All My Ideas The Outlook Rejected

Similarities Between Paste-Up and a Kegger

2009-03-07T04:16:00.000-08:00

Teenagers consume ridiculous quantities of illegal drugs.
Outlookers consume ridiculous quantities of over-the-counter drugs.

Ugly girls look better as the night progresses, due to increasing levels of intoxication.
Horrible stories look better as the night progresses, due to increasing levels of intoxication.

People begin passing out on couches early in the evening.
Outlookers pass out under desks throughout the evening.

You have to sneak out to get to any good party.
Outlookers' parents think they sneaked out to go to a party.

Slurred speech and droopy eyelids -- 'nough said.

People are more likely to take their clothes off after a good deal of alcohol.
My co-editor is more likely to take his clothes off after a good deal of paste-up.

Fame and Glory

2009-03-04T22:51:00.000-08:00

Blog-readers: I call upon you now to obey me, your lord eternal.
When you find something funny, you share it with your friends. Thus, you will spread the word of this blog to the corners of the Earth. I call upon all true Linguisticists to obey this mandate.

You might ask, "Why, oh Great One? Why should I publicize one of the Internet's best kept secrets?" The answer is as simple as Louisiana. I want to be famous. Rich and famous. I want every kid to read this blog and to aspire to be just like me, and go to their kindergarten class on Future Career Day and say, "I want to be a copy editor like Loren Johnson!"

You might wonder why YOU should help ME. It's simple. I'm just a regular person, like you, only a lot cooler and a lot funnier. This isn't about making one person famous; it's about helping your fellow man; it's about celebrating the underdogs; it's about lifting your equal onto your shoulders so he or she can taste a tidbit of sweet fame. Plus, if I become super rich when I'm famous, I'll give everyone I like gift baskets of things made out of money, like little oragami Ferraris.

Now you might say, "Loren, you've convinced me. I see why I should become your mindless drone and do what you say, but how can I help?" The answer, my simple friend, is this: go forth and spread the word of this blog to all of your friends. The more readers I have, the funnier my content will be, and the closer you will be to money Ferraris.

When you tell a friend about this blog, force them at gunpoint to click the little button that says "follow" to the right of the posts. The more followers this blog has, the more famous it is. My goal for now is 100. Then it will be 1,000. Then so on until I have taken over the world.

Blog readers, I pray that you will not just ignore my call. Try to see yourself in me; I'm just an honest man trying to take over the world.

Then we can finally live in a world with no split infinitives.

Bacon Grilled Onion Day

2009-03-03T20:23:00.000-08:00

Henceforth, Linguisticists will all refer to March 3 as Bacon Grilled Onion Day. Why? Because of my holy sandwich. The story goes like this:

I, the pope of Linguisticism, was hungry and saddened by the linguistic sin of the world. I resolved to cure my wretched anguish through my expertise of the culinary arts. As I roamed the kitchen halls, though, nothing in my stately pantry could appease my divine hunger. I truly ached for something out of this world. Bacon flashed through my mind. I didn't feel like breakfast though; the usual side of eggs seemed like only a half-meat. I was in the mood for something juicy: a meal worthy of three animals' deaths. That's when the epiphany erupted in my head: Club sandwich. Ultimate club sandwich. Yes. With divine speed, I rushed to the refrigerator.

I whipped out some turkey, thinly sliced, and threw it onto a holy cutting board next to some dripping ham, also thinly sliced. The meats have to be thinly sliced. That way you can fit more slices in the sandwich. The logic of that last sentence makes perfect sense to real men.

I threw on the sacrificial veggies: a ripe, red, bulging tomato; a perfectly green lettuce head, harvested from the holy lettuce fields where it is believed that Reno once trod; and finally, the secret weapon: the onion.

I grabbed the condiments, threw three slices of white potato bread in the holy toaster, and stopped to pray. I was about to combine two gods of the food world: Grilled onions and bacon. I didn't know if it would work, but I carefully laid three strips of perfect bacon in a pan and began to cook them, covered. (They cook faster and more evenly that way. I know that because I'm also the pope of a culinary religion.)

