During this year's annual beating courtesy of the University of Florida, the Georgia Bulldogs wore black helmets and black pants. To avoid the public humiliation of losing to Florida at the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party again (only 3 wins since 1989), we've taken to disguising ourselves as Division I-AA Grambling State University. Both the football game (final score UGA 17, UF 41) and the uniforms were unwatchable.

Please, never, ever, do that again Georgia. Ever.

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The internet was "born" 40 years ago yesterday with it's first connection between nerds in California colleges. Credited with making the graphic world wide web profitable, banner ads celebrated their 15th anniversary on Tuesday. And of course tomorrow is Halloween. Keeping all of that in mind, I present to you a complete convergence:

Image and caption stolen borrowed from Bobby "Fatboy" Roberts, courtesy his article "5 Reasons It Sucks Being a Joss Whedon Fan" at Cracked.com.

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I just saw Transformers 2, and it made me like Michael Bay a little more. As I mentioned years ago, even Michael Bay thought the first movie was bad, but it sold well. Really well. So he did what any sane man would do when presented with an astronomical paycheck (reports estimate a personal income of $75 million for the original film) and a public that just couldn't get enough crappy cinema: he gave us more. Jump cuts of dogs fucking, large scrap heaps punching other large scrap heaps, and mystically-reanimating teenagers should not equal box office gold, but somehow they do. Bay gives us what we ask for, and therefore what we deserve.

It's worth noting that the movie goes so far beyond stupid, it can be used as a litmus test for judging the quality of a man by discovering whether he liked it or not. There are two types of people in this world: people who hated Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and the living dead. People who enjoy this film cherish style over substance, and their idea of style is anything that will make a rational person bleed from at least 2 of the holes in his head. A bit of advice: if you are over the age of 12 and genuinely like Transformers: ROTF(L), not just Megan Fox's tits or the distinctive sound of metal grating against metal, see a doctor before you reproduce. Your children may unwittingly suffer because of your retarded genes.

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What the world really needs is a superhero with the power to stop email spam. Think about it: his story would be a taut psychological thriller. His mere existence would interfere with the fabric of space-time, creating a natural firewall for all batch junk email advertisements worldwide. He'd be forced to wander anonymously from town to town as a drifter, a la The Fugitive, as the forces of organized spam, led by his arch-nemesis, the Nigerian Prince, aka "the Phisher of Men," hunted him in order to destroy his unique ability and return to their corrupt spamming ways. Danger at every turn! One-armed men! Meddling!

On a very related note, I've added a captcha to my contact form, as the computers had figured out how to pester me with a growing stream of dick enlargement and Russian bride ads. According to a 2008 study by the University of California, spammers get one positive response from 12.5 million mails. Another 2008 survey by Marshall (now M86 Security, a company that designs email encryptions) estimated that nearly a quarter of web users admit to having purchased something through spam email. It's clearly only a matter of getting the right spam through the right firewalls to the right person. It seems a shame that they keep sending mail to everyone on my street when only 1 neighbor ever buys anything. So let me make it clear, spammers: I am not that person. Just leave me alone. I've got other affairs to meddle in.

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CSI: Gotham City.

This process is called infrared luminescence photography and is still in use today. These days scientists rarely need to use any "newly discovered chemical" because of advancements in infrared imaging, still a relatively new and delicate process in the 1930s.

Thank you, Batman, for putting me one step closer to the perfect crime.

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On this date in history: Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon completed surveying their famous line separating the well-mannered South from their ill-bred Northern neighbors in 1767. Just think: if Pennsylvania had built a fence on their southern border, it sure would have saved the United States a lot of trouble over the years.

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Metafiction Quiz: If Robin recognizes Jerry Siegel as the creator of the comic book character Superman, and Robin shares adventures with Superman, does this mean:

1. Robin is self-aware that he is also a comic book character?
2. Superman is a real person, the offspring of Jerry Siegel?
3. Jerry Siegel is a comic book character created by someone else?

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Yes, comic books can also be textbooks! Though it may not seem so at first, Reed Richards, the so-called "Mr. Fantastic" and self-described genius, is correctly using the word "myself" in the above panel.

According to my Unabridged Second Edition-Deluxe Color Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (which surprisingly has color on only 16 of 2,305 pages), the word "myself" is defined "a form of the first person singular pronoun, used: (a) as an intensive; as I went myself; (b) as a reflexive; as I hurt myself; (c) as a quasi-noun meaning 'my real, true, or actual self'; I am not myself when I rage like that." While the Quicksilver may use the first example sentence and the Incredible Hulk the third, Mr. Fantastic is clearly interested in hurting himself, so to speak.

In Reed's sentence, "myself" is an intensive pronoun referring to the sentence subject, "person." If Reed had said "I have that qualification myself," there would be less confusion, but super geniuses just don't talk like common people. For the sake of clarification, consider the following sentence diagram (don't look at me like that; sentence diagramming is way more fun than Sudoku):

So there you have it: proof that repeating anything that Mr. Fantastic says is not only melodramatic fun, it's also grammatically correct. It really gives us all something to think about, doesn't it?

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NES Legend of Zelda + sex jokes = funny. Don't agree? Go away. You're reading the wrong blog.

If you haven't seen the Legend of Neil, go to Effing Funny and watch it. Now. I'd embed it here, but the Atom Films embed is a little squirrelly, and I'm not nuts about embedding auto-playing video. The only person who should get to yell at my blog readers is me. (And, yes, I did intentionally use the words "squirrelly" and "nuts" in that earlier sentence.)

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Three things I learned from the internet:

Lesson 1: Sea-Monkeys® support hate. Harold von Braunhut, the man who in 1957 began marketing brine shrimp -- specifically a patented hybrid involving Artemia salina, used his fortune to support the Aryan Nation. This despite the fact that von Braunhut was born an ethnic Jew. Note: other than Sea-Monkeys, von Braunhut literally holds patents for, among other things, X-Ray Cameras and an aquarium watch. ("A wearer of such a timepiece is then able to contemporaneously tell time and enjoy watching the aquatic pets." Thank you, Google Patents!)

Lesson 2: Eat dolphins and die. Further investigation into the life cycle of the brine shrimp accidentally led me to discover that the Japanese annually hunt dolphins. Many in the East consider dolphin meat to be a delicacy, and the hunting of dolphins continues despite the fact that they frequently contain more than 10 times the legal Japanese allowable tolerance of mercury. Note: Mercury poisoning is blamed for many neurological conditions, one of which may be developing a taste for dolphin meat.

Lesson 3: Mormons control the world's fish supply. Utah is among the world's foremost suppliers of brine shrimp (at one time controlling up to 90% of the market), as the Great Salt Lake is an ideal breeding ground for the little critters. (The brine shrimp is, in fact, the largest animal living in the saline lake.) Commercially, brine shrimp are used as food for birds and farmed aquatic life, biomedical experimentation, and, of course, pets. Brine shrimp fishing on the Great Salt Lake has its own lobby, the Utah Artemia Association, that relies on the tiny organism for life support like a tapeworm. Note: despite their nearly microscopic size, brine shrimp can carry and transmit real tapeworms.

If I can learn all of this, quite by accident, in 5 minutes on the internet, I believe that this clearly demonstrates that it is finally time to stop throwing away money on public education. I never learned anything as interesting or useful in my high school French classes. (What did I learn in French?
Je ne sais pas.)

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