My favorite site for killing three minutes is fmylife.com. I also hate FML, because everything is written by teenagers without enough life experience to even invent a decent lie. So, here’s my tribute FML:

Today, I’m at my bf’s house and we’re about to get it on when I feel the urge to make a shitnetz. So I go to the bathroom and my butt explodes so hard that there is shitnetz on the ceiling! I try to clean it but just smear it everywhere so my bf dumps me. To make myself feel better I visit my nana in the hospital. The next day my mom tells me my nana died from diarreah she caught from me! I killed my nana!! But I found out I inherited $1 million and I take the check home and see my crush is banging my ex-bf on the couch. in the butt! I am so mad I rip up the check. I got dumped, killed my nana, lost a million dollars, and apparently I love gay guys. I am a girl. FML

Today, I tried to write the ultimate FML but I couldn’t limit myself to 300 characters. I’m a professional writer considering self-publishing. I guess I really do need an editor. FML

Here’s a better way to experiment with Google Suggestions: the Hint.fm Web Seer. We’ve done this before, but this is prettier! Here’s some more gender-related searches:

(more…)

ATTENTION: If you are currently in a relationship, but no longer want to be in a relationship, you must complete your breakup before the February 1st deadline. If you do not complete the breakup before the end of January, you are obligated to continue the relationship until March 1st out of respect for Valentine’s Day. This includes, but is not limited to, providing a Valentine’s Day gift at least 75% the value of a gift you would give someone you actually loved.

After March 1st, breaking up is sanctioned until the holiday breakup suspension period from 11/14 to 1/14*.

* Not including mandatory breakup suspensions beginning two weeks prior to and two weeks following each partners’ birthdays, the death of a loved one, or the diagnosis of a terminal illness.

Over at Predictably Irrational, Dan did that interesting comparison using Google suggest (which completes your typing based on popular searches). Based on that, here’s how the most popular searches from gals and lads compare:

Girls :: Guys
Commitment :: Oral sex
Time together :: Sex
Rekindling emotions :: Making their chick lose weight
Overcoming jealousy :: Overcoming jealousy

In fairness, girls do think about sex (“how can I get my boyfriend to last longer in bed”) and guys do think about emotions (“how can I get my girlfriend to love me again”), but clearly the overall priorities are exactly what you’d expect.

After the jump, a few of my own gender comparisons, revealing that men want women to be thin, shaven, and hypersexual, while women want men to commit, be sensitive, be honest, and to go down on them. Shocking research, I know.

(more…)

I’d give you a spoiler alert, but let’s face it, you’ve seen this entire movie before–dozens of times. If you have other references for the cliches, please add a comment. The times are based on a pre-release version of the movie, but I’m not suffering through the production version.

• 3:00. Loved one is killed. Scream ‘NOOOOOOOoooOOoOooOo’, and switch to overhead boom camera that pans back. See “Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan” to see a proper example.
• 3:15. “He’s not your father… Son”. The hero discovers that the antagonist is his father. See “Star Wars”.
• 8:45. Imprisoned soldiers with specialized skills assembled for secret team. See “Dirty Dozen”.
• 12:30. Stop up a tank cannon with a fist. While the cliche is putting your finger into a gun barrel, they’ve just taken the cliche and turned it up a notch. This is so cliche, Mythbusters even tested it. See Bugs Bunny vs. Elmer Fudd.
• 14:00. Stopping bullets with a sword. Another Mythbuster-worthy cliche.
• 17:35. Tear off dogtags and throw them angrily on the ground.
• 18:10. Ex-soldier moves into the wilderness to get away from it all. See “Commando” and “Firefox”.
• 23:24. Wake up screaming with war flashbacks. See “Magnum, P.I.”, “Firefox”, and just countless other references.
• 24:21. In fairness, this is an extension of the “ex-soldier moves into the wilderness cliche.” The government comes back to get him because he’s the best. He literally says, “I’m the best there is at what I do.”
• 25:42. Someone is hunting down the old team… See “The Watchmen”.
• 32:35. Loved one is killed. Scream ‘NOOOOOOOoooOOoOooOo’, and switch to overhead boom camera that pans back.Yes, we covered this one before. The same cliche, twice in a single movie.
• 43:30. Hero flatlines, then his heart starts up again.
• 44:00. Build super-warrior, only to lose control of it and have it turn against you.
• 44:30. Leaping off a waterfall. See, “The Fugitive”.
• 47:00. Kindly farmer takes hero in (only to later die). See “Superman”.
• 52:00. Antagonist frames hero by killing innocents and blaming the hero.
• 52:11. Hero drives out of exploding building.
• 52:30. Leaping from danger into a helicopter.
• 52:45. Machine gun shooting at hero, bullets hitting all around him, but never hitting him. This cliche hardly makes sense here, because the hero is bullet-proof.
• 55:45. Hero uses antagonists radio to communicate to headquarters and let them know that the antagonists failed in their mission.
  
• 56:40. Antagonist is trapped alive in wreckage. Instead of killing him directly, walk away, and light a trail of gasoline to cause the wreckage to explode. Mythbusters tested this, too.
• 57:30. Hero walks toward camera, unflinching while massive explosion occurs in the background. Yep, our third explosion-in-the-background shot. Cliches aren’t just for writers; they’re for filmographers, too.

(more…)

Dear mom,

My wife, Ashley, and I bought our dream home in 2004 for $449,000. We took out a 30-year mortgage for the full amount, paying 6.5% interest. We’ve improved the house by adding granite countertops, and we haven’t yet missed a mortgage payment.

Last week, Ashley lost her job. While she’s eligible for unemployment, we were living paycheck-to-paycheck, and we won’t be able to completely cover the mortgage on unemployment.

Ashley’s looking for a job, but it could take months in these tough economic times. I’d like to put the house on the market, but the realtor says we’d be lucky to get $360,000 for it–leaving us owing about $100,000 on the mortgage after realtor fees and closing costs. That’s about $100,000 more than we have.

Should we allow the bank to foreclose on the house? Does Obama have any programs that might help us out?

Signed, Hal in Springfield.

(more…)

Einstein deserves some credit. The Theory Of Relativity was not at all obvious. I can barely understand it, and I certainly couldn’t have come up with it.

That’s not the case for these super-obvious discoveries. We shoulda thought of them sooner:

• The wheel. Round rocks roll. Logs roll. We figured this out about 5,500 years ago. Seriously, what took so long?
• Gravity. Shit falls. Thanks, Newton. It really took humanity until the 17th century to figure this out?
• Evolution. In 1858 my man Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. No offense, Darwin, but ‘duh’. We’d been breeding animals for centuries, intentionally making the same genetic changes evolution had been making all along. And really, all you need to do is notice the similarity between all animals to figure out that we all had common ancestors.
  
• The Earth is round.  Ever seen a ship sail off over the horizon? That’s all you need to figure out that the Earth is round. Humanity first figured this out around 2000 BC, and then we basically forgot it until Pythagoris re-invented the wheel, so to speak, around 500 BC. Yet, thanks to religion, many people still didn’t acknowledge it.
• Religion is fake. This alone held back many of our big scientific discoveries, like evolution and the earth being round. Some people still haven’t figured this one out.