A few years ago, I bought my then-girlfriend a stuffed polar bear. Since then we've named him, given him a voice, a personality, everything (likes: salmon, sleeping in, movies about bears; dislikes: the cold, barking dogs). We have a birthday for him. We have "conversations" with him and treat him like he's our son. Are we crazy people?
Are you doing it with a stuffed polar bear? No? Then I guess you're not crazy. But I don't think you're being efficient. First of all, you don't necessarily have to keep butter in the office fridge. You could leave half a stick in a butter crock in your desk! ADORABLE! I'm sure there's Bon Appetit editor out there who does exactly this and deserves to be clubbed to death for it. But my point stands. You can avoid the fridge, avoid office thieves, and have spreadable butter on you right when you need it. You'll forever be known as The Butter Guy at work, but joke's on everyone else. They have no butter. Plus this saves you the production of pre-buttering your toast before it's even toasted.I have been cocky and tried toasting buttered bread, especially when the butter is still hard (snicker snicker) from being in the fridge. The butter melts and soaks into the bread before the bread has a chance to get crisp. Then it just leaks all over the goddamn place. And that's in a toaster oven. If you're trying this with a slot toaster (I'm assuming you aren't, but that might be a generous assumption on my part), you're gonna burn the office down. My advice to you is to eat toast for breakfast at home and then eat an officially sanctioned lunch product, like a Hot Pocket, at the office. PROBLEM SOLVED.I like to eat toast at work but I got tired of (and grossed out by) leaving my butter in the barely clean work fridge. Now I butter the bread at home, bring it to work and then toast it. Am I a maniac?
It would. People only tolerate that shit for the Pope, college football coaches, and Stephen A. Smith. If it's just some sweetguy like me blowing through intersections like they're Lord of the Galaxy, people would talk. I live in Maryland. I have to share the road with 100,000 people who already all drive like they have a police escort alongside them. I want them all to burn. Therefore, I gotta live my values and sit in traffic like a common schmuck. The police have more important things to do anyway, like typing up angry union missives when video leaks of them shooting people to death.Alex:If you could have a free police escort everywhere you drove, would you do it? I'm talking no traffic, no waiting at lights, no having to honk at the person who cuts you off—straight to wherever you want to go like you're the president. Seems incredibly convenient, but I wonder if the inevitable nationwide disdain for "police escort guy" might outweigh the benefits.
There are no great fictional sports upsets. The sports movie formula is dependent on you walking into a screening of Glory Road knowing how it will end. They're not gonna pull a Tarantino on you and have Texas Western LOSE at the end of the goddamn movie. That isn't what you paid for. The only time upsets happen in sports movies is when the good guy loses. This happens in Rocky, which is now 500 years old. It happens in Tin Cup, which is the daddest dad movie that has ever dadded. It also happens in Million Dollar Baby, but that was an Oscar movie. It's only natural that a boxing movie written by the Crash guy would end with Hilary Swank getting curb stomped by her own corner stool and then left for dead in a hospital room with her legs chopped off. Really inspiring shit.I'm watching Beerfest and I want to know what you think is the greatest fictional sports upset. Or you can rank them if you want.
I wouldn't. If we're all dead of coronavirus in six months because of anti-vaxxers, I'd have a different answer. But for now, no. The only reason to turn my nose up at celebrity activism is to make myself feel better for not doing nearly enough charitable work myself. Oh they're all fakes, etc. We took the kids to a huge community service day here in town a couple weeks ago. We sat at tables in a massive convention hall, writing encouraging signs for sick kids in hospitals and stitching blankets for elderly people in hospice. This kind of work can be tedious, and at times it feels like you're doing busywork for the sake of doing busywork. But at least we spent a couple of hours feeling like we were actively trying to help people. Do we do this every week? Nope.In light of the continued and recent spate of anti-vaxxer celebrities flapping their gums, let's ponder celebrity activism, writ large. If you could wave a wand and undo the effects of ALL celebrity activism, for good or for ill, would you? For example, that's JJ Watt's significant contribution to Hurricane Harvey relief AND Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaxx body count.
I could ask a math person to calculate this for me, but I would be shirking my duties as a professional bullshitter if I did so. Instead, I looked up the drop speed for the Tower of Terror at Disneyland. If you've ever gone on this ride, you know that when it drops, your ass comes off the seat. Very scary. Turns out that it drops at 39mph, which seems fairly modest unless you're on the ride when it falls out from beneath you and you spray diarrhea all over your own feet. NOW … would you leave your feet in an elevator dropping at that exact same speed?How fast would an elevator need to drop between floors before a person's feet come off the floor? For this exercise, let's assume a human of average height and approximately 170 pounds.
Are we talking about how you look playing these games without a shirt, or how you feel? Because as looks go, I don't think anyone is gonna be awed by me whipping off my rash guard to play some volleyball. I know because I've done it. I've been the dad who burns the clock by dragging my kids over to the volleyball net at the beach and has them bat the ball around for six seconds before they start bitching that the sand is too hot. Women passing by stare, but not for the reasons you'd want them staring. It feels good to be out on the court, doing a budget dinner theater version of Top Gun. But I still look like a bag of white chocolate chips that melted down and got rolled around in some floor lint. I'm not young enough to keep up the illusion that I look impressive out there anymore. But sometimes the illusion kicks back in and I feel very masculine, indeed.Can we get a ranking of best shirtless sports? I guess volleyball is the clear winner, but there are some that I think might be sleeper picks. A nice summer day on the golf course shirtless sounds great.
