Servicey!

This week, in Science: You’re about to die, watch out, or don’t, I’m not exactly directly invested in your well-being and safety, you know, so, friendly advice, take it or leave it, I’m not your mother, I’m just a dude on the internet. You’d do well to quit eating McGriddles tho. Also: Whales! We’re having a whale of a time.

• Another doomed spacecraft set to fall back to earth, this headline reads. But they buried the lede here, which is: HOLY SHIT LOOK OU-
• What the hell is a “boffin”? Is that something weird, and British? It totally sounds like a weird British thing to me. Like, is that what they call hats, over there? You never know with the British. They’re so weird. I mean, blood sausage. What is that, even? Thank god we won that war. Thank the Lord.
• There’s a Russian icebreaker (there’s a Yakov Smirnoff joke in here somewhere) en route to free 100 Beluga whales trapped in an icy, watery prison, of ice, and water. But maybe the whales like being trapped in ice? Nobody ever asks the whales these days.
• “Bridle Path Elementary students learn about energy use through Christmas lights”! That is so cute. Compared to last month’s lesson, which was crushing lifelong regret, through heroin. Bridle Path is a Montessouri school, I think.
• Here’s what life in 2100 looks like: your face will melt off in the ongoing nuclear war, and everyone you know and love will be dead. And you can pay for train rides with your cell phone!!!
• The newest science on heart-healthy diets? It’s whatever you’re not eating, shit-heart. Yeah, I called you shit-heart, and you can’t catch me, with that shit heart of yours. Fatty.
• Why Science is Failing Us. Hint: cocaine is a major factor. Science cocaine. For science.

Remember when you had your first child, and life was so full of joy and promise, and you had high hopes for an Ivy League education and a rich life for your offspring, full of high-earning-power executive career positions and yachting and mingling with the crustiest of the upper crust? HAH. Good luck with that:

REMEMBER the Dumb Kid in your math class who couldn’t understand what a square root was? Gone. Vanished from the earth like the stegosaurus. If your child is at an elite school, there are no dumb kids in his or her math class — only smart and smarter.

James Atlas reports in this Sunday’s NYT from the front lines of Tiger Mom Nation, where kids are killing themselves for an Ivy League education. Almost literally. A few examples:

• Kids who fucking choose archaeological digs in the Negev desert in lieu of summer camp
• Kids who fucking file stories from Bosnia or El Salvador on their summer vacations for high-school newspapers
• Kids who fucking work at orphanages in Katmandu, over Christmas break, for fun
• 12-year-olds with fucking pilot’s licenses, taking fucking calculus

The rich get richer. For some parents, nothing beats that feeling of sending little Johnny to Harvard when neighbor Suzy only gets into Brown. It’s better than sex for these soulless, abusive folk, and certainly takes the place of all that sex they’re not having while groading Johnny to practice that overture just five more times before bed.

For career women who’ve lost their careers, their kids become their careers, their new outlet for all that overachievingness their parents fostered on them at the same age, while failing to realize they’re playing into the same cycles of parental pressure and emotional neglect their very parents passed onto them. And now, in our New International Economy, your kid doesn’t just have to compete with all the other nerds in Mock Trial at their high school: they have to compete with nerds from Bulgaria and Africa, where they have a lot more time to study, while they’re not making out in air-conditioned movie theaters and sexting.

Is Yale really even worth it, at this point? Because it would be a lot easier to just settle for state school. At least then your kids might turn out kind of, you know, normal. But then they might not end up rich! And for the rich, that’s a fate worse than death.

What do you do when your industry is dying, quickly being replaced by an electronic equivalent that’s thousands of times faster, more convenient and cheaper? Much like magazines, you turn to self-advertising, to remind the country, hey, we’re still around! Doing what you do on computers— but with paper!

Americans watching college football games and news broadcasts in the next week may notice new ads from USPS — long known for its campy messages promoting Priority Mail shipping services. Now, the “If it fits, it ships” campaign will share airtime with two 30-second spots designed to remind customers that paper mail, unlike e-mail, can’t be hacked, and that letter carriers are still providing reliable and safe deliveries to doorsteps.

