Dear Viagra,

No matter how much Herbal Essence shampoo I put in my hair, I still cannot achieve an orgasm. Do you make a special pill for this?

Fact Attack!

After a long day of Wiki-ing, here are some fun tidbits of info I would like to share:

-groundhogs are not actually hogs
-geese don't actually get goosebumps
-the Czech Republic is not actually Czech
-Phencyclidine is not actually a "cyclidine"
-a goat is not actually a horse

Atheists

Setting: A cocktail party. Cocktail weenies are being served. This will come into play later.

Mary: Todd, I'd like you to meet my brother, Jeff. He's also an atheist.
Todd: Nice to meet you, Jeff. Were you at the last atheist convention in Copenhagen?
Jeff: No, actually, I went to the one in Oslo.
Todd: (disgusted) Oh, so you're an Eastern Orthodox atheist.
Jeff: At least we aren't watering down atheism for the masses like you shameless Reformed atheists.
Mary: Wait, I thought you guys just all didn't believe in a god and that's that, right?
Todd: Ha, if only it were that simple. You see, whereas your brother here believes that there is no God and never was one, the Reformed Church of Atheists believes that there was a God but he was killed by Noam Chomsky in a knife fight back in the 50s.
Jeff: (praying) Forgive him, God-who-doesn't-exist. He knows not what he says. Also, my non-existent Lord, I left you some milk and cookies on the table last night as a sacrifice, but since you aren't actually real, I succumbed to my desires and ate the cookies myself. Please forgive me and don't banish me to the subterranean fires of Hell, which science has proven don't exist. To repent for my evil deeds, I shall watch YouTube videos of Christopher Hitchens for six straight hours.
Todd: Oh here we go, another typical Eastern Orthodox move. Praying in public, trying to look like a big devout atheists in front of the non-non-believers. Real genuine, you charlatan!
(Max approaches them)
Max: Hey are you guys praying to the great Non-Existent One? You should come to my anti-prayer group this Tuesday night to celebrate the joy and blessing of his non-existence. There'll be fudge squares!
Jeff: Buzz off, you new age weirdo.
Todd: Yeah, now here's a retarded atheist.
Max: Very well, brethren, but remember--the forgiveness of the fake Lord is always real!
(he leaves)
Mary: What was that all about?
Jeff: Heh, Max is a Fundamentalist atheist.
Todd: Ha, the idiot believes that there was an omnipotent God, but he lost his powers to Satan in a game of Connect Four in 1985 and since then he's been working as a computer programmer in Cincinnati. It's an off-shoot of the Reformed denomination.
Jeff: So stupid.
Todd: Yeah, seriously.
Server: Would you gentleman like a cocktail weenie?

A Public Service Announcement

The Murdbonez blog and all employees of Murdbonez are in no way affiliated with Murdbuger. Sorry for any confusion/disappointment this has caused.

Wiki Wednesdays - David Eckstein

Not to try to steal any of Fire Joe Morgan's Eckstein thunder, but read the last sentence of the "College Career" section.

Now I don't hate David Eckstein. He seems like a nice guy, his entrance music is sometimes Crystal Method's "Busy Child," and, according to Wikipedia, his last name means "cornerstone" in German. Seems fine. However, I can't stand how overrated this guy's become thanks to a lot of bone-headed ESPN writers who praise him like he's Radio from that movie Radio or Rudy from that movie Willow. He's a very average-to-slightly below average baseball player! But because he's four feet tall, everyone's got such a soft sport for him, including Jews apparently, who voted him on their special All-American team even though he's a devout Catholic. Joe Morgan pulling this crap I can understand, but come on, Jews!

St John's College: Beginning Poetry Workshop - England, 1788

Dear William Wordsworth,

I really enjoyed your poem! I think you are making a lot of progress this semester, and I am grateful to be assigned as your peer reviewer this week. I like that you write about nature a lot. I am often deeply moved by nature, too. Here are some comments I have on your poem.

Okay, now this is ultimately up to you, but I was thinking for the title, instead of "Unicorn Dream," you could maybe call it something like "Tintern Abbey" or "Lines Composed for Tintern Abbey" or I don't know, maybe even "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of Wye During a Tour." I only say this because the poem seems to be about pensively looking at Tintern Abbey, and while "Unicorn Dream" has a dulcet ring to it, there are no references to a unicorn in your poem. Just a suggestion, though.

I think the beginning's very strong, though a few lines could maybe be improved. The setup for the second section is intriguing, though I think maybe instead of saying "But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din/Of towns and cities, I have felt sad," you could say something like

"Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration: —feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure;"

Those are just some lines off the top of my head, they're probably nothing more than trite drivel, but if you don't feel they convey the speaker's swell of emotions better than the single word "sad," then by all means ignore my suggestion.

I like how you mostly use blank verse in this poem, though I would watch towards the end when you suddenly switch to a brief rhyming pattern in which you try to rhyme "And this green pastoral landscape, were to me/ More dear, both for themselves and for thy pie." Unless the speaker has been suppressing a hilarious Cockney accent for the majority of the poem and cannot help himself at this last line, I don't think this couplet rhyming "me" and "pie" will work. And again, this is another somewhat radical suggestion, but maybe instead of "thy pie" you wrote "thy sake"? It would do away with the rhyming scheme and keep the poem uniformly in blank verse, but also there's no previous mention of the speaker's sister owning a pastry in the poem.

