Archive for April, 2008

Zero is the substitute teacher of the numbers world.

April 30, 2008 at 2:53 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , ,

I’m going to blow your mind here. Did you ever stop to realize that numbers are invented?

It just seems like they’ve always been here. It seems like a lot of things have always been here, but they weren’t, always. Sure, we all know that things like phones and Cadbury Creme Eggs weren’t always around and that modern society is heads and shoulders above the Aztecs because we have these things.

That’s right — I just totally called out the Aztecs and I’m not afraid to highlight it. All you ever hear — assuming that you hang around with this kind of crowd– is how great the Aztecs were, but when you get right down to it, why? They couldn’t even beat Cortes. And Cortes was a failed lawyer and failed philanderer who stumbled into conquest who had only about 400 guys and 16 horses. So the Aztecs lost their land to a guy who couldn’t even pass the bar. It’s no wonder they didn’t invent the Cadbury Creme Egg.

It’s easy for us to imagine life without Cadbury Creme Eggs and cell phones. Horrifying, but easy. Our imaginations are equipped to encompass a world in which we couldn’t carry a phone with us and candy wasn’t shaped like things. But stretch a little further, and it becomes a lot more difficult. Picture a world without calendars. That maybe sounds great until you realize that most guys would have even less of a clue when their anniversary was coming up, you’d keep losing track of the 4th of July, and that one guy in the office would keep claiming that it’s his birthday roughly every three weeks, so you’d have to keep buying him lunch all the time. But until the Pope took things in hand and invented the modern calendar (I understand that the first one, in addition to having “blank days” and “filler months” also had “The Girls of Vatican City” on it) that’s exactly what life was like, if you substitute “4th of July” with “day of virgin sacrifice” and replace “guy in the office” with “indentured servant on the fief.”

It’s a lot harder to picture a world without Arbor Day and pages that flip up to show a new cute kitten every month accompanied by a cute, inspirational saying to get you through the tough times of May, is all I’m saying.

Now, try even harder: Picture a world without zero.

I know what your first thought was because it’s the same as mine: if there’s no zero, then that means that my bank account balance would have to show that I have something. That’s the dream, sure, but move beyond that a little. Imagine what life would be like, your own life, without zero hanging around. I’ll help.

Zero’s most common function is a place holder. If you have 101 Dalmatians, say, then zero serves to let everyone know that you have 1 more Dalmatian than a hundred – -holding the tens place open. No zero = 11 Dalmatians. Big difference, especially if you’re cleaning up. So no zero = need a much more cumbersome way of writing that out, so instead of writing “101 Dalmatians” you have to write “one hundred one Dalmatians.” And try adding one hundred one to some other number. (I hope I don’t get sued by Disney, so in the interest of not getting sued, let me say: I’m talking about a totally different set of Dalmatians and any resemblance to any other 101 Dalmatians is purely coincidental, the way that “Law & Order” episodes are deemed “purely coincidental” even though they don’t even really bother to change ANY of the details anymore.”)

Seems impossible, doesn’t it? But for over 1000 years, people didn’t use zero at all — they had no place holder, so nobody could have more than 99 of anything and if they had 10 of something, by law they were decreed to only have 1 of something and had to give 9 away. Probably. I’m a little hazy on what happened, but you get the point: they had no zero and so things were screwed up, so screwed up that people like Cortes could conquer them with only 400 soldiers — something that was likely helped along because the Aztecs didn’t know about zero and so they didn’t know if Cortes had 4 soldiers or 400 or 4 billion.

Zero doesn’t have just mathematical qualities, though — it also has spiritual significance. One Indian mathematician says that zero as a spiritual concept goes back 17,000 years. The reason zero could have a spiritual component is because of what happens when you use zero in regular math — and what happens is astounding.

Zero reverses all logic and turns the world inside out. Here’s some basics: A negative number subtracted from zero results in a positive number. So 0- -4 = 4. A positive number subtracted from zero results in a negative number — so 0-5 = -5.

Zero divided by anything is zero, which makes sense but is the only time zero makes sense. If I have zero Cadbury Creme Eggs and divide them among my five friends and that guy at the office whose birthday it is, we all get… zero.

But divide something by zero and all heck breaks loose. To try to find an easy way to explain it, I Googled “what happens when you divide by zero.” I was hesitant to do that in case just asking the question caused the universe to fold in on itself, but in the interest of “science” I forged ahead, the same way the Manhattan Project guys decided to test the A-Bomb even though they had a suspicion that doing so would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere, burn the entire planet to a piece of charcoal and end all life. Did that absolutely true story about their fears that their experiment would destroy the world stop them from going through with the experiment? No. Real “science” is willing to break a few eggs to get results — or, in some cases, incinerate a few planets to get results, and my readers can expect no less of me. So I went ahead and heedless of the risk to myself or the planet, googled that phrase.

