Underpants On The Outside

A couple mornings ago I was drinking my coffee and trolling the interwebs for funny things, and I came across this wonderful little article: The 10 Best Mathematicians. Now, I know a bunch of you reading this are big ol’ geeks, so I recommend you get yourself over to this site and enjoy. Even for you non-nerds it’s plenty understandable, even when we get to the later numbers and things start getting weird.

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A very dear friend of mine is now nine months AND ONE WEEK pregnant.  She’s gone on Facebook, asking people for suggestions for what she can do to pass the time while she waits on the kid.

Personally, I think she’s looking at this problem all wrong.  Why so passive? She’s the kids mother, for crying out loud!  It’s never too early to start teaching good manners, starting with: it’s rude to be late to an appointment.

So here are my top 6 8 things she can do about her (adorable I’m sure) little wombguest who, quite frankly, is starting to overstay his/her welcome.

1) Playskool’s “My First Eviction Notice.”

2) Invite friends over. Make it sound like there’s a totally awesome party going on just outside your vagina.

3) Put speakers against your belly and start playing Metallica. Psychological warfare.

4) Take a rolling pin. Start just below the breasts, and work your way down. (Be careful, obviously.  You don’t want to hurt the kiddo – you just want to let him know you’re not messing around.)

5) Smoke ‘em out.

6) Pacifier + fishing pole = baby.  For the line, I’d say a ten pound test oughta do ‘er.

7) Find something to do – something where the absolute most inconvenient thing that could happen during it would be to have a baby.  For instance: drive to Los Angeles.

8) Start baking cookies.  Stand near oven.  (True, this is similar to #2.  But everyone loves cookies.)

How ’bout it, Underpants readers?  Any more?

I’m currently sitting in hour 6 of a sales conference that can only be described as “riveting”.  Well, that would be the only way to describe it, on the condition that you knew no other words.

The speaker just asked “Who can tell me a use for cream cheese?”  About ten seconds too late, I turned to the guy next to me and whispered…

“That’s between me and my fuck-bagel.”

Thank you – I’ll be here all week! (Literally.  Yay sales conferences.)

Okay, here’s my question:

Say I were to show up at an ex-girlfriend’s house.  I interrupt whatever she’s doing, but it’s important, I say – I have a message for her that she really needs to hear.

I admit that our breakup was tough on me.  A lot of the things she said hurt me at the time.  But after a while, I started to see what she was talking about.  I WAS taking her for granted. I HAD become boring and stale.  And if I was really being honest with myself, I couldn’t blame her for wanting to see other guys.

But things were different now.  Because of her I’d changed a lot of things about my life – I was getting out more, trying new things.  I wasn’t a different person, but I was a better person than I had been.  And I wanted her back.

Would that work?  HELL NO.  So then why do I want to try that new Domino’s pizza so badly! Why?!?  What did they do that I didn’t?

Well, they didn’t cry, for one.  But that just means they don’t love me as much as I loved her.  My hypothetical ex-girlfriend, that is.

Or maybe I should have painted my dick with garlic butter.

From an objective standpoint, I shouldn’t like playing fantasy football: I spend four months being nervous; on Sundays I am unavailable emotionally, physically and intellectually (not everyone considers this to be a bad thing), and the amount of time I spend performing “research ” could be dangerous for my career.  Each week, winning brings me no joy, just relief, while losing makes me despondent.  And at the end of the road, the grand prize is $180.  Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but if you break it down to an hourly rate it’s on par with most small-market lemonade stands.

But I won.  I. WON.

Do you know what this means???  It means I know a lot about football.  Like, Vince Lombardi, Mike Shula, Mike Ditka… Z. It also means I am a better human being than my friends. Case closed. QED.

See, fantasy football isn’t just about football – it’s a measure of integrity, leadership, moxie and most importantly, penis size.  Ultimately, it’s about one winner (with a big dick) surrounded by a whole bunch of losers.

Speaking of the losers, I’d like to take some time and recognize a few of them.  First of all, I couldn’t have done it without Roommate Mary.  Our draft was scheduled for the same weekend as my bachelor party, and while I was in Vegas testing the limits of acceptable pre-marital depravity, Mary stepped up and drafted me a team full of winners.  I only wish that her own team could have fared better.*

Next, I’d like to thank our league commissioner, but I’m not going to until I get my winnings.   Bitch better have my money…

Lastly, I want to thank D, the owner of the team I faced for the championship.  No, I’m not going to thank him for losing – I’m not THAT much of an asshole. I want to thank him for being cool.  Let me explain:

Every season, the first thing I get all stressed about is what to name my team.  Just before the first game, I noticed that D had named his team Papi Del Sol (referring to his son, Solomon) so I thought it’d be funny to name my team “Solomon’s Real Dad.”

