Scheduling Conflicts

Seeing as Ohio University students began scheduling for classes for the fall quarter recently, I thought I might suggest a few classes that should be added to the school's curriculum. Considering the useless pile of crap I use to fill up my quarter with now (like the Aegean Archaeology course I'm taking this quarter and Buddhism in the fall) I think that we could add some more pertinant classes to our collective resumes. Here's a short list of courses that OU should consider:

DRIV 101: Basic Driving Skills
TTh 2-4 p.m.
4 cred.

"But why do we need another driving course if we already have our license?" Because you are all terrible drivers. Every single one of you. I'm talking to you, 'can't parallel park without pulling in and out of reverse a dozen times' guy. And you, 'forget to put your headlights on in the pouring rain' gal. Especially all of you members of the 'doesn't flip the turn signal until you're halfway through your turn already' club. You should be able to learn these simple basics given the two hour blocks of early afternoon time (when the least amount of pedestrians should be out). The final will be held on a Friday from 5-7 in rush hour traffic. In a thunderstorm. With three of your drunken friends in the back seat giving you directions. That'll learn ya.

LANG 178: Entry Level AIM Language
MTWThF 11 a.m.-12 p.m.
5 cred.

In this hour long daily course, you will learn the important basics. You will learn which emoticons are to be used in which situation and which abbreviations are to be taken seriously and which to be regarded as purely sarcastic. You will learn to decode unneccesarily cryptic away messages and profile song and poem lyrics. The basics of AIM name choosing and buddy icon recognition and representation. Perhaps most importantly, the art and science of creating separate compartments in your buddy list. This may be the most important class you will ever take.

DRIV 213: Parking Ticket/Violation Avoidance
MW 3-5 p.m.
4 cred.

As a prerequisite for this class, you must have already taken DRIV 101 and passed with a C average or better. The institution will not tolerate abhorrently bad drivers who can now avoid parking tickets. Included in this course are tips and tricks to avoid parking tickets as well as having to pay for on-campus parking at Ohio University. Things like moving your car according to the parking attendant's schedule for checking the lots, parking in lots that are not checked by campus police, having generic looking 'Staff' or 'Student Parking' stickers and window hangers to throw off the parking police, and utilizing printer/copier technology to fabricate your own 'parking pass' (use at your own risk).

DRGM 267: Advanced Drinking Games
ThF 9-11 p.m.
4 cred.

Though no prerequisites are needed for this class, it is strongly suggested that only upperclassmen with high tolerances for extreme amounts of alcohol take this class. Games and events such as classics like cornhole and beer pong are breifly touched on and rehashed, but most of the participants of the class will have played these games anough to not need more than a week or two to study them. More in depth games like the keg stand, flip cup, and beer bonging are to be perfected, and new games such as Avalanche and Noah's Ark will be taught. This class is B.Y.O.B.

LANG 1337: 1337
MW 12-1 p.m., F lab section
4 cred.

Since the beginning of the internet, hackers have utilized 1337 (or 'leet') to communicate without getting caught or deciphered. The code is no longer a secret (considering the fact that it's just numbers that look like letters), but it's still pretty cool. Ub3r Pwn4g3! Also, learn the correct pronumciation of words like Pwn, Nwb, o0o, and many more. A must-take class for any geek.

Hey, any of those would be much more important than knowing anything at all about Aegean Archaeology.

Horse Shit

Taking into account the firestorm of controversy my latest post ignited, I thought that my next post should be about something we can all agree on:

Horse racing sucks.

Do you disagree? No, of course not. You know why? Because less people care about horse racing than Major League Soccer. The only thing worse than horse racing is Nascar, because at least the monotony of horse racing is over in two minutes. I bring up the fact that horse racing sucks because there is a very important horse race this weekend. I'll give you one guess at what it is. Kentucky Derby? WRONG! See? Didn't know that, did ya? Okay, here's a tougher one: if you can tell me with complete certainty what state the race is run in I'll give you a nickel. Don't know? Yeah, me neither. Nor do I care. Nobody does.

Way back in the twenties horse racing was one of the 'big three' popular American sports: horse racing, baseball, and boxing. Winning jockeys were treated like kings and the horses they rode to victory were 'put out to stud,' meaning that if they won a few important races by the time they retired they could have sex with every hot piece of mare they could get their hooves on. But today? Horse racing has obviously become irrelevant. Boxing, though not to the extent of horse racing, has largely fallen out of favor with the American public as well. Both of these sports were largely hampered by mafia controlled gambling in the first half of the century, and more recently boxing has been negatively impacted by incidents involving greedy boxing managers and ear biting. Sadly, baseball is on its way down too. What was once American pastime has been replaced by football and basketball and is now just America's past. Steroids, inflating payrolls, inflating egos, corked bats, poor managment, and many other intangibles came together to make baseball ready to go down the tubes as well. It's sad, really.