Life didn’t end, so far as I can tell. Or if it did, the afterlife for some reason still requires me to work and that sucks. But I did get “The Math Forum,” which thought that dividing by zero was so dangerous that it warned people not to do so, in big block letters. Here’s an actual quote:

The only way we can interpret 1/0 (or any nonzero real number over zero) is as positive or negative infinity. In general though, listen to the oft-heard words of advice: DON’T DIVIDE BY ZERO, but with the following addendum: if you do, make sure you’re prepared to deal with what happens.

Chillingly, the mathematicians don’t say what might happen — just that we need to be prepared for it. And apparently anything can happen, because that same site goes on to explain that zero divided by zero equals zero, but it also equals two, and it equals one and if zero divided by zero equals one, then one equals every other number.

So that little website, designed to help people with math, has almost-singlehandedly brought down our whole number system and now you’ll never know how many Cadbury Creme Eggs you have. I say “almost-singlehandedly” because they couldn’t have done it without zero.

Zero acts so weird because zero has to interact with numbers but zero isn’t really a number as we think of them. Zero is a “number” the way a wife a company Christmas party is a “guest” at the party — she looks like everyone else, and knows a lot of the people, and can be holding a plate of hors d’ouevres but she won’t get all the inside jokes and will laugh at the wrong times and look blank when people talk about the Penske file.

That, by the way, may be why the Pope, when he invented time and put it on a calendar, did not have a “year zero,” which is why all those nerds you know kept telling you in whiny voices the year 2000 is not the millenium because there was no year zero, which is why you did not invite them to your Millenium Party, which is why they now look all hurt when they run into you at the bars, which is why you don’t go to those bars anymore, which is why you spend a lot more time home on Friday nights, which is why you can watch the new Battlestar Galactica, so if it wasn’t for the Pope and Zero, you’d be missing out on that.
I’m not sure what the point of that paragraph was other than to mention Battlestar Galactica.
Zero is a “number” because it’s part of the set of numbers and does number jobs, but it’s not really a number because it can’t be used like other numbers — you can’t (as noted) divide by zero and zero is not any thing, it’s quite literally nothing. Zero indicates the absence of anything else (so I know, from my bank account). (The fact that zero is an absence of things shows you how misguided people are when they compare zero to infinity — zero is the exact opposite of infinity; zero is nothing else; infinity is everything all at once.) Zero is the substitute teacher of the number world.

Zero poses such a problem, in fact, that it has caused some people to think up even more things that aren’t numbers and don’t really exist. One “scientist”, according to the BBC, claimed to have come up with a way to divide by zero. His way involved inventing a new kind-of number, “nullity,” a number that would sit outside the ‘regular’ number line and that would be the result of dividing by zero, as I understand it. You have to wonder how seriously to take the inventor of “nullity,” (whose name is “Dr.” James Anderson), though, because his idea of debate is to say that if people doubt him he’ll hit them over the head with a computer. If the people who invented velociraptors had that kind of moxie, we might all believe in those, too.

Zero certainly has captured the public’s imagination, though– from “zero tolerance” to “Coke Zero” to Japanese Zeroes to Ground Zero to the Smashing Pumpkins, zero may be a latecomer on the scene but it’s here to stay. I have no quarrel with that. Reality can use a little inversion now and then. So here’s to zero, the best thing that you think is a number but is not.

Reference note: Unlike most of the stuff I write on here, and unlike most of the stuff I tell my kids, report to my boss, or claim in court, my thoughts on zero are backed by some actual reading and thinking — mostly from the book Zero, The Biography of A Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife. You should read and buy that book, which you can do by clicking the title. I also refreshed my memory by going to this History Topics website. And The Straight Dope helped out.

No metaphysical concepts were harmed in making this blog.

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

Click through to look on the back! It’s clever!

This article appeared on The Best Of Everything: Our Opinions Are Righter Than Yours. Over 100 things are already The Best– read them all and submit your own today.

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What happened at 3 a.m.?

April 29, 2008 at 4:24 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , ,

This is part Four of the story “The Deal,” which is being serialized on AfterDark — your home for great horror stories.

Nothing is much more lonely than 3 a.m.

Lily woke at 3 a.m. that night. Jim was sleeping next to her. She heard him breathing, but did not feel anything. He was probably motionless a few feet away in the dark. She laid there, awake, but eyes closed.

She never opened her eyes anymore when she woke up in the night. Not since that night a few weeks ago.

The day after that night had been almost as strange as that night. She’d woken up. She and Jim had not talked that much in the morning, but they didn’t usually talk that much. But this morning it seemed like there was more to it. Usually they didn’t talk because they were drinking coffee, reading the paper, thinking about the day ahead.

That day they didn’t talk because they couldn’t think what to say about it.

She’d seen Jim off to the door. He walked out to the detached garage, pulling the door up. Up and down the street she saw a few other wives standing in the doorways, watching husbands leave. There were wives and husbands leaving together, or walking out together to go to work separately.

And nobody was talking.

And nobody was waving.

And nobody was kissing anyone else goodbye.

And nobody was meeting anyone’s eye.

And nobody looked up at the sky much, or around much, or at anything much.