I knew we’d all get a laugh over it, but D is from Long Island.  (Side note: People there call it “The Island”, which was very confusing to me, as there is another island really close by that is arguably a bit more important.  Y’know the one… MANHATTAN.) They’re weird about respect on “The Island.”  I wasn’t alone in expecting that D would call me up soon after and say “Hey – a joke is a joke, but your team name implies you humped my wife; take it down.”  I would have complied, of course, because he is my friend.  He also used to play lacrosse, which means you can hit him with a stick and he won’t stop whatever he’s doing.

To our surprise, D was a good sport about it all season long, allowing fate to bring us the poetic Super Bowl of Papi Del Sol vs. Solomon’s Real Dad.   The Commish aptly titled the game “The Paternity Test.”  Did I mention I won?

When the kid is about five or six years old I’m going to start sending him a card every year for his birthday.  I’ll say things like, “Went to a Padres game this week.  It made me sad – I always dreamed of taking my son to ball games.”  Inside will be $10, and I’ll sign it, “Your Real Dad.”

And D will punch me in the face.

*Though not better than my own.

This new policy is in response to an article sent to me by Robbb, frequent commenter and co-counsel on the Underpants legal staff. (Because you can’t spell “pro bbbono” without “robbb.”)  The article basically explained that when bloggers mention their employers in the same place where they talk about really depraved shit, they frequently become significantly less employed.  As it turns out, The Magic Kingdom is pretty good at tracking down information, so let’s keep things incognito so I can be free to talk about things like the following:

It is no secret that kids are always on the lookout for new ways to get themselves intoxicated while avoiding detection from their parents and/or authority figures.  Procuring legitimate drugs or alcohol is so hard that half the time you’re huffing the air from tennis ball cans just in case you get lucky, so when you actually score something good, you don’t want to have your stash jacked because you ran out of gum.  One of my favorites was taking the cardboard from a roll of paper towels, stuffing it full of dryer sheets and using that as some kind of catalytic converter for marijuana smoke. If my parents ever got suspicious by my friends coming over and holing up in my room for hours on end, their minds would surely be at ease once they realized we were doing laundry.

Now I discover that our efforts were amateurish at best. If we were really hardcore, we would have soaked tampons in vodka and shoved them up our asses, the way that kids these days are doing it.

If you need to, take a couple minutes to absorb this info (pardon the pun, haha.)  Come back when you’re ready.

There are so many things I have to say about this, I don’t really know where to start.  First, a quick aside about the article in that second link.  Did you notice that the subject of the article, “Milagros Rios” is a fictitious name?  That’s a writer with some style, right there.  Hats off to you, Maria Castro (if that’s your real name!!!)

But what really fascinates me about this phenomenon is that there aren’t a lot of lingo names for it.  The only thing I can find is that the practice is referred to as “slimming,” and frankly, I’m disappointed.  Teenagers are usually much more clever than that, as anyone who knows what the “Hoover” and “Two Dogs in the Shower” are could tell you.

I want to believe that you, the Underpants readers, could do better.  I gave it a couple hours of thought (okay, okay, a couple of days), and here’s what I came up with:

• Clogging the Drain
• The Russian Cyclops
• Dronking (Like drinking, but kinda different)
• Taking the Brown-Eye Flight

I’m hoping you guys can come up with a few funny ones.  I’m also having a pretty good time imagining how things might have gone if kids in my school had been doing this.  For instance, Underpants commenter John Law was always a bit of a lightweight back in our high-school days.  Does that mean he would have stuffed his ass with tampons soaked in wine coolers?   Does Grey Goose go down (or go up – you decide) smoother than Popov?

Can we discuss this a lot?  I’m still giggling about it.

It’s been a while, but the fine (and assuredly attractive to whatever gender they want to be) people at Yankee Pot Roast have published another piece of mine.  Enjoy!

I believe it’s a common experience that when people hear themselves on an answering machine/voicemail they think, “Oh my God do I really sound like that?” Well, as I watch these videos of me at the Comic-Con, I can’t help but think, “Oh my God do I really sound like that… AND look like that???” [update: make sure you click to watch all three videos - the video that initially loads is something different.]