Then mighty Webster possessed my hands to perfectly slice the onion while the bacon prepared to begin its holy sizzling. Empowered by the essence of might Webster, I threw three ultra-sharp knives twirling violently into the air and caught them all with precision, one in each hand and one in my mouth, by the blade, all while doing a triple backflip and singing the National Anthem. (I hit the high note even with the knife in my mouth, but my mouth wasn't possessed. I'm just talented.) I spit out the third knife and threw the one in my left hand away; I really only needed one, but there was no way I wasn't going to be all ninja while a god had possessed my hands.

Anyway, I proceeded to slice the onion and laid three slices atop the bacon. By now, it had started sizzling. With my bare hands, I grabbed all three strips of bacon and turned them over so the onion slices were beneath them, absorbing the succulent bacon juice. When the onions had caramelized, they were a new, hybrid form of unmatched deliciousness. I felt the presence of Webster leave me, but my religious experience wasn't over.

I whipped out some pepperonchinis and threw all the ingredients together on my three slices of blessed bread. The sandwich sat atop a white, Roman column for a while (just because it was that badass), and I just looked at it admiringly. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with a surging strength! I felt the whole world in me, and there it remained! I understood the fabric of the universe, and everything was clear to me; by making this sandwich, I had brought something so awesome into the world that I achieved the status of god!

That's why we celebrate Bacon Grilled Onion Day. I'm going to eat my sandwich now.

The true garbage of the Internet

2009-03-02T23:05:00.000-08:00

I'm not talking about spam or junk mail. I'm talking about you.

Everyone with an opinion on something thinks they can write a blog. You can't. No one will read it, and you will be lucky if you update it once a month. Still, this doesn't stop a few million morons from making a quick blogger page and never updating it. I know. I never update this crappy page. I fill it with random pictures, and I'm my own biggest fan. I comment my own entries.

You don't want to be like me, do you? No. Of course not. So don't go out and start a blog. I know that won't stop you, so here are a few tips:

Firstly, no one cares what you think. A talking kidney stone's opinion would be worth way more than yours. With this in mind, you should be able to avoid making the worst mistake possible: caring. No one else cares what you think, so why should you? The best way you could argue for any point you're trying to make is to make fun of it. My most popular blog entry was about what I do in the shower. I have others about actually relevant things, but those don't generate nearly as much readership. Don't take off and write about your own bath-time adventures though; you aren't nearly as interesting as I am.

Secondly, remember this fundamental rule of blog posting: Be concise.

Thirdly, expect to have only eight followers after six months of posting. It will usually only be your friends. This goes back to the whole no-one-care's-about-you thing. Everyone tells me my blogs are hilarious, yet rarely do they think my blogs are funny enough to leave comments on them. I will tell you how, blog reader, because I actually believe it's just because you haven't found the comment button yet. It's right below the article. It will say something like "5 comments" on it (more likely "0 comments"). Just go ahead and click that li'l baby and type away. Be sure also to tell your friends about this blog, and be sure to list mine as a blog you follow. You know you want to.

Fourthly, always threaten the reader, or I'll find you and kill you.

Fifthly, never, ever make an error. Someone will be on your ass faster than you can say "Oops, I made an error. I hope no one notices, but not enough to change it right now."

Sixthly, use a considerable amount of jargon that no one understands, because it'll configate the reader into a state of aposiopses, and because it's fun.

Seventhly, never, ever conclude an entry. No one ever gets to the end anyway. The best way to end a blog post is to just sort of trail off. Like this one entry a little farther down where I....

The Purest Form of Writing

2009-02-02T19:59:00.000-08:00

The single most pure, awesome type of written word is undoubtedly the rant. I will employ this ancient writing technique to explain its sheer awesomeness, because it really is just that awesome.

Normally, a structured essay would begin with a clear definition explaining clearly and exactly what a rant is, but that’s the beauty part of a rant. It has no structure. You just write whatever the hell you feel like! Peanut butter! Sounds good, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t stop there. A rant is the most pure form of writing because it perfectly captures the stream of thought that we go through. It’s an emotional photograph. It’s like you took all your feelings and bottled them up together, but then they started fighting until one ate the others. Then, as punishment, you threw the winner in a high-priced blender and shredded that little ho (figure 23). Yes. That’s what a rant is like.

