I wrote an email to a lady to try and have a date

Hi, now you know my last name [from my email address]. (My sir name is Viscount Matthew von Idiotville the Seventh Esquire, is a thing I would say in person but not type, because homophones don’t work so well in text) Nor does Homo Phone, the dating app I programmed. The name is a play on the fact that we’re homo sapiens, but nobody seems to get it. There’s even homo habilis functionality where the app will respond if you bash your phone against a rock! But very low sales, and the reviews keep saying “delete and get Grindr.” I like to respond personally to these reviews, if for nothing else to correct the typo of Grinder, my other app that allows you to charge your phone by smashing your teeth together while you sleep. It’s tough to break into this whole app business.

That extended joke using homophone as a homonym brought to you by a childhood of sadness, probably

Do you like wheelchair breakdancing? There’s a semi-official music video for one of my favorite musicians, Aphex Twin, that consists of a hydrocephalic youngster with impossibly malleable bone and flesh structure wheelchair breakdancing and inhaling an enormous line of coke in a closet with a frightened chihuahua. I don’t condone 90+% of what’s going on in that video but I do listen to that sort of music completely sober, which is probably fair warning. (Another warning, this time the fairness of which is beyond dispute: I wouldn’t go poking around for that video at work)

Should we be humans? And get together for n drinks? What if you started a comedy club, but instead of “two drink minimum” you say “n drink minimum where n is prime.” And you can teach the servers to be like, “sir, you have had seven drinks, can i bring you four more?”

Whoa okay, hi. Drinks, yes? When are you free?

Antepenultimate,

Matt

Initial Agenda If You Build Your Own Death Star

I was writing this to some chick on OkCupid who indicated that personal Death Stardom was one of her objectives.  By the time I sent it, she “had left the site,” which probably means she read my profile and hated me.  Here’s the stupid 5-minute one-off message she missed. Dating is still SUPER FUN in case you were wondering:

1) Destroy Pluto. I ain’t mad at Pluto, but the “Planet or Planetoid?” argument is over and done with. Blast it into Kuiper Belt smithereens.

2) Assuming you used/modified the original plans, you might wanna redesign the HVAC system so it doesn’t have air ducts big enough to fly a spaceship through.

3) No roombas. Droids hate roombas. Vacuum your Death Star the old-fashioned way, trust me.

4) Carve a picture of a penis into the Moon. Your Death Star has variable power, right? And penises are funny.

5) Don’t skimp on the alcohol at the yearly Death Star Christmas Party. This is just general advice for keeping morale high.

6) Point the giant communications dish toward the Telemundo satellite on April Fool’s Day.

In one of the pictures, the Falling Man’s shirt or white jacket was blown open and up, revealing an orange tee shirt

so many

no time no time no time not iem tno etime notime notiem tnoem tnieom notime noteiom tneointeionteion noteoim niotiem notieom notiem notiome too busy sthinking

Population Control

One way to possibly control our soon-to-be-/already-done-been-a-thing population problems could be to make random rules where you die if you break them. Like when you draw a Jack(?) during that random drinking game, only with permanent irrevocable consequences.

But myriad legal issues. Say our first rule is, “anyone who says the word ‘derriere’ ever again will be humanely euthanized ASAP.” Immediate Fourteenth Amendment challenge on basis of national origin from the French. And what of the farmer who lazily comments on the crisp smell outside the milking stall one morning? “Big Pun: How an Off-the-rolled-up-denim-cuff Remark Killed One Sleepy Rural Town’s Beloved Mime.” Because his hobby was doing mime stuff. As a farmer they could take him or leave him; something about seedy pasteurization practices.

And honestly even the “beloved” part was a stretch: lacking the spatial confines of urban life, his routine consisted of acting out his freedom to explore the vast, open country, manifesting in his running off in a premeditated but undisclosed cardinal direction for hours, sometimes days on end. While a small handful of townsfolk, most of whom had done a stint in some epicenter of commerce or other themselves, championed the farmer-mime’s avant-/apres-garde (d)evolution of the art, most instead regarded the dramatic disappearances as eccentric jaunts, if not the fugues of an outright madman.

