Laughercize!

When I saw this ad in my local hippy-based coffeeshop I searched desperately for evidence that it was a parody or a joke:




Alas, there was none. Someone is genuinely seeking payment for teaching people 'advanced laughter'. Capitalism has officially failed and should be replaced with a crude barter system by the end of the week.

Whether it's more tragic that somebody thought the creative trail blazed by 'Jazzercise' demanded a sequel, or that it took them ten years to come up with it, is a question science is not yet ready to answer. A team of clinically depressed scientists consisting of Raiders fans, Hamlet Prince of Denmark and people who serially adopt kittens with cancer are expected to provide the solution as soon as they finish posting italicized poems on myspace.

I've researched all manners of humour from lowbrow (somebody getting hit in the crotch) to sophisticated (somebody getting hit in the crotch by the Unified Field Theory) and have no idea what "Advanced Laughter" is supposed to be. What elevates it to the 'advanced' level - laughing in latin? Cackling in code? Alliterated amusement? The fact that you, apparently, have to pay someone to learn it? The idea of "mastering the art" of laughter is like that of sex with a mime: At first you wonder "why would anyone do that", before the imagination kicks in and you come up with all manner of incredible and unusual ways that could be interesting, followed by the crushing realization that the actual act would never live up to those and probably be incredibly depressing beyond anything you could voluntarily think of.

The poster gets double 'Are you serious?' points for "master the art", "4 main laugh points" and "250 ways to laugh" - all designed to imply that laughing is a complicated task that shouldn't be attempted by the untrained. If an ad can convince you you're performing a reflex action incorrectly, then - holy shit! You're breathing wrong! Stop, and don't start again till I tell you. Plus the fact that anyone with 250 separately indexed ways to laugh should be avoided until Batman shows up to kick the shit out of them.

To the person responsible for this insanity: when listing yourself as "film director and improv instructor" go ahead and add "rockstar astronaut didgeridoo carver", because no one is buying it. The director of "Gloryholes 2: Back in Black" is sufficiently busy that he can't take time out to plan and teach a course on a basic physiological function, and he doesn't even have a mythical second career in a logical impossibility like "improvisation instruction". What I'm trying to say is: the man who makes money telling hookers when to suck cock on camera has 100% more professional credibility and real actual job than you.

Perhaps realizing this a desperate lunge at credibility is made with "fusion of improv, martial arts, acting technique". The only one who needs to fuse those is the brave soul who finally infiltrates Comedy Central and assassinates Carlos Mencia, and I can tell you two things about that noble Comedy Commando:
1) He will win at least one Nobel Prize
2) He will not be found among a class of people who voluntarily pay to be taught how to laugh.

Despite all this I'm kind of hoping this takes off - it could pave the way for a career where people pay me to show them how to enjoy steak. And in the advanced class, cheerleaders.

On the relative hardness of shelves and the human head

A real scientific report. So real it comes in the form of a pdf.

The Dangers of Dim Sum

Eating Dim Sum this morning with my girlfriend and a friend of hers. They speak Mandarin, also known as Crazy-Wobbling-Incomprehensiblese, so I could tell I was being discussed and judged, but was unable to understand a word and honestly didn't care because I was being well fed. Like being in a dog show but without anyone lifting my tail and testing my testicles for symmetry. I say well fed, but be warned - I am A Professional and the world of Dim Sum is not one for the unwary. A world where a large variety of small dishes are served, defeating our brave western tactics of memorising a single safe dish and ordering it, or checking the menu to make sure most of the words in the title are edible.

A long history of cultivating culinary skills, combined with occasional periods where they had to eat each other, has gifted the oriental peoples with kitchens containing wonder and terror as well as the usual pots and pans. Think of it as a Temple Of Doom for your mouth: you might find a previously unknown treasure, or end up rolling on the floor with something foreign and harmful lodged in your throat.

