You gotta love science though, swooping in like Captain Obvious to point out shit we figured out years ago and backing that up with some tests they performed on their mates. Case in point: the recent study published in Consciousness and Cognition that found that moderate drunkness inspires creativity.
Researches invited a record-breaking group of 40, that’s right FOUR ZERO, young men who were social drinkers to eat bagels, get a little sauced up and watch Ratatouille, after which 69% of the tipsy guys admitted to crying at the end (joking. But I’d bet good money they blubbed like little girls).
At the end, the drunk guys not only solved the questions they were asked relating to the film faster, but they answered 58% of their questions correctly, compared to the measly 42% the sober Joes got right.
The test subjects were kept just below the legal limit for the test though which, let’s be honest, is hardly drunk at all.
Their staggering conclusion following these ground-breaking tests? Getting moderately drunk dampens our brain’s “executive functionâ€, ie. the rational, logical part of the brain. Thus, if less executive function is inked to more creativity, this might explain why writers, artists and musicians are more vulnerable to substance abuse.
Well done science. Pat on the back.
As facetious as I’d like to be about this though, it now gives me a legitimate excuse to smash a glass or two of whisky in the evenings before I sit down to write.
Now I just gotta find an excuse for the two at breakfast, the three at elevensies, the five over lunch and the two at teatime and I’m all set!
So it’s old news by now but in case you missed it, Jason Russell (creator of the “Kony 2012†viral video) had a bit of a whoospie last week Thursday and decided to lose his damn mind.
There are a couple of different versions of what went down, the worst of which say he got white-girl wasted, stripped naked and ran through the streets shouting and masturbating at the cars.
Less graphic versions claim he was just suffering from over-exhaustion and didn’t engage in public fappery, but almost all the reports I’ve read agree he was naked and had clearly gone shit-your-pants-mad.
I’ll admit that finding out about this startling development in the Kony 2012 saga left me feeling like a bit of a jerk for posting all those Kony 2012 memes last week.
It was probably smarmy, cynical douchebags like me who drove the poor guy crazy. But then again, what the hell was he expecting to happen?!
When you shoot and publicise a video as deeply manipulative and emotionally provocative as “Kony 2012†and use social media to market it to hordes of white-guilt ridden liberals with a call to action that they can fulfil by simply clicking “shareâ€, of COURSE it’s going to explode on the interwebs!
You’d have to be either supremely naive or just plain stupid to not expect “Kony 2012†to get the attention that it did. Don’t put that shit out there if you can’t handle the backlash it’s going to create.
Here’s the video of the person who is allegedly Jason Russell losing his shit in the street:
How the mighty have fallen…
Stay tuned for the next exciting development in the “Kony 2012†saga.
God I hate bandwagons. Even the word is fucking stupid. What does it even mean? A wagon bands cruise around in? Since fucking when?! And who the fuck would want to jump on one of those?
Anyway. Regardless of what the origin of the term is, EVERYONE is talking about the Kony 2012 video so I figured I would too because site hits are like crack and daddy needs a fix.
The underlying message from the YouTube video about Kony is “make the evil fucker famous so that we can kill himâ€, but if you’re dumb enough to believe that’s the only thing motivating Invisible Children, then stop reading this now.
I’m not going to go into a detailed breakdown of the counter-Kony 2012 arguments doing the rounds on the interwebs at the moment because I know you guys are smart and either know this already or can look it up later, so here’s my take on it all:
Yes, Kony is a supremely evil person and deserves to die for what he’s done
Yes, it’s a good thing that now the world is aware of what happened (PAST tense) in Uganda and it’s a good thing that people are uniting across borders for a common cause
But the fact is, Kony hasn’t been active in Uganda since 2006 and he and his troops no longer occupy the country and are rumoured to have moved to the DRC
So why campaign to send more American troops into Uganda so long after Kony’s reign of merciless slaughter and brainwashing has ended?
