Author: Bryan McBournie

Finally, a way to insult the animals’ mothers

Dolphins are stupid, just like any other animal. That is why if the numbers were even we could take them all on and defeat them once and for all. However, among stupid animals, dolphins are some of the most intelligent. This is a lot like saying you were the valedictorian in your home-school class.

Scientists, in what is likely an attempt to turn them into informers, are developing an underwater translator to communicate with dolphins. Testing begins this summer on a new system collecting dolphins sounds and cataloging them. From there, they will try to learn the language of the dolphins and set up some sort of a system to create phrases in their language, as well as translate their responses.

Next, we’ll teach them to tweet.

Travel through time on your next vacation

Science fiction has given us some pretty preposterous ways to time travel, like flying around the world backwards, going 88 mph in a DeLorean and whatever they did in that Michael Crichton movie with Paul Walker in it. But now, we have something that’s real.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you real, honest, actual time travel. You can be a part of it, provided you are in Samoa later this year. Yes, the magical land where Girl Scout cookies are made is going to see what the future is like by shifting to the other side of the international dateline. On Dec. 29, Samoa will move the dateline to its east, losing a day and sending the nation straight to Dec. 31. It’s gonna be heavy.

Of course, everyone with Dec. 29 anniversaries or birthdays are out of luck.

The McBournie Minute: Down in front, Biden

It’s been a week now since they finally got him. After years of searching, they found the madman and killed him. Just so we’re clear, I’m not talking about Hugh Downs, he is still alive and at large, to the best of my knowledge. I’m talking about Osama bin Laden.

But what become clear from this even early on, is that it was an awesome photo op. In what has been provocatively titled the “Situation Room photo,” a photo of the White House Situation room, taken, coincidentally, when there just so happened to be people inside it monitoring an ongoing situation. It shows the faces of a whole bunch of important people during one of the tensest times they may ever experience.

That is, of course, unless you happened to see the version where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was photoshopped out. Continue reading The McBournie Minute: Down in front, Biden

Baseball and wine go together like peanut butter and pickles

With their team yet to hit the .500 mark this season, Boston Red Sox fans have an excellent reason to drink. Now, when they drink to forget, they can do it for a good cause.

Last week, the team unveiled two new wines named after pitchers Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz: CabernAce and ChardonClay. Sure, the names are really lame, but that’s not the point. The athlete proceeds benefit the Jimmy Fund and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, so you’re boozing with purpose.

(via Deadspin)

You Missed It: USA! USA! USA! edition

Oh, hello there. Sorry, I was just sitting here wishing something interesting had happened in the past several days. It just seems like things have been so quiet lately. Has anyone else been as bored this week as me? Here’s hoping there’s something exciting going on next week. If you were busy doing the Dougie with school children this week, odds are you missed it.

WOOOOOOOO!
Late Sunday night, President Barack Obama announced that a team of U.S. Navy Seals found and killed Osama bin Laden. The news, which came nearly 10 years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, was greeted somberly by Americans, as they were pleased to know that a threat was forever extinguished, did not feel right celebrating someone’s death. I’m just kidding, college kids across the country got drunk and burned stuff in celebration.

Where’s the Rocketeer when you need him?
JetMan, the Swiss daredevil known as Yves Rossy, who flies around with wing powered by, you guessed it, a jet strapped to his back, will not be flying over the Grand Canyon as he had planned. He said he didn’t have enough time to train, and if he messed up it would be “really bad.” Wait a minute, you can’t be a daredevil and not take huge risks. Did lack of training stop Evel Knievel from attempting to jump over Snake River Canyon?

Worst. Ventriloquist. Ever.
This weekend there’s a movie coming out in which Mel Gibson plays a guy who has gone a bit off his rocket and talks through a beaver puppet to cope. It’s called The Beaver. I don’t have a punchline for that one, I just wanted to let you know I can’t stop snickering.

You look familiar, eh?

Online dating is not just for the pathetic, the lonely or sex offenders anymore. With each year, more and more people are logging on to dating sites and finding someone who ends up being OK with meeting a total stranger, as long as it’s in public where there are a lot of witnesses.

It’s also picking up for those who want to find something on the side, just ask former Rep. Chris Lee and his guns. But every so often, it doesn’t work out so well. A 49-year-old Canadian man went to a local coffee shop to meet for the first time a woman he’d been talking to online. He had a good feeling about this one. Only thing was, it turned out to be his girlfriend catching him in a trap.

He got a face full of coffee and a few slaps, before an off-duty cop who happened to be there (Imagine that!) arrested the jilted lover, who was probably charged with whatever they call “assault” in Canada.

Return of the big yellow bus

Remember back in the 1980s and 1990s, when minivans were reasonably fashionable? They weren’t cool, but they certainly didn’t have the sigma that they enjoy today. Guess what, New York, your “Taxi of Tomorrow” is here, and it feels like the past.

In just two short years, the Nissan NV200 will be hitting the streets of the City that Never Sleeps as the new taxi in town. The minivan will start replacing older taxis in the city’s taxi fleet, like the Ford Crown Victoria types. Sure, we have seen minivan taxis in NYC before, but they used to be the Cash Cab. Now, with some big-ass vans taking over, New Yorkers won’t have to worry about hassles like seeing across the street, because the vans will block that view for them. Stick figure decals on the rear windshield denoting the number and gender of members in your family comes optional.

Breast cheese is here

It seems 2011 may go down in history as the year of the breast milk. We’re not really sure why, but it’s happening. People want breast milk. The people may not get exactly what they want, but they may get some sort of a decent compromise.

An art project in New York is offering cheese made from human breast milk. Oh yes, it’s artsy cheese. Lady Cheese Shop, which is serving the stuff, is the project of a New York University student to get people talking about biotechnology, which isn’t working, because here we are, talking about, you know, boobs.

The breast milk cheese comes in three disgustingly-titled flavors: West Side Funk, Midtown Smoke and Wisconsin Chew. So if you have been dying to have some breast milk-related food, and find New York closer than London, it’s time you book your trip, friend.

Which came first?

New Jersey is probably not the sort of place you would go to pick up chicks, but one town there actually wants to control how many chicks there are.

In what is being hailed as a revolutionary effort to defeat our chicken foes, the township of Hopewell, N.J. recently adopted an ordinance on when chickens and roosters can get it on and how many hens you can have in a backyard hen house.

The problem, we’re assuming, is not that chickens aren’t tasty and go well with just about any side dish with a white wine, it’s that they are kind of disease-ridden when they aren’t dead, and the roosters can get a bit loud. Good move, Hopewell, population control is the only way to take these earthbound birds down a notch!

The McBournie Minute: Show me Martin Van Buren’s birth certificate

Before I begin, there are days when making fun of the news really sucks. Every now and then, something happens that just wipes everything else aside for a while, because people suddenly remember what really matters. And there are times when people just don’t feel like laughing. I know, because my first-ever column was published on Sept. 12, 2001.

Conversely, there are times when something so good happens that one does not dare to cheapen it by making light of it while the news still settles in. America got some great news last night, and while we may cover it tangentially, it’s just in bad taste to touch it right now. So bear with us, bear with me, here, for a bit while we try to act like there is more than one story out there at the moment.

So now, I present to you my theory on why President Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) was not a natural born U.S. citizen. Continue reading The McBournie Minute: Show me Martin Van Buren’s birth certificate