9.30.2009

Who came first, the chicken or you?



It's a philosophical question at its very core, one that has baffled the minds of even the most learned and wise scholars. But let's face it, whatever happened between you and that chicken is in the past, time to move on now.

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.29.2009

Will a longer school year make American kids smarter?

President Obama announced that he would like to make school days and years longer. He thinks this will help America catch up to other nations that have more expansive education. If we're being honest, the real problem is the way kids are being taught and not how long they're being taught. If you're baking shit pies, you don't make someone eat more hoping eventually they'll like them, you change the damn recipe. Interestingly, most Asian countries don't have longer school years than America and yet their students still outscore American students in testing. There's more to that than the "Asians are smart" stereotype, it's simply a different culture.

Of course the American educational system is flawed and inefficient, but even if it weren't, I doubt American students would rise to the occasion at the level that their Asian counterparts do. We live in a culture where sloth and excess are rewarded with more sloth and excess. As long as that's true, a large number of kids are going to squeak by in classes and focus on enjoying their lives now as opposed to 10 years down the line, which is actually what we're always telling people to do. That kind of mixed message is confusing even if you have a decent education.

The problem with American education is a far more deep rooted problem than how long or short the school years or days are. Of course most people are against the longer days, because they know it'll only make kids more bored and liable to do dangerous things to stay entertained, or tune out the education even more than they are now. But I do think that Obama is smarter than to think keeping kids in school longer with the same crappy system will help, at least I hope so. I hope there's more to this plan that I'm just too lazy to read about right now. Oh hey! Domino's is here! Sorry, I have to go put on my Snuggie.

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.27.2009

Does this make you want to strap a plastic bag to your ass?



Yeah this was a weird one. Pampers has learned a lot since these crapfest commercials, but is it enough? What brand of diaper do you use? I tend to lean toward Huggies, mostly because of the name, but also because it gives me a fresh feeling even after I've done something not so fresh.

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.25.2009

¿Te gusta enchiladas?



A lot of commercials from the past used baby labor, but this one for "Pet Milk" was more blatant than any other at the time. It wasn't uncommon for commercial producers to snatch babies off the streets and bring them into the studio for hours at a time before dropping them on their parents' doorstep. Because it was called "babynapping" and a lot of people thought that sounded cute, it was ignored for decades. Fortunately FCC regulations have stopped a lot of this from continuing, but it is still out there.

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.24.2009

Dog Daycare Online Cameras?

I don't really have a problem with dog daycare centers, but some of the upscale ones do get a little ridiculous. The thing that gets me is dog daycare cameras that dog owners can watch remotely online at work. I understand the need to watch what your dog is doing at all times, and to make sure that they're safe, but watching your dog on a laptop at work is like a security blanket, it means nothing when someone starts swinging a machete.

Let's say something bad does happen to your dog, a hypothetical situation, what are the odds you check the webcam before it's too late? You would have to be watching at the near exact moment. This type of paranoia could lead to poor production at work. Unless you weren't aware of that, in which case, now it will, sorry.

Now let's say you do manage to see your dog being hurt or abused live as it's happening on webcam, what are the odds you can run out of work, and get down to the dog daycare center in time? That would be a tough moment I know, but you would be racing through traffic, putting a lot of people at risk, instead of finding out after work and being able to attack the people at the daycare center with a tire iron, which, to me, sounds like way more fun.

And lastly, if you don't trust the dog daycare center enough that you must have your eye on the dog at all times, why even leave the dog there to begin with?! You know, if the daycare is that nefarious, I'm sure they could rig up a camera trick like in "Speed" and loop the same footage over and over for you while they beat the dog. Assuming you're just worried about an accident or your dog getting beat up by other dogs, I guess it's not so bad to check up every once in awhile, but if the dog really means that much to you, take her to work and tell the boss to fuck off or you'll make him your new bitch!

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.23.2009

Is the plot to "The Terminator" inevitable?

In case you didn't know, there is a real company out there named Cyberdyne. The founder, Yoshiyuki Sankai, is manufacturing the HAL 5 hybrid-assist exoskeleton. The HAL 5 is supposed to augment human strength up to ten times, which could mean it only augments strength 1.1 times, since that is within the limit of ten, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. HAL stands for Hybrid-Assisted Limb, though they probably could have come up with a better acronym that would distance themselves from HAL 9000, and HAL, the NYSE ticker symbol for Halliburton, and Hal, the dad from "Malcolm in the Middle" that bastard...

Sure it starts with a simple hybrid-assist exoskeleton, then before you know it you've got full body exoskeletons, then they start making them out of liquid metal and defying all laws of logic by going back in time to kill a woman and kid at ages where they are mildly yet sufficiently able to defend themselves just to keep it entertaining.

