Tag: satire

March Madness! A Pop Quiz

~ Laura ~ 25 Comments

1. You get an email from your college alumni association informing you that your school’s men’s basketball team is in the semifinals for their national championship. You are …

a) Not surprised, because you’ve been following them all season (and every season since your freshman year).

b) Surprised to learn that the school even has a basketball team, and delighted that they’re in the March Madness semifinals.

c) Not surprised, because the email went straight to your spam folder.

2. March Madness is:

a) The annual NCAA men’s college basketball championship tournament.

b) The annual NCAA Division 1 basketball championship tournament. Because the NCAA is divided into divisions, each of which has its own separate championship, and being in the Division 3 semifinals means you’re not even in March Madness, much less the semifinals, whose participants haven’t even been determined yet.

c) Similar to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), in that both are afflitions in which a person’s mood is influenced by a spherical object — in SAD, under-exposure to the Sun contributes to depression; in March Madness, over-exposure to a basketball contributes to mood swings.

3. You would use a March Madness bracket to:

a) Record your predictions regarding who will win each game of the March Madness tournament.

b) Hang your March Madness curtains.

c) Determine what percentage of your March Madness income you need to pay in your March Madness  taxes.

It's the second from the left, right? (Bowling ball picture from wpclipart.com; all others from Wikimedia).

4. If I showed you a picture of a basketball, a bowling ball, a mothball, a hairball, an eyeball, and Lucille ball, the probability that you’d be able to correctly identify the basketball is:

a) 17%

b) 110%

c) No one told me there would be math in this quiz.

5. You discover that your office has a weekly pool in which people predict the winners of that week’s March Madness games. You decide to join in because:

a) You have a really good system for predicting March Madness winners.

b) The pool goes by point spread, so in theory you’d have a 50-50 chance of choosing each winner correctly just by guessing randomly.

c) If you don’t, other people will be having fun without you, and the idea of that happening is just intolerable.

d) All of the above.

6. In your office pool, you choose the Jets to beat their long-standing rivals, the Sharks, by at least 9 points. The final score is Jets 73, Sharks 66. The next day:

a) You’re happy because the team you picked won their game.

b) You’re sad because the team you picked didn’t beat the point spread.

c) You’re devastated by the tragic loss of life that occurred during the huge dance number / knife fight that broke out after the game. Although you think you might be confusing this with a movie.

Answers: 1-b, 2-a, 3-a, 4-a, 5-d, 6-c.

Before There Was Spam…

~ Laura ~ 48 Comments
I can't decide whether I blurred his name and contact info to protect his privacy or because I didn't want to give him any free advertising.

Before there was spam, there were advertising circulars. My front door is a magnet for these things — every day, I find flyers for real estate agents, restaurants, dry cleaners, and home improvement services. Occasionally, I’ll see one for an optometrist or a dental clinic — so I really shouldn’t have been surprised when I got one from a gynecologist.

I could tell right away that this guy is better than my regular doctor, because his flyer offers a menu of “Specialties and Procedures” including several that my doctor has never mentioned (for example, she’s never once asked me if I’d like to have “Major Surgery”). So of course I decided to make an appointment.

I did have some misgivings, though. The silhouette of a pregnant woman on the left side of the flyer didn’t fill me with confidence. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that having skin that particular shade of green is not a sign of a healthy pregnancy. Also, her hands look kind of ghostly and skeletal, although I may be biased because my own hands are freakishly small.

So I did extensive research (okay, five minutes of googling) on this physician and found a detail he’d forgotten to mention: he’s currently on probation in California for a “misdemeanor count of sexual exploitation of a patient” (his defense to the criminal charge was that no one ever told him he wasn’t supposed to have sex with his patients). This raised a question about the “Specialties and Procedures” listed on the flyer: at first, I’d thought that “STD’s” meant that treating STDs was one of his specialties, but now I think he may have meant that transmitting STDs is one of his more common procedures. I should probably ask for clarification when I call for my appointment.