The “big pun” thing, too, is really just a blatant misunderstanding of what wordplay even is, and invoking an oversized former rap artist truly sounds the falsest of notes in this homogenous white agriscape, provoking several readers of the weekly local newspaper to query whether the fall of said medium might be more merits-based than previously believed.

First Paragraph of Imaginary Urinal Short Story

I feel like I’m the sort of person who people get curious about what my dick looks like when they’re standing next to me at a urinal. They might feel an unidentified urge to peek over. To peer or to peek, depending on the infrastructure. Sinistrally. Surreptitiously. But while I know of their curiosity, I know not from whence it comes. Nor do they. Nothing about my zipper dexterity or an aural inference of stream strength or the length of silence between the one and the other suggests non-Euclidean geometry, a repulsive carbuncle, or an ironic tattoo of a Wonderland fungus.

I met someone from Tinder

Tinder is an app where you harass the opposite sex for no reason. Now that you’re up to speed…

I started talking to someone from this social abortion because her facial deformities seemed to avail of a limiting principle. Abort blog post.

Sore

Sometimes when I’m on a plane, I wonder if the captain is suicidal, but instead of crashing the plane, he or she has decided to make it climb up and up and up as high as it will go, and whether that would be a cold death or a hot one, and whether it might require some degree of skill on the captain’s behalf to get us high enough that we’d burn, and whether he or she and/or I would swell with pride/ make a brief note of that upon the flames’ onset. And then I think, this isn’t the airline with Fresca, is it. No.

An Oral History of the Word “Serpentine”: Unabridged Version

The last two people to say the word “serpentine” are Jon Gruden barking at a waiter in the least buxom Hooters commercial ever recorded and a police officer describing Lamar Odom’s preferred motor vehicle trajectory. Numbers three through several thousand are mechanics. Then Axl Rose. Then more mechanics. Then Adam, with sitcom-husband exasperation. Then Eve. Twice.

I sent some messages to women on OkCupid

They are as follows:

Something’s been bothering me recently that you might be able to help me out with: so it’s true that we eat an alarming number of spiders in the course of our lives. It’s also true that daddy long legs(es?) are poisonous as all hell, but apparently they have gimpy mouths or something and can’t inject us with the poison. But wouldn’t we eat the occasional daddy long legs and die or get really fucked up? Maybe SIDS is actually just what happens when babies eat a daddy long legs in their sleep.

On that note, I’m going to tape my mouth shut and go to bed.

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Your profile screams ‘workaholic,’ which is sexy (just kidding).

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I was doing some shart-related research, and did you know it means “challenge” in Hindi? There are 3 Bollywood movies called Shart. My new life’s ambition is to procure all of them and host three viewing parties spaced two days apart that will forever be remembered as Shart Week.

——————————————–

Ok, let’s break this down. You’d eat human meat if it were prepared just the way you like. My problem with that question is, how the hell do I know how I like to eat human meat before I’ve ever tried it?

The question seems to assume that human meat fits more of a steak profile than, say, chicken, because with chicken you’d just say, “Umm, fucking cook it until it isn’t pink and the bacteria is dead, like every time.” So maybe it’s more like steak? Or should I apply some kind of possibly racist criteria where white people are white meat and black people are dark meat and proceed accordingly?

If you’re already eating human meat, would you also ask it to be the meat of someone brilliant and/or famous? Because what about the 0.00000001% chance that there’s actually something to that voodoo stuff about eating someone’s soul and gaining their powers? (It was a cool theory that Walter from Breaking Bad was a Soul Eater: some uncanny things about certain affectations he developed after someone died at his hands, is about the only way I can put that and stay safely in the no-spoiler zone.) And if you were thinking along those lines, should you maybe have it prepared more on the rare side than the well-done side? You’ve gotta figure you get more of the soul that way, right?

What cut of meat would you go for? The thigh/butt cheek/I-guess maybe-breast would be the best, right? Would you have an aversion to eating someone’s butt that somehow emerges despite the fact that you’re ostensibly okay with eating a person in the first place?

