Sunday, April 22, 2012

Cookies

It's a safe bet that in a tense social situation, you are going to feel a little agitated. It is an inevitable, unenviable byproduct of being amongst people, especially your peers, or people who aren't your peers. What you should do in this situation is eat a lot of cookies. Trust me. I just ate a lot of cookies and I feel great.

Cookies are full of vitamins and minerals. They help to strengthen your immune system and make your vision at least twice as strong. You can eat them instead of regular food and shit will work out great. You have to eat a lot of them, though. This is a cautionary tale, to be sure - many people have set out to eat cookies and have made the fatal (not fatal) mistake of only eating one, or sometimes two cookies. Everyone knows you need to eat at least four and as many as sixteen in order for their health benefits to become apparent.

Cookies make your skin tighter, reducing the appearance of crow's feet and jelly legs. Once you've eaten eight or nine cookies, you will instantly notice a difference in the beauty quality of your whole entire shit. You will look a fucking lot better. They will help you with your figure and your physique, as well as your mental. Your brain just starts to feel like it's finally locked into a groove at around cookie #7. You will be able to do cool hard math problems. You will do your taxes, at all. Your taxes will do themselves, I should say. Your taxes will do you! That's how easy it is to eat cookies and feel great and positive about how your whole dome feels.

Don't delay! Go out and buy a lot of cookies and just eat them shits. They will go down like a smooth business transaction, or like your sister on prom night. Sorry, that was an easy joke, but I'm just trying to get across to you the importance of eating a lot of cookies and eating them right. You gotta just stuff them in your whole mouth and chew em. Nobody will look askance at you. 

Feed the extra cookies to a dog if there's one around. Dog benefits from eating the cookie. It's not even bad. Dog knows it too, he will wolf them right up, or dog them right up, I guess, help me out here ladies. You and your dog will go to the bank and just start cashing checks that you have, some of them are made out to you and some of them are made out to your dog, or you can sign some of your checks over to your dog. It's cool to help out a dog if it's in dire financial straits, if it needs help until it gets its tax return back from the Dog Government. You can just give the dog a few cookies until that fat check rolls around and your dog is rolling in dough, cookie dough that is. I apologize for all the puns, but I think you take my meaning that I am going to do whatever it takes to make a cookies be eaten by you.

In conclusion, get a dog and cookies and feed the extra cookies to the dog after you eat twenty or thirty of them. You don't even need to name the dog, just say "cookies" and it will think that is its name, and any houseguests you have will also think that too. Cookies isn't a bad name for a dog, now that I think about it, but don't name your dog fuckin anything. 



Friday, April 13, 2012

Jokes To Watch In 2012

It's about halfway into the year, so that means it's time for the APKWIAB Joke Index. These are some jokes that made a strong showing in previous years (we at APKWIAB have given up on the possibility of any new or original jokes this year), and are the contenders for Trope Of The Year at our big award ceremony gala sacrificial birth ritual in December.

- "That's what she said" - Still holding strong out there. Showing an especially strong trending popularity spike among men slightly too old to use this joke, and, strangely enough, among a select few actual funny people who either adroitly use it with post-millenial wraparound double irony or who wait for an absolutely perfect time to use it.

- Mullet Jokes - You might have thought jokes about hockey hair had reached their peak mainstream awareness when that mullet book came out in 1999 - and you would have been right. Nevertheless, you can still count on someone to break out every nickname ever coined for hair that's long in the back/short in the front, should the opportunity arise, and that has kept these jokes as strong contenders.

- "Seriously?" - This is not a joke, it's just one word. But it is looking like this single word is in the running to win our grand prize, the "J'oke D'or", at our Joke Festival later this year. How you use it is, someone says something, then you say the word, and that's the whole thing. (That reminds me, look for our Joke Instruction Manual in stores and through online retailers later this month.)