That's it for comments this week! Again, I think you're getting much better. Oh, and one final piece of advice - maybe instead of having your poem written in the shape of an ice cream cone, you could separate it into stanzas and simply number each line. Again, this it totally your call, just a suggestion.

Sincerely,
Danny

An early draft of George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television"

-Shit
-Farty
-Buttsack
-Tintinnabulation
-Isopycnic
-Honorificabilitudinitatibus
-A skunk sat on a stump and thunk the stump stunk,
but the stump thunk the skunk stunk (seven times fast)

Wiki Wednesdays - My Favorite Doomsday Scenario

Death by TI-83

Monster Battle

"This town ain't big enough for the both of us," Godzilla said to Mothra, peering over the Legoland skyline.

Serial Killers

Many people wonder why so many serial killers, as well as infamous John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman, have cited J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as such a huge motivation behind their killings. I decided to research this by leafing through "Catcher" CliffsNotes published in the late 1960s, around the time most of these killers were in high school. The results were surprising...but not in a “Whoa, that’s nuts!” way, more like an “Oh yes, I see” way:

CLIFFSNOTES ON:

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE - CHAPTER ONE

SUMMARY

In this chapter, we meet the narrator Holden Caulfield, a boarding school student who feels like he doesn’t fit in. Do you ever feel like you don’t fit in? It’s okay, we all do sometimes! Holden tells us he’s currently in southern California being held in an insane asylum. Ha, sometimes I think society’s the one that belongs in an insane asylum, am I right? Holden begins his story as a flashback from the December of the previous year, just after being expelled from Pencey Prep - most likely because he didn't blindly conform to their "rules" like a blind, ignorant sheep. Eat your grass, sheep, listen to the shepherd, sheep, do your homework, sheep, shower every day...that sorta thing. That corporate thing. Holden was kind of also expelled for flunking some classes. Then Holden visits Mr. Spencer, a teacher he liked.

COMMENTARY

The beginning of the novel is one of the most popular openings in American fiction. Salinger sets a very strong tone with his narrator, a tone that says, "Hey pal, I'm just like you. I'm your friend. No one else understands you except me because we're friends, man. And I don't care that you dropped out of college instead of going to law school like your rich, successful older brother Charles, a fact your parents rub in your face all the time. Also unlike your parents, I think it's cool that you ironically wear an army jacket to school as your 'thing.' I get you."

In this first chapter, we get a sense of Holden's isolation, particularly when he chooses not to attend the big football game. While he looks at the field from afar, he feels lonely, but he shouldn't because football's a phony game where men beat their chests to fool stupid, shallow women into having sexual intercourse with them. Besides, even if he did go, the football players would just make fun of his poems. Do you write poems? I bet you do. Really brilliant, beautiful poems that no one understands because they’re all phony. They probably make fun of your short fiction, too, and how it's dumb to write a science fiction story about a kid who ironically wears an army jacket and can read all the townspeople's minds, but when he tries to warn them they're all thinking phony thoughts they try to burn him in the town square but then the kid finds out he is actually an alien and his long-lost alien family comes to Earth and rescues him and takes him to their home planet where no one thinks phony thoughts. I bet the football players say that's stupid, but I don't think that's a stupid idea for a short story. Maybe they wouldn't think it was so stupid if they were dead.

In the first chapter, Salinger also uses some symbolism.

"Wiki Wednesday" Preview

To plug my blog's newest installment "Wiki Wednesdays," in which I find utterly shocking/hilarious wiki pages, here's a taste of things to come...

I looked at this page for a long time and tried to be as PC and forward-thinking about this as I could, but I don't know what sort of statement Wikipedia is trying to make by having the main picture on the "Down Syndrome" page feature a child with DS trying to operate a power drill, or "assembling a bookcase" as they put it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_syndrome

Runner's World

Whew, now that I got over the dreaded "first post" hump, it's time for some comedy, and, on Thursdays, my weekly insights on the Blackwater scandal. Here you go:

"Monthly Letter from the Editor of Runner's World"

Dear Reader:

As editor-in-chief of "Runner's World," I can whole-heartedly promise you that this issue is jam-packed with more articles on running than ever! Since our last issue, there have been amazing developments in the world of running, like Kenya's Abdul Gbala running a really fast 3200m time in Brussels, or Russia's Vladimir Oromov running a slightly faster 3200m time in Tokyo. Then Oromov ran even faster in the 1600m two weeks later in Athens. What a wild month!

It's our job to bring you the most up-to-date research on running, and our running analyst Greg Korver has certainly delivered with his article in this month's "Running Tips" column, titled "Speed Is Important, but Endurance Is Also Important." In his newest research, he stumbles across some findings that build off his column last month, titled "Moving Your Legs Faster Makes You Run Faster." It's like Greg's got a crystal ball that sees into the future of running!

Don't miss our exclusive interview with Olympic distance runner Tom Sanders, in which we ask Sanders some of the hardest hitting questions in the sport, like "What's more important for a runner, your legs or your face?" There's also a great investigative piece about a new shoe from Nike. The actual findings are pretty unsurprising, but there are many pictures of the shoe photo-shopped in space with lasers shooting around it.

We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed running for a long time and then writing down how we felt. Also, look out for next month's issue, where we'll reveal our biggest fitness and weight loss secrets yet. Here's a hint—it has to do with low-cholesterol, low-carb dieting and proper vitamin intake. Oh wait, nevermind, it has to do with running more.

Sincerely,
Brent Matthews, Editor

First Post!

What up!