Unless you live in Topeka you're aware that Chuck Norris is no longer the hotness. It turns out that all those facts about him distributed on the webness were total falseness. A marketing ploy for tshirts. But for those of us left yearning for a new beacon of superlatives, I have found a replacement: Cormac McCarthy. Not much is known about this elusive Southwestern author of rugged, austere fiction. According to a 1994 article in The Atlantic:
Category: Funny
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Chuck Norris is the poor man’s Cormac McCarthy.
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Funny Boneless
Earlier today I mentioned Nick Sylvester’s Village Voice article about pickup artists. The Voice fired him for taking liberties with the truth–for mixing reporting and riffing a little too ambiguously. The lesson: if you make stuff up and put it in a newspaper, make it obvious that you’re making stuff up. Case in point: Sylvester’s 2005 Voice article on college cheating methods.
But wait! Apparently even that’s not enough. In reporting last month on Sylvester’s pickup piece, AP writer David Caruso mentioned Sylvester’s cheating piece:
In an August story about cheating on college campuses, Sylvester described interviewing a student who spent $500,000 to have a multiplication table tattooed over his entire body; a Harvard Medical School graduate who cheated with Morse code; a Boston College junior named Simeon Criz who cheated using a specially designed deck of playing cards; and a Manhattan doctor named Noam Feldstein who delivers "a hundred newborn babies each day."
Boston College said it had no record of a student named Simeon Criz. The board that licenses doctors in New York said it had no record of a physician named Noam Feldstein.
In all fairness, I believe it was the AP that broke the story that the guy in Prison Break is an actor.
(Oh, how relieved I would be to learn that Caruso and his editors were merely reenacting this gag.)
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The Mannequin Within Us All
What happens when you lock a woman in a tiny room with a mannequin for 11 days? This:
Mom never fully recovered from this experiment. Neither did Mandy. (She disappeared in 1998; the last time I saw her she was modeling a dress made of pretzels for my friend Yvonne in an art show. (My mannequin, not my mom.))
Full transcript, plus outtakes, after the jump.
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No Balls
I’m disappointed in this week’s finalists for the New Yorker caption contest. They are:
A.) “I think the Manhattan skyline is getting suspicious.”
B.) “I just wish we could talk about something other than global warming.”
C.) “Well, that was abominable.”
I don’t get A. I think I get C, but it’s not very funny. [BTW, when I was young I thought it was the abdominal snowman.] B is pretty funny but a bit pedestrian. I bet 1000 people submitted similar lines. I much prefer the one I sent in:
"Do all the frozen sperm banks offer seasonal specials?"
The most obvious, and yet unprintable, caption, of course, would have made reference to snowballing. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if The New Yorker received submissions on that theme. I can only imagine relative obscurity of the term among their dignified readership as an excuse for not selecting one of those; surely prudishness would not have stopped them, as they are not the New York Times.
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Bossy Boots
I have discovered what may be the Best Thing Ever. It’s a 2002 episode of the BBC’s Look Around You dedicated to the brain. Take out your copy books, as you will learn things such as the following:"The brain is basically a wrinkled bag of skin, filled with warm water, veins, and thought muscles. Think of it as a kind of modified heart, only with a mind, or brain."
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Overheard in San Diego
Today at the beach a pontoon plane flew overhead.
Young woman #1: What’s that?
Young woman #2: It’s a plane.
Young woman #1: It doesn’t look like a plane.
Young woman #2: It’s the kind that can land on water.
Young woman #1: A hovercraft?Exhibit A: Exhibit B:
Any questions?
