Underpants On The Outside

First of all, as you read this you’ll see why the title is such an awful joke. My bad.

Recently I came across this article. Several members of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders went tandem skydiving with members of the Army Golden Knights, an elite paratrooper unit. And while I know those guys have a very dangerous job and train incredibly hard…well, I’m sure no one had a tough time getting out of bed that morning.

The thing about the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders is that they’re a lot like nurses, stewardesses and Hooters waitresses. They’re not as hot as they used to be, but there’s still a sexual mystique about them, a holdover from the generations that remember WWII. What I mean is that if an American male ever has the chance to have sex with one, he sort of feels compelled to, because his father would be incredibly proud. And jealous. It’s all very Oedipal.

In any case, no matter what these cheerleaders looked like, those guys were working on ‘em (as they should have). Then I started thinking of skydiving-based pickup lines they might have used I would have used in that situation, like, “Have you ever felt the earth move from ten thousand feet above it?” Then I kicked it up a notch in terms of planning and creepiness, and the following is how the orientation speech would have gone that morning if I was running it and it wasn’t for things like subtlety and the women’s rights movement.

———–

Good morning, ladies. I’m Lieutenant Z, and on behalf of the rest of the Golden Knights I’d like to welcome you to Fort Worth. As you know, today you will be doing a tandem skydive from a height of 13,500 feet. It’s actually only ten thousand feet, but we tell the ladies it’s longer – ha ha, that’s a little paratrooper humor for you.

Now, before we get started, let me ask you all a question: who wants to join the two and a half mile high club? I have to warn you, by the time you officially join, it may be more like the mile, mile and a quarter club. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. But seriously, if you’re interested, please see Corporal Thompson over to my right, he has some waivers you’ll need to sign.

Upon exiting the plane, you will be experiencing sixty seconds of freefall. Many women owe the best sixty seconds of their lives to one of us - some of them have even gone skydiving, too! HI YO! Hopefully someone’s writing these down, because I’m on fire today! But back to freefalling, when you leave that airplane, you’re going to want to arch your back with your arms and legs spread-eagle. We’ll cover this in more detail later, but this will help your partner control your descent. Who knows, maybe he’ll throw in a few exciting rolls or flips…. It will also provide him the chance to double-check your harness, particularly the troublesome buckles in the chest and upper-thigh areas. We care about your safety. That’s our job.

At this time I am legally obligated to read the following statement:

The parachutes we will be using today do not feature two primary rip cords. If you are told any conflicting information by your jump partner, please inform the Officer In Charge, particularly in the case that one of the rip cords is unusually flesh-like in coloration, and you are instructed to ‘be gentle with it.’

Blah blah blah, legal mumbo jumbo…– hey, did you come here for jury duty or to jump out of a plane? There was an isolated incident a long time ago, but let me assure you that all of the guilty parties have been reprimanded. Which actually reminds me, let’s welcome back Sgt. Davis, who has just returned from a six-month unpaid leave of absence – say hi, Charlie!

I bet some of you have questions. One that I hear a lot is, “Hey, Lieutenant Z, can I get pregnant in mid-air?” No, you cannot. It has something to do with air pressure, but don’t ask me to explain it unless you’re also willing to ask your OB-GYN to jump out of a plane in the middle of the night, two miles above enemy territory.

Okay, that’s all the time we have for Q&A. It’s time for us to split up into pairs, but before we do, let me leave you with one final thought. Most of you have probably never seen what a human body looks like after hitting the ground from two and a half miles up. Hopefully you never will, because it’s beyond the power of words to describe. So take my word for it – having sex with your partner is a lot more preferable, if you catch my drift. That even goes for whoever’s stuck with Sgt. “Cease-and-Desist” Davis over there.

Have fun up there ladies, and just so you know, we’re all shipping out tomorrow morning – this could be our last night on Earth.

A link to a “Ask Yahoo” article appeared on my gmail yesterday morning, with the title, “Is the postmaster general really a general?”  I immediately clicked through, because these things are always amusing, particularly when they start off on such a stupid foot.  I was not disappointed.  (I don’t want to steal their content, so go read it if you want to know what I’m talking about.)