Lily had never experienced anything like that. Jim backed the car out and did not look at her. He did not look at anything. She did not hear, for a change, the news-talk radio on the car. He did not wave at her. She did not wave at him.

All because she’d opened her eyes at 3:00 a.m. the night before. Jim must have, too. They all must have. Everyone must have seen the same thing because everyone was acting the same way.

That day, Jake had run by her after Jim pulled out.

“Bye, Mom,” he’d yelled that day, and headed off towards the bus stop. For Jake, the day had been sunny, and still warm enough that she’d seen him take his coat off even before he usually thought she was out of sight. For Jake that day had obviously been full of light and warmth and laughter. He’d come home with grass stains and messy hair and there were leaves inside his socks.

For her, that day had ended at 3:00 a.m. It had started and ended at 3:00 a.m. and it felt like her life had stayed at 3 a.m. since then.

Now she lay in her bed and felt 3 a.m. weigh on her like a body holding her down. She would not open her eyes. The last time she’d opened her eyes in the middle of the night…

She couldn’t think about it.

And she couldn’t open her eyes.

Down the hall she heard Jake scream.

And she couldn’t open her eyes.

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A Belated Happy Birthday To The Boy

April 28, 2008 at 3:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

I’m just a little bit late on this, but I have to salute The Boy because it was his birthday on Friday; he turned 16. And since I on occasion will make fun of the kids on here, then I also feel compelled to at least one time per year recognize them for being the good kids they are.

For The Boy, though, recognizing him on-time was made more difficult by several factors — first, my Real Job intruded a lot last week, and without the Real Job, there’s no “Thinking The Lions” first because my office at my Real Job is where I do most of this and second because if I don’t have the Real Job then Sweetie will make me do housework.

The Boy’s actual birthday was last Friday, and I could have posted something honoring him that day, since I took the day off after my busy week, but I was too busy on Friday blow-drying our carpet and picking up Greek food, both of which are time-consuming but only one of which was The Boy’s fault. I know what you’re guessing, but, no, The Boy was responsible for the Greek food, since he wanted gyros for his birthday. He didn’t want to go to the restaurant because going to a restaurant means taking the Babies! to the restaurant with us, and because saying “taking the Babies! to the restaurant with us” is synonymous with “taking two very loud perpetual motion machines to the restaurant with us” or, to be more accurate, it’s synonymous with “taking two very loud perpetual motion machines that apparently were designed to rub Ramen noodles in their hair and then throw their milk cups at the computer to the restaurant with us.” So I had to go pick up the gyros. (I took the Babies! anyway.)(Ramen noodle-hair and all.)

But I didn’t leave until after I tried to blow dry our playroom floor. There are, it turns out, lots of hidden secrets to owning a house, and I will let you in on one of them: If you have a back door that is recessed into the ground so that if you go out it you have to climb up stairs, and if you never ever use that back door because it’s in the playroom and you really don’t go outside all that much anyway because “outside” is filled with hickory nut shells from the hickory trees in your yard and it’s also filled with bugs, and if because you don’t really use that back door you tend to ignore the leaves that accumulate in the stairwell until they are waist high, and if because of that you forget that there was a drain in that stairwell, a drain that is now covered by years of old decomposing leaves that are now waist high, and if you also live in a location that occasionally gets rain, if all of that is true, then here is my tip for you: you can’t really blow dry a carpet with a hair-styling blow-dryer left at your house by Oldest when she moved out.

Here’s another tip: Babies! will happily play on a soaking wet carpet, getting their socks and pants wet, for hours, so if you find yourself suddenly, inexplicably, changing diapers a lot on your day off, and also changing pants and socks and wondering just what the heck is going on with the Babies! and their peeing, maybe go check the playroom.

So that took most of the day Friday, and I couldn’t post anything about how great The Boy is to make up for all the times I post things about how he’s basically an optimist who uses phrases like “the Stalin of snacks.” Plus, it was hard to think up good things to say after watching The Boy eat about15 pounds of lamb on his gyro. He ordered so much extra meat that you couldn’t really call it a gyro anymore. It was more like a pita being overrun by lamb strips — like if the pita was the Spartans in 300 and the lamb strips were the guys who weren’t Spartans in 300.

Saturday, I was going to post something about what a great guy The Boy is and how he helps out and pitches in and really takes surprisingly good care of the Babies! when we have him babysit. I didn’t get to it, though, because I had to go get plants for the yard, since I announced to Sweetie that it was time we started doing the yard right, and that meant going to a greenhouse to get actual plants that were designed to be in an actual yard, and by the time we got home from that I was exhausted because we took the Babies! with us there but left The Boy home since he was watching the NFL Draft and didn’t want to move off of Frankencouch.