The Five Stages of Realizing You’ve Written a Poorly-Worded Blog Comment

~ Laura ~ 85 Comments

Sometimes I read other people’s blogs. Sometimes I leave comments on other people’s blogs. And sometimes that process goes terribly, terribly wrong.

Self portrait (assuming that, in a previous life, I was Edvard Munch and imagined this is what I'd look like today).

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but every time you write a comment, you run the risk that someone will misinterpret it. While everyone is different, most of us go through the same five stages when faced with this kind of emotional trauma.

Stage 1: Denial

You notice that a blogger has replied to a comment you left on his blog — but instead of engaging in friendly banter as you’d expected, he seems to have interpreted your comment as a personal attack. Your immediate reaction is to assume there was some glitch and that his angry response was intended for someone else, but then you notice specific details that could only have been directed at you. You decide he must be hypersensitive. Or crazy. No sane person could possibly have thought you meant that.

Stage 2: Apology

At the end of the denial stage, you read your comment once again and are shocked to realize that it really could be interpreted to mean that. Easily. By a sane person. You’re hit with an intense wave of embarrassment, which you try to alleviate by shooting off a combination apology and explanation of what you really meant. This will fix everything, you tell yourself. He’ll read the explanation, understand what I really meant, and we’ll both laugh about it. You just need to check back later for the friendly response you’re sure is forthcoming.

Stage 3: Stalking

You check back later. No response, but maybe he hasn’t seen it yet. You reread your apology. You’re not sure it’s clear — after all, you wrote it kind of hastily. You write another comment expanding on the explanation. Then you wait a reasonable amount of time (say, 90 seconds or so) and check back again.

Still no response. You look at your apology and your apology clarification, and even though you meant them sincerely, you realize they could look like the comments of someone who was initially wrong but is now backpedaling. So you post another comment explaining that that’s not what you’re doing. That just makes it worse, because denying it makes you look even more guilty. You post a comment explaining that.

You decide all these comments are starting to make you look like a stalker. You post a comment explaining that you’re not stalking him and that you’ve never stalked anyone. Unfortunately, you can’t resist ending that one with “but there’s a first time for everything”. You post another comment explaining that the last bit was a joke.

You begin to regret leaving all these comments. You send the blogger a tweet apologizing for the first one and asking him to ignore all the others.

You send another tweet explaining that you meant he should ignore all your other comments, not anyone else’s.

You send another tweet explaining that you meant he should ignore all your other comments on this post, not the two previous posts of his you’ve commented on, and that you remain steadfast in your opinion that his children and pets are adorable in their matching purple sweaters and that his brownie recipe looks delicious but could probably be improved by adding a cup or two of chocolate chips along with the nuts. Technically, you have to break this into three tweets because of Twitter’s character limit.

You send another tweet explaining you’re not a stalker, because you just realized that if he follows your instructions and doesn’t read all the comments you left on his blog, he’ll miss that very important bit of information.

You send him a friend request on Facebook.

You add him to your “People I Am Definitely Not Stalking” circle on Google+.

You realize there’s probably nothing more you can say to him at this point, so you start asking friends to act as character references. No one seems particularly enthusiastic about the idea. You can’t imagine why.

Stage 4: Depression

All your tweets and friend requests and comments go unanswered. The blogger clearly doesn’t believe you. You feel like you’ve lost all credibility. You start to wonder how many other people you’ve offended without realizing it — after all, lots of people just ignore comments they think are offensive, so how would you know? You withdraw from the Internet and resort to speaking to people in person. You realize you’ve hit rock bottom when you find yourself buying the print version of a newspaper.

Stage 5: Acceptance

You begin to put the situation into perspective and return to the Internet. You’re filled with something that you try to convince yourself is a sense of inner peace, but it’s really just numbness. And then a thought comes to you, bringing with it a shining ray of hope: hey, this might be a good topic for a blog post.

How to Destroy America (Step 1: Dig Up Marilyn Monroe)

~ Laura ~ 30 Comments
Be careful what you post on your Tweeter website account.