That's all for now - just wanted to keep you abreast of the latest knockers at the door of Joke Greatness, the contenders for the Great Joke Cup, the ones you can always count on some boobs out there to keep in the mammaries of the public. Nipples.  



Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Brain Beta-Test Log

After extensive beta testing, in which we gave the test brain a variety of scenarios in which it might be called upon to react/respond, there is some discord among my colleagues. There is an even split, by a show of hands, between those who believe that we should give the brain one (1) response option or two (2). Of course, the most logical solution seems to be to limit the possibilities that the brain should be able to imagine, when posed with a problem, to a single, easily-defined choice.

In support of this theory, we put the test brain inside a test body and put the body in Test Chamber FRN-05y5 with a test Grizzly Bear. The one option the brain was given (Option "Fight") resulted nineteen times out of twenty in Death for the test body, and the twentieth time also in Death for the test body but not quite as quickly. Dr. Greenvald argued, sensibly, that the results were of course going to be skewed by the overwhelming physical advantage the Grizzly Bear has, and that we mustn't make any hasty decisions based solely on the test body's utter inability to win out against a large predator in single combat. There were sober nods of agreement.

The dissenting opinion came from Dr. Rooney-Underhorse, who made the radical suggestion that the test brain be programmed with an unheard-of Second Possible Response: Option "Run Away". After significant rewiring, the test brain inside the test body was placed again in the chamber, and in a startling and overwhelming twenty out of twenty trials, it chose Option "Run Away". Granted, the limited size of Test Chamber FRN-05y5 caused the test body to ultimately be destroyed by the Grizzly Bear the full twenty times, in this scenario. Since no larger chambers are available, we are at an impasse.

What follows is editorial; it is not based on hard facts from our extremely controlled and methodical experiments. It is simply my opinion, which, although shared by some of my fellow researchers, is not a unanimously held group consensus.

I believe that the brains should be given both options in any given situation the body may encounter in actual field use: Option Fight AND Option Run Away. What if the carpenter, when presented with a nail, were given only the option to use a screwdriver? The carpenter needs two tools to fully complete his job, and as such, I believe we should roll the brains off the line with no fewer than two tools to deal with whatever might arise in the field. Let's say, for example, that the body is confronted with a shouting man. Rather than only giving the brain the ability to decidedly strike and kill the man, should it not also be allowed to opt for scrambling away and hiding under some loose dirt or mud? It's just good sense.

The end result, after all, of any possible interaction the bodies might encounter in the "real" world, could only be one of two things: A) Ultimate Victory, or B) Ultimate Defeat. Let's take another example: Our body in the field makes a trip to the grocery store. Through the subsequent series of events, the only logical end results are A) The body wins out over all competition and adversity, and commences to dominate and enslave its entire race (and, of course, every other species on the planet), bending all the world to its will, or B) The body fails and dies alone in a hole.

I argue that we should take both of the actions available as options to the brain into account, instead of just one. But, again, this is just one researcher's opinion, and it will either become the supreme accepted wisdom or will be scooted into a waste receptacle by the sheer force of a superior opinion. Only time will tell.

ALSO: We're thinking of giving the bodies some really absurd-looking reproductive organs. But, we must finish up the brain first. Yes, brain first, then the genitals, and after that I think we'll be finished.       



Friday, April 6, 2012

Regarding Your Recent Hospitalization

You came into our emergency room at 3:30 AM on February 12th. You stated to our front desk attendant that you were having difficulty seeing, hearing, smelling, or tasting anything. You also stated that you were having problems with your breathing and balance. After you filled out your preliminary forms and provided the proper identification, you were asked to sit in the waiting area.

We at this hospital pride ourselves on our commitment to giving the best care possible to our patients. It is not our intention to have anyone wait for longer than is necessary, especially in an emergency situation. The actions you then took on the morning of February 12th, while not criminal in nature, caused a disturbance in our emergency room that we are required by law to report to both the local police station and your primary care physician.

