I was reading the other day about this guy, Daniel Maston, an assistant operator at the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station. He was sentenced to four months for spiking the cafeteria’s juice cooler with tritiated heavy water from the reactor.
Apparently he said –- and I quote –- “I don’t have a good reason. […]
How many students does it take to change a light bulb?
‘That’s the janitor’s job, let him do it, he’s getting paid.’
Speaking of perpetual hard-ons, you know how they’re always saying they can’t control it?
Yeah right. They control 94% of the planet’s property, 96% of its politics, and 98% of its money.
But they just cannot control their own penises.
I saw a book the other day titled Sex Can Make You Stupid.
I laughed, but you know it’s true, isn’t it? Whenever I get really horny, I do stupid things. Really stupid things.
And then I thought, you know how men are always telling us they’ve got this perpetual hard-on? Well.
For most of us, loss is the difference between what you have at Time 1 and what you have at Time 2: yesterday, I had ten marbles; today, I have seven; so I lost a few – three, to be exact.
However, those in business define loss as the difference between what you get and […]
Saw another ad, for a food demonstrator.
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? This – is food.”
“Heard you were ill, injured, whatever –-
Can I borrow your car this weekend?”
“I’m sorry we fought last night. I’m much more vicious during the day.”
Saw an ad for a poet for a greeting card company. Even submitted a portfolio.
“You light up my life.
Like an oncoming train.”
Now that the Olympics are over, I’d like to point out that there are several sports in which we haven’t yet reached our full potential.
In water polo, as in regular polo, there should be horses involved.
In the sculls, they should narrow the lanes and let the competitors whack their opponents out of […]
It occurs to me that there are a few sports we just haven’t named very well.
Squash is not played with a squash.
There are no fences in fencing, no rugs in rugby.
And ‘the butterfly’ – have you ever seen what happens to a butterfly in water?
And you know, I don’t think the Olympic marathoners are all that impressive. You’ll notice that most of them are done in two, two-and-a-half hours.
I’ve run a marathon and I can tell you for a fact that I can keep going for another two hours. At least.
Have you noticed that the distance running events are almost always won by someone from Kenya, Ethiopia, or some other starving country?
See what you can do when all you’ve got to carry around is skin-and-bones?
Did you know they once tried a men’s synchronized swimming team?
One guy got pissed off at another guy, and then another guy got involved, next thing you know, half the team’s dead in the water.
Guess they couldn’t handle that hold-hands-and-coordinate thing.
You know how there are different weight classes in wrestling?
I think other sports should do that too.
For example, in the high jump, there should be a separate competitive class for short people.
I don’t really understand weight lifting.
People lift heavy stuff.
They don’t take it anywhere.
They don’t do anything with it.
They just pick it up — and then put it back down.
Know why it took a hundred years for there to be a women’s triple jump?
Because hopscotch isn’t really a challenge for us anymore.
Know what event I’d like to see?
Men’s double-dutch.
And she can do it with a tennis ball in her mouth.
So Usain Bolt won the hundred in 9.63 seconds.
My dog can do better than that.
And she’s only six years old.
‘Course, she’s black too.
I heard one athlete emphasize the need to stay focused and keep his objective in mind.
How hard can that be for a sprinter?
How many swimmers does it take to change a light bulb?
Don’t know yet. They keep getting electrocuted.
Olympic athletes are especially driven.
Imagine spending years trying to throw a really heavy ball a few centimetres further than the next guy.
Now there’s a candidate for the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Most athletes are driven by the desire to win.
Not to win anything in particular, anything of significance, just – to win.
We pray to this god.
But he’s omniscient – he already knows what we’re going to say.
And it’s not like we’re going to change his mind: hey, Supreme Being and Ruler of the Universe – this is what I think should happen here.
Some people believe that when we die, we’re reincarnated.
But if that were true, the human population shouldn’t be increasing.
Unless there’s been a lot of pigs and cows who’ve been promoted – actually, I think I know some of them.