- Wiffle ball
- Fishing
- Any combat sport (boxing, MMA, pro wrestling, etc)
- Running
- Touch football
- Soccer
- Volleyball (beach)
- Tennis
- Cycling
- Horse racing
- Hunting
- Skiing/Snowboarding
- Racquetball
- Kayaking
- Golf
- Basketball
- Volleyball (at the Y)
- Bobsled
- Peloton class
HALFTIME!
Aren't you cold, though? When I grab that towel off the rack, my first goal isn't to be dry. It's to be warm. The second I turn the shower off I feel like I just got air-dropped into Greenland. I require soft, fluffy coverage. I had to dry off with dish towels once as a bachelor, because I was undersupplied and overly drunk. But I am a very wet man, and those little towels lacked the absorbency I required to get the job done. And, again, I was fucking cold. I'd rather have a towel.Having run out of bath towels in my bachelor dump, I instead opted to use hand towels to dry myself off after showering. I'm telling you folks. Throw out your damn bath towels. It was like being a part of a NASCAR pit stop. I was dry in a fraction of the time, plus the extra control I felt from having one in each hand …. Fucking exhilarating. I see absolutely no downside to living like this now.
All right so I'd marry The Big Bang Theory. There are worse fates. I've never watched a second of The Big Bang Theory but it seems harmless enough. I've been indirectly exposed to The Thundermans so many times this year that watching an actual, professionally-made network sitcom would be a HUGE* step up for me. Also, my in-laws say it's the funniest show on TV. Who am I to argue with them? You wanna know why this show has earned $78 trillion during its run, and why Friends will never fucking die? Because they're easy shows. You don't have to watch them in order. You don't have to rank them by seasons, although I'm sure people do. So much high-end TV now feels like an obligation. You're exhausting all your time and energy just trying to keep up with the culture. So it's easier to opt out and watch a show that asks far, far less of you. This is why Aerial America remains the greatest show in television history.Fuck Marry Kill: The Voice, Big Bang Theory, The Bachelor/ette. Worst three shows I can think of besides Steph Curry's putt putt thing
I'm almost 30 and currently working an office desk job that I hate and is incredibly boring, but I make good money ($80k/year). My bosses give me Exceeds Expectations on performance reviews even though some days I'm only at the office for six hours before bailing out early (they must not notice or must not care). Even at work, I don't work that hard. I read PDF books and Reddit for large portions of the day, and I even watched a few episodes of Barry in a meeting room last week. How do I balance having this well-paying job without much oversight or responsibility with wanting to do something that actually gives me some fucking purpose in life? This surely matters somewhat, but I'm very happy in my personal life, so I do have something to look forward to everyday. Do I just ride out this easy-going job for as long as I can until I actually figure out what I want to do in life? Or should I force myself to find something new ASAP to ensure I'm not locked in here forever?
But virtually no one can run as fast as NHL players can skate. NHL players can skate at speeds of 20mph and above. That's as fast as Tyreek Hill running untouched down a football field. I would say if you magically WERE that fast, then you'd be such a good athlete that it would behoove you to not use your magical powers and lace up real skates instead.Then again, there's a reason that Tyreek Hill doesn't play for the Calgary Flames. He can't play hockey well enough. You, with your magic broomball shoes, would be similarly useless. Yeah, you could run around out there without slipping, but you'd still get hip checked into the boards. You'd still have to keep the puck away from defensemen and other assorted hired goons. You'd have to anticipate passing lanes and have an intuitive feel for spacing on the ice. You wouldn't have any of those skills, which are pretty necessary as hockey goes. Shit, put you on rocket skates and it wouldn't matter. You'd just end up flying over the wall and into the penalty box anyway.But I DO appreciate the question. That's a quality weed question.Zachary:On the heels of watching the Stanley Cup and smoking weed, it got me thinking about a potential scenario. Let's say I was a good high school hockey player. However I was given magical powers where the space immediately below my feet are hardwood floors, not ice. The rest of the rink is ice and only the spot directly below me turns to hardwood while I am there and goes back to ice after I move. I can still run as fast as players can skate. This would allow me to cut and turn on a dime whereas the other players' movements are restricted by being on ice. Would this mobility allow me to make it as an NHL player?
I fucking hate both those men, but stiffing them on a handshake wouldn't help much. They'd still be evil pigs after the fact, and it's not like they would be chastened by my rebuff. These people are sociopaths. They don't care if you scream at them or do a George Conway HOW DARE YOU SIR kind of move on them. My dog would process that kind of interaction more emotionally than either of those men. Same with Roger Goodell, who I've DREAMED of being rude to on many occasions. If I'm gonna refuse to shake someone's hand, it's gotta matter. It has to HURT. And that's why my choice would be Meghan McCain. The fucking idiot.Whose hand would you be most pleased to publicly refuse to shake? As in, among other people that person extends his or her hand to shake yours and you conspicuously refuse to reciprocate. Trump is the easy answer, but I think Mitch McConnell might be top of my list.
Email of the week!
I think spit-roasting would be the move. Like a suckling pig. That way you get a nice crackle on the skin. Now that's good baby!I recently became a new father. A baby boy. He's tall and skinny, but he's healthy. I love him. He's great. I'm a chef (I hate this term, but it's what people call what I do) but I don't think you need to be one to have a constant and pervading question when you're holding your child: How would I cook this little nugget? My first inclination is roasting him slow as a whole piece of meat. Simple seasoning I think would be key. My first thought was a kind of clam bake with corn, potatoes, and lobsters. My wife suggested a lau lau style wrapping him up in taro leaves or in banana leaves. But I also think that maybe taking advantage of his tenderness would also make sense. Quickly seared cutlets or even some sashimi. Thoughts?