Generally speaking, I think I eat fairly healthfully. I am wrong… having grown accustomed to eating only the mildest berries of the forest during my time in the Bio Brigades, “fairly healthy” for me is eating my bark and foliage with a little bit of cream. I jest, of course – I’m more of a nuts and berries kind of guy.
But! Every once in a while the siren call of the way I used to eat, and once in a maroon moon, I heed it. Tonight was one of those times. The siren in question, pleading her false case to my willing ears? Ach, the sailors speak of her only in whispered tongues… for she is the one known only as…
*Shoelaces untie themselves. Headphone cords tie themselves. Even if you notice this and start tying your shoes with headphones, you won’t get what you want.
*If you cut off your finger, it won’t grow back. If you cut off a hairy, disgusting mole, it’ll grow back.
So we live in what we perceive as a three-dimensional world. It works well enough for us; we can get around from place to place each with three coordinates. We know of a fourth dimension, but cannot actively notice it. Sure, we see its effects, but we cannot travel through it. So we’re stuck with 3 usable dimensions. At least, for material things like your computer, a cat, the ocean, or even tardigrades. For images, we have been stuck with two. Wall paintings, crayon pictures, up to majestic works of art at a museum have all existed with a one-dimensional handicap. Sure, you’d have those red and blue colored glasses, but those were gimmicky and changed the actual color of the picture you were seeing. Electronic images for years had the same hindrance. Only recently have movies come up with a way to keep the color consistent while not sacrificing the trick. But is it good enough? Let’s take a look.
I live on a quiet street in a nice neighborhood, in a house that is actually two apartments. The first floor is a three bedroom apartment, and the second floor is a separate three bedroom apartment.
What makes the house interesting is that it is the third of four identical houses on that particular block, all in a row. Alternating houses are mirror-images of each other.
As the third house in the line, our large dining room windows look out across twelve feet of scrub brush into the large dining room windows of our neighbors in House 2. For most of my time there, those neighbors have been a gaggle of young gay men, all Pitt students.
They were rarely home, but when they were, they were usually shirtless. Unlike our house, their house had a finished basement, with two more bedrooms, for a total of five bedrooms and five twinky gay boys.
When summer started, many of the gay boys went home to various tiny, not-quite-glam-enough Ohio and Penna. townships, to suffer out the summer in neo-christian hyper-moral misery. They found a few subletters last minute, and then, oddly, those subletters found subletters.
I ran out of time looking for houses over the summer, so now I’m subletting for two months and moving into a new, awesomer place in August.
The place where I’m living is not bad; the house is beautiful, and my room is rather nice – spacious, and just a bit on the humid side. Some of my housemates are mixed up in entirely the wrong crowd, so much so that when Dr. Subtle told me over the phone last night that one of my housemates had just been arrested, my response was, “Oh, really! Which one?”
However, this is not the point. The point is that the fridge doesn’t work very well. It might be just about the right temperature to sit in and relax over these hot summer months. However, it is entirely the wrong temperature for dairy products.
You think I sat down because I wanted to hold myself up? When I come home after a long day of playing Mass Effect, I expect that I’m not going to have to worry about the little things, like having dinner ready and holding up my own goddamn arms.
Although everybody says that nuking the spill isn’t on the table, the fact that it’s even being discussed in the New York Times just goes to show you what capable hands we’re all in. Right? Because nukes are a great way for sealing things up, not, you know, blasting huge holes in them and scattering the debris all over the fucking place. And nothing screams “Success!” like a dead, oil-covered, radioactive porpoise.
It’s really startin’ to get fucked. I know my stepmom’s a bitch, but that’s no excuse, really. I’m sure there’s plenty of girls who’ve had to clean the house. I guess that’s what I get for downin’ a fifth of Grey Goose before I got down to cleanin’ shit up. I’ve blacked out before, but that was a real dick move on her part to get the handyman to drag my passed-out ass into the fuckin’ woods. I was so paranoid that he was gonna try to kill me. When I came to I just started runnin’ like they lit a fire under my ass. I heard gunshots and a half an oink in the distance…
Yeah, I’ve seen a bunch of your newfangled “action flicks” that you people are watching in theaters these days. I was underwhelmed by “G.I. Joe,” underwhelmed by “Ninja Assassin” and “Transformers 2,” and just plain whelmed by “The Book of Eli.” But all you young people out there, you get so excited when you see this stuff, you’re practically pissing in your popcorn! Well let me tell you something; the action movies of my day were so awesome you’d start blowing CRAP out your EYEBALLS if you so much as glanced at ‘em.
For a long time, the widely-accepted standard for racist jokes has bothered me a bit. The standard is this: that any joke exploiting a given racial or other group is okay to make, so long as it’s made by a member of said group.
Put your shit on the correct side of the flag, Zambia. It goes on the left, near the pole, not the right.
Okay, flags of the world, listen up. A nation’s flag is supposed to be its unique identifying symbol, a collection of colors and insignia that define its people, what they stand for, and what they hope for. It is the banner that will brand their greatest accomplishments, it will be hoisted above their competitors on the world stage, and is the oriflamme they rally behind in times of war. Yet so many of y’all are pedestrian, similar, and uninspired. You fly behind the god damned presidents of the world, ya gotta shape up.
I know not the manner in which you came to be on my ceiling. Nor do I know why you struck my lower back as you fell from the ceiling to the back of my chair.
This isn’t even the right flag! That’s Liberia’s flag! As if decades of slavery were not enough, now we deface someone else’s flag just because we’re too fucking LAZY to ink the RIGHT NUMBER OF STARS!
Worse still, it’s a THROW PILLOW. It’s not even a real pillow!
It’s like a big-game hunter tracking down the last Tasmanian tiger and then calling it a dingo when he mounts it to his wall.
Patriotic holidays are just commercialist circlejerks. We don’t honor the fallen. We have sales on mattresses. It’s bad enough that Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Labor Day have been bastardized, but why you gotta exploit the blood of our ancestors to make a $.59 profit on a refrigerator magnet?
Marmaduke is a comic that is as old as my parents. It’s been drawn by the same fellow, one Brad Anderson, since 1954, and since the fateful day of its creation Marmaduke has served as a daily reminder that you don’t have to be funny or talented to be syndicated in newspapers nationwide.
I once read the entire Marmaduke comic described succinctly as “The big dog is on something you want.” I think there’s an even simpler explanation: the cartoonist is not funny at all.
