Thursday, May 28, 2009

A word from our sponsors...


Are you sad? Confused? Not sure what you want to do with your life?


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Well fret no more! This amazing new product with solve all of your problems in an instant. It's cheap! It's fast! It's easy! It's..........


DRINKING!


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*"Drinking" and its affiliates, parent companies, and subsidiaries do not endorse the consumption of alcohol. Drinking alcohol can and will lead to swearing in front of your mom, spilling beer on a cop, and having unprotected sex with not one but four people who you kind of knew from high school, but who were a few years younger so you never really talked to them but just kind of saw them around, you know? Also, you might get puke in your hair. Void where prohibited.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

I do other things

Look at what else I've been doing

The above link will take you to my new and very exciting blog entitled Irrational Geographic. It is a work in progress, but already contains some very great photos that I stole from Google Images. To whet your appetite, here are some images that will appear in future entires:
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Aleister Crowley in Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn get-up

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The "Montauk Monster"

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Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, surrounded by members of the Theosophical Society of Bombay, in 1881

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An antique bottle that has become encased in what appears to be a mineral deposit resembling coral

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

An open letter to the squirrel that I hit today while riding my mo-ped


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Dear Mr Squirrel,
What the eff? I obviously feel a serious amount of guilt about this horrid incident every time I replay it in my mind, which I've been doing compulsively. But the conclusion that I keep drawing, the conclusion that my rational brain thinks is correct*, is that this debacle is 100% your fault. I mean, I couldn't have been going more than 20, ok, 25 miles per hour. And it was just you and me on that big, two-lane road. And it's not like you didn't see me from at least a block away. I saw you lock eyes with me, saw you size up the width of my front tire, and saw you run directly for that five-inch-wide death zone with the speed and precision of a professional football player. I even sent you super intense psychic messages saying, "Keep your distance, squirrel, for I am riding a murder machine!". But nah. You dove under my tire, and in an instant were transformed from a spry, animated creature into a dull thud accompanied by a slight bump under my seat. Bad call, bro. And I'm supposed to feel guilty about this? I guess that, even when dealing with woodland beasts, this is a world of double standards and undying angst. Like Odysseus, I am cursed to walk (scoot) the Earth as an eternal bringer and bearer of pain. I'm gonna go listen to Bright Eyes and burn myself with the metal tip of a lighter while trying to muffle my sobbing so mom won't hear me over the sounds of the season finale of House. Thanks for nothing, squirrel!

*My emotional brain, however, has moped about this out of deep despair for the last twelve hours. (Get it? Moped? Mo-ped? I am clever)

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Do you miss me? Did you even notice I was gone?

Loyal fan base, you may or may not have noticed that my blog posts here on the good ol' 413some have slowed to a figurative crawl. This is because I have been spending a lot of my time preparing a new blog that will hopefully be ready to launch within the next week or two. It will focus on historical oddities, curios of the natural world, cryptozoology, ancient technology, and so on. It will not be funny at all. While I scramble to get it off the ground, please enjoy these meager offerings:

This woman thinks that gays lack the sense of vision


Please don't let your children watch news channel 15


Catchphrase is a filthy, filthy game show


This is what happens when Orson Welles, one of the greatest actors and directors of the 20th century, gets shit faced while trying to film a commercial


Nick Jr is way cooler now than when I was a kid

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

French Onion Soup Review #3: Plats du Chef Brand "Heat & Serve" Frozen Soups

Friends, I'm sorry/thrilled to inform you that 413some has officially relocated to Brooklyn, NY. Since I don't yet know my way around the neighborhood and am too paranoid to ride the subway alone, I have failed to discover any exemplary eateries specializing in pub fare. That is why I was pleasantly startled to find this product in the freezer aisle of a nearby market.

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(Box is shown next to plastic baby in order to establish scale)

I bought this two-pack of frozen French onion soup at Trader Joe’s. It was the first purchase I made after arriving in New York, and my decision making process may have been in a questionable state of upheaval. Regardless, the purchase was made and my resolve was steeled. I was going, for the first time in my life, to kind of make French onion soup.

I discovered upon opening the box that, contrary to what was implied by the idyllic scene pictured thereon, these frozen soups do not come with their own bowls. Instead, they are akin to frigid soil core samples showing the strata of natural history laid out in layers of mineral deposits. It appears as if there was a mass extinction about 60 million years ago (creating a base of decayed biomass), followed by an era of mineral deposits (resulting in a buried crouton mountain range), all topped with the gruesome remnants of a vicious Civil War battle, if the Civil War had been fought by small, spongey cubes of cheese.

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Yep, weird.

In order to remove the solid block of frozen broth from its stubborn plastic housing, I had to bite the packaging with my teeth. This led to my tongue inadvertently grazing the soup block. In this brief moment I experienced a salt flavor explosion as intense as if an octopus has blown its load in my mouth. And the octopus’ boner kind of tasted like onions. And he lived in Arctic waters.

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After a whopping 40 minutes in the oven, Phase One of my gustatory experiment was complete. The cheese had assumed a slight brown color, meaning that the soup was ready to be devoured. It was now time to learn whether my foray into soup making was a smashing success or a dismal defeat. I lifted the steaming spoon to my lips and…


Crap. The frozen flavor dynamite that has bewitched my tongue 40 minutes earlier proved to be nothing more than a really exciting trailer for a really disappointing film. The cheese, the “croutons”, the soup; it was all bland. The best thing about this bowl of soup was the bowl itself, which I found in the kitchen cabinet. It’s a brown crock with applied handles. Real nice little thing. Sturdy.


So my first ever attempt to make my favorite dish ended up a miserable failure. Thanks a lot, TRAITOR JOE!

Final Soup Rating: 0 out of 10 octopus loads

Friday, May 1, 2009

Gambling with Brain Chemistry

We've all got our vices. Some smoke, others steal, and I myself enjoy raping the fuck out of pandas. Wouldn't it be great if, when caught in the act, you could excuse your prurient behavior as the unavoidable side-effect of perfectly legitimate medication? Well, now you can! Allow me to introduce you to a little group of drugs called Dopamine Agonists. Prescribed for the treatment of the apparent crock-of-shit known as Restless Leg Syndrome, these drugs are known to cause increased gambling and sexual deviance. Think I'm lying to you? Take a look at the Mayo Clinic's website:

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Yep, this shit is for real. Since pills that treat leg tinglies can make you gamble away the house and try to finger grandpa, one can only imagine the other unforeseen side effects that medications can cause. Here are some uneducated predictions regarding drug side effects that we will hear about in the future:

1) When you take Tylenol PM, your neighbor experiences the urge to rename his cat.
2) Use of Midol leads to the compulsive renting of season one of The Gilmore Girls on BluRay.
3) Ambien, when combined with alcohol, will make you blow a cop.
4) Camomile tea causes pregnancy. The child will be biracial.
5) Drugs prescribed to treat fibromyalgia prevent the user from suffering shock when he or she remembers that Mark Knopfler uses the word "faggot" three times in the second verse of the original version of the Dire Straits' 1985 hit song Money For Nothing.
6) Excessive marijuana use leads to blogging.

From now on, any indiscretion can be chalked up to an innocent chemical byproduct. For example, that cup of coffee I had seven hours ago has got me in a, shall we say, certain mood.

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"I'd had a latte, your Honor."