That left Sunday, when I had fully intended to post something nice about The Boy but I couldn’t because The Boy had to use our home computer (which we call ” ‘Puter”) to do his homework, homework he started at 11 a.m. and continued working on with only one break (at 12:10 to eat lunch, which was tortillas and mayonnaise and lunchmeat) until 4:30 p.m., nonstop, and I had to hang around and help him with that because he was working on a research paper; my role was to edit each draft and help him interpret my editing comments and also to calm him down when I suggest, in draft three, that he move paragraphs back to the spot he’d had them in draft one, only I’d suggested that he move them for draft two and then changed my mind because I thought they were better where they were in the first place. (“That’s called editing,” I explained, unhelpfully). By 4:30 when he was done ‘Puting, I couldn’t go on there and post anything nice about him because I was tired from editing, and also because I was really close to the end of The Golden Compass, which I’d been reading in between editing, and also because I had to start cooking spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.

So now it’s today, and I’m really late posting this entry to say nice stuff about The Boy, but you can see that I really had no choice but to delay things even though that means The Boy gets an after-birthday salute instead of an on-birthday salute.

And he did deserve an on-birthday salute, because The Boy really has a great many good qualities. He’s funny, funny in a way that makes it seem very natural. He works hard at whatever he sets his mind to do — he recently started working out to build up muscle for varsity football and puts a lot of effort into it, effort that requires a large amount of lamb meat but effort nonetheless.

And although he will probably hate that I mention it, The Boy is a softie. He wants to come across all gruff and tough, but he’s not. He’s nice to his sisters — he recently took a break from watching sports just to talk on the phone to Oldest, who had called to talk to her mom or her sister but found neither of them available. When she asked to talk to The Boy, he went ahead and did it. He plays with the Babies! — actually gets down and plays with them and talks to them and interacts with them and (we’ve seen it) kisses them. And he’s moved by tears; The Boy is still affected by the time Sweetie was pregnant and overwhelmed by having 36-week-old Babies! inside her and broke down crying about laundry not being done.

You may have to dig a little to get past the layers of NCAA-Tournament-Watching and Playstation 3-Playing and Teenage-Boy-Hanging-Out-With-Friends-Looking-Guilty and all that other stuff that lies on The Boy’s surface, but scratch past that and you find a great kid who’s not only fun to hang out with but will make you proud to know him, and prouder to know him the longer you know him. So please, in your comments, with The Boy a happy belated birthday.

I’ll pass them to him just as soon as I finish blow-drying the basement.

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I have invented a new emotion to go along with The Best Emotion That’s So Lame It’s Cool.

April 26, 2008 at 5:19 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

Okay, I started this early, and I’m ending it early. I’m not ending it because I can’t keep it up, but I’m bored with it. By now, you get the point: Things can be so lame they’re cool, because The Coolness Continuum dictates that.

And those “things” can include things that aren’t things at all, like “emotions.” Emotions are not things. They’re… something that’s not a thing. And the lamest of all emotions is “love.”

Love is, as an emotion, hopelessly lame. There are cool emotions, emotions that are just perfect the way they are. Like “happiness.” Nothing wrong with “happiness.” Happiness is awesome. Happiness makes you laugh along with the thing Joel McHale says. Happiness lets you walk with a bounce in your step. Happiness helps you get out of bed in the morning.

Another cool emotion? Righteous indignation. This one is underused, but is very cool. It’s not just being indignant, but righteously so — so smack, there, in the description, you’ve got permission to feel indignant because your indignance is righteous.

How do I know, by the way, that “righteous indignation” is underused as an emotion? Because there’s no emoticon for it. Emotions that don’t have emoticons are underused. But I will remedy that because I will create an emoticon for “righteous indignation.” And here it is:

: ( )

That shows the befuddled, astonished feeling that we get when someone does something to cause our righteous indignation — say, when you have two people who pull into an aisle in a parking lot and it’s one of those parking lots where the spots are not slanted, so you can really enter from any direction, but one of them (let’s say me, just for kicks) is going the opposite of the conventional, accepted way, and the other one (let’s just say it’s another driver) is going the way most people go through this parking lot, and both of them know that’s what’s going on, and a guy is pulling out of a spot, and this lot is very crowded, and the one driver who is going the wrong way (hypothetically, me) lucks out because the backing-out-guy angles his car to cut off the other car (hypothetically, the other guy), and the backing-out-guy might have done that just because the first driver (remember, we’re pretending it’s me and this is not based on any actual incident in any actual Best Buy parking lots on any actual recent weekends) pulled his car a little close and made the backing-out-guy pull the other way, so then the first driver swoops in and takes the spot in defiance of everything that’s good and decent in our community, and that first driver justifies his behavior by, in his mind noting that he’s got twin Babies! with him, which he thinks if the other driver saw the other driver would understand why everything just happened that way.

Let’s say that happened. The other driver, hypothetically speaking, could feel a righteous indignation over his loss of the parking spot, and could send a furious text message with the righteous indignation emoticon:

: ( )

And that would be a great way to handle it. Much better than hypothetically flipping off the hypothetical me.

Back to love, which is totally lame. Totally completely lame. Look at Valentine’s Day, if you want to know how lame love is. Lace. Pink. Hearts. Poems that don’t rhyme, or, worse, poems that do rhyme but still suck. Love inspires the lamest part of humanity to rise up. To rise up, look around, and declare things in overblown hyperbole, usually with glitter and roses thrown in. We fall in love and we start acting as lamely as humanly possible, so lamely that we really should be forced to live underground for years until the shame blows over.