Oil. Plain and simple. America needs an excuse to get troops in there so they can get their filthy mitts on Uganda’s oil supplies and what better smokescreen than Kony 2012? It’s the Facebook version of 9/11 all sugar-coated and easy to swallow
Also, only 32% of the profits from Invisible Children go to Uganda. The rest goes into funding more movies and paying everyone working for the organisation’s salaries
And let’s not forget the powerfully manipulative narrative that underpins the whole Kony 2012 video. Did he have to bring his kid into it? “When I grow up I wanna be like you dad!†Are you fucking serious?! Be wary of anyone who resorts to tactics like that to make you believe something, it is deeply manipulative
But don’t get me wrong, I think uniting people against a man like Kony is a noble cause which is why, in my own way, I’m going to help the cause by making Kony even famouser.
Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know this already, but for the rest of you, you might want to sit down because what I’m about to tell you WILL BLOW YOUR MIND!
For decades people have speculated that if anyone had to pass 999 followers on Twitter, it might cause a similar scenario that was predicted when the year 2000 approached ie. a complete technological meltdown.
Well, I am simultaneously proud and relieved to tell you that as of 18h16 yesterday (UTC/GMT +2) I reached exactly 1000 followers on Twitter and from what I can tell, technology everywhere is FINE.
By my estimate, I now have the most Twitter followers of anyone in the world.
Not even big name celebrities like Tina Yothers (“Family Tiesâ€, 340 followers), Andrew Rubin (“Police Academy†479 followers) or Rodney Dangerfield (“Rusty: A Dog’s Taleâ€, dead) can boast as many followers as ME, your Tiger pal.
But at the same time, reaching this new high in online super-stardom has made me pause, become emotional and think really hard about the people who follow me.
Who are you?
Who are you people and why are you following me?
Do you think I have all the answers? That because I’ve reached the absolute pinnacle of online influence and success that I’m some kind of messiah? Some kind of prophet put on earth to guide you, protect you and give your life meaning and direction?
I didn’t ever think I could be a person like that. But winning at Twitter has changed me in ways I don’t even know yet. So yeah, all I want to say is that if you want to I dunno, make some kind of religion out of me or something, I’m ok with that.
But if you don’t mind just holding back until I’m back from Thailand (remember that prize I won? Turns out it was for anywhere in the world so yeah, we’re leaving for Thailand on Monday, wa-hoo!), that would be great.
I mean sure, work a bit on the basic principles of the religion (there is plenty of material on the site to help you with this) and maybe sketch out a few ground rules, but please don’t get into the part where you hand over vast amounts of money / material possessions / your firstborn until I’m back, ok?
As amazingly entertaining, arbitrary and awesome as the internet is, there’s also a darker, far more sordid side to it.
Yes, you guessed it. I’m referring to the “cute factor†that turns distinctly average content into a powerful internet supervirus because we live in a sibling society where people dwell in the perpetual twilight of their childhood years, refusing point blank to grow the fuck up.
It’s Neverland, and it’s populated with sickeningly adorable characters that people LOVE simply because they evoke that “aaaawwwwww, cuuuuuuuuuttte†reaction that defies all rational logic.
Case in point – Sophia Grace Brownlee and her hilariously useless sidekick cousin.
For those of you who don’t know these two distinctly mediocre, irritating little girls, let me enlighten you.
It all began back in September last year when this video hit the internet. Brace yourselves, the content I’m about to show you WILL instantly trigger your gag reflex.
Yeah. Pour yourself a whisky now, because it only gets worse.
So mom films her kid and goofy sidekick singing a distinctly average version of an irritating pop song which, let’s be honest, isn’t the first time in history that’s ever been done.
The difference is that is years past, recordings like that would be relegated to the VHS drawer under the TV and not surface again until the “performer’s†21st birthday where she would die of embarrassment the second the play button was pressed.
Instead, this video exploded in such a huge way on the internet that it has had no less than 31 MILLION views to date!
So great. Well done to everyone involved. Excellent work guys. Let’s just get on with our lives shall we?
No. We shall not. Enter Ellen Degenerate who, credit where it’s due, is one smart lesbian. She latches onto these talentless little chavs like a goddamn barnacle and exactly one month after the video appears on YouTube, this happens:
People lose their minds. They think these two girls are the most adorable, cheeky, loveable, talented, and all round SUPERCUTEST things they have ever seen and Ellen’s eyes turn into gigantic green dollar signs as a world of possibilities opens up to her.