Here are some other potential advertising strategies, on the house:

• “USPS— Because Birthday Cards Are Usually Full of Cash®”
• “The Postal Service— Not Just An Indie Pop Band Anymore!®”
• “Your Mailman: America’s Favorite Weed Dealer Since 1952” (© Mitch Hedberg)
• “The Post Office: The Most Efficient Way to Communicate Information, Forever”
• “Mail: Like E-Mail, But Slower!”
• “The United States Postal Service: Bringing You Those Dinky Coupon Books That You Love To Throw Away Since 1852.®”

Just a few thoughts. USPS: If you wanna talk, you know where I live.

Shroom trippin’! Plasma givin’! Morning studyin’! Cig quittin’! Coffee drinkin’! Miner smokin’! And more news about Cancer than you can shake a Cancer-ridden stick at, while having Cancer. It’s your Thursday health watch, where we watch your health— with those beady little eyes that just look so punchable.

• Dropping shrooms will improve your personality and make you more “open.” Yeah sure, but they’ll also make you listen to a lot of jam bands and wear hemp. Scientists never mention the cons, these days.
• Doctors just love to infuse your perfectly healthy kids with frozen plasma, for no real reason at all, besides the office pool to see who can inject the most kids with plasma this month. Jim’s dropped 15 units this week! Dude’s gaining heat quick!! 
• Easily embarrassed people are more likely to be trusted. Go around your office and point out tiny physical flaws in all your coworkers’ appearances this afternoon. The ones that cry? Say hello to your new gossip clique.
• Younger men are overtreated for prostate cancer, older men are undertreated for prostate cancer, and it seems doctors these days just can’t figure out whose anuses to prod anymore. Hint: If your doctor wants to prod your anus, you don’t have cancer, and your doctor is a pervert.
• Tobacco firm research confirms they knew cigarettes were bad for you! But we all thought it was a healthy phlegm.
• Students in early classes get better grades. Which is weird, because they have less time to drink and have casual sex. I don’t see the correlation??
• There’s this really cheap, all-natural drug that helps you quit smoking, and it’s called My Fist, Punching You In The Face Every Time You Think About Smoking. Treatment is free because your face is really fun to punch.
• Coffee helps women avoid depression. Why isn’t this on the cover of Cosmo?! I already have silky smooth skin and tight thighs! It’s not helping with this crippling existential crisis!
• More pregnant women are testing positive for drugs than ever before, which is probably bad for babies, but not bad for those babies’ PR teams. Little Johnny just made Page 6 last week for the first time!
• Cancer myths persist. Here’s one: Cancer makes your boobs sooooo big! But not too big! I love spreading false rumors.

The Patriot Act may have granted the Department of Homeland Security virtually unlimited rights to do whatever they want to prevent terrorism, but it is sorely lacking in Plumbing System Protection clauses:

WASHINGTON — Restrooms are back in service at a General Services Administration building, where a toilet exploded and injured two federal workers.

The bathrooms at the GSA Regional building were declared off-limits after two Department of Homeland Security employees were injured Monday by the toilet blast, GSA spokesman William Marshall said.

At least one of the employees was taken to a hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries, fire officials said.

A few questions, here:

• Were these workers using the same toilet at the same time? Were they doing cocaine, or hooking up?
• If so: Why isn’t our country doing enough to prevent at-work cocaine use by the very people charged with keeping that terrorism-funding cocaine out of our nation’s bathrooms and toilet stalls?
• What are the exact circumstances of these non-life-threatening injuries? What kinds of injuries are we to expect from an exploding toilet? High-pressure sewer water ejection, into the face?
• Was this an act of terrorism? Cherry-bombing the plumbing system at DHS sounds a lot like terrorism.

Expect a highly-detailed report tonight from Fox and Friends taking a very close look at the growing threat of our nation’s toilets and cantaloupes. Remember: Just because you use/snort blow off it every day doesn’t mean it can’t be used in an act of terrorism. You’ve been warned, America.

Remember in college, when you’d be at The Library (there’s a bar named The Library on every college campus in America, this is in the Constitution,) and two fratty looking dudes would break into a fistfight, while the chick they were fawning over looks on in shock and disgust? Then one of those dudes’ meeker, sidekick-ish friends swoops in to take her home? This happens literally twice a night at every college bar ever.

Well, we learned all that from Meese:

Female moose, or cows, are able to manipulate amorous males into fighting each other, allowing the more desirable bulls to emerge as mates, according to the study, which is based on observations made in Alaska’s Denali National Park. 

Female moose use protest moans to ward off small male suitors, the study points out.