Figure 23: An expensive blender, just 'cause. In a rant, the visuals should be unsurpassed in terms of irrelevance, except by the metaphors.

A rant should never take more than five minutes per page. That’s ridiculous. It defeats the whole purpose. My rants take me about 10 minutes max, and if I don’t like them I just go back and add some cool stuff about cactuses and blenders. Don’t worry about staying on topic. A true rant doesn’t really have a topic. One minute it could be a “how to,” and the next it could be a biography. This is the idea; in fact, if you can confuse the reader by quickly diverging from one central theme to the next, that’s 40 bonus points.

My whole blog is themed around the idea of a rant. Before we came to high school, we just wrote whatever we felt like — and some of us were damned good at it. Yeah, our eighth grade teacher told us to make outlines, but we just wrote our papers and threw some stupid sentences together next to some roman numerals and scribbled “outline” on it. Why? Because screw her! Outlines suck! Rants are where it’s at.

There’s nothing like the type of writing that doesn’t correspond from paragraph to paragraph; the pleasure derived from stringing together random sentences with no significance is unmatched; there’s simply no greater feeling for a writer than creating a conclusion with no pertinence to the rest of the essay.

That’s what I think I’ll do.

In conclusion, manila folders are more valuable than gold, and copy editing pens are the most valuable things on the planet. All problems could easily be solved with a duel with meter sticks. Cactuses are cool, and that’s my blog post, so suck it.

The Importance of Cynicism

2009-01-25T14:36:00.000-08:00

I’ve decided to open this blog entry with a list of synonyms for “cynical,” in the adjective form, going from short and simple to long and then to unnecessarily, annoyingly long.

Cynical. Caustic. Ironic. Sarcastic. Sardonic. Critical. Satirical. Dark-humored. Sharp-witted. Lightly acerbic. Mean in a funny way. Funny at others’ expenses. Comical in a way that causes only one person in the room to laugh and draws glares from everyone else.

As a copy editor, I realize the importance of being cynical.

It might seem like a strange topic, but think about it. How many copy editors do you know who are cute and cuddly? None? OF COURSE NONE! If — by some cataclysmic error — there is a copy editor out there who can form a smile that stretches to both corners of the mouth out of any thoughts other than those of pure scorn, it won’t be long before they, too, are reduced to beings of poor posture and comical malcontent. It is one of the fundamental laws of nature that all copy editors should be offensive and disgusting people, and today — purely because I feel like it — I’m going to tell you why.

The first reason is because no one gets our jokes. We spend our whole day correcting grammatical errors that most people either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care to notice because of the insignificance of said errors. Occasionally, we are driven to make a snide comment about a writer’s stupid mistakes. Sadly, if there are no other copy editors in the room (which is likely because none of us likes the others), no one else will see the irony of our comments, and we will have to laugh out loud just to convince ourselves that what we said was actually funny (which it probably was not). After a while, we have to laugh louder and louder to truly convince ourselves of our comic own ability; and the result is one person laughing maniacally in a room while everyone else shoots them the kind of look normally reserved for insane people.

Another reason is probably the fact that reading and rereading articles long into the night is kind of like standing in line all day. You have to talk yourself into thinking it’s worth it, and eventually you forget why you’re standing there anyway. Then your editor comes up and reminds you and cuts you in line, taunting you while she does it. Some people really love copy editing and/or waiting in line, but generally no one wants to be around those people because they’re offensive and disgusting.

The next reason is because it’s just fun to be mean. You might see a copy editor laugh when you look at him or her, and then you might think, “Did that copy editor just laugh at me?” and you’ll continue to ask yourself that same question all day. The only time, in fact, you won’t be worried that the copy editor might be making fun behind your back is when you turn around and they flat out tell you, “Yes. I am making fun of you.” See how fun it is? If you answered, “Yes,” congratulations — you’re a copy editor (or probably just a jerk).

