Most of us like to think we’d make it through many life-threatening situations just fine. After all, you’ve seen the Discovery channel, you’ve watched disaster movies and you’ve got a good logical head on our shoulders. You should be just fine, right?
But that’s like thinking you’ll be good in a fight because you’ve watched a Jackie Chan movie; whatever “techniques” you think you’ve learned are more likely to get your dumb ass killed.
In Case of Shark, Punch in Nose
For whatever reason–plane crash, riptide, sailing misadventure, a bad case of Ocean Fury–you find yourself in the middle of the sea with nothing but miles of water around you. And, to your horror, here comes that heavy string music and a circling fin slicing through the water.
Luckily, from multiple websites and news stories about shark survival you remember the Shark’s Achilles Heel: Punches to the face. Specifically, the tender nose area. You wind up to belt that fishy bastard in the schnoz, and make your testicles proud.
The Result:
First let’s look at a shark. Can you find his nose? Yep, it’s that incredibly narrow point in front that drops precipitously into a slimy, downward sloping ramp right into his 5,000,000-toothed mouth.
Take into account the fact that you’re bobbing around in the water like a buoy full of meat, facing off against a lightning-quick predator with several million years of practice in eating things that punch it in the nose, and you’ll see that chances are your fist will just deflect down into that aforementioned gaping hole of teeth like Boba Fett into a Sarlacc Pit. Now if your plan to defeat the shark is too feed yourself to him until he grows tired of the taste of you, you’re off to a great start.
But experts say that even if you hit the shark-nose punching lottery, you won’t have scared him off, just dazed him, giving you a minute or so tops. Now, if this particular shark is suffering from ADD, then great: You’re in the clear now. He’s off to chase a shiny thing or update his twitter feed 82 times an hour. But if not, all you’ve done is managed to piss the shark off and give him a minute to ponder how revenge is a dish best served in a blood-filled bag resembling you.
The modern world as we know it was shaped by the minds of geniuses. But the same “outside the box” thinking that gave us our great innovations also gave them some truly ridiculous ideas.
Does that give us the right to mock some of history’s greatest minds? Ah, who knows?
Thomas Edison is America’s most beloved asshole inventor, famous for stealing other people’s inventions, hiring thugs to physically intimidate his competition and heroically electrocuting an elephant to discredit the use of alternating current. Also, he invented the light bulb (which he stole) and the motion picture camera, which he only invented so he could film himself having sex with other men’s wives [citation needed].
“…and you’ll just be in the closet the whole time we’re boning, filming the shit out of it.”
Naturally, the next step for Edison was paranormal extermination. During the early days of the 20th century, contacting the spirit world was all the rage and any jackass with a gypsy wig and/or monocle could make bundles of cash holding seances to bilk grieving families hoping to talk to a deceased loved one. And if there was one thing Edison loved, it was money.
After intentionally burning his finger to point his fingerprint was erased, Edison noted the fingerprint grew back and triumphantly concluded that all human beings must be made of “immortal units” which cannot be destroyed, thus explaining the existence of ghosts. He set about creating a device that would trap these immortal units and allow them to be studied by the living.
“GET THE MICROSCOPE!”
Edison was incredibly secretive about the nature of his ghost hunting mechanism–not even a prototype was ever seen. Just about the only real detail anyone knows is that one of his assistants died while working on it, presumably because Edison wanted to test and see if it worked.
You’ll have to watch Casper: Origins to learn more.
New article up on Cracked in which I help you to loathe rich people even more than you already do by showcase extravagant cat weddings, $12,000 erotic massages…for your car and a half million dollar dog house with retinal scanner security and 50-inch plasma TV. You’re welcome, collapse of society.
Everyone’s got their kink. Maybe you like a girl in a gold Princess Leia bikini, maybe you go a little further and make her dress up like that alien singer at Jabba’s palace.
But at least you can pull those off with a trip to a costume shop. Some people have fetishes that are just plain never gonna happen unless they’re willing to break the laws of physics (and several federal laws) in the process.
The right celebrity endorsement can make a good product exponentially better. Sure, we like Hot Pockets as much as the next starving guy well below the poverty line, but put Hulk Hogan’s face on them? Now you’re talking, buddy! Get your hands off our Hulk Pockets, or feel the pain, brother!
Some celebrities, however, drastically misjudge their demographic and we wind up with releases of classical Renaissance ballads as sung by Brock Lesnar or a line of fur coats sponsored by Moby.
By now we expect rappers to expand their brands: Energy drinks, clothing lines, hot dogs (finally all of America can put a Snoop Dogg in their mouth) but discount bundled family vacation packages to Tampa with air and hotel included do not fit the classical definition of “gangsta.” But hey, it’s Kayne West, we’re talking about here. He never truly marketed himself as a “hardcore” rapper, he’s most famous for his hedonism and that might translate to vacations. If it’s done by Kanye West, this travel website’s got to be deluxe: All done up in red leather and auto-tuned out the ass, right?
Not so much, no. Kanye Travel features a giant flash animation of some kind of rap-based satellite orbiting the Earth. If you hover your mouse over it, you can make it dance!
“If they can do this, surely they can book my vacation!”
And then if you click it, well, nothing happens. The site is sporting a plethora of buttons, most of which don’t work, but maybe that’s a statement: This site is so rich it’s got buttons that don’t even go nowhere! Kanye’s makin’ it rain buttons, yo!