Bowyer and his study partners found they also use those protest moans when approached by some big suitors, setting off fights between large bull moose.

Who’s worse, horny sorority girls or horny sorority moose? (Meese?) Either way, you put ‘em around a keg and two dudes from the frisbee team, nothing good will come. Something’ll definitely come, that is, but nothing good.

You don’t scream and cower and piss your pants, you punch that bear in the face.

This week, in Health: Rectal blasts, cyber bullying, binge drinking, masturbating, crying, not-not moving and How To Make It in Corporate America. Hint: the secret is to not be a dick. And now you owe me a consultant’s fee! Hint: the real secret is consultant’s fees.

• Chewing more helps you eat less. It also helps you not tell that story about the little girl who beat cancer with prayer, for the forty-fourth time in a fucking row. Grandma.
• Hypoallergenic pets are a myth! THAT’S WHAT YOU GET FOR PLAYING GOD. A ridiculously expensive Labradoodle that doesn’t even work.
• More girls are cyber-bullied than boys? Nooo. Teen girls talking shit behind each others’ backs, anonymously? NOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
• Why is Colorado thinner than any other state? Does it have something to do with all that weed, and all that exercise, and all that fresh, mountain air? No, it’s because of the lap-band they got last year. This is between you and me. And Colorado.
• Boys who masturbate are likelier to have safe sex. GREAT NEWS FOR THE INTERNET!!!!
• They used to say all crying is good crying, because you just let it all out, but That Is Bullshit. Instead of crying, try bottling your emotions up inside, or drinking. Doctor’s orders! Dr. Jameson’s orders.
• Instead of crying, which is a loss of perfectly good fluids, try shooting fluids into your colon with a hose, which is a gain of fluids. This ain’t rocket science, people! It’s colon science.
• 1 in 4 Americans are binge drinking. 1 in 4 Americans should meet me at Timmy O’Toole’s tonight, because I feel we’d get along swimmingly.
• Speaking of colon science: doctors say that when it comes to not moving ever vs. moving a little bit sometimes, that that is a terrible side-by-side, and you are disgusting.
• “Don’t copycat an unpopular boss’s behavior, study reminds.” You’re who they’re referring to when they whisper about “unpopular Steve” in the lounge, study reminds. Everyone hates you and you’re going to die alone, study reminds. Studies! MAJOR BUZZKILLS.

What does Lithuania smell like, and why in God’s name would anyone want to smell it?

Three Lithuanian entrepreneurs have created a new national fragrance in an attempt to make “scents” of what they say is a misunderstood country.

Dainius Rutkauskas and two other friends have created the Lietuvos Kvapas as a novel memory aid.

They claim the “national perfume” – which is more an air freshener – was a crude attempt to create the “scent of Lithuania”.

The fragrance combines subtle hints of:

• Perogi
• Burning gasoline
• Vodka
• Freshly-baked bread
• Blood
• Tears
• Anger

To form what some are calling “the fragrance that reminded everyone about Lithuania, last week.”

Also: “They read in their newspapers of Lithuanians committing crimes or doing weird stuff. But we are not criminals or bandits.” And then this.

(Umm, this conveniently showed up in a Google Image Search for “dunkin donut.”)

America Runs on Dunkin’, sure, but America Also Runs on Blowjobs:

ROCKAWAY — A 29-year-old woman working the night shift at Dunkin Donuts is facing prostitution charges for allegedly taking breaks from selling donuts and coffee to provide sexual services in exchange for money.

Melissa Redmond, 29, of Mine Hill, was arrested after a six week investigation known as “extra sugar” that began when police got a tip that people could go to the Dunkin Donuts on Route 46 and arrange a liason with Redmond.

“Extra Sugar”! HAH! Like sugar in coffee, but also, like sugar, as in sex. Cops are hilarious.

Anyway, does this not seem like the perfect business plan?! I mean, she was working the night shift, serving up caffeine and sugary treats for beat-down truckers and night shifters. Dunkin’ Donuts was practically built on these creature comforts for the tired. Throwing a handy-j in the mix there is the natural extension of that business model: get a pick-me-up, get a tasty treat, and get off, all in one convenient drive-through transaction.

And to think, this is considered illegal. Could this have something to do with America’s dissatisfaction with God’s overall job performance? I mean, in an America where such perfect things are disallowed, how could you NOT be angry with God? Get it together, lawmakers.