When our attendant advised you that you would have to wait, you (in her words) "called me a dirty ringmaster in a circus of pain" and continued to harass her until our security officer intervened. Your tone was relatively civil, but we still find your use of language to be objectionable; there were several children present in the waiting area.

Once you saw Dr. Repal, our doctor on call on the morning in question, the first thing he noticed about you was that you had a black bag duct-taped over your entire head and part of your neck. He attempted to explain to you that this bag might be the cause of your symptoms, and suggested that he carefully remove the bag to alleviate you of any further discomfort. What followed marks the second time our staff found you to be combative in nature, as you refused to remove the bag from your head. Instead you insisted that the bag was not causing the problems you were complaining of, and that in fact you had been suffering from all the ailments in question before the time the bag was ever on your head. When Dr. Repal asked you how the bag came to be on your head in the first place, you admitted you had put it on yourself over ten years ago.

You went on to explain that you needed the bag to remain on your head to survive, as it was the only thing you had found that would satisfactorily manage the symptoms that brought you to our hospital. You also explained that you had tried taking the bag off before, but you immediately suffered headaches. Dr. Repal attributed this to an increased sensitivity to light and sound, which would pass in a relatively short amount of time. You argued vehemently against his theory, stating that you had kept the bag off of your head for an entire day at one point in 2007 and had not been able to stand the way you felt, so you put it back on, this time securing it with duct tape so it would not fall off accidentally.

We recommended at this juncture that you speak with one of our resident mental health experts. You then stormed out of our hospital, were rude to several of our attendants on the way out, and made a short speech to the patients in the waiting area, which was muffled and hard to understand but was clear to contain numerous baseless accusations regarding the quality of health care provided by this hospital.

We would ask that should you visit our facility again, you would please be mindful of the mental health of the people around you, and please also return the hospital gown you were wearing when you left last time. We have mailed your clothes to the address you provided.  




Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Korean Food Restaurant

Thank you for your interest in our Korean Food Restaurant. You are probably dying to get right down to eating some good old Korean Food! Not that the food itself would be old. It would be new Korean Food, as you may already be accustomed to regularly eating at another Korean Food Restaurant. Before you get started, however, there are a few things you should know about our establishment.

First of all, we do not currently serve Korean Food. Hang onto your hat, if you have one. If you don't have a hat, it's fine to securely grasp the top of your own head. We tried making Korean Food for a few weeks, but none of us are Korean, and only one of us even knows how to cook at all, and he is pretty much only good at making pizza bagels in the toaster oven. Which we have been eating a LOT of, lately. But that's neither here nor there.

You're probably asking yourself at this point something like What The Hell Did I Put On My Good Shirt With The Buttons And Drive All The Way Here To Get Korean Food For When You Don't Even Make Or Have Any. To answer the second part of your question first, we did for a while try ordering from another Korean Restaurant and reselling their food to patrons of our restaurant such as yourself. That worked for a little while, but there was the issue of the longer wait for what was, ultimately, secondhand food; also we think the other restaurant may have eventually caught on, because they eventually stopped filling our orders. (They are located directly across the street from us and are quite successful, which was the original reason we decided on this location for our Korean Food Restaurant.)

But to address the first part of your concern, What Am I Doing Here In My One Good Unstained Shirt, you need only relax and let our solution wash over you like warming sexual lubricant. You may have also noticed that we don't presently have an actual physical restaurant available for you to eat in. Rest assured that if we did, we would be the very first people to offer you a place to eat your outside food. We toyed with the idea of opening an "Eating Room" of sorts, with this being its express purpose, but that idea was voted down. In any event, we encourage you with the fullness of our beings to not despair, fret, or regret your choice of our Authentic Mexican-Style Korean Food Restaurant (we've undergone a few slight menu changes since we started out to write to you) as your destination for taste-bud titillation and general evening atmospheresence. No, indeed.