I actually don’t really know the reason copy editors are so sardonic. It’s probably the same reason the sky is blue — something science-y like that. I’ll just tell you this, blog-reader: if you had to read and correct your writing, then write a headline for it, then take the fall if there was something wrong with it after its publication, you’d be a sarcastic jerk too.

I hate you.

Errors Haunt Me Night and Day

2008-12-29T20:18:00.000-08:00

In my "Twilight" blog, I misspelled Stephenie Meyer's name twice.

I later repented and looked up "forgiveness" in the dictionary.

Asymmetrical Style (and Why It Rocks)

2008-12-29T20:14:00.000-08:00

A short while ago, I was looking for the matching sock to a splendidly un-fouled one I found on the floor of my room. It was white — pure white — Downy white. Mr. Clean would have worn that sock underneath his lumberjack boots (I assume he wears lumberjack boots, which are rubber but steel-toed (in case a lumberjack needs to kick a robot’s ass)).

Anyway, I was looking. On and on I looked, never finding a match. Once I came close, but that sock was not pure and white. It was old and crusty and occasionally it coughed and wheezed, like a foul, miserable, little sock (because that’s what it was). After three years of searching to no avail, I had nearly resolved to clean my filthily cozy quarters (hoping that a good vacuuming/purging would make clean socks easier to find).

I had almost uncorked the holy water when a violent epiphany struck me (violently). I didn’t need to clean my room. That was pointless (it would only get dirty again, as it did every time some ignorant fool tried to clean it). This cleaning was, in fact, almost as pointless as the symmetry of socks. People can’t even see socks. They go underneath shoes, then underneath pants. I grabbed a differently colored, longer, dirtier sock (one that Mr. Clean would probably not have worn, which is senseless because no one has ever seen Mr. Clean’s lower half (and because no one can see socks, which are worn beneath pants and shoes).

I wore the two mismatched socks all day, and whenever someone got in my face (which was never (because you can’t see socks (because they go under pants and shoes))), I kicked them with the foot that had the dirty sock on it (the left one). Then I went home and wrote a kickass blog entry about why it’s pointless to spend three years searching for a matching sock.

(I later found the other clean sock and didn’t care.)

The Twilight Epidemic

2008-12-28T16:03:00.000-08:00

I address this distress call to any remaining men, because all of the nation’s women are infected with this unstoppable vampiric craze. Take up your torches, raise your idols and prepare to beat back countless slaves to the “Twilight” curse! The time has come and gone for action, and now, severely disadvantaged, we must face a disease that multiplies every second, and hope that whatever entity is good and pure in the universe will join our side. Though this terrible curse has drawn to it many great minds, there are forces left in the world that will never fall, demigods of masculinity like Chuck Norris and Mr. Clean.

Before we face any enemy, it’s important to understand what compels her. It’s important to understand how this curse works. Before trusting anyone, carefully observe them to be certain that they are indeed still uncontaminated.

The blighted make a habit of constantly withdrawing for hours or even days at a time to perform their unholy rituals in whatever private locales they tend to dwell. A darkness sweeps over them in their pestilent privacy, and they sit, in silence, poring over their captors: medium-sized books of the “Twilight” series. These fallen comrades are forever Stephanie Meyer’s unholy minions, and their numbers are bolstered every time one of our own falls. These lost souls are mostly teenage girls, who are the most susceptible to the “Twilight” curse, primarily because of their faintness of heart and weakness toward pale men who aren’t attractive enough in the real world and have to create an alternate reality where they are and where they can trick others into feeling accepted because of their hatred of worldly monotony and internal desire for outlandish and strange “undead” characteristics which don’t even conform to traditional vampire lore. Edward Cullen has taken these poor souls’ imaginations and twisted them with false romance. Beware, once under the “Twilight” curse’s influence, the pestilent ones can never be restored. We have all lost someone to this terrible epidemic. I have lost my little sister, who was only 16 when she was handed helplessly to the ranks of the damned.