We write poems or songs or, if we’re not creative ourselves, we make mix tapes. Or used to. Nowadays, I expect kids just IM a playlist to the person they’re “hooking up” with. But in the olden days — 2004 — we expressed our love creatively and very very lamely. Like this:

Note: I know that was not made in 2004. That’s just an example of how people used to display “love” in days of yore.

I was no better than Barry Manilow — and no worse. I play piano and guitar and have done things like played “True Companion” for Sweetie on the acoustic guitar. I also made her a mix tape of songs that expressed how I feel about her and included “True Companion” and also, for some reason, included “Bell” by Mike Oldfield. (No, I can’t explain that to this day.) I made a card for her with photos of us together and inspiring quotes about love from famous philosophers like Jennifer Aniston.

Love brings out the 13-year-old girl in all of us. Love makes people in their teens draw hearts on their binders and in their 20s write their own atrocious wedding vows and in their 30s pick out cards with snippets of songs in them and in their 40s renew their atrocious wedding vows and by the time they’re in their 50s, they know better and stop that stuff. Love makes us pretend to like “The Hills” or makes our Sweeties hypothetically try a shot of tequila at a Hard Rock Cafe in Puerto Vallarta even though those Sweeties don’t really drink all that much and certainly don’t want to drink tequila. Love makes us do dumb things like that.

So love is lame. And it’s indescribably cool at the same time. A while back, I mentioned that “love” is treated differently from all other emotions in that only with “love” do we say stuff like I think I’m in love rather than just I’m in love.

Why do we say that? Because we elevate love to a pedestal, as something different from all other emotions. We put Love way way up there above all the other emotions — Love rules over all the anger and sadness and confusion and contendedness and Galatication (an emotion I made up specifically to describe how it feels to be watching Battlestar Galactica keep getting awesomer and awesomer while also in the back of your head knowing that it’s going to end, and wanting it not to end but also wanting it to not eventually stop being awesome and suck because it went on too long). Love is something better, something lamer but also way better.

Love is better because it makes us do all that silly stuff. Nobody ever wrote a poem because they got mad over a parking spot. No one in the history of the world has sent someone flowers simply because they were feeling confused. We don’t have a whole holiday to celebrate optimism. A box of candy does not convey respect.

Love is also better because it’s more complicated. Anger is anger. Get mad at your boss because he insists, periodically, that you stop blogging and do what he pays you for, and that anger will be identical to the anger you feel when you realize that The Boy has beaten you to that last piece of leftover pizza. Different in degree, maybe, but the same feeling.

Love’s not the same. Love differs. The love you feel when you go into your Babies! room at night to check on them and they’re sleeping all splayed out like little starfish and you can’t help yourself from reaching in and patting them on the head because you just want to touch them one more time that night, that love is completely different from the love you feel when you turn around to look down the aisle at the woman who in a few minutes will stop being your girlfriend and start being your wife. The first love is soft and cuddly and breathing quietly. The second love takes your breath away with its beauty and makes you tear up even years and years later when you write about it on your blog. Love is complicated that way. And cool that way.

And love endures. All other emotions fade away. Eventually, you’ll forgive The Boy. Eventually you’ll forget about the parking spot. But love is in it for the long haul. Love can overcome any number of socks left on the floor. Love rolls over little bickering arguments and flattens them into a mere bump in the road. Love ignores all of those things in the long run and makes you promise a trip to Paris. Love makes it easy to stop for milk on the way home and while you’re there grab a couple of muffins because you know she likes those kind of muffins and they’re there. Love would make you throw yourself in front of a train for that other person, and if you’ll do that for them then love makes it really easy to let them watch their TV show.

Finally, Love is cool because it is the only emotion that operates while you sleep. If you’ve ever woken up to realize that in the middle of the night you rolled over and hugged the person next to you, then you know what I’m talking about.

That wraps up Lame/Cool Month; Monday, TBOE will be back to business as usual. But to recap, we covered all these topics: Nonfiction books about lame/cool topics., music that was brought back by the two greatest forces for social change in the world, e movies your kids make you watch but which turn out to be pretty good because of the songs in them , TV shows you wouldn’t guess are so cool, guys who should be on TV more, superheroes who can’t be gotten rid of, food that defies Newton’s laws, this guy, places you can take the whole family and they’ll actually have fun, and my ideal pet, this other guy, a song you can’t live without hearing.

And The Banjo.

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Back Soon

April 20, 2008 at 5:37 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Hi! Sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but real life (you know, that thing that keeps you from getting on the Internet) is taking over this week; I’ll be too busy to post anything until Friday or Saturday — April 25 or 26– at the earliest.

But in the meantime, why not browse around some of the older stuff? You could check out the hilarious stories on Thinking The Lions — where you can meet the newest member of the family, “Frankencouch.”

There’s always more to read here on The Best of Everything — I bet I’ve got over 200 posts, and many of them don’t even mention Dennis DeYoung.