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Craptacular Design
Intelligent Design is great fodder for satire among the science set. In the new March issue of the The Atlantic Monthly, Bruce McCall riffs on the ID worldview with a short piece called "Not Conspicuously Intelligent Design." The designs that are not conspicuously intelligent include Minneapolis-St.Paul ("Only two big cities in a state of 80,009 square miles, yet less than half a mile apart") and sock static ("Wastes electricity"). I would have added Grape Nuts. No grapes… no nuts… What’s the deal? McCall’s gags hit closer to home with these biological examples:THE NOSE
• Placement in exact center of face compels unsightly public discharge of liquid waste from headDEATH
• Crimps planning
• Totally one-sided decision leaves a bad taste
• After x-million years, exact function still debated
My favorite attacks on ID are of the "Why do men have nipples?" type. If there’s an omnipotent designer, what’s with all the useless doodads and embarrassing/deadly oddities we find in the biological world? The geologist Don Wise pushes the idea of incompetent design ("the other ID") in an interview for Seed. He says, "No self-respecting engineering student would make the kinds of dumb mistakes that are built into us," and goes on to list several of the examples: We have too many teeth, our pelvises aren’t straight, we have appendices and tonsils, our retinal receptors are facing the wrong way… And he quotes a man who wrote to him, "I would write more, but I have to go pee in Morse code, because some idiot designed my aging prostate."The science writer Jim Holt took a more somber tone last year in an essay for the NYT Magazine titled "Unintelligent Design." He reminds us that nearly every species ever "designed" is now extinct. He mentions dying cancer patients who must suffer although the corporal status updates that physical pain provides are no longer required. And he notes that most pregnancies end prematurely. That last fact, combined with two common beliefs–that the soul originates at conception, and that one is a sinner unworthy of salvation until baptism–should lead to quite the quandary for many Christians. "Owing to faulty reproductive design," he writes, "it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined." Awwwwwk-ward…
Call it what you want: "Incompetent Design," "Unintelligent Design," "Design By Numbers–The Dyscalculic Deity Edition"… It reminds me of an engineering joke. Three engineers were arguing over what type of engineer God would be. The mechanical engineer said God had to be an ME because of our sophisticated skeletons. The electrical engineer claimed God as an EE because the human brain is the best damn computer around. But the civil engineer had the last word. "God would have to be a civil engineer. I mean, who else would run a sewage system through a major recreational area?" -
Chuck Norris Breaks Rules, Craniums
Chucknorrisfacts.com is a list of hyberbolic factoids enumerating how Chuck Norris can manifest paradoxes and intimidate God, often with the use of his trusty roundhouse kick.A couple nights ago my friend Liz and I got wacky on IM and started trading new ones back and forth. I've salvaged a few of mine, fixed the typos, and decided to add them to the canon. Read on for the semi-humorous sleep-deprivation-supplied souvenirs.
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Sorry ladies, only room for one Jesus in this manger.
Ah yes, my favorite Christmas tale. I turned atheist around the age of 10, but before that I went to church on the regular. My church (First Presbyterian, in Columbus, Indiana) had a special Christmas Eve tradition in which the pastor would read the story of the birth of Christ, and all the kids in attendance would dress as a character in the story. When their characters were first mentioned, they would rise from the pews and join the nativity scene on the stage. I had a friend named Brock Jolly who liked to pick farm animals and would show up in elaborate costumes constructed of cardboard and papier mache. My sister and I would just grab hockey sticks and bathrobes at the last minute and go as shepherds.Typically if you were dressed as Mary you were responsible for bringing a baby Jesus. So all Marys would carry dolls and place them in the manger. One year I decided to be Joseph, and I also decided that I had just as much a stake in our son (no pun intended) as Mary did, so I brought a baby Jesus. Now this wasn’t just any doll. This was one my mom had as a girl. It was large and heavy and realistic. When you tilted its head back, the eyelids would close over its stunning glass eyes. I had the best baby Jesus in the room, hands down.
The way the story was told, the pastor mentioned Joseph before Mary, so I had a leg up on the competition. I went up there with my son and nestled him snug in the manger. By the time the cavalcade of Marys approached, I’d decided the crib was mine–after all, my Jesus objectively kicked their Jesus’ asses–and I stood my ground. Rabidly. Blood may have been shed. Look, bitches, this inn is full.
I don’t remember how they eventually got me to relent. I think adult intervention was involved. But for a moment I had truly created a Jerry Springer Christmas on that stage. And for any baby Jesuses I may have tossed out of that manger in a fit of parental pride, I truly apologize.
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Keepin’ It Unreal
In The Onion today, a former trucker-hat pioneer reports taking his fashion statement another step and asks, "Why Can’t Anyone Tell I’m Wearing This Business Suit Ironically?" (He later went on to work at "this hysterical corporate law firm," married "this clueless girl from Connecticut," and had "two ironic kids" to complete the parody.)If only The Onion were not so unintentionally prescient. This winter, look for a new line of spats from LeTigre.
Also, I think hipster vegans should eat steak, like, all the time. You know, for the irony. Assholes.