We at this restaurant have only one wish: that you eat the best food possible and have sex tonight, and that you do both with the most attractive available member of your species and gender of choice. We want to get you laid, and let's just all make sure we understand that right up front. Nothing would make us happier than to see you slipping and sliding around on a rubbery bed with your sexual equal. To be totally up front and honest about the whole thing, we hope you think of us as you achieve orgasm later on tonight. Not us as individual owners of a Cajun/Caribbean/Mexican-Style Korean Food Restaurant, but as an organization. We're going to make this happen together.

So, we hope this has cleared up any questions or concerns you may have had about our former Korean Food Restaurant. We also hope this has cleared up any acne you may have had, although we make no claims as to the potential dermatologic benefits of reading this message. We hope you drive a very fast car one day along the coast of a picturesque ocean or other large body of water, and that the wind buffets your face and hair and sunglasses in a not-unpleasant fashion. We hope that one of your favorite songs starts playing, and you look back fondly on the day when you visited our restaurant and then got it on deep into the night, and as the chorus of the song crescendoes you open your mouth and throw your head back and unleash a string of meaningless vocables directly at the sun, cosmically linking you with everything and nothing.   

Finally, we hope you one day own a tank full of frogs, or a stylish full-length mirror, or a tube of chapstick in a flavor that you really like. Or all three. 

*this blog entry was rejected from McSweeney's web site thing. I know, it's hard to imagine



Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Just Relax

Coming home from a hectic day at work? Just finished your daily round of illegal cow-milking? Having a nail driven directly into your third eye? You need to relax, girl, or boy. And you have tuned into the correct frequency on the internet for relaxation to occur - we're pumping out gushing rivers of soothing text today at APKWIAB, all day! 24 hours a day, seven days out of about every 13 days, excluding national holidays, including state holidays, extruding local holidays.

Just sit back and relax. Or if you find it uncomfortable/not relaxing to sit back (maybe your chair suffers from faulty construction), sit forward and relax. Lean all the way forward, but let's say not so far forward that you might fall down, just to be safe. Or you could find some middle ground, neither sitting forward nor backward, and certainly not sideways, but rather at a comfortable, relaxing angle that allows you to fully be comfortable and relax.

My point is that you should find a good way to sit in your chair, or wherever you're sitting, that feels good to you. Me, I like to sit all the way back when I relax. I just pull up a chair or whatever and sit all the way back until I can't sit any further back. One time I sat back so far that I came out the other side of the chair! That's not actually true. It's a joke. It would be funny if that happened though, or if you sat back to the point where you ended up sitting in a chair directly behind your chair. At which point you'd have to start all over again with sitting back, and you might find yourself in still another chair behind the first two, and the process would repeat until, well I imagine until there were no more chairs behind your chairs.

I don't want to try to trump or best anyone's preferred method of sitting back in anticipation of relaxation, is all I'm trying to say. No one way of sitting back should be given any preferential treatment over any other way, in my opinion; after all this is America and the last thing that should happen here is for someone to tell someone else a more correct way of sitting in a chair. It's not fair, and it's unconstitutional.

So now I assume you have a relatively comfortable angle at which you have positioned your body. Let the relaxation begin. Close your eyes and exhale loudly through your nostrils. Slacken your jaw and allow all of your muscles to become completely loose and floppy. Let everything go, feel the tension melt away. Let go of the muscles that hold in your urine and feces and let it all fill up your pants. Imagine you are floating in a river, a bumpy river that's more than a little bit polluted.

Whoa! Wait, hang on, I forgot to tell you that you need to forget everything you're thinking about. Did I mention that? Jesus, I have been remiss. Under no circumstances should you think about the guy that you're pretty sure your wife has been clandestinely blowing, or the possibility that there is a large cancer growing on and around an important organ you might have or not have. Definitely do not think about how you have no money! That's a big one. Whatever you do, do not think about how your bank balance is impossibly low. And if you have so little money that you do not even have a bank account, or so much debt that you do not have any money at all, do not think about that either. Oh, and don't think about that stupid face you make when you try to work out how words are spelled.