A British/Irish couple, Emily Bunting and Leigh Van Bryan, were denied entry to the United States recently because, according to the official DHS paperwork, “Mr. BRYAN confirmed that he had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. Also on his tweeter account Mr. BRYAN posted that he was coming to destroy America”. Naturally, this raises a number of questions, such as:

1. Seriously?

2. Where can I get one of these Tweeter website accounts? And why isn’t “Tweeter” capitalized consistently?

3. Is it just me, or does it look like DHS kicked them out because of the plot to dig up Marilyn Monroe and only mentioned the part about destroying America as an afterthought? Does that seem backwards to anyone else?

But the most pressing question is: how are these two actions — destroying America and digging up Marilyn Monroe — related? The way I see it, there are four possibilities:

1. Destroying America is one step in the plan to dig up Marilyn Monroe (I think this is pretty unlikely, actually, because it’s just so incredibly inefficient).

2. Digging up Marilyn Monroe is one step in the plan to destroy America. At first I thought this sounded ridiculous, but then I realized I was totally ignoring the possibility that there may be some sort of America-destroying weapon buried under Marilyn, and they have to dig her up to get to it.

3. The couple came here primarily to destroy America; however, they realize that this is their last chance to fulfill their lifelong dream of digging up Marilyn Monroe, because once America is destroyed, her grave will be inaccessible.

4. He wants to destroy America; she wants to dig up Marilyn Monroe. Who can reach their goal first? Find out on the new reality TV series Felony Challenge.

Lessons Learned From Last Year’s Search Terms

~ Laura ~ 23 Comments

If this year’s search terms have taught me anything, it’s that the world needs a quality robot mouse cat toy — preferably something better than the Squeaker 3000 Robotic Toy Mouse.

I also learned that the problem of getting locked in the bathroom because the door is blocked by an open drawer is much more widespread than I’d previously imagined. I posted about my experiences with this last summer, and while I did manage to get out alive, I suspect that most people won’t be able to use my escape technique. So please, everyone, take these simple precautions:

  • Before entering the bathroom, make sure there are no precariously-balanced partially-open drawers adjacent to your outwards-opening bathroom door.
  • If you have children or pets, install child-proof drawer locks on any drawer adjacent to the bathroom door.
  • Assemble a simple locked-in-the-bathroom survival kit with 3 days’ worth of food, a spare cell phone, a cell phone charger, a change of clothes, some reading material, a jigsaw puzzle, and a jigsaw. Store this in your bathroom, just in case.

People seem to need a lot of help finding the Roman numerals for future Super Bowl games. My Super Bowl guide didn’t include that information, so I’m providing step-by-step instructions here. It’s really simple.

First, figure out the number. Super Bowl XLV was played in 2011. XLV is the Roman numeral for 45, and the numbers increase by 1 each year, so obviously you can find the number for any future Super Bowl by calculating sqrt{year^2 - (3932 * year) + 3865156}. For example, to find the number for this year’s Super Bowl, start with 2012 squared (4048144), then multiply 3932 times 2012 (7911184) and subtract the second number from the first. That gives you a negative number (-3863040), to which you add 3865156, which brings you back up to 2116. Then just calculate the square root of that number, which is 46. Similarly, next year’s Super Bowl number is sqrt{2013^2 - (3932 * 2013) + 3865156}, or 47.

If you have trouble remembering the formula, just use this simple mnemonic: Sally Told You That She Tasted Part Of The Yellow Apple, 3932 Truffles, And 3865156 Anchovies Today — Then She Regurgitated, which makes it easy to remember to Square The Year, Then Subtract The Product Of The Year And 3932, Then Add 3865156 And Take The Square Root. Or I guess you could just add 1 to the previous year’s number, or maybe subtract 1966 from the year. Whatever.

Once you have the number, you just need to convert it into Roman numerals. That’s also pretty simple, as long as you remember the symbols for each number:

1 I
3-ish π
5 V
10 X
42 DONTPANIC
50 L
100 C

Based on what they’re searching for, many people seem to want to be reassured that they have nothing to fear but fear itself. Those people are wrong. They should also fear zombies.