One month after that performance on her show, she gets them all tarted up to the max and plants them squarely on the red carpet at the American Music Awards.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
So now not only do celebs have to put up with the paparazzi swarming them like locusts on the red carpet, but they also have two (let’s be honest, one) hysterical, screaming pink girls to deal with.
I love the cousin though. “We are so excited to be here, aren’t we Rosie?†“Whatever. I can’t believe you dragged me into this again…â€
And the thing is, unlike the other members of the press, you have to be nice to the cute little girls or you WILL be crucified on the spot and left desperately trying to douse the flames of your near-unsalvageable career.
Something else that’s interesting to note on that last clip is how exponentially precocious the little scamps are becoming – a sure sign that they are being spoilt ROTTEN which any child psychologist will tell you is a great way to raise kids.
But whatever right? Who cares? I saw those videos last year, shrugged it off as people being pathetic and had another whisky.
BUT, in a furious bout of trawling the interwebs yesterday what do I find? ANOTHER fucking video of these two on the red carpet of ANOTHER awards ceremony.
Only this time it’s the Grammys and as you can tell from both the girls and the celebs themselves, everyone’s starting to get a little tired of this sparkly pink dog and pony show.
I love the way all the celebs address Ellen in a thinly disguised “seriously, enough with this shit now†tone, priceless!
How did this ever get so big? What are the implications for our society that something like this is not only allowed, but encouraged to happen? Those kids will never be the same. How can anything they ever do ever live up to the experiences they’ve been spoiled with thus far?
I mean to be fair, they don’t know any better. They’re literally just being handed everything they want on a silver plate because God knows why, people love it.
As irritating as they are, I can’t help but feel sorry for them because this is child exploitation in it’s very worst form and call me old school, but I don’t think it should ever have been allowed to get this ridiculously overblown.
So I’m surfing the interwebs the other day just doing my normal thing of checking my emails, writing some kak on vleisboek and looking for pictures of MASSIVE AND RIPPED okes covered in oil looking flippin’ BUFF in there speedos and what do I find?!
THE FLIPPIN BUFFEST CHARNA IN THE LAND!
I mean, a oke who shouts ALL THE TIME, RIDES TIGERS, HAS BICEPS INSIDE HIS BICEPS, CAN TURN OFF THE SUN, KICK BUILDINGS DOWN and blow his own MIND! Seriously boet, the only way I can explain it is if you watch some of the videos I found.
How flippin’ INTENSE is that charna?! I dunno what it is about him that I think is more awesomer, his MONSTER pecs, his GIGANTIC DELTS and TRAPS, his MOUNTAIN RANGE BICEPS, his FLIPPIN’ AWESOME TAN, the fact that just like me he SHOUTS ALL THE TIME or his lekker tight red shorts.
But just wait, cause it gets BETTER!
The oke is so flippin’ POWERFUL, he’s invading OTHER OKES adverts!
Check how MASSIVE AND RIPPED he’s made this flippin KAK ad for some toilet spray stuffs.
But the BEST one is this one for some kind of chocolate bar you put on your washing (I know, who the flip puts chocolate bars in the washing?! Chopheads…)
Now THAT’S how you handle a situation! WITH EXPLOSIONS, A JETSKI, PECS THAT MAKE DRILLING SOUNDS AND FLYING THROUGH THE ROOF!
Charnas, we can only one day hope to be as buff as the Old Spice charna. In the meantime, I’ve bought 30 cans of Old Spice that I’ve been INHALING since Saturday and ja… I’m not quite as BUFF as that charna yet, but last night my muscles got a bladdy AWESOME workout when I went into a SEIZURE so I think it’s working…
International experts at the Stuttgart-based University Of Extremely Irritating Things (UEIT) have published a report recently to find out who the most irritating pop star is and, as predicted by every rational human on the planet, Willow Smith came out tops.
“We didn’t think it would ever be possible for an artist to be more irritating than Rebecca Black,†said Hein Schwarsvenberg, head of research at UEIT, “but data we’ve collected over the past few months would suggest otherwise.â€
According to the UEIT report, 11 year old Willow Smith has not only topped Rebecca’s status as ‘most irritating pop star alive’, but is currently in the running for the top spot as ‘most irritating person in human history’â€.