First of all, I love the faux-casual tone Yahoo answers with (I highlighted the text):  “The postmaster general (PMG) has one of the coolest job titles in the United States government… you need a shrewd business sense to compete with UPS, FedEx, and, of course, that darn Internet… The current postmaster general is a fella named Jack Potter.”  Oh, Yahoo, you dialectic scamp!  It’s damn near impossible to understand you through all that down-home country slang!

Now what if I was working at Yahoo when Frank from New Orleans wrote in his question (and I didn’t care about my job)?  Let’s find out.  For the sake of comparability, I will also write my answer in an informal, conversational tone.

What’s up, Frankie!

Whoooooooooa Nellie, that’s one hounddog of a question!  Now here’s your answer: hell, yeah, the Postmaster General’s a general!  And if he hears you ever questioning his authority, he’s gonna order a ‘code red’ on your ass.  Also, you’d better not think that this is a job that just anybody can do.  You have to earn that bad-ass title.  The dude in office now, Jack “Don’t Call Me Harry” Potter, earned two degrees before he enlisted in the Post Guard and worked his way through the ranks to be the Big Cheese.

He is a prominent member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with the Surgeon General and the General Manager of the Yankees.  In fact, most people don’t know that their mailmen are colonels – you should be saluting them.  They are fighting a war – a war against people like you and me, who choose to use these newfangled “internets” rather than pencil and paper like proper Americans.   ”Snail mail” wasn’t too slow for ol’ Ben Franklin, the first Postmaster General.  He killed the King of England with his bare hands so that you and I could have the right to send mail.  To support his recent efforts, the Postmaster General was granted the power to raise the price of stamps as part of the Patriot Act.  (Now, that’s what I call a Stamp Tax!  Know what I’m sayin’? ….Frank?)

K.I.T., B.F.F.!

-Y!

I almost called this post, “Ask a Stupid Question, Get a Stupid (for different reasons) Answer”.  Oh, and when it comes to the coolest job title in the U.S. Govt., I’m going to go with “Majority Whip.”  Most offensive sounding:  “Minority Whip”.

I’ve been on a health kick lately.  While dying later would be sweet, it’s really more of an added bonus; Wonder Woman has seemed a bit too comfortable lately – I need her to think I have options. 

Not only am I taking my blowjobs sans grilled cheese sandwich, I’m trying to eat better across the board.  This weekend I was grocery shopping with WW and I saw a box of reduced-sugar Frosted Flakes.  With only 33% less sugar, I figured they’d still taste delicious - I would just go without the bowlful of milk-flavored soda pop at the end of my meal.   I’m willing to make sacrifices for the greater good.

You know in movies how anytime a criminal hands over a suitcase full of cash, it’s a couple hundreds on top of big stacks of paper?  That’s what Low-Sugar Frosted Flakes are: a couple of Frosted Flakes on a big stack of Corn Flakes.  It’s not that I don’t like Corn Flakes, but it’s important to manage one’s expectations and whenever I see Tony the Tiger I anticipate some guilty pleasure in my near future.  (Same thing for Shannon Tweed.)  I don’t like to start my morning with a double-cross.

Now I’m trying to decide if they should be called A Cereal-us Mistake or Frosted Flakes for Roosters.

The first name probably makes sense if you enjoy awful puns.  (And if you do, and have breasts, please contact me at zach@underpantsontheoutside.com.  Remember, I work out.)   As for the second, these Not-So Frosted Flakes remind me of Jews for Jesus.  They start out as Frosted Flakes, but their personal preference is to be Corn Flakes.  Hey, no problem, you are who you are.  But you don’t get to be in the blue box with a tiger on it.  I know, sometimes the blue box seems cool – after all, we get to watch Woody Allen movies – but you belong in the white box with the rooster.  That’s how it works.  Names are important: a tostada full of ground beef, refried beans, rice, cheese and sour cream doesn’t become healthy because you call it a taco salad.