Anyway, back to putting small men in colorful spandex on the backs of large land mammals and having people bet on which one will be the fastest to the white line. Nobody watches horse racing like people watch basketball or something. By that I mean that there aren't people who tune in to watch every event the way people watch every first round game of the NCAA tournament. It doesn't happen. And horse racing would garner zero interest is there was not a gambling aspect to it. The only reason they get as many viewers as they do is because you can get 50-1 on Bumbling Bayou, 13-2 on Jester's Monkey, and 3-1 on the favorite Uncle Yanush. There are those who make the bets and those who place the bets, and that is the entirety of the horse racing community. Do you know a horse racing fan? Somebody who has a Secretariat poster over their bed the way people have MJ or Shaq? Doesn't happen. Horse racing is no longer necessary. Get it away from me.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some Major League Soccer to watch.

The Tenth Circle of Hell

Those of you who know us know that the only thing we spend more time on than comedy is poker. Ordinarily I wouldn't bring these two subjects together, but an experience that I had this weekend forced me to make these worlds collide. This post has nothing to do with the VFW we frequent every Wednesday, with its patriotic flare and thick clouds of smoke, nor does it pretain specifically to our Sunday cash game full of strange characters and soon-to-be college dropouts. No, this is about the Chauncey (pronounced CHANCE-ee) game that Miller and I visited Saturday.

Allow me to start by telling you how we got to this particular game. What we did was we drove up route 33 towards Columbus and turned off the The Plains-Chauncey exit and turned right at the intersection. Once you have done that you have, as far as I am concerned, left planet Earth and landed on the planet Stereotypical White Trash Wasteland. Most of the things seen from my car while in Chauncey were what I once thought to be unfair and biased charicatures of white trash America, but there they are in their full-on rundown splendor in front of me. On your left you see the shell of what once must have been a house, but now resembles an army training facility in that it looks like nothing but a bombed-out series of cinder block walls with a full grown tree poking out where the roof once was and underbrush flourishing inside. On your right is what appears to be the scene from Stand by Me when they were walking down the railroad tracks, but instead of Keifer Sutherland and River Phoenix I see people who more resemble the fat kid from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Joe Dirt. Further down the street is the house that matches the pick-up truck parked outside: half-white, half-blue with primer in patches. Abandon all hope, all ye who enter Chauncey.

The list goes on, but I'll cut to the peice de resistance.

This poker game used to take place at the Chauncey Am-Vets which was ridiculous in its own way, but per the Ohio regulation of not being allowed to serve alcohol and hold a gambling event in the same building it was moved to the Lions' Club down the street. Trust me, whenever the directions include 'turn off the paved road' you know you're in trouble. So what did we do? If you said 'we turn off the paved road' you are right. You get a gold star. We made our way to the 'new' building, new used here meaning new to us, because it was quite obvious at the sight of it to be as old and worn out as every line of dialogue in every episode of 'Friends.' Not twenty yards from my parking spot is the remnants of a two story house fire that no one has seen fit to replace or even bulldoze. Parked next to it is a semi truck with a trailer. Maybe that's their new house, I wouldn't know. I didn't go and ask. Anyway, the Lions' Club itself is located in an old train station set far back from the street. The building can only be forty or so feet long and at most fifteen feet wide, directly next to active train tracks. It has two rooms. Two rooms make up the entire Lions' Club. Surrounding me on all sides is typical blue-color Bush supporting goodness. How out of place do I feel in my '98 Mercury Sable covered in alternative rock bumper sticker and wearing college t-shirt? Very.

Nothing really went down at the game. The trains went by three or four times and shook the whole building and Nascar was on the tube whole time we were there. Of course the players were terrible. That's about it.

This post kind of petered out toward the end. It was building, building, building, and then bupkis. Maybe I should've made fun of Larry the Cable Guy or said that, "we could all learn a little from Mao Tse-Tong," to make this post more exciting. I'll try to start a hick-fight next time.

All Your Base are Belong to Us

We can't say they didn't warn us. "The Apocalypse is upon us!" "The end as we know it!" "Repent now!" "Will work for food!"

Maybe not that last one, but the others are pretty acurate. As correctly predicted by countless homeless unshaven pee-ridden guys in Times Square and other metropolitan cesspools, technology is on the verge of taking complete control of all of our lives (moreso than it already has). We are already consumed by cell phones, television, and, most importantly, blogs (we know you love us), but some new products are coming out to finish the job that the trebucher and the Gutenberg press started. So how 'bout a quick rundown of the bits of metal and plastic that will add to the science-fiction hell we are plummeting towards? Sound good? Let's go.

How ridiculous is this Nintendo Wii? I'll wait for you to look at the link. Absurb, right? Well, Nintendo decided to get back in the videojuegos business, and this is their triumphant return. What is it, you ask? First of all, it's pronounced 'we,' as in you and I put together. We, Wii. Got it? Okay. Next, it's a garage door opener attatched via firewire to a vibrator. Did I say vibrator? I meant joystick (though I bet it would be more popular if it were a vibrator). Original it was going to be called 'Revolution,' but the Nintendo heads figured that the Japanese would have trouble with all the Rs and Ls. "Levorution." Doesn't roll of the tongue. Anyway, this will soon consume you all. I know you all need your occasional dose of a new Smash Brothers game.