Maybe you chuck it all, embrace the depravity, and say, “take away all the good parts and make me a hot dog out of the rest.” Baller.

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…

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A few months ago I was at an interminable six-way stop light and realized I was behind a pickup truck whose back window (is there a word for that stupid vertical pickup truck back window? there probably is) was an elaborate graphic featuring the smiling visage of Bob Ross. I scrambled for my phone to take a picture that I’d cherish until the end of my days, but I couldn’t get my shit together in time. I’m still mad about that. More accurately, I am phthalo green with envy that I was too yellow ochre to capture his van dyke brown coiffure. (Those are three colors he would always mix on his little palette thing. I can’t apologize enough for subjecting you to that sentence.)

Anyway.

A Medieval Nobleman Recalls a Visit to Champp’s Americana, Part 1

Yesterday, my friend Sextus and I repaired to the local Champp’s, ostensibly to watch the Cincinnati Bengals concuss and be concussed while ultimately prevailing in unremarkable fashion against a Buffalo Bills team starting a recently furloughed park ranger at QB. And sort of watch the other games at the same time.

Upon emerging from the vomitorium and scanning the myriad viewing surfaces scattered throughout this cellulite (and cellulose, lots of wood everywhere) coliseum, my heretofore fully functional, 20/20-but-full-disclosure-one-time-they-said-I-had-an-astigmatism eyeballs detected divers fauna of the canine(-murdering), bovine (Texans), and porcine (Andy Reid) varieties, multiple fellow felines, and three flavors of marauding vagrant folk. And yet neither the flaming coiffure of our field general, Andy Dalton, nor the drooping visage of coach Marvin Lewis were blasting my rods or my cones. With dread in my heart, I hailed the buxom concierge, inquiring, pray tell, did they fucking contract the Bengals late last night, JesusChristwhatthehellisgoingon? Crestfallen, she replied that my beloved bestriped Bengals had been besmirched, banishéd to the patio, because “the manager is a Browns fan.”

Abscond to yon patio? What choice did we have? Jettisoned like common detritus, we emerged onto said terrace, which, as promised by the friendly hosting wench, contained two televisions projecting our quarry, positioned as polar opposite ends of the space, perhaps in an attempt by the diabolical manager to have both screens create an infinite strange loop of glare upon the other. Euclid, however, would prevail this day.We scanned the area for lifeforms, immediately noticing a rather large group of bipeds sporting identical t-shirts proclaiming the wearer to be one of Maggie’s Magical Magpies or some bullshit; I actually have no idea what they said. Upon further exploration, Sextus’ tricorder was able to detect a group of septuagenarians at our seven o’clock (which, had I thought to inform them at the time of their relative location, the mere uttering of words representing such a late hour may have induced a fatal torpor).Averse to offending the bluehairs with our wanton and profane commentary, we alit next to Maggie and her brood. Little did we know, magpie nesting behavior includes spontaneous bouts of swordplay, and it was not long before these roustabouts began rudely jostling us with each parry and riposte. There was no time to wonder whether the Depend Adult Undergarments® cupping those bedsored buttocks would be a suitable dike for the staccato series of sharts surely surmising from these postprandial pensioners. Menus in hand, we gingerly approached the blast radius.

A random person in response to hearing a favorite artist is releasing a new album:

“Oh fuck yes. Finally it’s about time. ~time to get pregnant~”

Killing in the Name of

I signed onto my “Mitt Romney” Xbox Live Account after a long hiatus. Yeah, I had one moment of zen-like clarity about two years ago, and rather than do anything world-changing or otherwise important, I registered the Xbox LiveID “Mitt Romney.” Anyway, I jumped on that account after not using it for quite a while, and there were literally dozens of messages from people who just jettisoned some random comment or friend request to “Mitt Romney” in the hopes that whichever random person had that name (me!) would holla/friend back.