Or find out what is or is not a sport, as well as why you should know Owen Meany and my plans for one of my twin sons to grow up to be a lady golfer, over on Nonsportsmanlike Conduct.

You can see those twin sons, and a lot of other Babies! and Pets! on Babies! Babies! Pets! Pets!; take this week to send in your own photos for that site — Mark!– and maybe you’ll win the coveted year-end t-shirt. (People who submit something to The Best of Everything have that same chance, so tell me what you think is The Best!)

Finally, if you’re in the mood for a scare, check out the stories on AfterDark — stories like You Know What Happens After Dark, in which Freddy is a little too near her friend when her friend dies, and so (sadly) finds out why we close the dead’s eyes.

And, as if that wasn’t enough (I know, it’s not) you can take this week to get into, and get caught up on Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!. Rachel woke up one day to realize that she didn’t know who she was or where she was or what she was supposed to be doing. With the help of a Valkyrie, a talking dog, Brigitte, and her octopus, she’ll hopefully be able to figure it out.

See you in a week!

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Count Your Blessings (An Installment From “Lesbian Zombies, etc. etc.”

April 19, 2008 at 2:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,



It was on us with a heart-rending roar. The waterspout suddenly leaned over and dove at us, I swear it dove at us, and Ivanka and the horse reared back. I saw the waterspout’s mouth open up and there were waterspout teeth that looked both solid and liquid, I guess the ordinary rules of things don’t matter in Hell, and they came at us. As the horse reared back and tried to avoid it, it almost flew straight up in the air and I slipped off.

I was holding onto Ivanka’s waist, luckily, and had my arms wrapped pretty tightly around her. So the horse was going straight up and Ivanka was riding it like a pro and I was hanving from her as it flew up and the waterspout came at us and swallowed us.

It was engulfing and terrifying. The teeth clamped around us and I clung to Ivanka as we were instantly soaked. I could feel small things pelting me and the water was both icy cold and boiling hot and it burned my skin something fierce. A big thing slammed into me as I closed my eyes and I saw just a glimpse of a tortured soul being flung past us and it was shrieking. You think when you’re alive that you’ve heard shrieking but you haven’t heard shrieking until you get to Hell.

When the soul slammed into me it jarred one arm a little and I felt my hands slipping. I tried to interlace my fingers but it wasn’t working.

“Ivanka!” I screamed but even I couldn’t hear my own voice. The water was howling around us and we were immersed in it. I could feel the horse straining. Another body slammed into me and my hands broke free and Ivanka turned her head to look.

I fell from the horse and from Ivanka. I fell and fell and fell and the waterspout was swirling me around just like any other damned soul…

… was I a damned soul?…

Ivanka and the horse tried to turn around. They were going to their left; I had been torn off to their right. Souls and debris and water were pummeling me now and I was getting bruised and broken. One poor person grabbed at me, got a hand on my neck and I started choking and they pulled me down. I looked over my shoulder and saw a man, his face half melted off. He scrabbled at me and he tore my hair out by the roots. I felt the water stinging it. I was screaming and didn’t see Ivanka anymore but I was still falling and getting sucked down closer to the ocean’ surface.

I saw the face of the waterspout appear; it had rotated around and was inside the spout now and was leering at me and it opened wide and the mouth reached out for me. One of the teeth was right above my face and was about to bite in and I couldn’t breath because the dead guy was still holding onto my neck when suddenly a sword lashed out and cut off the tooth at the root.

Ivanka and the horse had worked their way around, going upstream, and the horse had broken out of the walls of the waterspout and was in the middle where there was only a bloody sort of misty haze. They floated there and Ivanka whirled her sword around and the water was about to carry me past but she leaned way over and with her left hand grabbed my foot and pulled me into the middle of the waterspout, too.

The face roared and the horse started up, Ivanka still carrying me by my foot. The dead guy clung to my throat and I gasped for air and saw the blood drip from my scalp onto his face as the horse climbed and climbed and climbed and finally we were at the top.

We broke free.

We broke free and got out into open air, as open as air can be in Hell. The waterspout kept stretching and reaching for us. The voices in the waterspout, the souls, were crying out. I saw them whirling by and reaching out arms for us. The dead man clung to me grimly, moaning. I couldn’t get him off of me.

We kept flying higher and higher, putting distance between us and the waterspout. I wished we’d done that in the first place.

I wished, too, that I could get the dead guy to let go of me.

I wished, three, that Ivanka would pull me up instead of dangling me by a foot.

I tried to count my blessings, though.

Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!: Read it from the beginning.

Is Pigeon Racing A Sport?. You’d be surprised.

