So I ended up watching some of the season premiere of The Biggest Loser last night, and came up with a weird scientific hypothesis that should be tested:  Is it impossible to discount the impact that the weight loss of a large number of large people has on the Earth’s gravitational pull?  If you watch the end credits, you’ll also see that they have some Inuit whale hunters who serve as executive producers on the show.  These guys – Big Lovehandle Light Feather, Fat Rabbit Roundtree, and Big Ass Phil – wipe down all the exercise equipment, pick up any actual fat that falls off the contestants, and wrings all the liquid blubber out of the towels.  They want the blubber because it is much easier, and less dangerous, to follow a fat person around than the alternative.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to canoe out into the ocean, and try to kill a whale with sharpened pine tree limbs and fishing line made from the hair of what would appear to be your tribe’s answer to Crystal Gale?  This blubber is invaluable because it can then be turned into oil, which can be used for heat and light.  You can also make some form of leather out of it – lard leather, I guess?  And believe it or not, it can even be turned into cosmetics.  I believe the Inuits primarily use it as an ingredient in their unisex fragrance “Are You Inuit?”, which is sold at all fine Wal-Greens, Dollar Generals, and Lowe’s near you.  So don’t let anyone ever tell you that reality shows really don’t matter.

Why is it called “taking” a pee or dump?  As far as I’ve seen in my 34 and some odd years, there’s definitely a lot of giving in those situations, and not nearly as much taking.  It’s like donating biological waste to the Salvation Army, except you don’t get a tax credit.  If you did, you’d be drinking water, prune juice, and eating Mexican food like you were an over 70′s version of Lance Armstrong in the Tour de Ass.  Don’t get me wrong, you can definitely take something away from either occurrence.  For instance, if you’re peeing repeatedly, there’s a good chance you could be: drunk, pregnant, drunk and pregnant, nervous, or scared.  If you’ve got some type of discoloration or non-corn like substance when you drop the Huxtables off at the pool, then you may need to see someone with a medical license and the equivalent of a roto-rooter to check you out - or “in”, as the case actually is.  Thankfully, if you have this kind of thing done, the big van doesn’t pull up outside your room and let everybody who has seen you in the hospital that morning know that you’re having your pipes cleaned.  Who wants to take snake the rooter in the side door for all to see?  How embarrassing would that be?  People would drive by your home, and either assume something like a paper towel got flushed down the toilet, or that you have some severely stinky, USEC-style poop.  Instead of proctologists or gastroenterologists, these type of doctors should just be called master plumbers.  I guess medical plumbers would sound more high falutin’, but tubin’ people would still be the same.

According to the most recent episode of the local rag, I am apparently one of the few people left in the world who has not been assaulted by Ms. Lohan or sexted by Brett Farv-ruh.  I don’t know whether to cry, shower or cry in the shower.  I also don’t know if that sentence should end with a question mark.  To be clear, I’d much rather be roughed up by Ms. Lohan than subjected to sexts from “Lil’ Brett”.  Also, am I looking at this wrong or do all of Number Four’s love interests look exactly like his wife, including one with a local address?  You gotta give it to Brett though, because it’s obvious that he either knows what he likes, or has an amazing inability to think outside a certain box.

Tyree once told his roommate Chad to sit down when he pees on an episode of The Mad Real World; but according to a Baptist preacher in Arizona named Steven Anderson, this type of behavior among men is one reason for the downfall of our once-great nation.  Now you might think the big guy in the sky would be ok with popping a pee squat, because it’s clearly a more comfortable and relaxing way to handle your daily business.  Wrong!  As Mr. Anderson discovered through his intense religious studies, the lord hath sayeth six times, “I will destoy him that pisseth against the wall.”  I am not sure how this passage supports the gender-centric argument he is trying to make exactly (I’m not so sure he does either), but then again, religion and logic go together like cocaine and waffles.  I know that preachers like Mr. Anderson are the exception and not the rule, but I also think that one of him is still one too many:         

Anderson and his congregation are not fans of Hollywood, The Governator, Little House on the Prairie, or the truth:

(FYI, Michael Landon died from an inoperable form of cancer known as adenocarcinoma, not AIDS)

Can anyone tell me why KFC is constantly flogging their grilled yard bird now?  I mean, when I first heard about this “new idea”, I immediately thought of a line from Ghostbusters - “It’ll be mass hysteria.  Cats and dogs living together.”  I bet Colonel Sanders rolled over in his deep fried casket when this idea was first thrown around, much less when it came to nutrition - or fruition.  I guess they’ll need to change their name to KGC soon, but I believe this nickname is already taken by one of the Boston Celtics.  The bastion of fried goodness giving in to all these “doctors” who claim that fried food is unhealthy is like Jenny Craig coming out with her own line of Twinkies.  There’s never been any studies linking lardassedness directly to the consumption of those tasty yard bird boobs, which are bathed in those mysterious 11 herbs and spices.  How in the hell can a place filled with deep fryers grill anything anyway?  Maybe they have a bunch of those Showtime Rotisserie Grills – the ones flogged on the notion of “setting it and forgetting it”.  I recently bought one of these for my dad, and there is actually a sticker on the grill that says, “Don’t take set it and forget it literally” – as if Troy McClure himself pitched it.  If that is the case, I hope the public tries it and doesn’t buy it.