Highlights of those messages include:

ScarceTrout says: radioactive llama penis (He will be surprised that Mitt Romney replied to that)
I Am Ryan Cable says: i hate you (I told him he was an hero (hacker inside joke))
A friend request from “Governor Romney” (pffft)
A friend request from “Ann Romney” (Accepted!)
Poopets asks: Are you the real Mitt Romney? (Poopets!)
H20 Drama wants to buy the account (No)
GunSmith117 challenged me to man up and clear out my Inbox because Barack’s is full. (I’m on it!)
MattisBestPony just yelled I LOVE YOU MITT really loud and hurt my ears, then started spamming me with party invites once I accepted his request to the point that I had to block communication. Matt: great pony, iffy human.
XxGhostVisionxX called me a racist. (Against Ghosts)

So those highlights weren’t very high. But the people friending me were!

Oh

Director’s Cut: I almost deleted this post, then read it again and thought it was funny. Love me some me.

Watching a baseball game, you can just lie back and let the stupid wash over you like a warm sunbeam coming out of a care bear’s small intestine (little-known-but-obvious-in-retrospect fact, that stuff comes from the inside). Take the officials. They make calls like this:

Our National Pastime!

By the way, that thing the umpire did with his arms means “the lunging guy did not touch the sliding guy with his glove prior to the sliding guy putting his hand on the white thing in the dirt.” The lumbering gentleman made this determination from approximately 3 feet away while looking directly at everything that happened. He had a better view than you do looking at this .gif. I don’t know what’s crazier: the call itself, or the fact that directly after it happened possibly literally no one in the world thought that was the correct call, including the umpire himself, and there was nothing that could be done about it. And yet the entire fabric of sports would supposedly collapse if, say, somebody asked Omar Infante (sliding guy) if he was out, and he said, “of course I was out. I almost didn’t even bother to put my hand on the bag. Here, look, the Jumbotron is playing the replay–check out the pissed-off look on my face as I peek up at the umpire, only to see he’s calling me SAFE! I also farted right then, but the Jumbotron doesn’t capture sound, and/or it was silent but deadly, a lot was going on at the time and I wasn’t really able to gauge my ass decibels” and so they actually called him out. If this happened, it would be the biggest thing in sports ever, and I have no idea why. Obviously, if it’s close, don’t call yourself out like a moron, but it’s strange how the lines of “integrity” are drawn in sports. Anyway…

Because of shit like this, soon they’ll institute instant replay for safe/out calls, fair/foul calls, and lord knows what else, and at the end of the day, they’ll still get something like 20-30% of every ball/strike call wrong, and everyone will be completely fine with it. If you asked an intelligent alien (extraterrestrial, I mean…citizens of Central America know their baseball) to watch a GameCast on ESPN.com and to decipher the relationship between the blue rectangle (strike zone), green circles (balls), and red circles (strikes), the alien will probably just get really pissed off and vaporize you and then go into a coughing fit because you were sitting too close to him when he vaporized you so he accidentally breathed in your bone-smoke, and then vaporize your dog in the yard out of spite.

Baseball is also the only sport anyone gives two shits about that has different rules for its different leagues for no good reason whatsoever (except “that’s how it’s always been,” which I don’t know is even true in this case and am too lazy to look up, in part because that’s the worst explanation ever given for anything). The American League has a random guy past his prime who plays the position I’m Too Fat to Field and just bats instead of the pitcher. The National League makes the person who plays every 5 days and could not possibly care less about hitting come up once every couple innings and strike out feebly. American League pitchers get to have worse stats because they don’t pitch to a mannequin every 9 hitters.

When teams from opposite leagues play each other, rather than use the AL’s rule exclusively, which wouldn’t seem to do a whole lot of damage to NL teams, as they can plan ahead and grab someone from the minors, rework their roster, whatever, they use the rules from the home team, so in NL parks, AL pitchers have to bat, so the NL pitchers now get to face a mannequin with dysentery. What sounds more exciting: players batting who get hits as often as a Paradise Flycatcher feeding insects to its chicks in the nest uses too large of insects so the chicks can’t swallow them (this website is great, in large part because I think all of the “Strange Things, Events and Happenings” (these are not different concepts) are supposed to be links, only they’re not, so it’s just these disembodied comments, like the one about the Paradise Flycatcher, a “comical sequence!”—this person’s use of exclamation points is also top-notch), or people who are, like, good hitters?