So the next time you see a crazy guy on the street screaming "Judgment Day is coming!" At least you can rest easy knowing it's the "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" scenario, and not all that Jesus fighting Satan crap. But now that we know the movies are real, I think we all owe it to our collective futures to storm Cyberdyne headquarters and destroy the building, including that damn robot arm and special computer chip they got! And we'll have to torture as many people as we can to find out where they're hiding it! Who's with me? No one? Fine! I'll go to Japan myself! See ya on the news!

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.21.2009

Do Space Vampires really exist?



We've all heard the tale of the Space Vampires as youngsters, but this video provides some strong evidence to prove that it's real. We are learning more and more about these freaks every day, but what planet they come from and what they actually want from us besides blood, are things that may never be known.

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.20.2009

How do you have a chunk of plastic in your lung for two years and not know it?

By now we've all heard about the Duke doctor, Momen Wahidi, who removed a big chunk of Wendy's plastic from John Manley's lung. If you don't know who John Manley is, he's the guy who was eating at a Wendy's two years ago and drank his soda so fast he didn't notice a piece of plastic in the cup and inhaled the obstruction into his pulmonary system, where it laid for two years.

It's a good thing there weren't more people like John Manley around thousands of years ago, because if there were I could imagine there'd be an extra commandment created just for them: "Thou shalt not inhale what you intend to swallow." And that would be a big eyesore on that list. Eventually it would fall into the mini-list of commandments that we don't really take seriously like "Thou shalt not murder."

It's not often when a personal crisis can be averted by the use of a straw, but this was one of those times. I will admit, the story does seem a little curious, how can you go two years with a one inch chunk of plastic in your lung? I probably couldn't go five minutes! Maybe we should be worshiping this John Manley! (That false gods commandment is one of those I don't really pay much attention to either). I wouldn't be surprised if this was all a setup to give the Duke doctor some good publicity. Maybe what he does is implant old plastic into patients' lungs when they come in complaining of coughing. Then when he pulls it out, of course they're gonna feel better. I'm onto you Wahidi! Watch yo back!

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.18.2009

Is Jell-O racist?



This was from the 60's so perhaps they've changed, but Jell-O was never too reluctant to use racial stereotypes to sell their gelatin treats. There's a lot of talk about racism these days, so I think it's important to define what racism actually is... Come to think of it, even this commercial isn't too racist. They did have another version that was much more offensive and that one happened to be real.

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.17.2009

What did you do for the Fourth of 'You Lie!'?

As we all know, today is the fourth day since the Fourth of 'You Lie!' (September 13th 2009) when Rep. Joe Wilson announced that he would not be making a second apology to the House of Representatives for his Obama speech heckle.

The House really wanted him to apologize for besmirching their hallowed halls of ineptitude, but he refused, dragging the ordeal out even longer. It was a very crucial day in American history.

The story has always been that Wilson's heckle was a spur of the moment thing and not organized, but it seems like the perfect plan. I think he figured he could yell at the President, make a name for himself, then if anyone had a problem with it, he could say they were wasting time on him while ignoring real issues.

And yes, that is a great point, but the bottom line is, he's the one that started all of this. Wilson should have just kept his mouth shut from the beginning and knew that an outburst would have detracted attention away from health care. You can't think that's okay to do, which is apparently what he did think, and for that, he does deserve reprimanding. That's like me going to a prostitute, kicking her in the throat, and then being all surprised and mad when she stabs me in the gut with a pocket knife. You don't launch the kick to begin with, no good can come of that. Sure you get your point across, but really, it's not worth it in the long haul, as Wilson has no doubt already realized. Who knows, there may even be an added case of Syphilis in it for him! As there was for me...

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.16.2009

Is your shower a death trap?

For most people, the shower is a place where they can come to clean themselves, think, cry, and perhaps even masturbate, but new scientific studies show that the shower could be more dangerous than ever thought before. Of course we all know the dangers of slipping in the tub and cracking our skull against the faucet, lying there convulsing naked, shitting ourselves until help arrives too late, but this is a completely different threat... Bacteria!

Apparently most shower heads contain a massive amount of Mycobacterium avium which is often linked to lung disease. The threat isn't too severe, but if you have been experiencing inexplicable diarrhea, (that's when you have no idea what caused it, NOT when you're screaming at the heavens wondering why it had to happen to you) or any fever, and fatigue, it may not be H1N1, it could just be that the one place you thought was safe, is killing you.

Perhaps if we lower our ingestion of shower water and stop licking our shower heads clean after every use, the threat can be ignored, but that's a big IF!

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.14.2009

Are liquor ads ethical?



