchase at http://torweeks.com/ and possibly at http://torweeks.blogspot.com.


NOTES
1. And unusually hairy women, as far as we know.

Please Giggle at This Noble Cause, and Then Donate

Note: If you’re not entertained by wordplay and/or lowbrow boob humor, you may as well stop reading, because there’s really nothing for you here.

All day today, Dr. (Mrs.) Some Guy will be participating in Girls Gone Rx, a CrossFit competition that doubles as a fundraiser for Barbells for Boobs, which is (according to their website) “a non-profit organization that provides funding to pay for breast cancer detection services as a last resort for thousands of people who don’t qualify for assistance elsewhere.”

While we applaud the participants’ phenomenal athleticism and their willingness to work their asses off (not usually literally) for a good cause, what really hooked us here was the lengths to which some of competitors were willing to go, and the linguistic creativity they were willing to apply, to come up with boobie-themed team names that are either really good or really bad, sometimes simultaneously.

The competing teams include:

• Breast Friends
• Bar Belles
• Twin Peaks Rescue
• Bonkers for Honkers (our personal favorite)
• Fembots
• Breast Assured
• Titty Titty Bang Bang
• Bad LAsses
• BrEAST MODE
• Rack Pack
• Team Motorboat
• Big or Small...Save ’em All
• Stop Drop and Squat
• Saving Second Base
• Push-Up Broads (extra points awarded here for a triple meaning, even if the competitors don’t actually have to do push-ups today)
• Breast buddies
• Sweater Puppies
• Pirates for Healthy Coconuts (also our personal favorite. Why “Pirates”? Who cares?)
• Sweater Kittens
• Breast Friends Forever
• Brazinga!
• In Titties We Trust
• Lumbear racks
• Girls Gone WOD (WOD is a CrossFit term that stands for “Workout Of the Day”)
• Pink Ninjas
• Tits on Tits on Tits
• Itty Bitty Titty Committee
• Peeka Boobies
• Honkin Tatas
• Tittsburgh Feelers (we’ve done what research we can, but have been unable to determine whether this team really did come all the way from Tittsburgh to compete)
• Ta-tas and Tiaras
• Bad Ass Boobed Bitches
• Treasured Chests
• Booby Trap
• Go BOOB or go HOME
• Double-D Double Unders
• A Cups
• Breast of Intentions
• Do These Squats Make Our Asses Look Big
• Rack Attack
• Boobie Traps
• Nice Rack
• Rack City
• Mis-Tits
• Booby Buccaneers
• We Care About Your Pair
• Hee HawHotties
• BoobBeasts

Lest you think this competition amounts to a bunch of lunkheaded gym guys snickering at boob jokes like a bunch of fourteen-year-olds, the Girls Gone Rx competition appears to be for women only. The single lunkheaded guy we know snickering at it is the one blogging about it at the moment. So take that, people who object to stuff!

If you'd like to donate—which would be great—please visit this page for Saving Second Base, towards which I am terrifically biased but only because it’s possibly the greatest CrossFit team ever assembled, and not because it includes my wife.

This is Why Your Auto-Spellchecker Is Not Enough.

Follow Your Dreams. Even If You Suck.

American rock band Van Halen, formed in 1972, has sold almost 100 million records in its forty-some years of existence. Fifty-six million of those sales are of the albums released between 1978 and 1985, during the first tenure of lead singer David Lee Roth: Van Halen, Van Halen II, Women and Children First, Fair Warning, Diver Down, and 1984.

Roth was replaced in 1985 by Sammy Hagar, who in 1996 was almost replaced by David Lee Roth. Neither Roth nor Hagar were in the band in 1996, so technically neither one was replaced as lead vocalist by Extreme’s Gary Cherone, who was with the band until 1999 and then replaced in 2003 by Sammy Hagar . . . who was replaced in 2008 by David Lee Roth.

The band’s latest release, 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth, has sold one million copies, far lower than the usual for their other albums but still several hundred thousand copies per lead singer.

What’s more interesting than the band’s legendary inability to get along is, frankly, that David Lee Roth has been able to make a lifelong—and very lucrative—career as a singer:

The moral of the story here is that America is, even today, still the land of opportunity. If you work hard and find something you’re good at, you can be a great success . . . but even if you’re no good, no big deal. Follow your dreams, even if you kind of suck at them.

The Comma: Punctuation's Unsung Hero

On the Benefits of a Well-Rounded Education

Mixed Signals

The Minimalist's Thirty-Million-Dollar House

Near the end of May 2013 it was reported that New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez’s Miami home had sold to an unnamed buyer for $30 million, making it one of the most expensive home sales in the city’s history.

Rodriguez bought the property for $7.4 million in 2010, and spent roughly the same amount on building the house, which was finished about a year later. Less than four years after starting construction, Rodriguez was able to sell the house for a profit of somewhere near $15 million.