Up through this year, one division, the NL Central, had 6 teams, while a division in the AL, the West, had 4. After like 10 seasons, they figured out how to fix that. Can you guess what they did?

I suppose this isn’t “stupid” per se, but the players also take off all of their clothes and put them back on after each pitch. This gets boring quicker than you’d think. And the field is a completely different size everywhere, and one team plays on the moon where there is no gravity (this is an embellishment–there is some gravity on the moon), so their pitchers are always pissed off.

Oh, this one is awesome: so in baseball, the sport is so random and stupid (see above) that the best teams in the league win like 50.1% of their games. Taking a hint from other sports, then, how many teams should make the playoffs, and how many games should they play in the first round series? Good basketball teams and good hockey teams win shitloads more of their games than good baseball teams, and basketball and hockey let like half the teams into the playoffs and play a first round best-of-seven. So what does stupid creepy Uncle Baseball do? How about letting about 30% of the teams into the playoffs, and then playing a best of five, assuring not only that the teams who just miss the postseason are pretty much exactly as deserving as those who make it, but that complete randomness will determine who advances.

Shit, I forgot, baseball added one more team from each league to the playoffs this year, and then made them play the other crappiest playoff team in their league in a one-game playoff to make it to the next round. So you just finished in the top third of your entire league, and your reward is that dude from No Country with bad hair/Chin Dimple from The Dark Knight/that idiot main character from White Teeth comes in and flips a coin, only here, if you win, you don’t get to live, you get to go to the stupid five-game series and play more stupid baseball. Plus it’s like 20 degrees outside now, because that’s what the temperature is in almost-November.

Baseball’s stupidity can be summed up by the We Get Rid of All the Baseball Stadia and Equipment and Cards and Etc. and Everyone Gets Amnesia Test: if humans hadn’t invented baseball by now, would they ever invent it? HELL NO they wouldn’t. Throwing a ball through a hoop? Sure. Even hitting a ball with a stick would be bound to happen, maybe even a ball thrown by someone else. But baseball only exists because people back in 1880 or whatever were completely strange. For example, more likely to be named the “Red Legs”: a communist lingerie football franchise, or the first baseball team ever created (may not be true)? Everyone was nicknamed weird Civil War crap like “The Duke of Tralee” or bizarre alliteration like “The Nashville Narcissus.” People back then didn’t even laugh when they said boner.

That got pretty long. I guess I could have just said the Reds signed Dusty Baker to a two-year extension. Q.E.D.

Q4 2013 Edit: they fired that bastard. Zounds!

Why There Are Obviously Not Infinite Universes

Have you ever seen a bird, flying in the air overhead, nonchalantly take a poop? Sure you have. But have you ever seen a bird, flying in the air overhead, nonchalantly take a poop, which then fell down and landed directly on another bird, of a completely different species, just chilling out and walking around on the ground? Of course you haven’t.

If that ever happened in real life, anyone who saw it would either:

1. Go insane instantly;
2. Become a born-again Christian (subset of #1);
3. Run and hug the besmirched bird, causing a hipster passer-by to make a really awful Uber-finch pun (really really small subset of #1, and probability may depend on bird species involved, with finch at the high-p end and tufted titmouse elsewhere);
4. Achieve Nirvana (one in three chance of being a subset of #1, one in two [always reduce fractions] if you count Pat Smear); and/or
5. Film it and create a real-life Infinite Jest (definitely a subset of #1—J.I. went one up on Sylvia Plath after all).

Now, if every possible universe actually exists in its own reality, that means there exist literally an infinite number of universes where a guy was walking along, this bit of non-local Avian Centipedery occurred directly in front of him, and he turned to the talking unicorn next to him walking a tiny velociraptor wearing a LIVESTRONG bracelet and sporting an ironic Jurassic Park 3 tramp stamp, in the pocket of whom (the man) is a 1986 Roseanne Barr Topps Super Rookie baseball card, voraciously eating (Roseanne, on the face of the card) from a partially empty bag containing exactly 4E23 molecules of doorknob-flavored Doritos, and, nonplussed, said, “Ewww, did you have him declawed? That’s pretty goddamn insensitive.”

