Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Forget World Hunger and the On-Going Wars of the World - These Guys Are Tackling the Real Problems

Time to Overhaul the Calendar? - Forget leap years, months with 28 days and your birthday falling on a different day of the week each year. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland say they have a better way to mark time: a new calendar in which every year is identical to the one before. Their proposed calendar overhaul — largely unprecedented in the 430 years since Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar we still use today — would divvy out months and weeks so that every calendar date would always fall on the same day of the week. Christmas, for example, would forever come on a Sunday. "The calendar I'm advocating isn't nearly as accurate" as the Gregorian calendar, said Richard Henry, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who has been pushing for calendar reform for years. "But it's far more convenient." "Everybody has to redo their calendars," Henry said. "For sports schedules, for schools, for every damn thing. It's completely unnecessary." "My favorite reason it shouldn't be done is, 'But my birthday will always be on a Wednesday!'" Henry said. "Of course the answer to that is you can celebrate your birthday whenever you want."

This is a real thing? Brilliant, University educated scholars, wasting their time and federally funded resources, researching ways to overhaul a perfectly good calendar, because they don't like re-printing syllabi and calendar companies can't use the same standard template every year? Are you guys freaking kidding me? Of all the things in the world, this is what you have an issue with.  You must be the laziest people on Earth. You don't have 10 minutes a year to update the dates on your course schedules? You don't think that calendar manufacturers just use a computer template to handle their printing?

And what's this shit with my Birthday falling on a Wednesday permanently? Fuck that noise. And don't give me the crap about "you can celebrate whenever you want." Sure that shit flies when you're like 8 and in the 2nd grade, mid-week birthdays were killer back then. All your classmates celebrate with a song and some cupcakes your mom sent you to school with on Tuesday (your actual birthday), then you have all the popular kids come over the following Saturday to bring you gifts and play a few rounds of tag (maybe hide n' go seek in the dark in your basement, if there's time). It's the best back then. But you can't get away with that now. Imagine me trying to tell my friends and relatives that I'd like them to provide me cake on Wednesday and then come pay homage to me on Saturday with gifts and free drinks at the bar. I'm sure that would go over like a lead balloon.

No I'd say the calendar situation is just fine the way it is...if you really need someone to take care of your syllabi for you just contact me, we'll arrange for paypal payments and I'll update your dates once a semester for something like $25...I'm completely serious.

Speaking of tackling the big issues...

Fox - The weekend came sooner than usual for the tiny South Pacific island nation of Samoa. When the clock struck midnight Thursday, the country skipped over Friday and moved 24 hours ahead -- straight into Saturday, Dec. 31. In June, the Samoan government passed a law to move Samoa west of the international date line, which separates one calendar day from the next and runs roughly north-to-south through the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Under a government decree, all those scheduled to work on the nonexistent Friday will be given full pay for the missed day of labor.

Now that's how you tackle an issue, talk about a progressive government...Just outright eliminate one workday and pay everyone for it anyway...That's my kind of country. Look out Australia, Samoa is moving up the ranks for CW's favorite country in the world, fast (anytime the USA wants to jump in and make this a competitive race, that would be great).

The NFL is Winding Down and the Holidays Are Over: Happy Season Depression Day!

I feel you bud, asked for a Forever Lazy and Received a Drug Rug, We've All Been There


Woke up this morning with the realization that its all down hill from here for the next couple of months, just nothing left to look forward to. My weekends are slowly going to get worse, the Holidays are crappier (nothing against the Good Doctor, MLK, or Lincoln and Washington, but you guys wouldn't even matter if it wasn't for the Pilgrims and Sweet Lil Baby Jesus), and to top it all off, no more random vacation days because you're in the middle of the "4th quarter push," where I basically didn't work a full week from mid-October on because I had days to burn.  

Nope, today is solidly January. The football field has been cut to 12 and will be halved in each sequential week, the holidays are fewer and further between with less celebrating, and I legitimately won't take a vacation day until March Madness and St. Pattys day come around, because lets face it, if you live in the Northeast and aren't a skiier (which I'm not), January and February are an absolute barren waste land. 


 That, right there people is what we're about to give up (no, not the hair, I'm sure that's male pattern baldness, I mean the sheer laziness of NFL Sundays). Ask any domesticated male and they'll tell you, there is no better built in excuse in the world for spending an entire day in a sweatpants and robe/blanket combo than NFL Sundays. They can't be beat. I have no idea why, but women don't even seem to put up a fight when it comes to this ritual. Every other day of the year they'll have no problem nagging you out of your laziness, but for some biological, survival of the species reason, when you move from the bed, plop down on the couch, and simultaneously flip on the pre-game show and crack open your laptop for fantasy monitoring, they know to just let it alone. Serve a snack or two, maybe run some errands or wash some dishes, or just join you watching the game, but really reading some celebrity gossip mag. 

It's a beautiful thing, and it exists no where else in the sports world. Think about it, can you imagine telling your wife/fiancee/live in gf, that you need to spend the next 8-10 hours watching NBA games that in no way involve the home team? Or telling her that all you really want to do is watch the TBS Baseball Triple Header while monitoring your fantasy baseball team? How quickly do you think you'd be divorced? By half time? Your shit out the door by the 7th inning stretch? Speaking of things that exist no where in the sports world....

Uhhh...whats going on here? Where are the guys in t-shirts and sweatpants, reclined back as far as they can in the couch because they're so full from beer, chips, nachos, and hoagies/wings? Granted sometimes I watch in jeans, but why are you wearing buttoned up shirts (douchey ones that highlight chest hair to boot), whats with the nerf football, the visually appealing presentation of those sliders, and the lone mug of beer with no cans or bottles strewn about? I have no idea what the hell these guys are doing, but I can tell you for damn sure they're not watching football. If I had to guess, they're watching some Tyra Banks special and discussing where they get their eyebrows waxed, because these are not real men watching football. Whoever came up with this advertisement presumably was fired.

The 2011 St. Louis Rams, Andrew Luck Consolation Prize



Your season may have been injury riddled and sucky, and your team didn't win the grand suck prize of Andrew Luck, a once in a generation talent, or so we're told. So here's this, a little consolation prize from the good people of Fox, hoping to spread some Holiday cheer, from a buxom cheerleader, ironically named Holly.