Brothers, do not allow yourselves to be fooled. Reading “Twilight” is most certainly gay. Watching the movies will brand you as homosexual, and there’s no taking it back. False pretexts like, “I’m using it to get into this girl’s pants” or, “I didn’t really enjoy it, my girlfriend made me” or, “I thought I was immune because I wrestled alligators for 10 years” will not earn your soul back. Once a man’s eyes have gazed upon this pansy horror, they will never regain their masculinity, and will be ushered headlong into Stephanie Meyer’s slave army.

The creature responsible for transforming our beloved women, and rather effeminate men, is the sordid book we have all seen. The monster dominates bookstores, festering in its own toxic black aura. Even so, the threat ends not with mere leaflet pages, which are so easily purged with a deep, cleansing flame; the beast comes in many forms, and its most terrible shape yet has stretched across wide screens to poison our minds via motion picture presentations. It was a terrible day when the first “Twilight” movie came out. No one could have predicted that an entity as pure as cinema could fall to a lowly beast of the night, but, alas, it has, and look what fate it has wrought upon us!

The curse is set apart from regular diseases in that the hosts are not simply destroyed, but reanimated and given new drive to infect others, causing the curse to spread through its own unholy minions. As more and more become infected, they begin to resent their loneliness and maliciously draw other innocent minds into the terrible affliction, causing the number of infected souls to increase exponentially with time. Those few remaining braves who are not infected must be wary. We have all seen the compelling force of this foe, whose tainted lyrics have poisoned the minds of our race’s best. One gaze upon a blighted screen or an unholy tome will surely seal a stalwart rebel’s fate.

Do not give up all hope yet, though. Their bodies may be wasted, but the souls of the damned can still be saved, for every force in this universe has a weakness, every foe an Achilles’ heel, and this frightening epidemic is no better. We must strike at the source of our bane, the very pinnacle of unholiness. We must strike down the evil Robert Pattinson before his next rampage. My brothers, rip out this miscreant’s fake plastic fangs and wring his scrawny pale neck before he can bring anymore damage to the ones whom we love — or loved. Once the monarch of this curse is cast aside, his mindless acolytes will abandon his side, and, like all fads, the “Twilight” curse will fade into the fringes of acceptability, whence it came and whence it should have remained.

The Savior

2008-12-15T15:53:00.001-08:00

Webster be praised!
The holy prophets Strunk & White have not forsaken us! Our Savior, Reno Sorensen, has come; the God of Style has descended from the Great Beyond to save us from a life of unholy sin! My children, renounce the your stylistic sins and join in praise of the One True Lord, the Almighty Webster, who has sent his only Son back to absolve of us our world of elegant variation and severed adverbs!
Pass on the word, that the Monday following the year's final paste-up shall henceforth be known as Linguistica!
Rejoice, my brothers and sisters, for our Savior has come, and His wisdom is great!

With travesty,
Pope Loren Johnson II

Supersexism

2008-12-13T21:56:00.001-08:00

It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even go outside anymore. Everywhere I go, I can feel their cold prejudice looming over me, like a raincloud dampening my spirit. I bow my head and look at my feet as I walk down the city street, with thousands of burning, glaring feminist eyes boring into my back, all seeming to hiss, “QUIT OBJECTIFYING ME!”

Supersexism, the most crippling form of bigotry today, is the preconceived notion all women possess that all men are sexist. No matter what I do, no matter how courteous and respectful I am, no matter how many times I compliment their makeup, I cannot for one second escape the label with which women have branded me: the label of a sexist.

Despite workplace anti-sexism laws, female employers deny me jobs time and time again simply based on the fear that I possess a higher mental and physical capacity than they do and that I will earn one dollar for every 75 cents they make. Supersexism, therefore, has cost me jobs and distorted my life.

Thanks to ridiculous sexual harassment regulations, I’m afraid to make eye contact with girls at school for fear of being exiled to Antarctica for sexual harassment (figure 1). This is unfair. If women don’t want to be eyeballed they should dress in uglier clothes, or perhaps put on a little weight. All women are always watching to see if a man’s eyes ever, for even a microsecond, pass over their breasts. When most women talk to me nowadays, I simply close my eyes to show that I am taking extra steps to avoid ogling them. That’s why most men hate push-up bras.