For maximum safety make sure the food is ordered by two people who are well used to it, talking in another language, and don't show you the menu. If possible make sure they're grinning and watching you carefully as you eat: that means you won't get any nasty surprises, and you are lucky to have such good friends. Despite these precautions I still ran into a few problems, amazingly, and list them below to save you from a similar fate:

1) Rice noodle skin wrapping.
In response to the increasing number of white devils who can actually use chopsticks without looking like they need a bib, Chinese Counter-Intelligence have developed a frictionless but edible material in which food items could be wrapped. This renders the food utterly inaccessible to anyone who did not start using chopsticks in the womb, or perhaps have them involved in the conception. Brave experiments in stabbing viciously at the food and swearing have so far failed.

2) "Radish filling pastry cake".
That's clearly not the name but was the closest to a translation I could extract from the Drunken Moon Scribblings of the chinese menu. It's a small delicate pastry with a lightly carved outer shell which looks sweet and airy without betraying even the tiniest hint of the miniature star burning within it. Reports from my surviving taste buds suggest that the outer shell is an edible version of the shielding used in fusion reactors, designed to contain vast quantities of scalding heat while giving the false impression that this is something even remotely safe to put in your mouth. It's also possible for it's name to be translated in any one of a million equally incorrect ways, not limited to "Caucasian Killing Thermal Grenade", so be careful. You have been warned.

3) Chicken Foot.
Seriously, chicken foot, cooked up and served just like it was food. I'm no burger-munching xenophobe, and have honestly eaten so much chinese food in the last two years it's a miracle I haven't developed some kind of rice-based superpower, but Chicken-God-Damn-What-The-Foot? I'm all for recycling and efficiency but you can't cut off the one part of the damn animal that isn't made of edible stuff and call it a delicacy.

Imagine a thick juicy T-Bone steak, and keep imagining it and its delicious fleshiness until your mouth is watering. Now picture the meat part shrinking, shrinking and disappearing like hopes of a threesome after forty, until the chewy gristle has constricted tightly around the piece of bone. Now leave it on top of a stove in a jar of spices for a day, then take it out and put it on the table in front of an innocent white guy and try to keep a straight face as you pretend it's something people are meant to eat. What I'm trying to say is that chicken foot is the opposite of food.

Remember these simple warnings, and being pointed at and fed by gibbering foreigners can be as enjoyable for you as it is for me!

Internet Safety Tips

My Internet Safety Tips, for your delectation and delight over at Cracked.

EDIT: This piece got Digg'd into the stratosphere, mainly because it rocks.

Religion Bad

If you've ever had doubts that religion should be kept to the status of 'private hobby', let them end here.

For the modern businessperson who doesn't have time to click links, here's the summary: 20,000 people marched in Pakistan claiming that they should be allowed to rape women.

Take a second to unscrew your face from 'maximum horrified and disgusted'.

The existing law states that a woman has to produce four witnesses to the rape in order to press charges. The current president cleverly deduced that this means that, as long as a rapist resists the urge to invite a barbershop quartet to the event, he gets away with it. Further, he realised that that was not okay, a step that has apparently eluded the entire Pakistan government for the last twenty-seven years.

The protesters claim that this change violates Islamic law and all the usual bullshit, but here's the thing: words are infinite while actions are binary. Right now somebody is saying "Women shouldn't be raped" and you are either for that or against, whatever you say your motivations are. Astonishingly over twenty thousand people - equal to nearly half the population of the Cayman islands - come out to stand in the open and clearly identify themselves as people who think 'raping women is cool!'. Even worse, none of the police on the scene realised that this was the very moment that machine guns had been invented for, and thus lost the chance to increase the average intelligence of the world by five points with half an hour of sustained fire.

Decision making

Alas, this is a fairly accurate model of some decision making I had to do this week.

Click for full size.

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My work for Lowpings.net. I get to play video games, write about them, and get paid for it. This is why when somebody says technology isn't awesome I punch them in the face.

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