Other ridiculous Japanese imports? The new Toyota Yaris. Go look it up. Sure, the car looks cool and gets 40 mpg highway, but the commercials are absurb. True, I know nothing about the safety quality or how many cupholders it has, but what I do know is that the commercials are the single greatest 30 seconds of television I have seen since they took the Aqua-Velva commercials off the air. Start your day with a splash! Burst onto the horizon! I digress. The Yaris commercial I like the best is one with what looks like a spider, but has gas pump handles for legs, and it's thorax is a clear gas tank. So this abomination is making its way across the screen when the camera pans out and who do you suppose rolls up? The Yaris. And the spider thing knows some shit is about to go down. It does what any other spider would do: it says 'Rawr!' Trust me, that's what spiders would do if they could. So the gas tank spider is trying to back away and WHAM! It gets fucking run over! That'll teach you to be a spider! Then the Yaris opens its gas tank and drinks the gas from the now quite dead animal's carcass and drives away. Fucking craziest commercial I've ever seen. I'd watch it non-stop if I could. Highly suggested viewing material.

Bluetooth earpieces are also gaining in popularity. I hate this. These things are making me look ridiculous for answering someone's "how's it going?" with a "I'm fine, thanks, how're you," when in fact they're talking into some tiny brightly colored headset. Now I'm the one that looks retarded for being polite. Excuse me, I thought you were taking a chance and asking a complete stranger if they wanted to go get a drink later, but it turns out you're talking to your offensive coordinator up in the booth. My bad. Asshole. One good thing about the Bluetooth crap is that you can be talking to yourself and no one would second guess it. Assuming you have long hair so as to cover your ear (and most crazy people don't cut their hair; they're too busy being fucking insane), you can be having a shouting match with the voices in your head and the business elite that work in the building you sleep in the doorway of will just think that the Mexico City proposal didn't go through as you had planned, when in fact they just told you to kill your parents or rape your dog. Now your out of your gourd, but with 1500 anytime minutes and double the bars!

This brings me to another point I want to make; why can't cell phones have names that make sense? It's either a random series of numbers and letter like LG 3600 or a name some marketing associate made up to sound edgy and cool like Razr, Pebl, Switchback, or Whateverthefuck (that last one is mine; you know you want that phone).

So before we all die from the Terminators and the I, Robots and the Whateverthefucks (it's sweeping the nation already), have fun with the technology while you can. We've created a monster that will destroy mankind as we know it, but we may as well have streaming video along the way.

Go Forth and Be Funny, Part IV: When Bad Things Happen to Horrible People

The Lord spoke to Hurricane, saying, "Lo! Heed my word, for I am the Lord."

And Hurricane said, "That's crap. I've seen 'The Ten Commandments,' and you're no spinning helix of flame. You're a dismembered voice. This is just one of those people in my head again, isn't it? Listen, I've been going to my meetings and my therapist says that I'm doing well, so I shouldn't be hearing voices at all any more. Plus, who says 'heed' anymore anyway? Don't piss down my leg and tell me..."

"Silence! Hurricane, you and your friends have had a good influence on the internet. Your cutting sarcasm and your dry wit, they comfort many. But you have been unfaithful. You have been using your blog for other purposes than for the literary good. You have used your powers for evil: to advertise your stand up comedy shows. Nothing is wrong with your stand-up; your word can be spread any way you like. But this conflict has led to your demise. "

"Our demise? What are you talking about?"

"Your power ranking on Top-Blogs has fallen out of the top 100. You have allowed pansy ass bitches like 'The Floater Blog' and 'Bitter Blog' to sneak ahead of you. Even 'Jay-Walking' is ahead of you, and they haven't updated since November. That is just sad. 'Why is this happening,' you may ask. 'Why do bad things happen to Horrible People?' The answer is simple: you haven't had a new post with anything to say non-stand-up related for a week, and the last time one of your compatriots wrote anything new was more than three weeks a go, a post by Miller about, what else, your stand-up comedy show. So I say this to you:"

"Yeah?"

"Get your shit together. I may have to put 'All Things Good' and 'Haggis Ain't Cake' back in front of you if you aren't careful. You don't want that, do you?"

"No, sir."

"Good. Then I expect great things from Horrible People. Remember, I'll be watching you."

"Okay. Hey, God?"

"Yes?"

"You want to come to our stand-up show on Friday?"

More Stand-Up than you can Shake a Stick at!

Well, I guess you can shake a stick at it if you really want to, but it won't do you any good. We're going to do our thing. The good news for you is that you can come and see.

Nick, Jeff, and Reuben
Friday, May 5th
11 p.m.
The Front Room, Baker Center

So you go ahead and shake that stick as much as you want. We're doing this show anyway.