All right, so now that you are fully relaxed, stand up and attack your life's work - however insignificant and rudimentary and inconsequential and ultimately meaningless it may be - with renewed vigor. You will now have forgotten that you are not important! It's like magic, how this works. There is no need to thank me - I stress this point most of all in my Relaxation Seminar, now available for $100,000 on DVD or iTunes. I do not require the fealty and adoration of the legion of peons that I save the sanity of on a daily basis. Allow your face to melt away. Sit in chairs, and support the chair industry. Bounce oddly on your feet as you walk to work. These seemingly minor actions are all that I require that it is mandatory that you do.




Monday, April 2, 2012

It's not quite cold and not quite warm outside;

if you stand on the shady side of the street then cold wind bites you and on the sunny side you get cooked. I have walked an inordinately long distance (~1 mile) to buy a pair of pliers at the dollar store instead of at a "real" hardware store. I am in the market for a pair of pliers because I have to attach a new hose to the washing machine, since the old hose burst and sprayed like 2 inches of water into the middle of the apartment. I was pretty annoyed when that happened, but soon realized I was grateful it was the cold-water hose that burst and not the hot-water hose, which if that one had burst it would have been spraying scalding water and steam everywhere. I also am grateful that there was someone home at the time, otherwise the leak would have filled up the whole place pretty quickly.

I am in the market for the pair of pliers because I am over 30 years old, a man, and I own zero tools. Not one. No hammer, no screwdriver, no...shit, I can't even think of the name of another basic tool (other than pliers). I don't even have any thumb tacks.

The traffic situation on the corner of Grand and Lorimer is really entertaining. It's a busy intersection on a normal day - Grand is a major truck route - but today is special, the traffic light is flashing yellow on Grand and red on Lorimer. The walk/don't walk signs are off. School has just let out. There are buses, commuters, dumptrucks, and groups of children all snarled up, honking and screeching. I stand on the corner for 5-10 minutes, waiting for a truly fantastic accident to occur, but I am sadly disappointed.

The dollar store is great for some things, and not so great for other things, but I'm not trying to start a professional tool collection. They have hammers there that feel like they're made out of balsa wood and aluminum. I buy a pair of pliers for $1.08.

On the way home, there is a man passed out on the corner, flat on his back. He looks like he's on his way home from a construction job. I pat him on the shoulder and say Hey buddy are you OK, and he wakes up and starts mumbling in Spanish. A man in sunglasses standing nearby says an ambulance has been called, I guess this guy fell over a few times before deciding to nap on the corner. I ask him if he needs help, and he nods and sticks out his hand. I stick out my hand and he grasps it and keeps mumbling and rolling his head around. I'm like, OK, I guess I'll sit here and hold this guy's hand until the ambulance gets here? I'm still giving him the benefit of the doubt w/r/t whether he's injured or just drunk. Then he starts pulling on my hand, he's trying to get up, and he's thanking me. He's drunk. He gets up and weaves away, makes it about half a block before falling up against a fence and leaning on it. I follow him and try to ask him how far he has to go. He starts saying "que?" which I'm pretty sure means "what". He starts getting salty, and starts saying "que" louder. I'm like OK man, I'm gonna go. He says "go" and points down the street. He is moving in slow motion. I'm like, OK man. I go.

When I get back, I take the pliers out of the package and try to use them to attach the washing machine hose. They are terrible pliers, in my (admittedly uneducated) opinion. They don't open very wide, and almost immediately the rubber grips on one of the handles slides greasily off. There's kind of a lot of grease on them in general, I don't know if that's a thing with pliers or what. I didn't look on the package, maybe they said "Now With Extra Grease" or something. Maybe that's a thing with pliers.