5 Books That Can Actually Make You Stupider

Look you, commoner, for there is another piece of mine up over at Cracked: 5 Books That Can Actually Make You Stupider. Go for the comedy, stay for the faith-in-humanity-destroying comments!

As an expert internetter the sheer levels of retardation generated come as no surprise, so grab a bottle of spirits and join me in the Comments Drinking Game!

- Drink when anyone says the bible should be on the list
- Drink when someone insults someone who said that
- Two drinks for every other "Purely responding to other comments" comments
- Drink when someone takes far too many words to say "But I do Sudoku and I'm smart!"
- Two drinks when someone scores hip-and-edgy points by just insulting me directly
- Three drinks and punch something everytime someone focusses on the important distinctions between pedophilia and ephebophilia, as they are both entirely distinct types of fucking a goddamn child
- Drink every time someone points out that "stupider" is not a word, because as we all know something is only a word when legally recorded in a single reference book, not when it can be used to communicate concepts to anyone who speaks the language. These are the people who make scrabble hated (or worse, Wikipedia editors), and may be safely ignored.

Work samples

Some samples of written work by Luke McKinney

Humor and Science at Cracked.com
5 Recent Scientific Advances (and how they'll destroy us all)

Graphic design, video games, humor at The Galactic Emporium
Team Fortress 2 Motivational Posters

Science and education, for CRAM Teen Science magazine
The Fantastic science of the Invisible Woman

Science presented entertainingly for public consumption, published at Reuters
Radical views of the Big Bang

Beer review - Millennium Buzz Beer

Canadian, Lager
5.0 % Alcohol content

First up: the cannabis logo. It's the first thing you, it's the first thing you'll think of, and since it's still illegal to actually sell marijuana in this country it's your first warning that - like most products stamped with the logo - the contents are weakly organic crap designed for a target market of "buys anything to do with being stoned."


Under no circumstances should you find this near anything you drink.

The promised organic taste is delivered entirely in the form of dirt. Earth. Mud. Buzz beer pulls off the extraordinary feat of tasting like a mouthful of soil while remaining watery and bodyless, a true Zen state of terrible opposites. The earth is because it's based on hemp, and beer isn't usually made of hemp for a variety of very good reasons (every single one of which you'll understand if you drink some Buzz). The entire point of this liquid is to harness the cannabis crowd, it was made out of whatever was needed to qualify for that and taste wasn't a even a secondary consideration - it wasn't even on the table.

The water is because the dread words "cold-filtered" apply to this weakness. A brewery proclaiming a beer to be cold-filtered is like a carpenter boasting that he used chipboard - the whole point of cold-filtering is to reduce time and cost for the manufacturer with the direct and unavoidable effect of killing the fuck out of the beer. In fact, Buzz beer proves that cold-filtering doesn't just murder beer, it can even kill the taste of weeds or chunks of the ground itself dug up and dumped in your glass.

I suppose the combination of earth and water makes this the ultimate hippy beer, a combination of the elements required for plant life. It also represents hippies because it's extremely weak, smells like dirt, and totally sucks at its job.

Previous: Kingfisher

Reuterization Continuation

Another of my pieces has jumped from the springboard of the Daily Galaxy onto the big stage of Reuters. It's about Dark Matter, and the lack thereof, and you can read it here (if you find their formatting screwy, the original article is here).