Male Nurses of the World Unite!

If my title in any way implies that I have medical knowledge, please disregard this notion. Aside from obscure medical knowledge for (possibly made up) diseases that I learn on House, I have absolutely no medical expertise. (did you know some cases of irritable bowel can be cured by a cigarette a day?)
I do, however, know about the human condition! And I would like to point out that being a nurse requires a great deal of medical knowledge, patience, and empathy for your fellow man.
That's right, I said MAN. Now if it's a fellow man, this implies the nurse is a man. Stop snickering. There's nothing wrong with male nurses. The only one I know of who was dissatisfied with his profession was Peter Petrelli on Heroes and that was because he had powers and was meant to save the world.
So unless your male nurse is a scrub-clad Clark Kent, stop turning your nose up at him (unless he's checking it for an infection). All of this goes along with the double standard that men are subjected to in today's world. When women go out for the football team, everyone says, "Oh look at how brave she is! You go girl! Tell those misogynists to make their own sandwiches!" But when a man wants to get a pedicure, all he receives is verbal beration (curiously not a word, but it should be) in the form of: "Shouldn't you be chopping down a tree? Shouldn't you be grunting and watching football? Stop stepping outside the bounds of your gender!"
Does anyone else see an issue with this? Are you telling me it's not brave of a man to go and get a pedicure? I've gotten many a pedicure, and they're most enjoyable. Especially whilst reading a graphic novel. You know who else gets pedicures? Paulie Walnuts from The Sopranos. You want to screw around with him? I didn't think so.
So then, what is the problem with male nurses? Or male secretaries? Oh pardon me, male administrative assistants. It takes a lot of bravery for a man to step into a role generally reserved for women. If we're all going to be "progressive" then I say let's be progressive with everybody! So let's see ways in which men can be manly in ways you wouldn't expect:

I get my hair cut at a Salon. Why? Two reasons: the lady who cuts my hair speaks English, and the shampoo girls are hot.

I'm not a male cheerleader, but if I was, I'd be a lot more buff and I'd be in close proximity with hot women all the time.

I like watching reruns of Gilmore Girls on ABC Family. There are three reasons for this: both women are hot, the show is funny and brilliant, and it gives me something to talk to TV watching women about. (The ones who aren't fans of 24 and South Park I mean. You know, the ones with two X chromosomes.)

I've been told that real men wear pink. I have yet to test this hypothesis. I'm going to check my records to see if either Jack Bauer or Batman have worn pink when at a formal gathering. I'll get back to you on that. (possible example: Spider-Man's outfit with the wrong detergent might appear slightly pink)

Most commercials on TV involve a man looking stupid and his wife coming in and setting him straight. What if there was a commercial where the woman didn't know how to work the universal remote for the TV? (imagine that) Well, I'd say there'd be an outcry and all those involved with the commercial would be drawn and quartered (slight exaggeration). I say a society is not truly equal until everyone is made fun of equally. I want to see people insulted who are male, female, white, black, and Canadian. I say that this is America, and that no person should be robbed of his or her freedom to be the focus of an insult that is pop culture referencing, obscure literature referencing, or just plain mean. If Julius Caesar had laughed at Brutus' joke about the shortness of his toga, things might have turned out differently.

I Absolutely Positively Reinforce Negativity

A few months ago, when I should have been watching a Red Sox game, I was instead at team building job training with an already built team. It was about over, but they offered to let us climb the climbing wall. Obviously I didn't want to, I wanted to watch Papelbon strike out some Rays (go Sox!). But then the man said the magic words: "Here we believe that a challenge is whatever you choose it to be, if going up one step on the ladder is a challenge, good for you! But really, it's up to you because we believe in Challenge By Choice!" I also remember a womanly squeal after that, but I might have imagined it (impossible).
Well, since they had to be hippies about it, I climbed their wall. And I did pretty well too, for a skinny little Trekker. But I just couldn't climb that last bit of rope, a fact which didn't bother me in the slightest. Ever try climbing a rope when you have no stamina, no muscles, and it's 38.7 degrees out? Not much fun. But as many times as I tried to get down, they just wouldn't let me.
"No man! You can do it! I believe in you! You CAN DOOOOOOO ITTTTTT!"
"No really, you don't understand." I begged this flower child sociopath. "I have plenty of self esteem, I'd like to come down now."
"NO! Just believe in yourself and you can do it!"
My muscles were frozen, that's all there was to it. I wasn't in a Hallmark movie, as made clear by my severe lack of childhood trauma or physical deformity, and the fact my mother wasn't played by Andie Macdowell. As such, my muscles stayed frozen and the power ballads remained silent. I just wanted to get down so I could watch the game.
Well it took a full twenty minutes for me to be released from my sky high shackles (I might also add that those harnesses are most unpleasant, and eliminated the already slim possibility of having offspring) and by this time I couldn't even write my name on the sign out sheet.
I was sore for three weeks! All because of some positive reinforcement. Want to know what the world might have been like had this technique been used throughout history? Well I'm glad you asked that, I will tell you exactly what would have happened:

Scene: Revolutionary War. George Washington runs over the plan with his fellow generals.
"Well I was thinking: don't fire until you see the reds of their coats!"
"Uhh, yeah GW that's a...that's a great plan! You can DOOOOO ITTTT!"
As a result, we're all paying ten quid for a fish and chips, which is far too expensive so we all throw a bloody wobbly!

Scene: A train on the way to Gettysburg, 1863. President Lincoln is putting the finishing touches on his Address.
"Now tell me if this is right, Billy: Four score, a decade, and a few months ago..."
"Sounds great Abe! I believe anything you say, you can DOOOOOO ITTTTT!"
As a result, a man in Gettysburg realizes his President can't count, and thus shouldn't be trusted. He then starts a movement against the Civil War, causing the North to pull out its soldiers. The South wins, slavery remains, all food is deep fried, and we all call soda "pop."

Scene: Little Bighorn. General Custer about to make his last stand, unbeknownst to him.
"So I was thinking, we're outnumbered by about 50 to 1, but I think we can take these Injuns."
"If you believe in yourself General, you can DOOOOOO ITTTTT!"
As a result, the poor General gets slaughtered along with his men. Oh wait, THAT'S A REAL STORY!

So as you can see, positive reinforcement is useless. Instead, let's all remember some great "negative reinforcement" stories such as:

"Japan hit us hard FDR! Your plan of non response is awful!"
"Henry, this Ford sucks! You might as well just stop at the Model S."
"I don't know George, I really think it's a terrible choice to put Jar-Jar in this movie." (bad example)

As can plainly be seen here, putting people down is just another way of giving them an opportunity to get back up again and be better. In case you didn't know, this is what Batman's dad told him, so it's definitely true. (interlude: all superheroes are born out of negative events) So if you want to disagree with Batman, then Bob's your uncle and don't forget to bring a brolly if it rains.

Bring Back The Pony Express!

Traveling by pony, how long would it take to get a package twelve miles down the road? I'm going to go with: sometime less than fifteen days. You see, I am an obsessive tracker of Amazon.com shipments, and I check several times a day until I have the newest addition to my collection in my hands. Well, last year I was awaiting a package in the mail and it was at the stop that comes right before my house. Meaning it should've been there the next day.
WELL
I waited a solid 15 days (I could've built 15 Romes in that time) and it finally arrived. And to make it even worse, the label "Express Delivery Recommended" was attached. Good thing all I was waiting on was 100 Bullets volume 10 and not my next insulin shot.
See if it was just the delay, I'd chalk it up to ordinary human stupidity. But since they left me a little note of irony, I'm forced to conclude that they're mocking me. I'm their biggest customer! Why do they hate me so much? This, after all, wasn't the first incident.
Let's go back two and a half years, during this time I had a free two day shipping deal with Amazon. And yet, I wanted this particular item on Saturday. So I paid five extra dollars to receive it on Saturday via DHL (little known fact, DHL stands for: Demonic Hierarchy of Lateness). Well it didn't arrive until Wednesday because they couldn't find my house.
Is that supposed to be funny? You'd have a tougher time finding the White House than my house! I live off of a major highway, and the White House is right in the middle of the nonsensical DC streets (which I'm sure make a cool Masonic symbol from up above, but from the ground you're out of luck unless your name is Daedalus). And the best part was, I could've paid nothing to get it on Tuesday.
So they tricked me into paying five extra dollars to receive the package a day late. Diabolical. I think I finally figured out why. Because they can. Only the USPS claims to deliver through rain, sleet, and snow, but they conveniently don't tell us exactly how long that will take. And UPS doesn't deliver on Saturdays (commies). But we have no other choice, since DHL can't find houses on Saturdays. They have too much power, and so they mock us. They could hold back our electric bills and we'd have no electricity. They could hold back our birthday cards and rend families asunder. So I say let's overthrow this corrupt system and bring back The Pony Express. Because A) Ponies don't know what day it is, they can deliver anytime. B) Ponies don't have to stop for red lights because they can take shortcuts through the woods. C) Ponies aren't smart enough to get drunk on power.
DHL was bankrupted at the mere mention of The Pony Express and their return. What does that tell you? It tells you they should've just given me my five dollars back.