“Extensive tests were conducted on random groups of volunteers who were exposed to Willow Smith’s music at extremely high volume on repeat, and after one day all 356 780 test subjects had bashed their heads repeatedly against the walls of the laboratory so hard that only seven of them are still alive,†says Schwarsvenberg.
Willow Smith, who instantly rocketed to fame simply by being born, started her illustrious career in irritating people in June 2010 when she released her first single “I Whip My Hairâ€.
Shortly after the single’s release, reports started emerging of people driving their cars off cliffs, gauging their eyes out and throwing themselves off buildings after having the song stuck in their heads for so long, they simply lost their minds.
“With Rebecca it was never this bad,†says Schwarsvenberg, “we all knew she didn’t have the money to ever pull off a career in music that would survive outside of the internet. It was all a cute joke really and fairly tame in comparison to what Willow Smith has unleashed on the world.â€
Smith’s current single, “Fireballâ€, which deals with themes of partying, being a spoilt little brat, partying, being amazing and more partying has a chorous line so irritating that medical professionals the world over are endorsing suicide as the only known cure for getting the line “Imma fireball of the party, Imma, Imma, Imma fireball of the party†out of patient’s heads.
“It’s a drastic call, we know,†said Charles Grant, MD of the medical profession, “but besides the fact that it’s the only known cure for getting that line out of your head, who’d honestly want to live in a world where atrocities like these are not only allowed to go unpunished, but are endorsed by commercial radio and TV stations simply because Smith’s parents are loaded.â€
With Willow Smith’s album being released in April of this year, we can only hope and pray that the predicted Mayan Apocalypse happens in time to save us from the extensive mind-raping the album is likely to produce.
It was only natural that after personal email accounts were invented, some genius would figure out a way to send an email, with the click of one button, to an address that goes to everyone in the office.
It’s a brilliant way to share innocuous jokes, engage in some inter-office banter or remind everyone that the office email address is NOT for sharing jokes or wasting everyone’s time with inter-office banter.
Thanks to all@xxx.xxx addresses at the various companies I’ve worked for, I’ve been sent countless emails about animals that need homes, been schooled time and time again about Jesus and been sent life-changing emails like this one.
This one’s called “Tips To Make Your Life Easier†and thanks to these tips, my life is now too awesome to handle.
Tip #1:
A tip for holiday packing. Store shoes inside shower caps to stop dirty soles rubbing on your clothes. And you can find them in just about every hotel!
Are you actually serious?! Best. Tip. Ever. Put your shoes in a shower cap and they somehow magically appear in “just about every hotelâ€!
The minute I read this I raced home and covered all my shoes in shower caps. I have yet to go to a hotel since doing this, but if the internet can be trusted, I’m pretty sure I’ll find all my shoes there.
Tip #2:
A muffin pan becomes a craft caddy. Magnets hold the plastic cups down to make them tip-resistant.
This is super-neat because up until now I’ve been using an old egg carton for my craft caddy and thus the cup size for my paintbrushes, scissors, crayons and fruit pastilles has been severely limited.
The only problem with this tip is that now that my baking tray is full of useful junk, it made tip #3 a little tricky…
Tip #3:
Turn your muffin pan upside down, bake cookie-dough over the top and voila – you have cookie bowls for fruit or ice-cream.
See, I tried this tip and while it did make some pretty amazing cookie bowls, all my craft utensils melted into this toxic, multi-coloured gloop on the bottom of my oven, producing a thick, black smoke that stained the roof of our flat so badly the landlord says he’s keeping our deposit.
Still, the cookie bowls were awesome. Even if they did taste a little of melted plastic and resulted in us having to be rushed to the emergency room.
Yum!
Tip #4:
Win friends at breakfast with this heart-shaped egg tutorial. Aww shucks!
For the longest time, I’d finish up a hearty breakfast feeling nourished physically, but completely empty and unfulfilled emotionally.
It was then that I realised it was because I wasn’t winning friends at breakfast!
With this handy tip, I win friends all the time now. Why, just the other day I was talking to one of the recent friends I’ve won, reminiscing about how we first met in a crowded restaurant and how, using nothing more than a rubber band I carry around with me everywhere I go, a chopstick and a rectangular piece of paper, I mangled 5 hard boiled eggs trying to make an egg / boat thing that I then cut in half to create egg hearts so I could win his friendship!