You know kids are watching this, and they make it seem so fun! I would risk a guess that this commercial alone spawned over a million alcoholics in its time. Nothing's wrong with that, but the ensuing violence, that's what I'm worried about.

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.12.2009

Astronaut Humor: When does it go too far?



We all know that feeling of telling a joke you know is not going to be funny, while you're saying it, but you power through it like a champion and cover up the ensuing awkward silence with boisterously loud self-laughter as you see the faces of those around you turn into something more dense and embarrassed for you than a granite statue of your mother. It's not fun, but that's sometimes the way it has to be.

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.11.2009

Is Alan Greenspan made of gingerbread?

I was reading about Leslie Cockburns' (tee hee) documentary on the American subprime credit crisis, then I saw a story on "60 Minutes" about the same thing. It's now in style to discuss what went horribly wrong years ago when Wall Street was vigorously gambling with the livelihoods of Americans. Fortunately, Michael Moore is getting involved to set the story and a few ham hoagies straight. The scary thing is, we are only now realizing what went wrong. For all we know, evil financial practices are still around today, not counting the usual ones.

One of the big players in what went wrong was Alan Greenspan, who is mostly to blame for deregulating subprime bets. I'm sure he meant well, but the end result was, the whole system got out of control and no one from the government was watching to stop it. Then I looked at Alan Greenspan and saw an unsettling resemblance to the Gingerbread Man from the movie "Shrek". After that, I realized the Gingerbread Man is a good analogy for Wall Street swindlers. The little bastard thought he couldn't be caught, he thought he was too quick, then the fucker got eaten by a fox. Which is ironic considering Rupert Murdoch probably had a hand in the crisis somehow, but which billionaires didn't? Actually it's not a good analogy considering these gingerbread fuckers never really got caught, they're all laughing about it, but that's not my fault, the gingerbread story needs to come to fruition!

I wonder if men who have slept with Leslie Cockburns get at all scared when they find out her last name the morning after... I'm just joking, that would insinuate Leslie is some kind of slut, but then again that's the joke of her name, so really I'm only commenting on that, there's no human element here, it's just about the two segments of that surname.

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.09.2009

What will happen on 9-09-09?

9/09/09 is supposed to be lucky because '9' is lucky to many cultures. But really, how can a day of 9's be lucky? It would have to be lucky for everyone and that's just not possible. Not everyone can be equally lucky, that's not how luck works, and it damn sure ain't the way 9 works either! You may receive good luck today if you have properly appeased the 9 gods. And no they're not 9 separate gods, they're 4 very temperamental gods that represent the number 9 and all it stands for. In case you don't understand how temperamental they are, there used to be 15, but "motherfuckers couldn't keep quiet about some shit."

I actually woke up this morning at 9:09 AM and my clock doesn't have a seconds readout, but it didn't become 9:10 for awhile, so I'll just assume I woke up at 9:09:09 on the dot. Did I mention my pajamas were soaking in urine? That's gotta be a good sign, or a really bad one, depending on how you look at things, and whose urine it was. Hopefully by the time 9:09:09 PM rolls around I will be lucky enough to be fully dry, yes I am going to sit around waiting for myself to dry naturally because I don't believe in laundry machines or logical nakedness.

And as far as 10/10/10 goes, I will venture to guess that will be a much more eventful "many of the same numbers" day that our buffoon culture drools over. I heard that everyone who eats pork on that day will transform into several ravenous werewolves (one person will split into about five werewolves) and terrorize the rest of humanity as wildfires stretch across America while Asia laughs having already experienced their own version of this a day earlier. Then Abraham Lincoln will rise from the dead and kill several dozen people in search of flesh to spread over his bones. Once he has his flesh, he'll attempt a forceful coup over the current government and be killed by attack dogs on the White House lawn where he will be unable to choose the kind of health care he wants.

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.08.2009

Why don't celebrities die more often?

When I ask this question, most people assume I hate celebrities. They think "Oh, you must want them to die otherwise you'd see their immortality as a good thing and leave it be!" Well, that's not the kind of person I am. I want to know WHY they have this immortality. Okay, immortality is a strong word, but let me explain my curiosity.

About 35 public figures have died in 2009 so far. But that list includes Mike Tyson's daughter, Jeremy Lusk, Wayman Tisdale, Nick Adenhart, (not true celebrities), Socks the Cat and Gidget the Taco Bell Dog (not people), as well as Ted Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Dom DeLuise, Oscar Mayer, Walter Cronkite, Eunice Shriver, Don Hewitt, Les Paul, Ed McMahon, and Bea Arthur (people who mostly died of natural causes). With that in mind the list decreases to around 20 surprising deaths and really only Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, and David Carradine were established stars who shockingly died all of a sudden (which is the type of death I'm wondering about.) That number seems curiously sparse to me.