But the weirdest part is that, aside from his name upfront, there is no sign of Kanye anywhere. If there’s one thing Kanye is all about, it’s Kanye, and not a trace of him anywhere. No “Kanye Krazy Savers,” no travel tips on which cities have the best asses, not even a spinning Kanye head placeholder while the page loads. This appears to be a no-frills discount travel website built in all earnestness. Kanye West started a travel website because he is passionate about deals. Seriously, according to press releases proudly exclaiming the amount of work Kanye and his business partners did to secure deals with airline, hotel and car rental concerns to offer the best travel deals:
“Miki Woodard, president of the [Kanye West’s] company, West Brands, told Advertising Age the process has already taken nearly a year. We did a lot of due diligence with online travel partners.”
Kanye’s true passion in life apparently isn’t angsty half-rap about how you should learn to appreciate his awesomeness more completely, it’s negotiating 30 percent discounts on Economy Suites in South Dakota.
Back in the 60s, 10 soldiers boarded a military aircraft for what they were told was a routine training mission. After reaching an altitude of 5,000 feet, the plane suddenly lurched and began to plummet back down to Earth.
The pilot took the intercom and informed the soldiers that the aircraft was experiencing catastrophic engine failure, and that everyone aboard should probably start kissing their asses goodbye while they still had lips. But before they could bend over, a steward passed out insurance paperwork and explained that the forms had to be completed in order for anybody’s family to be paid a death benefit.
So there they were, rocketing towards a jagged metal resting place by way of fiery explosion, trying to find a flat surface to write on. Then, just as impact seemed imminent, the pilot said, “LOLZ, just kidding about that emergency, folks” and righted the plane. Once safely back on the ground, we like to think the soldiers showed their appreciation for this fine joke by repeatedly sodomizing the pilot with their rifles.
What was the point? To see how extreme stress affected a person’s “cognitive ability,” measured in this case as the ability to do paperwork.
Also, we might as well test out the new puke bags.
In a revelation that surprised no one ever in the history of anything, researchers determined that errors in cognitive reasoning occur more often if a person is being exposed to unusually high levels of stress. So under no circumstances should you whip out a job application in the middle of a car accident or attempt to file a tax return while being stabbed to death.
It’s worth noting that the researchers were unable to repeat the experiment because the soldiers involved had written warnings to future subjects on the plane’s airsick bags. The only option at that point would have been to collect all the bags and then crash the plane for real. Which they probably would have done, if they could figure out how to make sure the paperwork survived.
(Here’s an article I edited, basically rewrote top-to-bottom and added the jokes. So if you laugh while reading this, you’re welcome.)
Kids have it nice here in the future. What with their hover boards, hover ponies and hover sexting. They get their whole lives handed to them on a silver platter (that hovers).
It wasn’t always so easy. Back in the day, people had only one reason to produce offspring: To force them to do the abhorrently awful work no grown person would dare to. And if you think child labor didn’t get any worse than dirty-faced children in Victorian shoe factories, well, you apparently haven’t heard about…
Small creatures make great little vacuums – ask any dog owner who’s ever spilled hot dog juice on the kitchen floor. The same goes for children. Back in the 19th century, textile mills hired children to run around the factory 24/7, picking up debris and loose pieces of cotton. Called “Mill Scavengers,” these tykes lapped up the proverbial hot dog water, except this hot dog water lay beneath giant, spinning death wheels.
“Where did Jimmy go? I dunno, but he better have gotten that piece of cotton.”
In fact, textile spinners made such good kiddy maulers, scavengers were reported to be “constantly in a state of grief, always in terror.”
As you may have guessed, most mill scavengers were orphans adopted by the factory owners, which makes forced labor and child endangerment a family business. It’s like Little Orphan Annie except without the money, happy ending or there being a tomorrow part.
It probably would have been easier to just turn off all the machines at the end of the day, then sweep everything up at once but it wasn’t that easy because fuck you, kid, that’s why.
Kids were pretty much lint screens that can feel terror and scream.
Without exposure to fresh air, children were susceptible to a multitude of health problems. You know, like cancer. Scavengers were not allowed to sit, rest or take a break while the mills ran. And the mills ran all day. And on Sundays? Those were usually spent cleaning the giant death wheels that terrified them so much.
An artist’s rendering of the noble sacrifices made to clean up lint.
What could make this worse? Worse than forcing an orphan to work in a noisy, unventilated factory, crawling under spinning manglers to pick up tiny bits of trash? Oh yeah, scalping.
While crawling under all those spinning wheels, if a child’s hair got too close to the machinery their hair got sucked in, separating their skull cap rather efficiently from their head. If the child wasn’t lucky enough to die, at least when it came time to play Cowboys and Indians they were way ahead of the game.
Here’s an article I edited (added ha-ha’s and larfs to) but the writer mentioned is the true research genius. Enjoy!
There are certain inventions that really don’t evolve, and most clothing falls into that category. Sure, styles and fabrics change, but the shirt has been using the same basic design for centuries. A hunk of fabric with holes for your arms and head. It works just fine.
But the world is full of designers and inventors who need to pay the bills, and so they are busy trying to apply the latest technology to items of clothing that really, really don’t need it. Here are the awful fruits of their labors.