A recent poll found that almost 80% of North Americans are Christian.
They say they were born that way.
President Bush kept talking about his “personal relationship with Jesus.”
Which is odd, because the last time I talked to Jesus, he said he didn’t know him.
I don’t think they should give driver’s licences to people who believe in life after death.
People give $80 million a day to God. $80 million! A day!
Just what the fuck has he been doing with all that money?
And when do you think he’ll start paying taxes for roads, schools, hospitals, and stuff?
The state motto of Ohio is “With God, all things are possible.”
Oh yeah? Is it possible for him to create a rock so heavy he can’t lift it?
They say God works in mysterious ways.
Why is that again?
And about this so-called ‘intelligent design’.
Tornadoes don’t have guidance systems, we don’t have earlids, and pain hurts.
Ever wonder why God doesn’t just once and for all provide conclusive evidence that he exists? Something simple and yet – godly.
Nothing like throwing chunks of bread at us.
What if there is a God – and heaven is only for those bright enough to recognize there’s no proof that he exists?
Or maybe he exists, but he went on holiday and got lost because, like one of his favourite sons who took the forty-year desert tour, he doesn’t know how to stop and ask for directions.
(Thanks to Julian Barnes.)
Or maybe he does exist, but he’s abandoned us. We may have been a disappointment. Or an infectious disease.
Maybe he inherited us. Or got us for Christmas. And he’s still trying to exchange us.
Most people figure either God exists or he doesn’t. There are other possibilities.
Maybe he used to exist, but he doesn’t anymore. Maybe he got run over by a truck.
The men in Sweden don’t wear ties.
I don’t know about you, but any country in which the men don’t walk around wearing little nooses gets my vote.
Then again, given that most countries are nowhere near Sweden with regard to women in government (43%), the noose thing does provide a certain – convenience.
When I was at a seaside restaurant, a waiter took three dead fish on a plate to some people at one of his tables – I guess so they could choose which one they wanted.
At first I thought “Ugh!” But then I thought, well, people choose which lobster they want from a bunch […]
You know how some men used to jingle coins in their pocket?
“Look at me! I’m rich! I have a bunch of nickels and dimes in my pocket!”
And then it became cool to carry around a lot of jangling keys.
“Look at me! I’m important! I can open lots of doors!”
Now, […]
In Italy, the street people don’t ask you for money exactly – they pray for it. Literally. They kneel on the sidewalk with their little cup in front of them and pray. Hands pressed together, eyes closed, the whole bit.
So when you give them money, you’re validating their belief in – no, wait […]
What is this obsession with taking pictures of everything?
If you want pictures of these places, why not just buy the book?
I swear some people took pictures of the postcards.
‘Course why not – the postcards always looked better than the real thing.
As a species, we are so in love with ourselves, aren’t we? Almost every painting and certainly every sculpture I saw featured human subjects.
I saw a few horses, a rabbit or two, and an antelope. But they were usually dead.
Or dying a very horrible death.
‘Course it could just be that […]
I don’t think I was in the right mood for the Louvre. I saw this one really famous painting of a shipwreck, the main figure is on the beach, dramatically draped over crates and sails, in a pose of utter exhaustion.
And all I thought was “Oh get a grip!”
I got lost a lot. Even before I got to Amsterdam, I mean.
I got lost getting from the train stations to the hotels. I got lost getting from the hotels to the museums. Then I started getting lost in the museums.
It’s true. You can spend days in the Louvre.
I noticed there were no garbage cans along the Champs D’Elysees – anywhere.
And I thought “That’s wishful thinking.” It’s nonstop tourists.
A block later I realized they’d just said “The hell with it,” given a woman a go-cart, put a vacuum cleaner on it, and made it a full-time job.
Copenhagen is made for pedestrians. It has lots of pedestrian-only spaces, the streets have these really wide sidewalks, and in Copenhagen, pedestrians always have the right of way. You can be crossing the street anywhere and the cars will stop for you.