In 2004, 2,398,343 Americans died. So, per day, that gives us a rough figure of 6,571 people. 6,571 Americans die every day, if every day is like a day in 2004... But still. That's 274 an hour and 5 every minute. If you count all the celebrities we have in America, and I'm including popular musicians, actors (even people on VH1), politicians (even the non-charismatic ones), best-selling authors (even the recluses), and pretty much anyone that's constantly in the media, that gives you a shitload of people and yet here we are, WITH the celebrity death wave earlier this year, at three? Five-star celebrities were dropping like flies in the 70's, mostly because of drug use, but drugs are still around AND we have way more celebrities than back then. It just doesn't add up.

You're saying "But they're rich! They have better access to health care and bodyguards." That is true, but not many celebrities in their primes are hooked up to iron lungs being saved by medical technology, and think about all the travel that's going on these days. When I think of celebrity plane deaths I think of Buddy Holly, JFK Jr., and Aaliyah, that's three notable (key word) in the past 50 years! Is that weird? Or is small craft flight really that safe? Those things are falling out of the sky left and right these days, it's just that no celebrities are on board, and maybe the pilots take extra precautions when they're transporting big wigs, but accidents will happen, or not... Consider the plane crash from September of 2008 that had Travis Barker and DJ AM on board. Those two were notable, so they survived, the other 4 people on board who died? Not celebrities. DJ AM did die later on, but that's not the point.

In conclusion, 33 actual people in the public eye died this year as of September 1st 2009, along with around 1,598,896 normal run-of-the-mill, average Americans. Are celebrities that rare? You might not know one personally, but if you knew 1,598,896 people, odds are you'd know more than 33 "celebrities"... These are people who constantly get into trouble, drive drunk, and live life to its fullest, and yet manage to escape the scythe of death much easier than an average American. You have a 0.00214% chance of dying every single day based purely on statistics. If I could find the number of total celebrities, (which is pretty hard to find) I could compare the two percentages, but from what I see, the best thing you can do for your health is forget about the health care debate and try to get on the next season of "Survivor".

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.05.2009

Would Michael Jackson have made a good Spider-Man?

In an interview, Spider-Man creator Stan Lee mentioned that during conversations with Michael Jackson, Jackson intimated a wish to star in the Spider-Man films. All I can say is, "Why the hell didn't they do this?!" In hindsight this seems like an amazing idea, of course the Spider-Man films have grossed more money than California, but Jackson would have made that ten thousand times better.

Sure some people might be turned off by the idea of Michael Jackson starring in any film, let alone a superhero film where he's running around in a tight spandex bodysuit, but... Have you seen the flash mobs for this guy? Even in death he's the most popular entertainer around! You think Justin Timberlake is going to have several thousand people gather in a town square to do some N'Sync dances anytime soon? Get real!

Just imagine if all the people who gathered to do those Jackson dances in mass (aside from all the inmates) paid to see Jackson's Spider-Man films. Holy crotch grab! That's talking loads of carnival ride money. I would go so far to say that if Jackson had been allowed the role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man, that would have kept his spirits up and he would definitely be alive today. Tobey Maguire would be doing well, I assume, and Kirsten Dunst would naturally be married to Jackson with tons of odd children running around. It would have been a better world damnit! Maybe George W. Bush watches "Spider-Man" in 2002, sees humanity for it's beauty, and then decides to NOT invade Iraq. Well that changes things a little doesn't it?! You chew on that.

A side note: Jackson had always identified with Peter Pan and called his home Neverland. Peter Pan is a property of Disney, and now Disney has bought Marvel, including Spider-Man... Is that just coincidence? Or does Disney know something I don't? Peter Pan, Spider Man, are those linked some how? I'm going to get to the bottom of this!

-Binkie McFartnuggets

9.04.2009

Do you have your new stylish Snuggie yet?

I just saw a commercial for the new stylish Snuggie and I have to say, they hit the nail right on the head. For years I've wanted a Snuggie, but the colors that they had to choose from were atrocious. Like I'm gonna wear a maroon colored body tarp around the house... What will the postwoman think? She'll probably think I'm some kind of self flagellating Bozo! Well finally they've designed better stylish Snuggies that can let everyone strut around (even in public now!) looking like a schizophrenic leopard person.

Don't try to fight it! We all need to wear Snuggies! If you think this is some kind of pervasive cult that's taking over the world, you're wrong! And think about how difficult it will be for the stormtroopers to inject you with the Swine Flu vaccine when you've got your Snuggie on! Have you given that much thought? It's the perfect clothing device EVER! And I'm including lederhosen in that! Just be warned, the Snuggie does not prevent STDs... I found that out the hard way.

-Binkie McFartnuggets