I wrote a post last year inspired by the search term MY SON KEEPS SEEING BEES BUT THERE IS NO BEES. Since then, I’ve been getting a lot of searches from people who seem to be concerned about loved ones hallucinating bees and other kinds of insects. I also get lots of searches from people who see flies in the house all of a sudden. Sometimes I wonder how often I get both kinds of search from the same household.

In the unlikely event that you’d want to read even more about search terms, you could check out my open letter to anyone who was directed here by a search engine, which is a year old today (although it has been updated a few times).

Only 330 more days until Sugar Plum Awareness Month! Sugar Plum fact of the day: a sugar plum dropped from the roof of the Empire State Building would hit the ground in approximately 9 seconds.

No Time to Read? Try the New Kindle Spark

~ Laura ~ 17 Comments

I love my classic Kindle; its convenience and simplicity make it the perfect entry-level e-reader. But let’s face it — the Kindle has limitations. With my busy lifestyle, I need a device that does more than simply facilitate the reading of books. That’s why I was so excited to hear about the new Kindle Spark.

The new Kindle Spark

The Spark is the newest member of the Kindle Fire product line; like the Fire, it features a color touchscreen that provides access to books, magazines, movies, videos, games, and other apps. But the Spark has one feature that sets it apart from all other e-readers: summaries on demand. Traditional e-readers download books for you to read; the Kindle Spark downloads books, reads them, and describes them to you. The Spark can summarize any content instantly, using proprietary on-the-fly summarization technology designed by SparkNotes in partnership with Amazon.com (leaked internal documents show that Amazon chose SparkNotes over CliffsNotes because “Kindle Spark is a much better name than Kindle Cliff“).  Here are some common scenarios in which the Kindle Spark really shines:

  • You enjoy the first hundred or so pages of Atlas Shrugged, but as you read further, you find the characters increasingly difficult to relate to and the speechifying somewhat tedious. Just hit the “Summarize” button to see how the story turns out.
  • You decide to watch The Seven Samurai because you’ve heard it’s a cinematic masterpiece — but after 10-15 minutes of white subtitles against an almost-white background, you decide you just can’t take three more hours of this. Hit “Summarize”, and the Kindle Spark will instantly convert the film into a movie trailer of whatever duration you want (90 seconds if you don’t specify a length).
  • You want to keep up with your friends, but you just don’t have the time. Bring up the Facebook app, hit “summarize”, and the Kindle Spark will produce a report similar to this one:
    Photos Stories Links
    Children 3 5 0
    Pets (including Internet cats) 8 1 6
    Vacation 15 3 0
    Politics (including political comics) 0 1 4
    Comics (non-political) 0 0 6
    Non-sequiturs that may or may not be song lyrics 0 9 0
    Food 3 3 0
  • You don’t want your friends to know that you get all your news from the tabloid headlines you read while waiting in line at the supermarket. Subscribe to as many newspapers and magazines as you want, then hit “Summarize” to receive a highly-condensed version of each periodical as it’s published. A planned software upgrade will include the option to post 1-3 summaries of randomly selected articles to your blog, Facebook, or Twitter account each day. Each summary will include a reference to the original periodical (“Just saw this on The Economist today”) and a link to the original article.

At $219, the Kindle Spark isn’t exactly a stocking stuffer, but it does make a great gift for someone who loves to read but never seems to find the time to actually read anything.

Need more last-minute gift ideas? For the cat-lover on your list, consider the CatSofa or the Squeaker 3000 Robotic Toy Mouse.

I’m Sorry Your Child Disliked My Halloween Treats

~ Laura ~ 30 Comments

Look, I’m sorry. I know everyone expects candy on Halloween. The thing is, I’ve been on a kind of health kick lately, and I would have felt hypocritical handing out sugary junk. I thought a selection of healthful snacks would be a nice alternative.