Now, we don’t object to making a profit—in fact, if we someday sell our own home for an extra fifteen million dollars, then so be it. That bothers us even less than it bothers us for ESPN.com to describe a 20,000-square-foot house—one with nine bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, home theater, and an outdoor kitchen (as well as the more mundane indoor gourmet kitchen)—as “minimalist.”

See if you can guess which of these houses is the quaint,
minimalist bungalow formerly owned by Alex Rodriguez.

We do admit, however, to being a little puzzled. In one of the worst housing markets and worst overall economies most living Americans have seen—or at least can remember clearly—this house was sold after less than four years for twice its previous price. What kind of luck is that?

Honestly, who on Earth gets paid tens of millions of dollars in order to get something that’s just going to sit there, inert, doing nothing but getting older and more and more run-down, and may well have been built using illegal materials in the first place? 

What?

 Hey—

  
Oh wait—

Yeah, we remember who now. Alex Rodriguez.

A Young Man's Dream Come True

Czech-born hockey forward David Krejci had to have been excited when, on April 2, 2013, his Boston Bruins traded for his childhood idol, twelve-time NHL All-Star and two-time Stanley Cup champion Jaromir Jagr. It’s hard to imagine a young athlete who doesn’t dream of one day suiting up with his or her favorite athlete, and not only has gotten to play with his idol, but also is (as of this afternoon) only two wins away from winning a championship with him. That has to be exciting.


As it turns out, Krecji isn’t the only Bruin who gets to skate with the favorite player from his childhood:




Getting to hit the ice with Jaromir Jagr has to be a dream come true for Jaromir Jagr, even if the guy hardly ever passes him the puck or even looks him in the eye.

The best comment we’ve seen so far on this comes from Yahoo Sports:

“In Jagr's defence, who would he have named as his favourite player anyway? When hockey was invented, he was nine.”¹

NOTES
1. We’d probably find this even funnier if we weren’t just barely younger than Jagr, and weren’t getting awfully thin-skinned about our impending decrepitude. But, hey, this is the internet; we can hardly expect people to pass up the low-hanging fruit of an “old guy being old” joke. Besides, have you seen the guy? He’s forty-one years old—shouldn’t he have, like, died by now?²
2. See what we mean? Low-hanging fruit. Cheap jokes. Internet.

"The Invader" by Ehud Lavski

---

We’re not sure whether posting this constitutes a violation of copyright or a perfectly appropriate, even desirable, sharing of an artistic creation that deserves wider publicity. We prefer to believe it’s the latter, although we’d find the notion of our little backwater blog actually providing wider publicity to be pretty laughable, if we had a sense of humor. Original artwork found online at http://elcomics.tumblr.com/.

Well, as Long as They're Already Dead, I Guess It's Okay . . .

If you’re too incompetent to keep them alive, then burying them
is, technically, part of the job description.

The above photograph of the office of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Bury, Greater Manchester, England, has been making the rounds of the Internet lately, even though the photograph dates from 2005, practically an eternity in terms of pointless and stupid internet fads. 

Mere months after the photo was taken, the sign in question was replaced with the more sensible “Helping Local Animals,” leaving a pun-starved public to hope, probably fruitlessly, that the RSPCA’s stateside counterpart, the ASPCA, happens to open similar offices in, say, Fishkill, Slaughter Beach, or French Lick.¹


NOTE

1. We thought about naming our all-time favorite Austrian town here, but the verb tense just didn’t quite click.

This is Your Childhood Taking a Crane-Kick to the Face

Noryuki “Pat” Morita was fifty-two years old when he starred as the aging but spry Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid with Ralph Macchio.

As of November 2013, Ralph Macchio, who starred in The Karate Kid as the young and initially ass-kickable Daniel Larusso, will be fifty-two years old.

We’ll repeat this for movie fans of a certain age: the Karate Kid will be fifty-two years old this year.

And this, movie fans of a certain age, is your childhood (left) taking a crane-kick to the face. Look how sad it is.

Irony, Illustrated

 

We’re not really sure whether this one passes the irony test, or, failing that, whether it passes for clever or super-stupid. As the entire message is, in fact, written in stone, it proves itself wrong and thus pretty pointless . . . but then again, the word “nothing ” is written in stone right here, so if read literally, the statement is technically correct . . . and pretty pointless.

All we can say for sure is that there’s somebody out there with a chisel and way too much free time.

Dumb, Illustrated

Irony, Illustrated

While we wouldn't go so far as to say that discussions of the definition of irony are widespread enough to call it a burning issue, certain kinds of people keep talking about it. The definition remains as slippery as always. This photo, for example, might better be described as poetic justice—although poetic justice does often involve heavy doses of irony.

We tried using Google to look up illustrations that would explain “poetic justice,” but all we got was nine billion pictures of Janet Jackson. So we’re afraid that you'll just have to settle for looking at a picture of a Klan guy on fire.

Odds are about 100% that this image is staged—something from a TV show or movie—but we comfort ourselves with the belief that at one point or another, it's happened in real life. One can always hope.