At first I was wondering why the camera guy kept filming me from slightly below waist level, because, as you can see, it kinda makes me look fat. (Then again, so do my eating habits.) But I also realized that shooting me from above would show off my bald spot, so it’s kinda damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I also want to take a second to add in some highlights that didn’t make the videos. In the musical intro, there’s a shot of me holding a sword, as some guy walks past and pats me on the head. First of all, I killed him in a duel minutes later; no one condescends to me. But second of all, that was a booth selling genuine samurai swords at a comic book convention. Like, real swords. With edges. This is a place where a lot of kids think they could totally be Batman, at a booth a hundred feet where they could play Quake 3 until their adrenaline is sky-high from fake killing people, and five feet from where they could play fight with light sabers. (I do this as well.) This seemed like a poor idea to me. I mean, I’m 29 and I was half-tempted to buy one and serve some justice and/or try and cut hot women’s clothes off. When I asked them what sort of measures they took to ensure people’s safety, they assured me that all of their swords were wrapped in cardboard boxes. With tape. In other words, we’re safe as long as those 18-year olds don’t have their house keys on them.

There was a booth belonging to a consumer advocacy group that defended violence in video games and other entertainment, saying it did not necessarily make kids more violent in reality. Their booth was located in direct sight of the Quake 3 trailer, directly next to the light saber seller, and right across from the guy selling swords. They didn’t feel like commenting on the irony.

Neal Adams, who appears in the intro, is a pretty famous comic book creator. I wasn’t expecting to get interviews with anybody, but in our random wanderings we started talking with his wife, who naturally controls his schedule (just as my fiancée controls mine) and told us to come back in about 45 minutes. While he was a really nice guy and talked to us for a lot longer of a time than we expected (until his wife told him to stop, naturally) the material he covered wasn’t really what Crave was looking for. But I got him to talk shit about Stan Lee*, and I can’t believe they took it out. Oh yeah – it happened.

The editors showed the really cute blonde who kept trying to get on camera. What they didn’t show was how blatantly she was hitting on me right before that. In fact, just about all of those fine fine women you see doing the promotional work (the belly dancers, the Bodog girls in vests, the two girls playing video games) were flirting with me. Needless to say, that’s never happened before, and I’m fatter and balder than ever. I wish that ten years ago someone would have told me that all I’d need to get hot women interested in me was a camera and a mic cube…Dad.

There was a booth where original transformers were on sale next to a copy of the Playboy featuring some chick from Battlestar Galactica. Someone call Disneyland and tell them they’re now the second happiest place on Earth.

I could probably go on for pages, but I’ll stop here. Needless to say, I had a blast, and I owe a gigantic thanks to the guys at Crave Online for the opportunity (you guys know where to send the check, right?)

*When I asked him what the problem was with good ol’ Stan the Man, Neal said that Stan was really bad at remembering names. When I said “talking shit”, I was using the term a bit loosely.

Awesome.  Now I’m just slightly below average! 

Also, I didn’t post these earlier to avoid innundating you all with my geekiness, but there are two new Superhero Diaries up, here and here.  If I may follow Wednesday’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels quote with one of my favorite John Candy lines, I’m rolling like a hunchback doing somersaults!

[Update: Over the weekend, Cracked also published this article of mine about sexy robots.  Enjoy!]

Most people think I’m a big ol’ geek, but I would say I’m much more of a dork.  While geeks and dorks both enjoy games involving dice having more than six sides and exhibit the same sweaty panic when faced with sports equipment and girls, geeks are more knowledgeable than dorks.  Geeks read Wired; dorks just look at the pictures.

My friends – now those guys are some geeks, and I say that with all due respect.  Keeping up with the conversation requires applied knowledge of fluid dynamics, nuclear physics, materials science and/or search algorithms… of which I have none. (In an unfortunate coincidence, all of those were classes I was taking during my “weed helps me think” days.)  But while I may be a dork, I’m a chameleon dork: I can APPEAR like I know what everyone’s talking about as long as I nod at the right times and keep an eye out for an opportunity to make a joke involving either the transitive property or “bubble sort.”* 

Which brings us to the good news of today: I have been published on The Science Creative Quarterly (the article can be found here.)  The SCQ is a terrific site for geeks, and I think many of you Underpants readers will enjoy it – the articles are intelligent and funny when they want to be.  But as far as my own article goes, I can only hope you think it’s funny because it sure isn’t intelligent. You won’t know anything after reading it that you didn’t before; you will just be a minute or two older. So yeah… big thanks to the editorial staff for publishing it.

*I couldn’t tell you what bubble sorting is with a gun to my head.  But it sure sounds funny…