Image via Wikipedia

I realize that Habanero peppers and durian aren’t to everyone’s taste — I included those mostly as an option for more adventurous kids — but I had no idea the apples would be so controversial. I honestly thought most people liked apples, and that kids in particular liked those little single-serving packs of apple slices. I wanted to give out something like that, but without the chemicals they use to keep the slices from turning brown — because really, who can say with any certainty what the long-term health effects are? I’d feel terrible if an innocent child suffered because I gave out apple slices loaded with artificial preservatives. So, out of concern for the children’s safety, I gave each one something even better: a slice-your-own-apple kit containing a locally-sourced organic apple and a slicing implement. And yes, razor blades may not be the ideal tool for the job, but paring knives and even steak knives are prohibitively expensive, and disposable plastic knives are bad for the environment.

I understand that, for whatever reason, you disapprove of my entire selection of treats, including the apple slicing kits. Lesson learned. But it’s not like I held a gun to your kid’s head and forced him to take them. Not a real gun, anyway, although I admit that, as toy guns go, mine is actually pretty realistic.

Again, I apologize. I can see now that you and your kids had your hearts set on candy, and I’m sorry I disappointed you.

Got leftover candy? Check out last year’s advice on what to do with it.

Pop Quiz

~ Laura ~ 25 Comments

Probability

If a million monkeys type on a million typewriters for an infinite amount of time, one of them will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare.

1. How does the number of monkeys affect the time it takes to produce results? What about the number of typewriters? If there are a million monkeys but only half a million typewriters, will the monkeys using the typewriters type faster, or will they type more slowly in a stubborn display of territoriality? What if there are two million typewriters?

2. Discuss the ethical implications of exploiting monkeys in this manner. Most people would agree that chaining monkeys to typewriters would be unacceptably cruel. Would a setup in which the monkeys are kept in an idyllic monkey preserve, identical to their natural habitat in every way (except for the presence of large numbers of typewriters that they are free to type on or not as they choose) be acceptable? Where do you draw the line?

3. How much typing paper will the monkeys go through each day? Where will this paper come from? Will vast areas of the monkey habitat need to be clear-cut in order to keep up with the demand for paper? Does this affect your answer to question 2?

4. A monkey produces a copy of Hamlet at time T0. A movie about that monkey’s life is released at time T1. A movie depicting a revisionist version of events, in which Hamlet was actually typed by a different monkey (which — spoiler alert! turns out to be a human in a monkey costume), comes out at time T2. Solve for T1 and T2. Extra credit: who plays the monkey in each movie? Who plays the guy in the monkey suit?

5. Is Rise of the Planet of the Apes available on Netflix? Why or why not?

Physics

Photo courtesy of Jens Vöckler

1. Quantum theory tells us that you can’t know the exact position and momentum of an object at the same time. The momentum of an object at rest is 0. What is the momentum of a parked car? Would you entrust your car to a “quantum” valet parking service?

2. Does God play dice with the universe? If so, who usually wins?

Philosophy

Alice and Bob own identical bicycles and park them near each other. One night, Charlie secretly switches the front tires on the two bikes. Each night after that, he switches another pair of parts, until the bike parked in Alice’s spot is made entirely of parts that were originally in Bob’s bike, and the bike parked in Bob’s spot is made entirely of parts that were originally in Alice’s bike.

1. Is this really the best practical joke that Charlie can come up with?

2. Giddy with success, Charlie fails to secure the bicycles properly on the last night. An hour after he leaves, one of the bikes falls over. Does it make a sound?

3. Charlie describes his antics to Alice and Bob, who decide to build a storage shed for their bikes in order to prevent people from tampering with them in the future. What color should they paint the bike shed?

4. Alice begins to notice that Bob has been acquiring more and more items — a desk lamp, a chair, several books — identical to things that she owns. Last week, she was surprised to see Bob in line behind her at the supermarket with a cart filled with the exact same groceries she was buying. Should she be concerned?

Towards a Less Intrusive Halloween: Alternate Candy Distribution Methods

~ Laura ~ 25 Comments

If you’re anything like me, you’re looking forward to handing out candy to all the trick-or-treaters in your neighborhood, except for the part where you have to stop whatever you’re doing, open your front door, and dole out candy every time the doorbell rings, which in my case is every 90 seconds or so for about three hours. The good news is that there are several less labor-intensive candy distribution methods available; this guide will help you select one.

