Day: March 5, 2010

You Missed It: Wooooooooooooo! edition

It’s the end of the week for most of you reading this. Because for you, it is Friday. However, for me it is only Thursday. No, I’m not in some sort of time warp, I actually have to work tomorrow, which in your universe is Saturday. I will be missing a basketball game, a pub crawl and a parade–all in the same day. Yes, I am bitter. If you were busy heading for higher ground, odds are you missed it.

You mean spring break can be dangerous?
Remember those wild spring breaks in college? Probably not, because most people stay home. However, more students could be staying above the border this year, after the Texas Department of Public Safety warned college students not to visit Mexican border towns where rival drug cartels are waging war. This makes sense, because spring break is all about listening to authority and making good life choices.

Planet Alaska
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is shopping around a reality TV show. The show would be about Palin’s home state and likely have the style of Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth. Sources say the show’s first episode would have everyone curious, but as more is learned, interest turns to either loving or hating it, and then the show will quit halfway through the season.

He was tall, puffy and had a homeless guy beard
Ben Roethlisberger. There’s a name you didn’t expect to hear in March, but just the same, here it comes. The star quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in Georgia early Friday morning. This is the second time he’s had to deal with such allegations. In the interest of neutrality and presuming innocent until proven guilty, I’d like to say I wish Rapistberger the best of luck shaking this latest blitz.

A toast: To guilt!

Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management researchers have learned something interesting about guilt: it makes you drink. For some reason, millions of Americans want to forget why they feel guilty, and nothing helps you forget like booze.

But did you know that undergraduates feel guilty about drinking underage and/or to excess? When shown Canadian (?) anti-drinking drinking public service ads, the teens decided they needed a drink.

American teens drinking to forget guilt-trips from our frozen, drunken neighbors to the north? Yeah, we’ll drink to that, too.

It’s fake reefer madness

The only thing worse than drugs are fake drugs. No, really-that’s what science tells us today!

It’s perfectly legal to buy fauxijuana “incense” blends (heck, you can do so over the internet), but according to Anthony Scalzo of Saint Louis University, smoking so-called “K2” blends can result in hallucinations and other unexpected, not-so-mellow reactions in its users:

K2 may be a mixture of herbal and spice plant products, but it is sprayed with a potent psychotropic drug and likely contaminated with an unknown toxic substance that is causing many adverse effects. These toxic chemicals are neither natural nor safe.

Now, some quick things:

1.) If you’re buying fake jazz cigarettes over the internet, you probably shouldn’t.
2.) If you’re smoking fake jazz cigarettes you bought over the internet, you definitely shouldn’t.
3.) If a cooler, rebellious kid offers you a K2 doobie, just say no – he’s neither cool nor rebellious. If he was halfway decent, he would have hooked up with a crazy hippy already by now.

In sum, if you have to resort to getting high from legal (albeit extremely psychotropic) herbs you bought from Amazon.com, you might as well be eating a bowlful of oregano.

Because, you know, they need the money

In a move that makes us scream “MORAL VICTORY,” but mostly “who gives a ####?” The New York Yankees’ postseason winnings were miscalculated (A-Rod’s cousin probably did the math) so now each member of last year’s championship team must give back $10,000 of their earnings.

Unconfirmed reports say that the Yankees will use the money to attempt to buy the one thing they haven’t been able to yet, a soul.

I double-dog dare you

Attention everyone planning their weekend revelries: we have a very, very important announcement.

You cannot be electrocuted by peeing on a wire. It is A-OK to urinate on a live wire on a bet, or because you work at a power plant that lacks bathrooms.

The good news comes to us from Grays Harbor County, Washington, where an autopsy found that a man was electrocuted not by urinating on a wire, but by touching a wire with his foot. He just happened to be peeing at the time is all.

Let us honor this man’s memory, and thank him for the gift of knowledge he has given us.