Mock Tweet

My parental units, with myself in grad school and my brother having just completed his second year of college, miss our heartwarming company for some so far unknown reason. In an effort to mollify the pain of the two kids flying the coop, they lure us together with the sweetest goddamn vacationary adventures. Now, I'm not a twitterer and will not tweet on the tweetnet to feed the tweeting twits tantalizing tales of my travels. However, in a hypothetical parallel universe where I have given in to said activities (I am blogging after all) my twitter over the next 14 days would look something like this.

6/01: PhD qualifying exam
6/02 10:15am: entering airport in Cork, Ireland
6/02 10:30am: drinking in a pub in Cork, Ireland
6/03: still drinking in a pub in Cork, Ireland
6/04: drinking in a pub in Dublin, Ireland
6/05: drinking in a pub in Belfast, UK
6/06: drinking in a pub in Glasgow, UK
6/07: drinking on a boat
6/08: drinking in a pub in Inverness, UK
6/09: drinking in a pub in Edinburgh, UK
6/10: shuffleboard on a boat
6/11: shrooming in a pub in Amsterdam, Netherlands
6/12: merrily obliterated in a tavern in Bruges, Belgium
6/13: detoxing in Heathrow

Swearing

There's so much to be said for creative swearing. Nothing beats a show stopping vituperation that renders its victim, and all within earshot, utterly speechless. Here's a few swears in languages that don't refer to every moderately negative occurrence as "gay." Warning: some may cause you to utter muffled crys of surprise and alarm.

Arabic
"Elif air ab dinich"
A thousand dicks in your religion

Chinese (Cantonese)
"ow lun dun jhew hai"
ox cock boiled in a pig's cunt

Italian
"No Skuche ala Gats!"
What the fuck do you want from my balls?

Morrocan
"Takool zep ala hamada, woodla halum"
Eat the dick of a donkey, Allah wills it.

Norwegian
"runknisse"
Wanking gnome

"Jeg spretta søstra di mens den tilbakestående faren din sto bak og fumlet med ballene mine."
I stretched your sisters ass while your retarded dad stood behind me and fumbled my balls

Turkish (a tongue that takes "motherfucker" to the next level)
"Ananin amina cam dikerim, golgesinde seni sikerim trans"
I will plant a pine tree into your mom's pussy and fuck you in its shade.

"Ananin Amina Beton dokerimde butun mahalle abaza kalir"
I will pour concrete in your mothers pussy, so the whole town will be horny.

"Ananin amina kale kurar sabah aksam mac yaparim"
I would create goals in your mother's pussy and play soccer there day and night.

Critical Critic Critique

Reading music reviews makes me want to obliterate things at random. Seriously, what kind of shit-slinging shister came up with the denouncement, 'They sound too much like themselves?' (http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12926-swoon/) as justification for a poor review. The bastardo at Pitchfork who struck Silversun Pickup's new album with that critical gem can go tiddle himself in the back room to unapproachable hipster garbage noise all he wants. In Pitchfork's review of Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, they extol the album's various musical “strokes of brilliance”. “They've punctuated perfectly likable indie rock songs with bleating vocalizations. They've seeded pretty instrumentals with irritating noise. They've stayed on a single chord for 10 minutes.”

If I join a band and some reviewer has the gall to pen an article containing the words “bleating” and “irritating,” I swear to god he's getting icepicked in the dick, whether or not he gives my album a 9.6 of 10 (the rating for AC, Silversun clocked in at 5.3). How can those words possibly be used to describe music, much less anything experienced via ears, in a positive light? Now, I'm not saying Silversun Pickups should be taught in Music Theory 101 but man, I've heard animal collective live and close enough to smell the drugs oozing out of their eyeballs and can firmly say that “bleating” and “irritating” and “one chord for ten minutes” are pretty accurate descriptors. The only use for their auditory vomit would be as the soundtrack for an LSD sponsored teddy bear orgy.

World Travels

Usain Bolt in mph:
100m in 9.34 sec (second split of his 200m Bejing WR run)
--100m/9.34s = .062137mi/.0025944hrs = 23.95 mph
alternatively, 10m in .82 sec (the fastest 10m split of his 100m Bejing WR run)
--10m/.82s = .0062137mi/.000227778hrs = 27.28 mph
which he held for only 40 meters.

Hippopotami top out at around 30mph and can hold that speed for a few hundred meters. They are also fiercely territorial, gladly using that or any other excuse available to engage in their favorite past time, being lumbering death machines. Before charging, they're known to open their mouths as wide as possible, yell "I'm the juggernaut bitch!" and deal out copious quantities of wholesale death.

In short, I am never going to sub-Saharan Africa. I have no desire to be utterly destroyed by a belligerent beanie baby.

Double the Meaning, Double the Fun

Now for those of you who don't know, I work in a lab in which I'm a minority. The English language's idiosyncrasies provide entertainment on a nearly daily basis. Here are a few gems from a gregarious and fiery Turkish friend, still in the process of mastering the language. Both came from one conversation regarding her bar flirtatiousness.

"I love when I go to bars with my boyfriend and other guys come over and hit me, it makes him very mad."
"My boyfriend thinks he is tough guy. Sometimes when he goes to bars, he will yell at other boys and they will go outside and fist each other. Sometimes I make him mad enough to fist me, although he is a big pussy and never will."

Behold, the subtle differences in hit me vs. hit on me, or fist each other vs. punch each other.

Pseudoscience

If I had superpowers, I would definitely use them for ill. Now, I'm loathe to admit that I lack said supernaturals as I definitely would have thrown a levitating glowstick goo rave or a "wow I wonder why it's 95 degrees in December" party or some such. The closest thing I have, which I try to take advantage of on the regular, is the one boon a bio undergrad degree and a year of PhD work has given me, the ability to spout immensely believable pseudoscience like a champ.

Riding on a bus last fall with several bio peers all armed with textbooks intimidating enough to be considered tomes, a fellow commuter asked “hey do you guys do, like, weird science?” So, revving up some serious charisma and a solid, no-bullshit 'I'm obviously a genius in the subject' voice, I told him the first thing that popped into my mind. Paraphrased: “Well, I'm currently deeply involved in the study of biomagnetism, that being the study of how certain species can both sense and utilize the Earth's magnetic field or in rare occasions, exude magnetic forces of their own. Did you know cattle have been observed to line up north to south when grazing?”

Pseudoscience followed, along with a rather convincing explanation of the early Amish Compass, and how the Amish discovered a lone dairy cow on a canoe in a sufficiently still body of water will point north. Truthfully, I think I freaked him out a little bit. He probably has nightmares of a cabal of labcoated madmen turning welsh corgi puppies into WMDs.

Shopping Cart Etiquette

Somebody show me where it is written that one is not allowed to ride the back of one's shopping cart through the parking lot at costco. Is there a “rules and regulations” manual on the topic of being a mature adult that I forgot to pick up when I turned 24? Is it stated in chapter “Fun time is over” section 12.36.1 in 'shopping etiquette' that one is not permitted fun of any kind while fulfilling one's weekly errands? And what about addendum 12.36.1a in which one must scoff at passers by who are having fun while running said errands?

Seriously, shopping cart riding makes so much sense. After I fulfill my hunter-gatherer instinct at Costco and find myself with about a hundred grapefruits and thirty pounds of Cinnamon Toast Crunch as my spoils, I definitely look for energy efficient ways of crossing the 200 yards to the ass end of the parking that still has leftover snowpiles in April. Doesn't it seem wise to get it up to speed, jump on the back and careen over the asphalt like a champ?