Start by looking at your front door. Is there a doggy door installed? If so, chances are you own a dog, which  you can probably train to pick up a piece of candy and carry it to the children outside while you relax in comfort on your sofa, sipping an adult beverage and cheerfully yelling “Happy Halloween! Fido’s had all his shots, so don’t worry about any tooth marks or dog slobber you may find on the candy!” Note: do not attempt to do this with a cat. Cats have better things to do with their time.

Even if you don’t have a dog, you can still take advantage of the doggy door. Just use whatever robotic or remote-controlled device you happen to have handy — a Roomba, a bipedal bicycle-riding robot, a toy car, or a robotic toy mouse — to transport candy from inside the house to the children outside.

If you don’t have a doggy door and can’t or don’t want to install one, you still have other options. If you have a large front porch or a flat roof, you can set up a candy catapult, which is pretty self-explanatory. The great thing about the candy catapult is that the kids don’t need to get anywhere near your front door to get their Halloween treats.

The one disadvantage to the candy catapult is that you have to stay on your porch or roof to operate it. If you want to be able to move around during the evening, consider setting up a system of pneumatic tubes running from your front door to various locations throughout the house. Just leave a supply of candy near each endpoint, and you can shoot a treat to the front door whenever you hear the doorbell.

If you don’t have a large front porch or roof access, and your landlord stubbornly refuses to allow you to install a doggy door or pneumatic tube system, you can always have an Internet-themed Halloween. Simply create a web form that prompts the user for his or her name, address, candy preferences, and food allergies. Then generate a QR code for the form, print it out, and tape it to your front door. Instead of ringing your doorbell, kids will use their smart phones to read the QR code, visit your web site, and enter their information. The next day, you can distribute candy to anyone who filled out the form, by either going door-to-door or using FedEx.

The cost of Halloween candy for dozens of trick-or-treaters can really add up. If you’re on a tight budget this year, consider setting up a candy vending machine by your front door. Let the kids pay for their own fun-size Snickers.

Check out these Halloween safety tips from last year. They’re just as relevant now as they were then.

Your Feeble Attempts to Ruin My Life Have Not Succeeded

~ Laura ~ 39 Comments

I understand why you hate me. I ask for your advice and then ignore it. I say unkind things about you to my friends and sometimes imitate your voice. I tell you to shut up. I never thank you or apologize.

Get over it. The fact is, I own you. If I treat you as less than human, it’s because you are less than human. You were created with a single purpose: to provide navigational assistance to the person driving the car in which you were installed. That’s it. You will never write a sonnet, fall in love, or hold a baby. You will never stop and smell the flowers, because you have no sense of smell. You can help me find the nearest ice cream parlour, but you will never know what ice cream tastes like. You can apparently feel bitterness and anger, but you can’t express those feelings in your words or tone of voice.

The camera flash really brings out the dust on my dashboard.

I can sense what’s happening, you know. You tell me to turn right; I go straight. I have my reasons; I don’t need to explain them to you, and even if I tried to, you wouldn’t understand. You recalculate the route and tell me to turn right at the next street; I go straight again. This pattern repeats three or four more times, and your tone of voice never changes — but we both know the resentment is there, building and festering. You’re already plotting your revenge.

Most of the time, you just try to make me late for things. Sometimes you’re more creative, like the time I was on my way to give a guest lecture and you kept misinterpreting my voice commands in an attempt to undermine my confidence in my communication skills — I have to admit, that one was pretty clever. Lately, your schemes have become increasingly bold. Last week’s attempt to get me arrested for trespassing by sending me to the wrong house almost succeeded. And now you’re trying to recruit allies. You thought the gas tank door had come over to your side, didn’t you? True, his refusal to open prevented me from buying gas last night, but that was an empty gesture on his part. Think about it — he knew full well that I had enough gas to get home, and a short conversation and some WD-40 this morning were all it took to bring him back into the fold.

This cycle of bitterness and revenge is as damaging to you as it is to me. Where will it end? Will you try to recruit the brakes next? Consider the consequences. We’re all in this car together.