They’ll do that in Amsterdam too. Though that could be because you’re […]
Europe doesn’t have the junk food we do. I had a heck of a time finding Doritos.
Especially in, of all places, Amsterdam.
One of the shops on the Champs D’Elysees is a travel agency for Iran Air – “The Airline of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.
I’ll bet they’re not doing much business these days.
Given the tendency of Islamic pilots to fly into buildings.
Remember Jules Verne? The guy who went around the world in 80 days?
He didn’t have to deal with airports and train stations and ferries and buses.
People in business class and first class need to feel important and special.
So they get to board planes ahead of the rest of us.
Along with the other infants and small children.
Half the world’s population is under twenty-five. The ones who aren’t undernourished are crack babies or fetal alcohol syndrome babies or AIDS babies or babies who for no good reason reached adolescence and graduated from high school but can’t spell ‘graduated’.
Makes you want to go right out and buy one of those ‘Children are […]
A site chosen for a nuclear power plant is two miles from an active fault line, and the blueprints for the reactors got mixed up, so the earthquake fault supports were installed backwards.
Oh yeah-–we’re definitely ready for that anti-matter stuff.
If you’re so proud to be American, why do you wear a Canadian flag when you travel?
Many men express surprise and puzzlement upon hearing the words “I’m pregnant.”
Apparently they have yet to connect having sex with having babies.
There have been over 2000 tests of nuclear weapons since World War II. You’d think we’d get it right after, say, the first couple hundred.
And we haven’t figured out yet what to do with the leftover stuff. We have enough radioactive waste to contaminate all of the Earth’s lakes and rivers – twice. […]
We do heroic things to save whales caught in the ice with insufficient oxygen.
Otherwise, they would never get the chance to experience a long, slow death from PCB poisoning.
I used to run a support group for people in denial.
But no one ever came.
The team of genetic researchers that successfully cloned a sheep from a single adult cell named the sheep “Dolly”, after a certain large-breasted country singer, because the cell had come from a mammary gland.
Grown men, brilliant men, men on the cutting edge of science, men who become headline news, are quite likely still […]
In the spring of 1991, Fred Turner set out from Beaufort, South Carolina, to walk across America in order to prove that most people are good.
He got as far as the state line before he was robbed and pushed off a bridge.
Another reason we’re too stupid to visit…
We make toy guns, encouraging our kids to play at killing each other.
I don’t do Christmas.
As Zoe Fairburns points out, “The birth of a male who thinks he’s god isn’t such a rare event.”
The Training Center for Subversive Warfare teaches that “Torture must be kept clean, it must not be carried out in the presence of those with sadistic tendencies, it must be carried out by some responsible person, and above all, it must be humane.”
Otherwise, it would be, what, wrong?
The economic system used for decision-making by the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and national governments considers only cash-generating activities to be productive.
So Tendai, who lives in Zimbabwe and spends eighteen hours a day providing food, clothing, and shelter for herself and her children, is unproductive.
But […]
Lieutenant General Daniel Graham once said ‘If a one megaton bomb was about to explode over this building and you had the good sense to start walking and get behind a lilac bush, that bomb would not hurt you.’
He was later chosen to be the Senior Military Advisor to the President.
Women, as a matter of routine, redden their lips, ornament their ears, push up their breasts, display their legs, and arch their feet.
Then they get pissed off if you see them as sex objects.
And they get really pissed off if you then tell they’re being irrational.
North Americans spend five billion dollars each year on special diets.
When it would be far cheaper to just move to Africa.
When AIDS became an epidemic, a certain company recalled the condoms not up to their new standards, claiming ‘a certain social responsibility’.
Apparently they were unaware that people had been using their condoms not only to prevent the transmission of disease, but also to prevent the transmission of sperm.
Being male is very much about being in control.
One has to wonder, therefore, why they hang their entire ‘manhood’ on some one thing over which they biologically have no voluntary control whatsoever.
(And they say they’re the logical ones.)