“Ha ha. Yeah…†he said, thinking back on that day, “I hate you.â€
Tip #5:
Bread tags make the perfect-sized cord labels.
Ever since I started using this tip, all that endless confusion about which cable belongs to my mouse and which one powers my laptop is finally over!
Now I come to work confident in the knowledge that no longer will I waste the first hour of my day trying to plug my mouse into the power cable hole and vice versa, hooray!
I hope you guys find these five tips as useful as I did and share them with friends and family to make their lives easier too.
Send this post on now to 5 people and an amazing thing will happen in your life!
Send it on to 10 and you will be magically granted the ability to fly and shoot lasers out of your eyes and send it to 20 or more and you will win so much money, you’ll be richer than God!
In a world where superheroes dominate the mass media, it was just a matter of time before ordinary citizens started wearing geeky costumes and walking the streets “fighting crimeâ€.
Actually wait, lemme rephrase that. In America, it was just a matter of time before ordinary citizens started wearing dorky costumer and walking the streets fighting crime.
If you tried that here in South Africa, the bad guys would kill you three times over for that shit. Once for interfering, twice for dressing up like a wanker and the third time because they’d be laughing so hard the first two times, they’d need a third try to get it right.
But in America, according to an article I read on www.reallifesuperheroes.org, there are roughly 200 real-life superheroes patrolling America’s streets, looking like tools and seemingly doing very little except indulging their geeky fantasies, picking up trash and handing out sandwiches to the homeless.
And then there are the Rain City Superheroes, who’ve been getting considerable media attention since their leader, a caped crusader (seriously, I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried) called Phoenix Jones made headlines in January this year when he was trying to break up a fight and got kicked in the face while a guy held a gun to his head.
Here’s the news report that did the rounds earlier this year:
After watching that report when it broke I had a quiet chuckle to myself and carried on with my life, convinced that they next report I’d pick up would either be “Phoenix Jones calls it quits after getting his ass handed to him… again†or “Phoenix Jones stabbed to death by crackheads†and that would be that.
But no, this guy is still out there. Only now he’s landed in a spot of trouble after dousing four people outside a nightclub with pepper spray because he thought they were trying to rough each other up.
According to the police report however, the partygoers were just walking to their car “dancing and having a good timeâ€, as you do. I mean Christ, if I got maced every time I’d had one too many and was dancing around like a drunk asshole, I’d be blind as a mole and my sinuses would have been utterly destroyed by the time I was 19.
But wait, it gets better.
At his hearing, Phoenix Jones dramatically unmasked himself and revealed his true identity as a black dude with the most EPIC afro I’ve seen this side of the early 90s, check it out:
It’s a seriously long article, but totally worth it just for the parts about what these “superheroes†actually do, which seems to be a whole lot of nothing.
Apparently this all started back in the 1980s with a guy who calls himself “Master Legend†and believes he has super healing, super speed, was born “wearing a purple veil†and has died three times. Oh, and he also drinks like a bergie, which basically explains everything.
Here’s a video of the guy I dug up for your viewing pleasure. What. A. Chop.
It’s like Kickass happening in real life, only you’d have to be delusional to think what these people are doing is going to end well.
In South Africa, where crime isn’t something that happens on the news every night, but rather something that happens to our friends, our close family and ourselves, the thought of getting dressed up in spandex and walking the streets, preventing “crime†by asking people nicely to do what you say or you’ll just stand there (seriously, that’s how Phoenix Jones and his crew stopped some dealers from selling on a street corner) is embarrassingly naive.
Sure, I’m all for being vigilant, reporting crime the second you see it and on the extremely rare occasion when the situation calls for it and you know what you’re doing, stepping in and preventing something bad from happening, but walking around dressed like these guys is like painting a gigantic target on your chest and playing “dodge the bullet†at a shooting range.
Mark my words, something very bad will happen to one of these retards sooner or later, but until then, here are some hilarious pictures of them to brighten up your Monday:
I’ve said it before, but I think it bears repeating: humankind has never, ever been this bored.
It’s been over a week since Mark Esterhuysen, a former newsreader for 702’s Eyewitness News, released the Hiroshima equivalent of F-bombs during a live news broadcast at 1am on a random Tuesday and catapulted himself to instant internet fame.