Women's Basketball and Lacking Police Movies of the 70s

The men's basketball team at my school is, as Woody Allen would put it, quite jejune. Our women's basketball team, on the other hand, is quite excellent. They're one of the best teams in the country in fact.
Too bad no one cares.
Only recently did it dawn on me why this is, and it's not because they're women, but because they play the game too properly. No one wants to watch a proper game of basketball! No fouls, so no opportunities to yell at the ref for a bad call. No one tosses the ball out of bounds, no one plays dirty. Americans like dirty, no sense pretending. Ever hear of the classic movie of the 70s, Clean Harry? Neither has anyone else. Its relatively short running time of an hour and forty-five minutes is full of nothing but waiting for lawyers to arrive at the station, getting a search warrant from a judge, failing to find anything at the crime scene due to a lacking search warrant, and filling out paperwork explaining what went wrong with the search warrant.
Yeah that was really going to produce four sub par sequels.
Or how about the show 24? Would anyone watch it if it was truly realistic? First off, it would be called 48+ and it would be horrendously boring. Who wants to watch Jack Bauer sitting in traffic every Monday at 9/8 Central? Instead of "drop the gun!" and "holster your weapon!" We'd be hearing: "Please lower your weapon, sir. Please lower your weapon, sir. Please lower your weapon, sir. (commerical break) Pleas....(yawn)" After that crap I'd have turned off the TV and taken up basket weaving.
You know what film had the biggest opening weekend of all time? The Dark Knight, a film about a vigilante. You know what the greatest movie of all time is? The Godfather, a film about a mobster. But good old-fashioned Clean Harry has gone the way of the dodo and Gigli 2.
The point is, no one wants to watch a realistic television show. We have our own realistic television shows five days a week from 9-5, which go on for seventy seasons or more, have a severe lack of car chases, and no guest appearances by Jessica Alba. That doesn't sound like anything I'd want to watch. So the next time someone mentions how boring women's basketball is, don't feed them to the Amazons just yet. Instead remember that TV's number one doctor is an egotistical drug addict, and he's the man.

You Can't Spell Satan Without SAT

I'd like to see the SAT scores of the moron who came up with the SATs. He was probably some kid named Stephen Andrew Trotsky who was turned down for Homecoming by way of the following note passed in class:

So Susie, do you think you would like to go to Homecoming with me?

Let me put it to you this way, Stephen goes with Susie as vegetarians go with
A) Steak
B) Hamburgers
C) Lamb Chops
D) Veal

And so the cycle of hatred and pain continued. Outraged that Susie could be so cold, Stephen swore that he would forever torture high school girls and their boyfriends with analogies of his own making. He would render their four years of homework and term papers useless by making his test the only true road to higher education. But he wouldn't stop there, he would schedule this ultra important test for seven in the morning, and students would be registered to take their tests the next county over, ensuring a wake up time before sunrise. Then he would fill the test with essays such as, "Keeping in mind the didactic sycophantism of late 19th century Prussia, please explain why Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade is the only PG-13 Indiana Jones film of the eighties even though The Temple of Doom is more violent (use as many quotes from Hobbes' Leviathan as possible).
To solidify his revenge, Stephen would forever imprint the pain of this near-impossible test on the testers' minds in the form of his initials: SAT.
Well, unfortunately for the world's students, his plan was believed to be impressive because by this time he had earned several letters after his name, which magically rendered everything he said as meaningful (his Ph.d was actually in the field of "Interpretation of the works of Dr. Seuss in light of pre-Cold War Russia" but no one ever thought to check).
And thus, the SAT was born.
This is my favorite version of the SAT origin story, because it's a very human story about a cold man who left his heart in sixth period Geometry with a note of rejection. I much prefer this to the origin story that involves a committee that was given millions of dollars in order to produce seemingly the dumbest test in human history, when the money would have been better spent ensuring that the number of raisins in Raisin Bran was upped to three scoops.

Australian Dessert and the End of Life as We Know It!