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The Best of Lame/Cool: The Best Comic Strip That Is So Lame It’s Cool

April 18, 2008 at 4:24 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

I’m kind of cheating again here, because I’ve already picked one Comic Strip in a Best Category. But that was over two years ago, and also was only a one-panel comic, and also was long before I started Lame/Cool month, and it was long before I discovered “Buttersafe.”
There are, as I’ve found out, a zillion webcomics out there. The Internet, so kind to aspiring writers like me, is also kind to aspiring cartoonists and has thrown open the door to those whose sense of humor is, simply put, awesome, but whose sense of humor, at the same time, is the kind of thing people would not expect to see in their morning papers. There is, I estimate, zero chance that “Buttersafe” will ever appear in a newspaper, and not just because its strips are unusually formatted and long, but also because its strips feature Skeleton Harvesters:
I stumbled onto Buttersafe, and immediately was drawn to it the way I’m drawn to other lame things — and I immediately noted it as lame, because it’s drawn weird and has a flat, strange sense of humor and features characters like “Saddest Turtle” and “Arbitrary Potato.”

But, as with all the Lame/Cool things this month, Buttersafe makes that pirouette around The Coolness Continuum by simultaneously not caring how lame it is — a hallmark of things that are cool — and by at the same time being incredibly creative and cool by never ceasing to surprise you. I can’t think of a single “Buttersafe” strip that ended the way I thought they would.
The strips, in fact, don’t begin or continue or end the way you think they will; they take these random left turns continuously, yanking you around until you’re somewhat dazed and lost and then, suddenly, it all blooms into perspective and is funny… but funny in a weird and haunting way that sticks with you and makes you email it to your wife, who will read one of them and then wonder why she married you and then probably not read any more of the comic strips you email her, even though she’ll tell you she did.

Here’s an example that encapsulates “Buttersafe”’s lame/coolness: in one comic strip, the artist manages to turn an offering of watermelon into a parody of an action movie with a catch phrase and everything, and then manages to parody that by having it all — well, I won’t spoil it for you. Just click here to read it, then come back.
See what I mean? The art is not great, but it works. The humor is strange and meandering, but it works, too. The comic has no continuity, except that characters sometimes come back and the characters all seem to think that we recognize them, and that works, too.

I do have one complaint about “Buttersafe,” though, and that is that “Buttersafe” has now given me entirely new nightmares. I have a secret, lingering, ongoing fear of spiders. The primary fear is that while I sleep, a spider will be walking along the ceiling and will be right above my mouth and will drop into my mouth while I sleep. But the spider-fear encompasses many other fears, from secretly worrying that I’ll have a beehive hairdo and they’ll move into it to wondering if every spider I meet is a Brown Recluse Spider which is waiting to kill me by making my skin rot off to even more exotic fears.
I’m not a wuss about it or anything — I kill spiders. I hunt them down with a ferocity you can’t imagine, something I have to do because if I see a spider and it gets away, I won’t sleep that night. But I still don’t like them. Just thinking about them makes my skin crawl.
So you can imagine how I felt when I saw this:

And now I have to worry about that, too.
Despite that, I’ll give the nomination for Best Comic Strip That’s So Lame It’s Cool To Buttersafe, and here’s why: Buttersafe has a character named “Arbitrary Potato.” I wish to God I had thought up the concept of “Arbitrary Potato” because if I had, I’d be a millionaire. And if you don’t understand why, then you’ll never get it.


There are also: Nonfiction books about lame/cool topics., Or things like music that was brought back by the two greatest forces for social change in the world, Or things like movies your kids make you watch but which turn out to be pretty good because of the songs in them

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

Check out But Is It A Sport: Pigeon Racing on Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!

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In fact, I think I qualify for both of these positions.

April 16, 2008 at 3:18 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Here’s what’s all the rage in sports right now: getting paid for doing nothing.

I have twin boys who are right now 19 months old. I also have a burning desire to not keep getting up at 6:30 in the morning and going into an office where I have to pretend to work while I’m blogging. So I hatched a plan, when they were born, and this was my plan: One of the Babies! would become a quarterback in the NFL — most likely for the Best Football Team, the Buffalo Bills, although I’d let him have a little choice in the matter. The other would be a left-handed relief pitcher.

That way, they’d both make millions, I would get to see most of their games because they wouldn’t compete against each other, and I would be allowed to retire and spend my old age watching sports.

There was a flaw in my plan, though — those two career goals required that the boys actually achieve something, that they perform. (Okay, I concede: being a quarterback for the Bills has not, in the past 10 years or so, required much in the way of “performance” or “results.” But Trent Edwards will change that, right? Right? Please?) So I was setting my boys on a path that required hard work and dedication and production and all that kind of stuff.

I have now realized that there is a far better, easier way. They can become the kind of sports stars that never achieve much of anything but still get to be paid lots of money and complain that they’re not getting paid enough.

One, I’ve decided, will become a teenage golfer on the women’s tour, just like Michelle Wie. I know, they are boys, but if Michelle Wie can play on the men’s tour, then I’m pretty sure that I’ll get a boy onto the women’s tour.

Michelle Wie has been named one of “100 People Who Shape Our World.” People around the country know her name and face. She has earned, from her golfing itself, $756,515. She has earned, from advertising, more than $19 million.