Figure 1: There are no anti-sexism laws in Antarctica, largely due to the fact that there are no women in Antarctica.

Push-up bras are the most evil invention ever (figure 2). If you don’t know, they’re a type of underwear designed to lift a woman’s breasts and cause them to protrude even further than they normally do. This creates a weight imbalance in thinner women, and often causes them to stumble forward slightly when walking in high heels. A man who has closed his eyes to avoid accidental eye-rape, hearing the staggering girl coming, will often make the mistake of extending his arms to catch the falling female lest she fall and hurt herself; yet it’s so hard for most women to see how these circumstances could accidentally lead to a man catching two giant handfuls of cleavage, especially in the more breastically endowed females, whose naughty parts cover a wider surface area (the entire front of the torso).

Men, here’s some serious advice if you want to avoid this kind of inadvertent groping: let the bitch drop.

Figure 2: Just look at the evil. Disgusting!

These days, I can’t state my opinion in public anymore (except on blogs where women can’t slap me), for fear of accidentally “objectifying” nearby women. In recent weeks I have been apprehended for “offensive sexist remarks” so many times that I have simply resolved not to talk anymore in the presence of the opposite gender. Here’s an example of how a common remark could be labeled as sexist:

“Anne, make me a sandwich.”

Most women would first look at that sentence and feel that Anne is being domesticated and objectified. They would feel as though the speaker views Anne as a kitchen tool more than a person, yet notice the sentence’s structure: Anne is clearly the subject of the sentence, not the object. "Me," the guy, is actually one of the objects, despite what any feminist would tell you. (The other object is "sandwich." I will talk about sandwich objectification in future blog posts.) If the lesser gender would simply realize that a humble request for a sandwich is nothing more than a compliment about a girl’s culinary skills, the world would be a happier place for men.

Luckily, supersexism rehabilitation is simple: just embrace your inner ancient Greek and turn to homosexuality when your woman pisses you off. For men with too much dignity for that, it might help to become a sadomasochist, because there are many, many facial slappings along the path you have chosen.

Men, hold your heads high through this storm. Though women everywhere will persecute you solely for your sex for the rest of your life, help is on the way. In my next column, I will show you how to make yourself deaf to higher pitched noises (like a whiny woman’s voice) by blasting hardcore rock music in your ears until they bleed.

By the way, women or sensitive men who disagree with anything in this article are supersexists.

Linguisticism

2008-12-13T19:52:00.000-08:00

Let it be known! The prophets Strunk & White have not forsaken us! As of about 10 p.m. Dec. 10, in the holy year of 2008, the call of our omniscient Lord was answered!

The Holy Church of Linguisticism was christened on Paste-Up evening. Our eyes were opened wide and all the ultimate questions were answered! All our eternal Lord, Merriam Webster, asks in return for everlasting deliverance — for protection from the stylistic sins of this world — is reverence of Him.

Open your eyes and your hearts for our Lord, for His knowledge is great and His power is ultimate! Only by turning to Him can life’s most awesome questions be answered. Yes! He will open your minds to the meaning of this life, for all is known to Him! In universal knowledge the Church of Linguisticism is superior to all other faiths. It is the only faith with the clear understanding of the Meaning of Life! The followers of our great Lord need only turn to the Book of L, in the holy doctrine of Linguisticism to find the Meaning of Life:

1. --Life: –noun, pl.: lives – the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.

This is one of the many answers to the ultimate question. My good people, turn away from your lives of unholy sin — your lives littered with misspellings and split infinitives. The book of Linguisticism does not discriminate against any of the peoples of the world. Let us all be unified in our reverence of the one true Lord, Merriam Webster!

Our first Holy Communion will take place with the acceptance of rough drafts in the next Holy Cycle, when the observant will make themselves known.

Cordially,
Pope Loren Johnson II

What I do at Paste-Up Thursdays

2008-12-12T09:23:00.001-08:00

NOTHING.