In case you missed it, here’s a transcription of what he said, verbatim, right before they cut to a convenient ad break:
Good morning. I’m Mark Esterhuysen. Fuck racism, fuck the pigs who killed Andries Tatane, fuck the AWB, fuck racism. We are all wild animals here, meant to live free. Fuck capitalism, fuck fascism. Fuck this fucking wage slavery graveyard shit. Fuck domestication, fuck Julius Malema, fuck the state. Fuck perpetual economic growth on a finite planet. This is the only fucking planet we have…â€
Right after that he proceeded to direct anyone who disagreed with him to his Twitter profile, Facebook page and blog http://markesterhuysen.blogspot.com/.
Can you believe the balls on this guy?! Hahahaha! What a legend! Here’s the original:
Naturally the first thing I did was to try and find out if anyone at work had hit the guy’s site so I could get the address (I kept misspelling “Esterhuysenâ€) and was told in no uncertain terms that this guy is COOKED!
FUCK YEAH! I thought. I love crazies!
But reading his site I soon realised that the poor guy isn’t crazy at all. Misguided, maybe, but outright shit-your-pants-mad? I don’t think so.
His site consists of about 10 posts, at least 5 of which are long, sprawling diatribes about his dissatisfaction with modern civilisation and this desperate need he feels deep down to get as far away from it as humanly possible.
I’d be lying outright if I said I’ve never thought that. In fact, for a long time when I was younger I entertained the idea of falling off the grid completely. Finding some remote desert island somewhere and living out the rest of my days spear fishing, climbing coconut trees and living in an A-frame hut on the beach.
Esterhuysen’s need to get the hell away from it all was calcified by an article he read on the Men’s Health website that was posted in October last year which, to be perfectly frank, stated some pretty obvious facts about how being exposed to the great outdoors is one of the best ways to sharpen the mind and senses and how modern society has all but cut us off from nature completely, to our detriment.
In fact, all of Esterhuysen’s posts seem to be pretty obvious at face value. Civilisation is tyrannical, agriculture is the root of all human evil, the abhorrent ecocide we are committing on a daily basis isn’t receiving the level of attention it should be, the sooner we go back to the Stone Age way of life, the better.
They’re all arguments I used to believe fervently. It’s a FACT that we are, by all definitions of the word, insane. All of us. Every living person on this planet, because we are systematically destroying the very thing upon which we rely for our existence as a species.
So the guy took a stand for what he believed in. He used the medium of commercial radio to stick it to the man in a 25th Hour inspired tirade, such was the strength of his convictions.
But here’s the kicker – what did his passionate outburst result in?
One Time Airlines recording an Esterhuysen-inspired ad that rips off his F-bombing and turns his entire outcry into a big fucking joke so that they can sell more flights.
Let’s just pause and reflect on the irony of that.
A guy who is so concerned with the way we’re destroying the planet voices his vehemence on radio only to be made fun of by an airline so that they can sell more flights, burn more jet fuel and stamp their carbon footprint firmly on the face of our planet.
Esterhuysen may be an ideological fool, but I admire what he did, and if that makes me an ideological fool as well, then so be it.
This weekend, J-Rab and I are going to (finally!) sign up with a recycling service in an effort to try and make some positive change. Sure, it won’t stop cars from driving or planes from flying or BP from fouling up our oceans, but it will make a difference, even if it’s a tiny one.
My old man goes to church on Sundays, which I found pretty bizarre when he first started going because he’s never been religious at all, but he never spoke about it or got all weird and preachy so I just let it be.
After returning one Sunday, he left a pamphlet on the entrance hall table that told the following story:
Two friends were walking along a beach one afternoon when they noticed that the spring tide had washed hundreds of starfish up onto the beach that were drying out in the sun and dying.
As they walked, the one friend randomly picked up starfish and threw them back into the sea.
Irritated with the futility of this gesture, the other friend eventually snaps.
“There must be a thousand starfish on this beach! Would you just give it a rest, you’re not making a difference!â€
To which his buddy simply picks up another starfish, throws it into the sea and says, “I made a difference to that one.â€
Mark Esterhuysen might have become the butt of everyone’s jokes, but at least he’s trying to make a difference in some way.
Yeah, like we didn’t already know that one.