Michelle Wie, in her career, has exactly zero victories on the pro tour. So, dividing, her earnings per victory work out to… well, you can’t divide by zero because the result doesn’t make sense. What does make sense is telling my kids to become woman’s golfers, since pay bears no relationship whatsoever to success.

Another place where pay bears no relationship to success is in Prince Fielder’s mind. Prince Fielder, you’ll remember, insulted humanity by declaring more than $600,000 per year to play a game to be an insult. Fielder said that when he was coming off a season in which he ranked 197th in batting average.

So how is Prince doing this year? Prince really turned it on, to date: He’s got… um, zero home runs and a batting average of… um, .222. But let’s put that in perspective. With a 0.222 batting average, Prince has improved from 197th in batting average to 289th!

So he’s moved UP 92 spots… wait, I’ve got that backwards.

Based on that, the other one of my boys will become a first baseman for the Brewers, so he can earn almost 3/4 of a million dollars while doing nothing and he’ll get to complain about it.

There you go: your path to sports riches and a relaxing retirement.

This article originally appeared on Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!: AlwaysMostlyRight.

Check out The Best of Lame/Cool: The Best Plot Twist In a Song Which Makes A Lame Song Cool on The Best Of Everything (Our Opinions Are Righter Than Yours!)

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Missed It By THIS Much

April 15, 2008 at 1:36 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

Congratulations to Mark, the proud father of JT! Send pictures, Mark! And everyone else!

Mr Bunches and Mr F made their return to my office this past weekend; they hadn’t come with me for about two months since the last time they did, Mr F had gotten upset and stayed upset for over an hour, with the only way to calm him down being to let him sit on my lap while I worked. That, though, made Mr Bunches (shown here, with hat) jealous, so Mr Bunches tried to climb onto my lap, which would be fine because I have a pretty big lap, but it wasn’t fine with Mr F, who got upset whenever Mr Bunches tried to climb on and shoved him back off, which made Mr Bunches upset… it was a vicious circle.

But they were back this weekend, older, wiser, and more supervised by The Boy, who accompanied them to the office to help me so that Sweetie could have an entire morning off with nobody around (since Middle was taking a college entrance exam.) Then, on the way home, Mr Bunches turned his hat so that the ear flap hung over his face and looked cute, so I whipped out my cell phone and shot the above picture, just missing the cuteness.

And that explains the title. See? Full circle. I’m just awesome that way.


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Check out The Best of Lame/Cool Month on The Best of Everything!

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The Deal (Part 3)

April 14, 2008 at 1:19 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

The Deal is a serialized horror story on AfterDark, the web’s best site for horror stories. This is part 3; go here to begin at the beginning.

“When Jim gets home he’ll run you home, Mom.”

“I could take a bus,” Grandma said from the kitchen. Jake sat slumped at the dining room table looking glumly out the patio door into the backyard where the sun was shining and only a few leaves had actually even begun to turn colors.

“Don’t be silly. It’ll be no trouble. You can stay for dinner if you want.”

“I really shouldn’t.”

Jake wondered why his grandma shouldn’t stay for dinner.

“Come on. You never stay over for dinner anymore,” his mom said. “It’s the least we can do. You come and watch Jake and won’t let us pay.”

Jake switched from the backyard to the clock. 1:30. Hours before his dad came home. He wondered if he should try to take a nap. The thought of going up to his bed made him sweaty.

“You okay, Jakey,” his mom said, coming up to him with a glass of water. “You look pale.”

“I’m okay,” said Jake.

“Maybe … it’s just a cold,” his mom said, looking him in the eye.

“I don’t think it’s a cold,” his grandma said, and came and sat at the table. She looked at Jake and looked around the room. She didn’t look long at his mom. “I don’t think it’s a cold. He doesn’t look like he’s got a cold.”

“It’s probably just a cold, Mom,” said Jake’s mom. She said it a little more flatly than Jake would have liked. There was an edge.

“Lily, the boy looks tired, but not sick.”

“I’m not going to argue with you.”

Jake sat there, and the room dropped into silence. Maizy came into the room, walked around, and sniffed each of them. She sniffed at Lily’s feet and then at Grandma’s feet and then came over to Jake and sniffed his feet. She backed up a little, and then looked up at Jake.

Jake’s dad was always telling him that Maizy could not think. Jake would say something like “Maizy thinks that’s funny,” and his dad would say “Maizy can’t think, Jake. She’s just go instincts. Instincts can’t think something’s funny.”

Jake had asked what an instinct was. His dad had explained: “An instinct is something an animal does without thinking about it, without even knowing why. It’s like it’s programmed into it, like a computer. They can’t help doing it.”

What do they do, Jake had asked.

“Like fighting to stay alive,” his dad had said. “If you corner a scared animal, even one that usually would just run away, it’ll turn and fight you because it’s instinct is to stay alive. An animal will do anything it can to stay alive, no matter how crazy it seems.”

Maizy moved towards Jake again, and licked at his hand. Then she turned and walked away. Just before she left the room Jake saw her look back at him again, and thought she whined.

“I don’t think he’s got a cold at all,” his grandma said. It sounded like she was accusing his mom of something.

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