Is your favorite book Lolita, Catch 22, Freakonomics, or Crime and Punishment? If so, then according to the website, Booksthatmakeyoudumb, you’re a genius! The website, using Facebook’s “favorite book” preference, compares college students’ favorite books to their SAT/ACT scores. U of I’s cumulative SAT score was 1249, meaning that our favorite book is a toss-up between Atlas Shrugged or Catch 22…too bad I’ve read neither. 

  Aside from ranking books, the site’s creator, Virgil Griffith, has compiled a list of college students’ favorite bands/artists. Beethoven, Sufjan Stevens, The Counting Crows, and Radiohead top the list.     

  We’ve all experienced it. You’ll be sitting in your room, mindlessly scrolling through facebook profiles, when a sudden sensation envelopes your body. “What could this be?” you ask yourself. “Oh, yeah,” you realize, “I have to go to the bathroom.” So, you make your way to the bathroom, open up the stall door, and there it is, floating in a pool of toilet water. “Ewwwwwwwy,” you think to yourself, “STOOL!” Quickly, you flush the toilet in disbelief.

  Now, normally I wouldn’t waste my precious time writing a blog on the phenomenon floating, stranger turds, but this has become a serious problem, especially within my dorm. Every other time I pay a visit to the little boys room, I am  greeted by one of these little surprises.

  Who or what is to blame for this strange, yet repuslive phenomenon? Do my floormates, blinded by spite, want to punish everyone on the floor with their smelly, pooh grenades? Are they crippled by peer pressure, and everytime they encounter a stranger turd, they feel the pressure to follow suit? Or do they have a latent desire to become one with the wild and detest our technological confines?

  After much unecessary pondering, however, I’ve concluded that the most likely answer is stress. “What is this kid thinking?”you may ask yourself, but yes, I attribute our lack of flushing to stress. With our thoughts consumed by so many things (sex, homework, relationships, sex), we tend to pay less attention to the little, less important tasks that constitute our daily lives. We readily discard them, taking their second nature for granted.

  So please, do not let your numerous stressors supersede the fundamental task of flushing the toilet. We are all stressed out, and when we see your little surprise mocking us with its bouyancy, it just adds to the pile of crap (no pun intended) we have to deal with.

  Oh, yeah, don’t forget to wipe!

A few weeks ago I wrote a column with Dan, and some of you may remember that I’m a big fan of writing in rhyme some of the time, but no one seemed to notice when it actually ran. So here I’ve rewritten the point that I made, obviously not because I’m going to get paid, but to make the rhyme clear for our readers here, and because we all know that I need to get more people into limericks!

Read the rest of this entry »

Step right up ladies and gentlemen…

Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit is a 1993 movie starring Whoopi Goldberg, directed by Bill Duke, and released by Touchstone Pictures. It is a sequel to the successful 1992 movie Sister Act. Most of the original cast reprise their roles in the sequel, including Maggie Smith, Kathy Najimy, Wendy Makkena, and Mary Wickes. Like the original, Sister Act 2 contains several musical performances, which are integrated into the main plot. Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit is widely considered the greatest movie ever made.

Obviously, the entry is missing “after Roland Emmerich’s 1998 tour de force Godzilla“

October 31, 2007: A day to remember.

Brenda Kay Zylstra: With the fairer sex especially, this is a prime opportunity to dress in the tradition of Julia Roberts’ character from “Pretty Woman.”

Lee Feder: Happy Halloween, Ms. Slutty Cop and Mr. Pimp. Welcome to the least enjoyable day of the year for me. With ghouls, ghosts and ghastly, slutty nurses, Halloween on campus is … uhm … an experience.

Me: According to Thorgsten V. Christberg, a professor in cultural studies, psycholinguistics and alchemy at probably Harvard or somewhere, “This particular oeuvre of ’slutty’ costumes showcases the desire of an entire generation of young women to HOLY COW DID YOU SEE THE BAZONGAS ON THAT SLUTTY COP?”

Oh and by the way, were you aware that a large number of people wear “slutty”-themed costumes on Halloween?

You know how you all threaten to flee to Canada every time something minor goes wrong in this country, such as the re-election of a President who can’t pronounce “nuclear”?

Turns out Canadians are just as dishonest as Americans, as we learn in this news clip about computer repair scammers:

I especially enjoyed the owner of the company that wanted to charge $2,000. He seems terrified, not angry. Unless he is angry that the guy didn’t try to charge $3,000.

NOTE TO CUBS FANS: I just wanted to point out that your team is so bad, they got swept by a team (the Diamondbacks) so bad, they got swept by a team (the Rockies) so bad, they got swept in the World Series. Playoffs-wise, you really can’t do much worse.

Still, “100 years” will look really good on t-shirts, won’t it? When your grandkids are old, they can wear the “200 years” shirts.

Compared to the current FEMA leadership, at least. Check this out: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N26366100.htm

Those nutballs at FEMA held a press conference, but instead of inviting real reporters (who does that these days anyway?) and instead had FEMA employees pose as reporters. Fox News better watch out - the government is eliminating the middleman.

The monkeys have attacked and killed an Indian official in their organized battle for civil rights. Slate Magazine helpfully provides a guide to surviving such an attack, though it neglects the most obvious way to get them to stop clawing and biting at you: give them the vote.

Ann Coulter was on tv this week, which I think is news in itself. Who keeps booking her? The only Ann Coulter television appearance I would watch is “Ann Coulter eats a cheeseburger.” She weighs, what, maybe 45 pounds?

Anyway she’s in a bit of trouble for saying this: “That is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews. We believe the Old Testament. As you know from the Old Testament, God was constantly getting fed up with humans for not being able to, you know, live up to all the laws.” (See the transcript here.)

In other words, Jews need to be “perfected.” As a lapsed Jew, my initial response was: “Hey Ann, thanks for calling me out! I was trying to keep that on the down-low, you dig?”

Ann is absolutely right - Jews do need to be perfected. In the spirit of encouraging improvement, here is a list of well-known Jews and the things they need to do to perfect themselves:

Barbara Walters: Re-hire Debbie Matenopolous on “The View”
Jerry Seinfeld: Call his mother more often
Henry Kissinger: Learn to speak without German accent
Barbara Boxer: Not be a woman
Adam Sandler: Re-grow foreskin
Don Rickles: Stop insulting everybody so much
Alan Greenspan: Retract horns
Albert Einstein: Rise from dead
David Berkowitz: No longer allow talking dog to make him kill people as “Son of Sam”
Bob Dylan: Enunciate
Steven Spielberg: Convert to Christianity
Ron Jeremy: Bathe
Scott Green: Stop stealing Ronald McDonald House charity cannisters and spending the money on non-Kosher Big Macs
Ann Coulter: Not technically Jewish but needs way more perfecting than any of the people on this list

Since 2001, Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest has been dominated by Japanese national Takeru Kobayashi. But not this year. A 22-year old engineering student from California named Joey Chestnut won the contest today with a gut-busting 66 hot dogs. That number again, is 66 hot dogs.

It’s a great day to be an American.

Happy 4th of July!