About two years ago, I was reading a book in the Math building while waiting for a class. I noticed there were pictures on the walls of someone's worldwide trip from wherever to wherever, so I began to look at said pictures. One of them was entitled "Australian Dessert." In the .374 seconds it took my eyes to go from the title to the picture, various images flashed through my mind: kiwi pie, Vegemite pudding with a eucolyptus garnish, a cake shaped like a joey, etc. To my dismay, there was a photo of a tree, amongst a bunch of sand.
Well, in order to understand this phenomenon, I first had to lower my IQ noticeably. After that twelve minute process was done with, I realized, they meant Australian DESERT.
Here are some examples to avoid confusion:
I enjoyed a nice dessert at Applebee's last night.
I exiled abysmal spellers to the Sahara desert with naught but a gun with one bullet and a compass that won't point north.

Mark my words, our inability to spell and our failure to use proper grammar will be the end for us all, and we will be done for. How many of you just became annoyed that I ended a sentence with a preposition?
Not enough.
I encounter these problems far too often, in class the other day someone asked me how many Bs are in robbery. Somehow my brain didn't explode and I politely answered. However, for those of you wondering, here are some examples:
Father John bought his fancy new duds at the robery yesterday afternoon.
There was a robbery at the robery last night, be on the lookout for suspects wearing electric blue robes of the bath variety.
See the difference? Hopefully you do, because 2 Fast 2 Furious was the beginning of the end. Imagine the possibility of disastrous consequences. I see, in my mind, a text message from a man being held hostage in a bank to one of his intelligent friends:
"Dude, I'm at First National and I'm stuck in a robery!"
"Really? Wow, that's great! Could you pick up a double breasted electric blue for me?"
By the time the friend's IQ has lowered, it's too late. So the next time you think it's okay to stand by while people use effect instead of affect, or give a military officer a rank of "unpopped corn," remember that you're instilling the apocalypse.

I've Been Blacklisted!

In a good way.
I've been blacklisted, it seems, by university interest groups (Greenpeace, Green war, Green Switzerland, etc.) Now, as some may recall, about a year ago I was stopped one too many times by an otherwise very polite member of Greenpeace on my way to class. It had been the third occurrence in a week, and by this time they'd given me so many brochures that I began to wonder if they made them out of reconstituted tofu, or if they were just a bunch of hypocrites. Neither would surprise me. Either way, I was having a particularly annoying day for whatever reason, and I plainly told them that the next time they bothered me I was going to burn down a tree. Not because I wanted to, but because they made me.
They haven't spoken to me since.
Now, part of this phenomenon is due to the fact that most of my class travel time since then has been in the cold winter when there are no petitions to sign because as we know, it's only important to fight for what you believe in when it's a balmy 60-80 degrees. But recently I've noticed that as I approach the diner for a delightfully overpriced snack, the people standing outside with petitions to sign avoid me like Outback Steakhouse. It even seems like they look away in fear. This could be because my goatee has been labeled "slightly nefarious in the correct lighting," but I doubt it.
Conclusion: I finally beat them.
So the next time someone stops you to sign a petition which, however important the cause may be, is a severe hindrance to your schedule, remember that they're as flimsy as their diets.

Apples and Oranges

As usual, I have broken through a seemingly impenetrable argument, which is as follows: "you can't compare those two things! That's like comparing apples and oranges!" Up until now, whenever you heard those words, you had to hang your head in shame and walk away, forced to change your opinion because they played the orange card. Well no longer. You can't compare apples and oranges?
YES YOU FREAKING CAN!
How is this possible you ask? Simple. Apples you can just start eating, and they're delicious all of .27 seconds after you've picked it up. Oranges on the other hand, take a lot of work. You have to peel them, and your hands get all sticky, juice can get squirted in your face, and if you have hangnails they're on fire. There's an entire line of orange peelers to assist people in eating their sub par fruit. You don't need to buy something extra to eat apples. It takes an approximate 2 minutes and 43 seconds to peel an orange (not counting the time it takes to remove the juice from your eye). By that time, I could have been 2 minutes and 42.73 seconds into an episode of Star Trek, all the while enjoying a delicious apple.

In addition, I believe the saying goes "as American as apple pie." This means apples are an American fruit. Where do we get oranges? Florida! A state which is neighbors with Cuba, a communist country, who probably ships them the oranges in crates along with their cigars. Because we know the old people aren't out in the fields picking oranges. So, apples are American and oranges are Communist.

As if that wasn't enough to convince you, an apple a day does what? It keeps the doctor away. You know what an orange a day does? It gives you sores in your mouth. That doesn't even rhyme.
So the next time someone tells you that you can't compare apples and oranges, tell them Domenic says you're wrong.