The lab down the hallway from me is full of fuck-ups. They’re the usual kind of head in the clouds, super-futurist types who think that robots will one day do everything that humans don’t want to do. News flash, buddy: humans don’t want to do anything . Our job is to lie on a beach during the sunset and eat fruit that falls out of trees on its own. This difference in belief makes…
Here’s a perplexing fact of life. Really big things are expensive. Really small things are expensive, too. A reasonable person would assume that things in the middle are less expensive. Right now, they’d be wrong, but once, a long time ago… they were right. A friend of mine worked on the International Space Station. In case you’re not familiar, it’s a station in…
“There’s a whole universe of adhesives out there,” says my government-appointed dad. Ever since I filled out that form with my taxes, Ted has been dropping by every Sunday evening to give me the parenting I so richly deserved. Now, don’t get me wrong. My relationship with my dad, although strained at times, was and is perfectly fine. When the feds give you a little box you…
“What is it, Space Dog?” I ask the Golden Retriever that has descended from outer space to be my unlikely friend at a time of great personal trauma. “You forgot to torque up that caliper bolt,” explains Space Dog. He was right. I had gotten distracted by one of the cool moments in The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift and, when my faculties returned, I just kept going on…
Nowadays, it’s common to accuse the media of bias. Certainly, I can’t blame anyone who does: the news is all owned by big corporate interests. They have to fight the other big corporate interests for their position on internet news feeds consisting entirely of clickbait headlines. They don’t have writers anymore, either, having replaced them with the word salad equivalent of that…
“You know,” said my fellow dog researcher, “I don’t think French bulldogs really are French.” This was the kind of cutting-edge discovery that we had to keep from the public at large, and I told her so. She responded by pointing to the microphone on my desk, which had inadvertently been set to “on” during the course of our conversation. Any one of the…
Here at the government, we like to keep an eye on you dangerous radicals. Your violent ideas of free love and complicated marginal taxation policy threaten everything that made this country great for, um, about fifteen dudes. And one of the other things we’re concerned about is mime bombs. Yes, you read that right. Throughout their history, the vicious French have participated in many cruel…
I’m Ian Hanomansing. And I’m Bob “The Price Punisher” Siffredi. One of us is a trusted newscaster bringing the world to Canadians, and the other one has been to prison four times for misrepresenting salvage cars at auction. Together, we’re telling important Canadian stories on our new podcast, It’s Not A Crime If You Don’t Get Caught . Bob, what can the…
People like to talk about what pieces of media are “classics,” which is one of those words that doesn’t mean anything. For most folks, there’s only two kinds of classics anyone cares about. There’s the books your university professors made you read, and then there’s popular movies that are slightly older than your dad. We’ll be talking about the latter…
Television likes to tell you that it’s easy to fix cars. We’ve all seen a movie where the main character’s quirky heehaw buddy just happens to have an old shitbox in the back yard. What’s more, that shitbox is exactly what they need to advance the plot. This is plainly unrealistic. For starters, the idea of having a hoard of cars where any of them actually still work is not…
In my part of the world, most cars are going to be pretty rusty after a few decades. We’re not as bad as Quebec, but you can’t expect to pick up something for cheap and not end up having to fix some rust. Rust is evil. Insidious, hard to detect, and impossible to completely eradicate. A bad patch will be showing through in just a winter, and things get worse from there. In traffic, I…
With all the debate over what constitutes real art, we have to figure out first what makes up a real artist. Artists are all around us, often unknown even to themselves. In our society’s great moment of need, they will emerge to fight our enemies with the power of the human spirit. Or they might screw around for a few weeks trying to avoid drawing, like, four lines. No one can tell which one…
Here at Asshole Castle, we’ll rent you an asshole for whatever reason you may desire. Many social obligations, work responsibilities, and civic duties can be gainfully interrupted by the tactical application of some dickhead you don’t know. Whether it’s loud and proud, like a shirtless dude screaming in the street and throwing bricks at the streetlights, or something more subtle…
Keep losing your car keys? I have a solution. It’s called “buy a lot of cars.” Why else do you think I’d have 37 Plymouths in the backyard? Statistically, I’ll find the keys to one of them when it’s time to leave for work. It’s fast and easy this way; no hunting under couch cushions or interrogating my domestic animals to see which one stole it. Sure, it…
I bet you know a lot of people who officiate dog marriages. That’s fine. When Fido and Rover want to make their union official, un-bastardize their litters of puppies, it’s a beautiful moment. They say their bow-vows, and someone gives the bride dog away, and then they have a good run in the park to tire them out before the long car ride home. Too many dogs rush into this hallowed…
In school, your children are taught all the shapes. Circle. Triangle. Square. Rectangle. Irregular polygons. Dodecahedrons. Notice I said “all” the shapes. Every last one. That’s one of those words that makes math majors super mad. They’re going to do something about it. In fact, this is already the case. Mathematicians are working hard every day to discover new kinds of…
When you become old enough, suddenly the crazy shit that happened to you turns valuable. It’s what historians are calling a “primary source:” you were there, so you would know what happened. Now that I’m slowly becoming old, the government has dispatched a crack team of social scientists to invade my privacy. They live in my house and follow me around in order to collect…
Ask any letter carrier, parcel delivery person, or meter reader. They’ll all tell you about the scariest dog they ever met. When your career involves visiting the property of random jerks, occasionally one of those jerks will leave a vicious dog in their yard. That dog will want to eat, or at least maim, you. Nobody should be eaten or maimed by a dog at work. Cats, at the most. When I was a…
Whatever you may think about animals, the important thing to remember is that they can’t build stuff. Well, except for corvids. They’re pretty smart. Once, a magpie flew into my garage and started criticizing how dirty my carb’s float bowl was, but I’m pretty sure that was just a hallucination brought on by huffing bad gas all day. Even though it was correct. Sorry, I get…
For all the differences between people, it really only comes down to one important rubric in my mind. Are you a problem-solver, or are you a problem maker ? Throughout human history, these two forces have worked at odds. Without a bunch of dickheads trying to come up with new and exciting financial crimes, we wouldn’t have, uh, a lack of prosecution for financial crimes. Let me try another…