Wow. Uh…I promise that won’t ever happen again. (But it probably will.) Man. …when you write up a post at like 2:00 AM in the morning and it isn’t even that significantly different than some of the crazier posts you’ve made over the years while you were dead sober…what does that say about you?

I generally never drink that much, but from now, every single time I do, I’m going to write some stuff up. Not even necessarily for this site, just anything in general, maybe even in my trusty notepad (shut up, it’s not a diary!). Because when you’re reading it over the morning after, it’s like you’ve written a drunken letter to yourself, and that is awesome. Drunken Yak knows all the same things I do, but he approaches them from a different (drunken) mindset, and it’s strangely refreshing. Plus, he is much funnier and more charming that I am, so it might be beneficial to tap into that from time to time.

And here are some links so that we can move on and never speak of this again.

– Here is an article from The New York Times titled Fearing Crime, Japanese Wear the Hiding Place. It’s fantastic – even the headline is barely English. Please take some time to go through the slide show – the shot of the kid disguised as a fire hydrant absolutely SLAYS me – I cannot seriously think about this and not laugh.

– I’m a little bit surprised to find that I haven’t posted this up already, or even really made any allusions or quoted any lines from it…but the Herlihy Boy skit has to be one of my top five most favourite SNL skits of all time. Just the escalating insanity of it all…it’s like watching a guy wipeout on his skis and just seeing him continually build speed as he rolls down the mountain, with pieces of equipment flying off his body and various body parts breaking as he goes, before his body just explodes in a shower of blood and assorted bones at the bottom. I truly believe that this was SNL (and thus television sketch comedy in general) at its best. Take any twenty of the typical life-ruining mistakes I’ve made over the last ten years, combine them, and their overall negative effect on my life would still be dwarfed by the day I first watched this skit. I think it broke my brain.

– Let’s just extend that to Chris Farley in general and blame him for warping my sense of humour. I’d gladly trade the lives of all my best friends to bring back Chris Farley, and I know they all feel the same way.

– I think this is the greatest invention of all time. Though I’m having trouble deciding whether it’s awesome because we’ve finally invented something that can uniformly spin our marshmallows at a consistent speed, or whether it’s sad because we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve needed to invent something that will do that for us. Furthermore, I just think it’s funny that for like 99.997% of the year, this thing is just going to sit in your basement or up high in some kitchen cupboard collecting dust. Seriously, you’re lucky if you’ve roasted marshmallows like three times in the last five years. Such a niche market for this thing.

– I bought some tasty white nectarines the other day which led me (through a series of loosely related logical jumps which are too trival to list out here) to start combing through Wikipedia to verify whether or not the Mackanaw peaches from that Seinfeld episode even really existed…because I wanted some. Turns out they don’t. Which is too bad, but on the other hand, through the horrible time-wasting power of Wikipedia, I discovered that you can apparently reduce the tear gas effect of onions by freezing or chilling them first. Apparently, alliinase enzymes are released when you onion cells are broken, which generates a gas called syn-propanethial-S-oxide (C₃H₆OS) which drifts up into your eyes, reacting together with your tears or your eye juice or whatever you call the water in your eyes to form sulphuric acid. The acid irritates your eyes, and that’s why onions mess you up. However, if you lower the temperature of the onion, you lower the temperature of the alliinase enzymes, which prevent them from activating or volatizing and breaking down the sulfides around them – meaning no tear gas (not actual tear gas though – the type you’ll find in a riot situation is generally some other stuff called CS that was developed in the 1950’s, also known as 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile…Wikipedia…too strong). So you chill your onions, you stop the enzymes, and you stop getting acid in your eye. Numerous studies have also shown that temperatures under 50°C don’t really affect the chemical composition of onions at all, so a frozen or chilled onion should just be as tasty or whatever as a normal onion. So now you know. And knowing is half the battle.

Yeah, slow day at work today.

– Also, if you’re in the mood for overly gratuitous amounts of insane arbitrary humour, then this bit by The Whitest Kids U Know, presenting What Really Happened To Abe Lincoln should hit the spot. I think this is still my favourite though.

Oh, and I am severely depressed. Just in case anyone needs to find me tonight – I’ll be locked inside my bathroom with a bottle of whiskey and a loaded gun. Hurray for me!

PB + J = HOOD