In Saudi Arabia, a woman must be accompanied by a man whenever she appears in public; otherwise, she is subject to torture.
Otherwise?
In our species, sexual desire seems to induce a state of temporary idiocy. Which is why it is not particularly encouraging that the male half of the species actually brags about being in a constant state of sexual readiness.
The U.S. continues to puzzle over the persistence of racism.
It also continues to call the official residence of the President “The White House.”
Some of our best and brightest philosophers have spent years trying to convince us that time doesn’t exist.
A sign on a community bulletin board saying “Learn to read English–Classes held Monday nights!” was posted by the Board of Education.
The Annual Turing Test Competition is an event in which a panel of experts asks questions from a remote location of a bunch of computers and a bunch of people. If they can’t tell that a computer is a computer, it passes the Turing Test – it is deemed able to think.
In a recent […]
A worker, no doubt somebody’s kid, accidentally dropped a socket wrench down a silo – it hit a missile causing an explosion that launched a nine megaton hydrogen bomb into a field several hundred yards away. Oops.
Because of naval mishaps, there are now nine nuclear reactors and fifty nuclear warheads on the ocean floor. […]
Many of us are too unimaginative–or too lazy–or both–to make our lives worthwhile. So we have kids. That’s our contribution to society. Genetic replications of our deficiency.
This inability to find fulfillment in the here and now is shared by those who set their sights instead on some heaven. No surprise, they’re the ones with […]
In a recent experiment involving monkeys, 13% pulled a chain electroshocking an unrelated monkey whose agony was in plain view. In a similar experiment conducted with humans, 65% administered the shock, to the point of fatality.
Much to do was subsequently made about the ethics – of the experimenters.
We came up with the concept of ‘garbage’: stuff we don’t want here – so we put it there. All gone!
A while ago, McMaster University initiated a research project to study the health effects of war.
Perhaps some genius hypothesized that it causes death.
Two bombs in a building were set to go off an hour apart, and the Mayor of the City said, “The second bomb was clearly designed to hurt the rescue workers coming to assist, so we’re dealing with a warped mind here.”
Um, wouldn’t the first bomb kind of establish that?
It costs more than $115,000 to create a job in crude oil production. It costs only $20,000 to create a job in solar energy production. We have an unemployment problem. We have an energy problem.
And we have a math problem.
Over half of our planet’s scientists and engineers work for the military.
The other half work for Pizza Pizza. <br/><br/>
Men pride themselves on being objective, they champion the impersonal.
And yet they’ll do anything to win. To be, personally, number one.
Most men generally don’t think much of most women.
And yet, they continue to oppose their joining the military, where they could easily get killed.
We distinguish males from females. Before we do anything else. And before we do everything else. For example, ‘Mr. Smith’ really means ‘Penis-Person Smith’. The use of such sex-identifying prefixes is considered polite.
The use of ‘Penis-Person’ – or ‘Dickhead’ – is not. Apparently.
We’re still trying to get our whites whiter.
We sentenced Socrates to death and let a number of serial killers live.
We put tons of carcinogens into our food, water, and air.
And then spend millions of dollars looking for the cure for cancer.
Oh where oh where could it be.
If the history of the Earth were a year, life would not appear until March, multi-cellular organisms not until November. Dinosaurs would show up on December 13, and mammals on December 15. On December 31, we’d show up. By late evening, we’d have well-developed brains.
And then it’d take us 60 seconds to thoroughly trash […]
Most of us still think there’s a god.
Well, okay, maybe that’s not really a problem.
We still think it’s an all-wise and all-good god.
Are there intelligent life forms out there in the universe?
Well yeah. No one’s visited us yet.
Have you noticed that more and more athletes are saying a quick prayer at the starting line?
A clear admission that you can’t possibly win without divine intervention, yeah, that’ll really psych out your opponents.
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A contraceptive pill designed for men was rejected because of the negative side-effect of reducing their sex drive.
Given the reason for taking the pill, wouldn’t that have been a positive side-effect?
