Worst Thing Said To A Homeless Person

I was four. My parents and I were visiting my grandma in the “big city” of Brooklyn, NY. On an afternoon stroll, we passed a homeless woman who had built her shopping cart and tin can shelter in the nook of a decorative foundation of a downtown building. She lifted her hands from the smelly tartan blankets and asked for money. My parents politely declined, and I stopped and shouted in a school yard manner…

“Nah nah nah nah nah… I have a house and you don’t.”

Worst Thing Said Before Sex

Me: Yes, I want to.
Her: I should tell you, I’ve been raped.

Me: …

That was the night I became a man.

But not in the “having sex” way… naturally, I couldn’t go through with that.

Worst Thing Found in a Toilet

My dad’s used condom. It’s like finding a fresh kill, assuming you’re not a hunter but a vegetarian and the sight of someone killing an animal makes you vomit and gives you night terrors.

On this day, rather than giving gifts, you can force a family member or friend to discard one item that he or she already owns. The selected item might be a hideous shirt that you consider an abomination, or that pair of bedroom slippers that are an insult to all footwear. The idea is that the unrecipient should be better off without the item you ungift.

For example, let’s say you have a single friend who has a collection of Star Wars memorabilia and also complains that he can’t get a woman to stay the night. You could help by making him give away the full-sized wookie that he keeps next to his dresser. When the next Negative Christmas rolls around you could go after the collection of light sabers he keeps over his mantle. It might take you a few years to make any difference in his love life, but think of it as a project.

For real Christmas, people often give gifts of clothing or accessories so the recipient will look attractive. For Negative Christmas you could pay a crazy guy with tattoos to punch your friend in his soft tissue every time he eats a Big Mac or skips going to the gym. In the long run it will help your friend more than a new necktie.

-Scott Adams Blog

“I don’t know what those words mean, and I don’t think it should be my job to define them, do you?”

“I guess not,” said the Knight, though he secretly believed the words were fairly straightforward. “So what do we do?”

Uncle Dicky smiled.

For more torture memo humor, check out the Daily Show clip posted a few days ago.

Remember a few months ago, when the economy broke, and then we gave a lot of money to the guys who broke it? Turns out, that didn’t work. So to make things better, Barack Obama has introduced an $819 billion economic package he says will create 3.6 million jobs, or to put it another way: Panama. It’s a massive spending plan following in the footsteps of such celebrated federal work projects as the New Deal, the interstate highway, and JFK’s $400 million Tunnel to the Moon.

Before Obama can do anything, though, Congress must approve the plan, currently endangered by the few surviving Republican nests in the Capitol. Apparently when Obama defeated them politically, he failed to exterminate their egg-laying queen. The Republicans are unhappy that this so-called “job creation” bill doesn’t actually create any real jobs, aside from teachers, policemen, scientists, doctors, salesmen, architects, engineers, garbage men, factory workers, construction workers, office workers and birthday clowns. Plus, they feel Obama’s not cutting enough taxes by only cutting “many” of them.

. . .

Will that stop the bill from passing? Probably not. The Republicans are a withered remnant, an evolutionary throwback atrophying into nonexistence, like the human tailbone. But when they join the Whigs in America’s political graveyard they can still be proud that up to the very end, whatever the other side suggested, regardless of substance or likely effect, they had the guts to say “no.”

–Metro: No Means Maybe

If you like this, you might like the Stimulus Payment t-shirt design.

To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.

While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health… The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. … The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.

Ignore, for the moment, what sort of subjects volunteer for wearing a genital blood-pressure cuff while watching porn. You can see what the point of the study is — to measure what we think turns us on vs. what actually turns us on. Men, unsurprisingly, were completely transparent.

The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.

Why did women get aroused no matter what image was on the screen? Chivers says she feels like a pioneer at the edge of a great forest. The Times article devotes pages to discussing this “great question that has never been answered.” I think the question was already answered, if you read carefully.

What do women want?

…a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina…

Of course they were turned on by everything. They were sitting on a dildo!

Scientologists, Jehovah’s Witnesses Know Why.
Jerry, Taking and Keeping Peoples’ Stuff Without Asking Isn’t Borrowing.
It’s Stealing. [CA Code 484] Stealing From The 1 Neighbor Who’s Tried To
Defend Your Slime Behavior To Other Neighbors [You Took The Gleasons'
Mailbox? Why?] Is Stupidity. When You’re Not Stupid, You Can Come
Here.

[Via bb]

If you like this, you may like ‘Have You Seen My Cow?’

Vegetarianism, or “recreational anemia,” is one of the leading behavior-modifying ethical beliefs, meaning that its adherents practice what they preach. As a Catholic, I find this troubling.

…

Vegetables! Vegetables are just fruit that didn’t try hard enough, fruit from the bad side of the tracks, toughened by life and social circumstance into surly imitations of edibility. Cucumbers are bananas with a jailhouse tattoo.

“Oh, yum, this one tastes like chewy water! Oh, try this one, it tastes like crispy water! And have you tried that mushy water one over here … Delicious!”

Yuck. I had to stick in a plug of jerky chew just get myself through this column. I’m a third degree Carnivoran, which means I eat things that have eaten other things that eat things. Like if a lion ate a gazelle and was then eaten by a whale, I could eat that whale.

- What I don’t get about vegetarians

Obama’s biggest priority during the transition is choosing a cabinet. He’ll probably get one from Crate & Barrel, a step up from the cheap Ikea stuff the Senate uses. Even more crucially, however, he needs to choose a “Cabinet” of close advisors, including the secretaries of state, defense, television and sunshine. Traditionally, presidents slowly and carefully select Cabinet officers. Harry Truman famously delayed picking his postmaster general until 1973, a year after his death. Nonetheless, Obama is being pressured to choose right away. And as America has learned, the best way to make a decision is to rush through it as quickly as possible.

–The Obama Cabinet: Some Assembly Required

Last week, Barack Obama hope-surfed his way into the White House, utterly destroying John McCain in a way that should be illegal to do to an old man. His flawless campaign, movie star looks and air of fairy-tale magic have led America to expect he can do anything. In the public imagination he’s a cross between George Washington, Merlin and Mr. T. Of course, these are probably unrealistically high expectations for him to live up to. But are they unrealistically high enough to ensure a successful Obama presidency? Possibly not.

Disappointment has long been America’s curse. What do you expect from a country whose constitution includes the phrase “more perfect?”

- Obama expectations: far too low? – Metro

Like many Americans, I first saw Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic convention. I remember telling my wife excitedly, “This guy is probably stuffed after a cup of minestrone!”

. . .

What else can we expect from a Skinny Black Guy White House? (I never thought I’d live to write those words!) We’ll turn the corner, or close the menu, as we like to say, on the war on terrorism. The time may come to sit down at the (under-catered) table with the Taliban. The president-elect has a lot in common with these guys. No, not that. It’s hard to get good takeout in the caves of Tora Bora, so you know they’re pretty lean by now. Nothing breaks the ice like, “Is that my stomach growling, or yours?”

There’s a lot of work to be done to get America back on track. There won’t be time for full meals, just light snacking. No problem. With the economy tanking, we’ll to have to tighten our belts. Again, no prob. When Skinny Black Guys say, “I’ll just have the Cobb salad,” it’s not a calorie thing. We’re cheap. It’ll come in handy when cutting the fat out of the budget in time for beach season.

- New York Times: Finally a Thin President