Q.E.D.

You Can’t Be Too Careful

People following the sentencing of Jerry Sandusky: Think there’s no difference between 30 and 400 years?

Wait until scientists figure out how to reanimate corpses in 2058, when we won’t have any solid legal footing to put Zombie Sandusky back behind bars, and President Sasha Obama-Bieber signs the Temporarily Dearly Departed Kennedys Act, drafted to allow for the reanimation of America’s true royal family and containing an esoteric loophole through which Joe Amendola, now a wizened professor of constitutional law at Penn State’s Happy Valley Campus–and revered to the point that “Amen Joe” has replaced “Joe Pa” in the hearts and minds of Nittany Quakers everywhere–will successfully argue that Jerry Sandusky’s handwritten prison fan-fic stories constitute “family lore,” some of which are from Jerry to that young Conor Kennedy chap–who, incidentally, and in a shocking coincidence/homage to his own family lore, will drive off a bridge in 2014 in a car containing Taylor Swift, who will succumb to her acute lack of gills and become what Americans will still refer to in 2058 as “Our Diana”–and that, thus, the necromantic privileges of said bill should apply to his former, um, current, maybe, client, resulting in the application of a real-life phoenix down to his person and his subsequent return to the terranean as a free man.

Baby Names

It has come to my attention that children often make fun of other children using insults that rhyme with their names. Hence, the best possible decision expectant parents can make is to name their children after words that rhyme with (almost) nothing. As a bachelor for life, I feel it’s only fair that I do my part for the breeders by reviewing my favorite unrhymeable (or almost unrhymeable) names:

1. Aitch: 9/10

Onomatopoeia for karate chopping someone in the vagina.

2. Angst: 3/911

Angst rhymes with “manxed,” which means when you’re sleeping and your cat comes along and rubs its genitals on your face.

3. Arugula: 1/10

AKA “pussy lettuce.” Pass.

4. Chaos: 666/10

Here we go.

5. Circle: whyyyyyyyyyy/10

Everyone knows this rhymes with “hurkle,” which means “to pull in all one’s limbs.” “Hurkle!” then, is not the noise Nancy Kerrigan made when she got blasted with a crowbar by Jeff Gillooly, but what she was doing during those spins to make herself go really fast. Common misconception.

6. Else: 7/10

Sounds like a cute Irish chick—like Saoirse Ronan, but hotter. And Saoirse needs a new name anyway, so…

7. Fiends: 665/10

If you have twins and name them Chaos and Fiends, you’re automatically the most awesome person whose vagina cannot be felt in more than one cardinal direction at the same time by the same penis.

8. Fugue: 0.2/10

Pretentious.

9. Music: 0/10

Rhymes only with “dysgeusic,” which means having a disorder that causes alterations in one’s sense of taste, and if you think kids on the playground aren’t going to run with that, you can eat peaches.

10. Opus: 1/Richard Dreyfuss

Rhymes only with “Hoppus,” a method of measuring timber. Do you know what they call a bundle of sticks? Probably nothing.

11. Plinth: 9/10

Rhymes only with “synth.” Also sounds like an ambient Aphex Twin song. Techno synergy!

12. Purple: 6/10

Rhymes only with “curple,” the hindquarters of a horse or donkey, and “hirple,” which means to walk with a limp. Dickensian.

13. Siren: 9.2/10

Rhymes only with “gyron,” a type of triangle in heraldry. If pink and upside-down—the triangle, I mean—then you’ve got a hot lesbian on your hands, probably literally.

14. Toilet: 10/10

No concerns.

15. Woman: 5.1/10

Potentially inaccurate.

16. Yttrium: 39/88.906

Because water soluble compounds of Yttrium are considered mildly toxic, peers with an ironic bent will often feign shock and/or drowning upon encountering your child at a neighborhood swimming hole.

cups

Just sitting here making ear cups for melodies