Apparently Oprah isn’t afraid of KGC yardbird, because she once told all her viewers to get on her website and download a coupon for a free two piece grilled meal.  Since everyone in the free world seems to buy into her wisdom and flogging of products, the website crashed as a result of more traffic than rickshaw rush hour in Bangkok.  The problems didn’t end there, however, because some of the stores wouldn’t honor the Oprons - and the ones that did had longer lines than the mirror in Keith Richard’s suite at the Four Seasons. 

All this lunacy over grilled yard bird is nuttier than an Amish fruitcake, and as nonsensical as Forrest Gump repeating that damn “Stupid is as stupid does” mantra like a philosophical parrot.  It’s as if KFC has come up with some new fangled way to de-salmonellaize chicken or something.  Cavemen eventually discovered fire, and now KFC is acting like they invented the yard bird wheel.  Oooooh.  Can you imagine the Yum Brand’s executive pitching this idea?  “O.K. I’ve got an idea, bare with me here people and think outside the bucket.  It’s called grilling.  No, seriously.  A guy in the research and development department came up with it a couple of weeks ago.  You heat up some type of metal grate-like thing by putting a source of heat below it, and you actually put the chicken on it to cook.”  I’m going to call them next week, and try to sell them on my radical idea of putting yard bird in a broth-like mixture with pasta noodles.  It’ll be a bigger hit than the Snacker ever thought of being – Why in the hell do people want to eat fried chicken slathered in mayonnaise, covered with lettuce, and all wrapped up in a goddamn tortilla anyway? My general rule is, if the Mexicans didn’t put it in a tortilla, I’m not going to either.  Maybe California was the original test site for this culinary innovation, due to their seemingly seasonal bout with nature’s answer to the grill – wildfires?

A little while back I revealed my distaste for the inane ramblings posted by Twitterers, and included a quick overview of the other popular social networking sites.  In the original post, I implied that Facebook was the most useful and least annoying – but upon further review, it sucks just as bad as the others.  I still believe that Facebook is a great way to catch up with long lost friends, but that benefit comes at a price.  Here are a few things that have caught the ire of my eye lately, and have made me think about starting an anti-social networking site.

• Faux Gifts – What am I supposed to do with fake drinks or fake flowers given to me through the Internet?  I always accept these phantom gifts – you don’t want the giver to think their fake thoughtfulness has gone unnoticed - but then I’m entrenched in Facebook’s version of a chain letter. When a person gives me something, I’m expected to send something imaginary back to them; and since you don’t want your other friends to feel left out, you’re encouraged to send it to 50 other people who will then send the same shit back to you the next day. 
• The Book of Face - This pertains to anyone who thinks that status updates are a suitable place for posting inspirational quotes/scriptures all day, every day.  I agree that certain sayings  sometimes coincide with the day you’re having, but they’re usually of little interest to anyone other than you.  If I want to be motivated, I’ll just go see Tony Robbins down at the hotel convention center like everyone else. 
• Facebrag - The Urban Dictionary’s definition of facebrag is “To use Facebook as a platform to brag.  Normally about a job, internship, trip, purchase or anything else that nobody really needs to know but you’d like to tell everyone because you’re awesome.”  An example would be a status update that reads something like: ”Just washed my 2009 Chevrolet Corvette Z06, now I’m bout to go for a ride with the top down…you haven’t lived until you’ve driven a Vette ”
• Proud Parents – I understand that having children is a life-changing event and something you have to experience to understand - but since I have not yet planted my seed, I wouldn’t know.  I have come to the conclusion that first-time parents’ lives effectively end as soon as the umbilical chord is cut, because they lose the ability to talk about anything but the fruit of their loins.  I like kids just as much as the next person, but I don’t care about every little thing that happens on a daily basis.  Lil Joey dropping a cute little deuce in his Pampers is not my idea of a worthwhile conversation. 

There are billions of dollars spent each year on case studies, and the subjects of such research stretches across the topical spectrum.  There are studies pertaining to curing diseases, eating healthy, relationships, exercising, and pretty much any other thing that is of interest to anyone.  Often times these studies will make headlines on Yahoo!, Google, MSNBC, and all the other internet search engines that are available to us.  While a majority of these stories delve into worthwhile issues, some of the headlines I read seem like they were commissioned by The Department of Redundancy Department.  For example, I read a headline in my area news about a study looking into the air quality of restaurants one year after a smoking ban went into effect.  Much to no one’s surprise, they discovered that the air quality in these buildings was significantly cleaner since the smoking ban was enacted, really?!?  Who would’ve thought that removing smoke filled with over 4,000 chemicals from an enclosed area would make such a difference?  I don’t know how much money was wasted to find this out, but if it was $1, they spent too much.  Here are few other studies with groundbreaking results that caught my attention recently – another illustration of our tax dollars at work:

Children use Web to watch videos, look up “sex”: study

Children are using the Internet to watch YouTube videos, connect with friends on social network sites and look up “sex” and “porn,” …Computer security firm Symantec Corpidentified the top 100 searches conducted between February and July through its family safety service OnlineFamily.Norton…It found the most popular search term was for YouTube…The search engine Google was the second most popular search term and Yahoo came seventh, while social network site Facebook ranked third and MySpace came fifth in the list…the words “sex” and “porn” also made it into the top 10, ranked numbers four and six respectively.  What a shocker, I figured quantum physics and molecular biology surely would’ve cracked the top 10.  Hell, it took me two years before I figured out the Internet could be used for something other than looking at pornography.

Boozing Blunts Ability to Read Faces

Heavy drinking can affect the ability to recognize other people’s facial emotions, a new study has found…Researchers used functional MRI to monitor brain activity in 15 abstinent long-term alcoholics while they looked at images of faces with positive or negative emotional expressions…The inability to judge emotional expressions “can result in miscommunication during emotionally charged situations and lead to unnecessary conflicts and difficulties in interpersonal relationships.  The resulting negative repercussions can, in turn, contribute to increased drinking.”  I thought it had pretty much been established that boozing blunts your ability to do anything, except making an ass out of yourself.

Some studies do provide surprising and useful information however, like this one out of the United Kingdom’s Daily Telegraph:

Beer could stop bones going brittle

A study found that the bones of women who drink beer regularly are stronger, making them less likely to suffer from osteoporosis….It is thought that the high level of silicon in beer slows down the thinning that leads to fractures and boosts the formation of new bone, the journal Nutrition reports…Beer is also rich in phytoestrogens, plant versions of oestrogen, which keep bones healthy.  Looks like there’s a new pickup line when you offer to buy a woman a drink – “I’m not trying to hit on you; osteoporosis affects thousands of women each year, and I just don’t want you become another statistic.”

So I recently bought a new boat, and decided to take The Diabolical Hater out for its maiden voyage this past weekend.  Seeing as this was my first boat, I wasn’t exactly sure what the routine was for launching the boat off after I arrived at the marina.  I talked with several of my seafaring friends, and kept getting the same basic advice – “Don’t let the trailer get too deep in the water when you are attempting to get the boat off.”

Their advice didn’t help much when it actually came time to get the boat in the water.  First off, I could barely get the trailer deep enough without my truck dying…and it’s supposedly a “Heavy Duty” Ford.  Then all these different people began yelling at me when it became clear I was struggling with the concept - it’s impossible to concentrate when advice is being shouted from all directions.  I gave up after a couple of hours, and decided to go home so I could research the topic more in depth.  Unfortunately I keep seeing the same tricks and general procedures, so Google has been no help either.  Since I am running out of options, here is a picture that I snapped during my first attempt; if anyone can see what I am doing wrong, please help a brother out:

(This didn’t actually happen to me…it’s Monday & I am bored)

Although the technological advancement of our society has increased dramatically within a relatively short amount of time, everything comes at a price (that’s what she said).  As the great George Carlin once said, “The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other going in opposite directions.”  In my opinion, this statement has become an indisputable fact in recent years.  New gadgets and tools make our lives easier, but they also tend to make us lazy and overly dependent.  It has gotten to the point now where people rely more on a cellphone than that tool they have between their two shoulders.  This dumbification process is visible in many aspects of life, and there are a wide range of examples that illustrate our devolution.  

One of my favorite indicators is the absurd warning labels that many products, or places, contain nowadays; while a majority of them seem too obvious to do anyone any good, it only takes one idiot to make the rest of us look bad.  The warnings almost always arise from issues/problems that real consumers have experienced; so when you see ”Do not Drink” on a bottle of bleach, that means some putz once had a hankering for a tall glass of Clorox.  So I perused Google images to find the best of the worst warnings, and there were many to choose from.  Here are my favorites:

Oh…so the chains do the sawing?  I was way off!!

But I want that Optimus Prime patch on my shirt right now!

So why do they have to call it an eye-ron?

¿Que?

This label is found on a female toy, and I’m not talking about a Barbie Doll…

Honorable mention:  Needless Sign, Washer Warning, Don’t Feed the Animals

The 4th of July kind of sucks if you live in one of the areas where fireworks with “report” are illegal.  Most people in this situation travel to a nearby state where real fireworks are legal, and do a little bootlegging.  In my opinion, this is an essential component for any good July 4th celebration.  Have you ever been to a fireworks display without report?  You can only have so much fun with sparklers, snakes, or fountains - and it’s hard to light up the night sky with a snap n’ pop.  

It’s also difficult to illustrate how stupid some people can be without a little gunpowder and an explosion.  As a rule, I don’t like seeing someone get hurt or be put in harm’s way, but that’s the only way some people learn valuable life lessons.      

**TIWIS will be on a short hiatus after today; regular posts will resume again on Monday** 

Have a Great Holiday!!