Fuck.  Now the next time I open my pantry my breakfast is going to try and hand me pamphlets.  

Over a year ago, the top of my head looked like this:

Looking at that should give you a better understanding of why, after reading the headline, “Hair Follicles May Regrow After Head Wounds”  (http://health.yahoo.com/news/175229) I immediately went out and brained myself with a ball-peen hammer.  When I came to, I was about to give myself another whack for good measure when I realized it was stupid for me not to read the entire article.  After all, it might contain information on which head injuries I could give myself to maximize hair restoration. 

It was fascinating.  For instance, like Silly Putty and the Post-it Note, this finding fortuitously stemmed from completely unrelated research:

While studying the healing of wounds in mice, a team at the University of Pennsylvania noticed that the animals developed new hair follicles after their skin was scraped.

So basically, “hurtin’ ‘em for hurtin’ ‘em’s sake.”  It certainly reinforces my personal theory about science: that it’s ultimate purpose is to legitimize the shit we did either as children or while drunk.

“We’re amazed that we’re getting follicles to form,” Cotsarelis said. 

“Usually the mice just roll around in agony and cry.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s hilarious - but when I think of those six months we spent punching them in the stomach, it makes me sad to think that time could also have been spent curing baldness.”  Costarelis added, “If only ‘scraping’ came before ‘punching’ alphabetically…” 

Unfortunately for mammals who don’t care to undergo physical pain for potential beautification, there are a lot of other mammals who are just fine with the idea, and one group has bank accounts while the other doesn’t wear pants.

Costarelis…is forming a company to explore ways to develop the treatment for human use.

It’s a shame, really.  He’s leaving before he had a chance to find out if titty twisters affect rodent mammary gland production.

Besides hair growth, the research could have other benefits:

“The follicle is a small organ, a mini-organ,” Cotsarelis said. “If you can figure out how to regenerate the follicle, you also have a better idea about how to regenerate a finger or a limb.”

Kinda taking the long way around the barn, no?  Has this guy seen lizards???  You can pull their tail off and like, two days later…new tail!  Wouldn’t it be sweet if we could do that???  Of course, extensive experimentation would be required.  Like, what if you cut off their tail rather than pull it off?  Or burn it off?  Or hit it with a belt sander, or…

Unfortunately, “No one knows if new follicle growth occurs in wounded humans”, and you know what that means: more research.  In other words, it still sucks to be a mouse.  I just hope they don’t keep them near the room where it’s always simian happy hour.

Somewhere there’s a mother who just noticed her son tying an M-80 to a kitten.  She wants to stop him; her husband wants to apply for grant money.   Meanwhile I’m combing my hair with a potato peeler and searching for signs of life.

Got another article on Cracked: 5 Movie Quotes that Must be Stopped.  Check it out and rate it highly, Focker!

Originally, the article was framed as another guide to Movie Quotes, but the editor wanted to make it a tad more focused on annoying quotes.  That meant that the following got left out:

“Bacon tastes goooood.  Pork chops taste goooood. — Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker.” 

Origin: One of the amazing things about Pulp Fiction quotes is that unlike 99% of movie quotes and 100% of philosophy, they never became stale, inane nonsense spouted by morons.  Pulp Fiction has dozens of terrific quotes, so many that it was difficult to choose which to discuss in this article.  In the end we choose “bacon” because we were hungry.

Proper Usage: “Bacon tastes good” is funny in a wide variety of situations.  Consider a few of the following examples:

• While eating Bacon
• While eating Pork Chops
• While eating Bacon stacked on Pork Chops
• While being arrested
• Passover
• Ramadan 
• While watching Babe

Conversely, there are only three times when quoting “Bacon” would be a bad thing:
 
• Before Cunnilingus
• After Cunnilingus
• During Cunnilingus

This weekend I received an email from Jackie Treehorn with a link to the story you’ve probably all seen, about the crocodile who bit off the zoo keeper’s arm in Taiwan:

Now, the first two jokes that came to mind were the very obvious, “Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!” and “Yeah, but a half-hour later the crocodile was hungry again.” But I’m into rim shots. (Ladies…) Then I got caught up trying to cast my all-Chinese* version of Peter Pan.