Obscenities

2008-12-10T22:18:00.001-08:00

Being on a successful newspaper, I’m not allowed to print certain common phrases like “FUCK YOU.” This goes against my natural instinct to use one of my favorite rhetorical devices: the obscenity.

I have wanted to do this for so long. Upon the creation of this blog, I gained the ability to publish any word I want for the whole world to see. I can tell anyone what I think of them here, with no consequences — unless you call losing friends a consequence. I don’t. Screw them.

Here it comes! Three years of pent-up vulgarity, all in one explosion of curse words and dirty phrases:

Tits.

Whew. I feel so much better.

Spelling Error

2008-12-10T22:04:00.000-08:00

I made a spelling error today. It was awful.

Loren makes an error

2008-12-06T18:27:00.000-08:00

It has come to my attention that I used some pronouns without antecedents in the last blog post, and I just wanted to apologize in advance.

I know that most people have no clue what an antecedent is, and often the word pronoun brings looks of discomfort and confusion to my cohorts' faces, but I felt dirty just leaving the errors there without calling attention to them. It's a curse.

Here's the delinquent sentence:

Moving out of the way of the water, I turn the knob to its hottest setting and cry out in pain as it burns the bottoms of my feet while it flows into the drain.

The first pronoun "it" refers to the scalding water. The second "it" also refers to the scalding water.

There. This has been my most fulfilling blog post yet.

Shower Math

2008-12-06T17:47:00.000-08:00

Family members often inquire as to what I could possibly be doing in the shower for 40 minutes each day. Sometimes I think about telling them, but then I realize these things are just better left alone. Does anybody really want to know what I do in the shower, besides apply soap to my wet, naked body?

But I don’t care what you think of me, blog readers! See? I just began a sentence with a conjunction. Oh, that feels dirty.

So I will tell you what I do in the shower for 40 minutes every day, because it really is amazing; just as penguins migrate miles and miles to mate each year, I go on my own sort of special adventure each morning as I strip down and lather up.

My attention span, some may say, is much like lightning. It’s a beautiful sight, but it’s always gone in a flash. That doesn’t apply only to class lectures and summer reading assignments though. Often, I get distracted in the shower during my daily routine. What could possibly distract me for a half-hour? Soap, shampoo, the various peculiarities of my own body, but most often, it’s my damned curiosity that threatens to make me late for school each morning.

One day, I had nearly remained focused for the entire shower cycle. I had gotten through the body wash, and I had already poured the shampoo into my hand when it happened. I was dumbfounded; a random question had taken hold of me, and at any cost I would know the answer:

What are the odds of rolling a yahtzee in Yahtzee?

Damn. Instantly, nothing was more important than knowing the answer to this, the question of all questions. I began to work it out in my head. What are the odds of rolling all the same number with five dice? Well crap. I’d better start small, I thought, the shampoo oozing off my hand. What about one die? That’s easy, it’s always all the same number with one die, so 100 percent. Sweet. One step closer. The shampoo slithered off the shower floor into the drain.

OK, how about two dice? Well, how many combinations are there? Steam began to rise around me. There should be six possibilities for the first die, and then six possibilities for its partner. Sweet. So that’s six times six? Duck? Wait, no – 36. Duck? Why would I think that? I saw a duck yesterday (figure 1). Wait. Focus.

Figure 1: A distracting duck.

OK, so 36 possibilities for two dice. Sweet. Wait, though, it seems too easy. More steam. HEY! One and two is the same as two and one! Shoot. I give up. If only I had a sheet of paper… but it would get wet…

...

…

...

WAIT! The steam! The sliding glass door is caked with it! It’s practically a white board!

1 – 1 2 – 2 3 – 3 4 – 4 5 – 5 6 – 6

1 – 2 2 – 3 3 – 4 4 – 5 5 – 6

1 – 3 2 – 4 3 – 5 4 – 6

1 – 4 2 – 5 3 – 6

1 – 5 2 – 6

1 – 6

(If you’re wondering, “Did he really write all of this with his finger on the foggy sliding glass door in his bathroom while hot water rolled off his naked body?” then the answer is yes. I did.)