Captain Hook: Duh
The Crocodile as himself
Tinkerbell: Bai Ling - petite; seems to frequently partake in fairy dust
Peter Pan: Jet Li – he can fly and is good with a knife
Mr. Smee: Jackie Chan – black belt in physical comedy
Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Republic of China and its upcoming generations of gender imbalance

I was halfway through figuring out how to get the crocodile to swallow a clock (solution: Cha Siu Bao, substitute mechanical clock for 1 pound finely chopped pork) when I read that they fired TWO BULLETS at the crocodile’s neck and it was unharmed.  Bullets.  Two of them.  

Forget worrying about nuclear warfare** - what will we do when our shores are suddenly flooded by brigades of bullet-proof crocodiles with a taste for human flesh?  From the picture, it would seem that Plan B: “Punch Crocodile in Mouth” doesn’t work so well either.   Who will save us?  Paul Hogan is selling Subarus and Steve Irwin is dead.  For that matter, how do we even know that the sting ray wasn’t sent by the Chinese??? 

That’s why I’m praying that this factors into tonight’s episode of 24.  Watching Jack kill a mutant crocodile with nothing but a cell phone would not only revitalize my interest in the show, it could very well be the key to winning World War III.

*I know, I know, the guy is Taiwanese.  But as soon as we decide Taiwan is a country, Catalina is going to start getting ideas.

**Personally, I’d love it; I hear that shit gives you super powers.

One of the worst things about being a scientist (aside from the crippling loneliness) is that you will often struggle to explain any of your accomplishments to people outside of your field.  When scientists made a bar of copper invisible to microwaves it was very cool, but the only way they could convey that was by suggesting that one day in the near future, anyone would be able to buy their very own Cloak of Invisibililty.  (Bringing me one step closer to my life-long dream of actually becoming my D&D character.) 

Back in college, my hardest project, by far, was building a CD player.  By comparison, the second hardest project was building a robot car, and that was so frustrating we gave it the Tourette-like name of  “Cockfuck!”,  the bizarre profanity one of my lab partner’s kept yelling whenever the car would veer off course and collide at full speed with some stationary object, like his ankle.  For the record, the rest of us never questioned the origin of Cockfuck - the project was so frustrating that no previous combination of obscenities seemed sufficient.

And that was nothing compared to the shitcunt of a CD player I had to build.  At one point, my lab partner and I worked for thirty hours straight with nothing but a 3 a.m. trip to Denny’s for a break.  Never have I ordered a Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity with such dejection.  Yet my girlfriend couldn’t understand what was so hard. 

“We’re building a CD player.”

“Is that dangerous with the laser and everything?”

“Well, no.  We’re not building that.  We already have a CD drive from a PC.  We have to turn it into an audio CD player.”

“You have to build the speakers?”

“…no.  Just the controls.  You know, play, stop, skip forward, skip backwards…that stuff.”

“What’s so hard about that?”  [Starts pushing buttons on her CD player randomly, as if I don’t understand the inherent ease of buttons.]

“For the record, we also have to do volume control.”

“Oooh.”  [Starts turning volume knob on her boombox back and forth.]  “Move over, Professor Hawking.”

I wasn’t about to explain how we were actually controlling the volume digitally.  It was a good deal more difficult than an analog control, but the explanation would have required me to admit that we were still using buttons, and she had already established that those were even easier than the knob.

I was reminded of this conundrum by a story yesterday on CNN.com.  More, after the jump.

Read more…

Just a FLOOD of posts today, (check it out - new Superhero Diaries post! This Adderall stuff is magic!) but after reading the article titled “Kenyans to transfer money using cell phones“, I had to ask: am I the only one who’d like to send some Kenyans the following text message?