That’s 21 possibilities for two dice. Six of those possibilities are doubles; therefore, the odds of rolling doubles are 6/21. Wait, but that’s almost a third of the time. That doesn’t seem right. Scratch that. Since there are two combos for 2 and 1 and 1 and 2 it’s twice as likely to occur and should be counted twice, bringing the odds back to 6/36, or 1/6 (I have a way of making things more complicated than they actually need to be, which you’ve probably noticed by now).

This means all of the numbers are complete idiocy. I find that I’m often a victim of my own idiocy. Unfortunately, I had used the entire foggy space of the glass to write this large sequence of meaningless numbers, leaving myself no room to further study my complex problem. How, though, do I clean the sliding glass shower door?

Then I remembered how innovative I am, and my superior brain quickly dissolved the problem.

Moving out of the way of the water, I turn the knob to its hottest setting and cry out in pain as it burns the bottoms of my feet while it flows into the drain. Soon the pain ends though; a fresh blast of steam covers the above collection of nonsense numbers like the large, foreboding wave that washes away one’s pointlessly intricate sandcastle (figure 2).

Figure 2: A pointlessly intricate sandcastle.

After having figured out the odds of rolling doubles with two dice are 1/6, and the odds of rolling a yahtzee with three dice are 1/36, I found the pattern. With four dice the odds are 1/216, and with five dice the odds are 1/1,296. After covering my shower door with multiplication problems, I had found the answer.

My life could now continue, once I had de-pruned. I stepped out of the shower/laboratory and dried myself by shaking like a dog for approximately seven minutes. Damn, I am interesting. Anyway, I resolved to move on with my day, having satisfied my thirst for Yahtzee knowledge.

Regrettably, I later realized that my findings were useless because you don’t just get one roll in Yahtzee, you get three. You’d have to first figure out the odds of rolling it on the first try, then the odds of rolling the same number with four dice out of five on the first try, then the odds of rolling three dice the same on the first try, and so on and so forth multiplying and dividing and adding all sorts of numbers. It’s a question for another shower.

Hopefully, this has shed some light on what people, or at least what I do in the shower for 45 minutes each day, other than the usual cleaning and the drinking warm shower water and the drawing obscene things with my finger on the foggy sliding glass door. I hope this has brightened someone’s day.

Pleonasms: another reason I hate my life

2008-11-11T21:15:00.000-08:00

I hate pleonasms.

What’s a pleonasm you ask? I will tell you. It’s a thing designed to be difficult for me to notice, which I must remove, partly because they aren’t supposed to be there, but mostly because I just don’t like them. They are words that are really unnecessary but that people still include in their writing:

Tuna fish

ATM machine

Safe haven

Foreign imports

Free gift

So why do I hate them? You see, there are these things called “writers.” A writer’s job is to make my job as difficult as it can possibly be by being arrogant, stupid and unbearable. Writers decide to flip out when they see a circle around one of their words, because I put that circle there, and it means that I don’t like that word, which means that I don’t want it to be there, which means that they have to remove it.

Unfortunately, this opens up the door for a writer to do two of their favorite things in the whole world: 1) to ignore the circle, hoping that by the time their work returns to me for the final purging of errors I will be too tired and malnourished to see the error again, which I probably will be, or 2) to find me and force me to spend a significant portion of my life listening to their complaints and reasons as to why the word in question should not, in fact, be circled, as if I am not, in fact, the copy editor whose job it is to circle words like the one in question.

A writer will often try to explain to me the artistic elements and necessity of the word “that” in a sentence like this one:

“The cookie that I fed to my cactus this morning was delicious. Don’t ask me how I know.”

Notice that the word “that” is stupid and unnecessary. To my writers, this word is highly appealing, and its removal greatly detracts from their efforts. Mostly though, I think that my writers spend ridiculous amounts of time inserting pleonasms into their works as a covert group effort to drive me over the brink of insanity.

Often when encountering pleonasms, I regret my decision to become a copy editor, and I wonder how much I would need to pay to get my soul back — but then I stop and think about the difference I make in the world every day by removing these somewhat unnecessary words.

Then I cut myself and I usually feel slightly better.