“Pls hlp. I hv 2 mil dllrs.  Need 2 get $ out of USA.   I give u half 4 hlp.  Need ur acct # 4 trnsfr ASAP.  Kewl?” 

1) When is Channukah?

December.  Well, December-ish.  Sometimes November.  See, here’s the thing.  Jews don’t really like to be tied down with dates and everything.  It’s best to keep an open schedule, just in case your neighbors decide to throw a last-minute Inquisition. 

Actually, Jewish holidays occur according to a lunar calendar, unlike the conventional Julian calendar.  There are plenty of reasons why we should switch over, just like there are a lot of reasons America should switch to the metric system.  Good luck making that happen.

In general, when you want to find out when a Jewish Holiday is, find increasingly observant Jews and ask them until you have an answer.  The internet-savvy could say that they “Jew-ggled it.” 

2) What do Jews typically eat on Channukah?

Latkes.  Latkes are potatoes and onions, shredded or mashed, then mixed with an egg and some flour, formed into patties and fried.  Despite being made exactly like hash browns, they somehow taste much more awesome than hash browns.  Definitely worth the circumcision, in my opinion.

3) I always heard that Jews receive eight presents for Channukah, one for each day.  Is that true?

Turns out that this is another December myth, just like Santa Claus and the idea that egg nog can be worthwhile without booze in it.  You know how it sucks figuring out what to get people for the holidays?  Mulitply that by eight.  That’s why Jews usually get one big present broken into eight different parts, like that year my parents gave me a Nintendo, but I had to wait seven days to get the power cord.  We just tell the Gentiles that bit about the eight presents to make their kids jealous.

4) What the hell is Dreidle?

A great way to keep kids entertained for twenty or thirty seconds.  The Dreidle itself is a spinning top with four sides and one Hebrew character on each side.  Supposedly it makes for some kind of gambling game, but no one knows the rules, because unlike legitimate games of chance, it isn’t played in a casino or by the black guys outside my apartment building.  These days, kids play Dreidle for chocolate coins wrapped in foil, and near as I can tell, the rules go like this: one player spins the Dreidle until such time as it rolls under a couch or similarly heavy piece of furniture, at which point all players eat their remaining chocolate and go off searching for the power cord to their new Nintendo.

5) How do you spell Channukah? 

It’s understandable that people are frustrated by the lack of a standard spelling for the name.  No matter how you spell it, you can’t get it right.  But that means you can’t really get it wrong either.  Think of it as free-form improvisation.  This year I wrote all of my cards spelling it with a pound sign, and I’d bet five bucks that no one says a word.

6) Are there any good Channukah songs and/or carols?

What, “Dreidle Dreidle Dreidle” isn’t enough for you???   Well then…um… some of our prayers have catchy tunes…  To be honest, for the most part we just sit around waiting to find out if Adam Sandler has come up with more liquor and/or marijuana based rhymes for “Channukah”.

7) What should I get a Jew for Channukah? 

Turns out that Jews like iTunes Gift Certificates, Starbucks Cards and giant tubs of popcorn divided into Butter, Cheese, and Caramel flavors just as much as the next Gentile.  There’s just one thing.  If you don’t mind, please make sure the front of the card doesn’t have Santa on it.  You can wish us a “Merry Channukah” all you want, but we all know what that word crossed out above Channukah is.

Do Jews have a traditional Channukah movie?  Y’know, like It’s a Wonderful Life?

Die Hard.  Not that it needs an explanation, but if Bruce Willis ever goes face to face with that claymation Reindeer, Rudolph’s nose will be red all right… with his own blood.

This week, Wonder Woman found out that she successfully passed the New York Bar, so everybody raise a glass and say it with me now: Congratulations, WW.

In the spirit of her achievement I’ve been trying to think of some legal-themed double entendres, but I haven’t had much luck.  I know there’s a couple lawyers on here; you guys got any ideas?  (I will not accept any entries using the word ‘brief’ or involving a gavel being banged.  Too obvious.)  Winner gets an egg sandwich they will have to claim by mail.