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BEST AND WORST OF 2003
January 1, 2004BEST WEB DEBRIS
Definitely the year’s best video splicing and dicing was the must-see butchering of George Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. Check out fuckitall.com to see his speech, slightly re-edited to more accurately reflect Bush’s real thoughts. Among the priceless moments of this short clip is hearing Bush admit "I have been trained by Al-Quaeda, and I am weak and materialistic." But the highlight comes near the end, when a smirking Bush declares "we have a great opportunity, in this time of war, to lead the world toward suicide and murder."FIRST CASE OF SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION
Amazingly, 2003 was the first year I’ve had the pleasure to report on a case of spontaneous human combustion. According to a police report out of Romania, Alexei Rusnac, 85, was found dead sitting next to his fireplace last March, with his head burnt to the size of an orange and his body and clothes unmarked. Initially, investigators thought the man may have suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning and then fallen into the fireplace and set his head on fire, but forensic experts ruled out the theory, saying that a fireplace could not reach the temperature of 250 decrees Celsius, which is required to burn a human body. For now, spontaneous self-combustion remains the only explanation.WORST LOSER IN THE PENIS COMPETITION
The next time you’re challenged in a drunken who-has-the-largest-penis competition you might want to wipe that smirk off your face and just play along. A man in the Philippines learned the hard way not to laugh at a drunk man’s penis after a friendly round of heavy drinking turned into a challege to all the men to show their penises in order to determine who owned the longest and widest member. After the first man pulled out his little toy, his buddy pointed and laughed, and refused to pull out his schlong. Enraged, the first man pulled out his gun and repeatedly shot his former friend.MOST POINTLESS EXPERIMENT
Professors and students at the University of Plymouth in the UK finished experiments in June which tested the theory that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare. The study charted the creative output of six monkeys for a month before the researchers concluded that the monkeys wouldn’t ever come up with anything even closely resembling a single word. Instead of churning out rhyming couplets and over-dramatic sonnets, the monkeys only succeeded in partially destroying the equipment and using it as a toilet. They did come up with about five pages of text, almost exclusively of the letter "s", as well as a few occurances of the letters a, j, l, and m.BEST NEWS FOR SEMEN SWALLOWERS
2003 brought great news for all you semen swallowers out there. A couple of entrepreneurs out in Arizona received U.S. Patent No. 6,485,773 for their "Semen taste-enhancement dietary supplement." According to their research, ingestion of the powdered fruit/vegetable/spice drink will create "significant semen-taste improvement" for approximately 24 hours. The drink works by reducing the salty and bitterness in male semen, while adding a "pleasant flavor," which, they promise, 98.5% of customers find very enjoyable. Get all the details at the U.S., Patent website at www.uspto.gov/patft.WEIRDEST FISH EXPERIMENT
From the extremely strange scientific experiments department, researchers at a Swiss University concluded in August that fish can be turned on by fish pornography. The scientists (if you can call them scientists and still keep a straight face) showed 17 male stickleback fish two different films, one showing a flirtatious courtship between a male and female stickleback, the other simply showing a male caring for his brood. After the foreplay, the researchers found that the fish who had seen the "soft porn" ejaculated much more sperm than the fish who watched the boring film. Unfortunately, they didn't explain how they managed to get a fish to watch a film, nor how they actually measured the volume of fish sperm.WORST CHRISTMAS GIFT
From the "just because you're insane doesn't mean you can't make a few bucks department", comes the tale of a man who was abducted by aliens in 1982, and given the right to sell the Title Deeds of millions of galaxies to Earthlings for the low, low price of US$19.95. Yes, at www.GalaxiesRUs.com, they promise you can become a GLM (Galactic Lord and Master) with complete naming, landing and mineral rights, and absolute ownership for you and your descendants for one of millions of galaxies in our universe. Hurry before they're all gone!WORST NEWS FOR MARRIED MEN
July brought along the very worst news possible for married men over the age of 30. A psychologist in New Zealand finished studying the lives of 280 great scientists and found that over two-thirds of them made their greatest contributions to science before the age of 30. Even more surprisingly, he discovered that regardless of age, the great scientists who married saw an immediate and substantial decline in their creativity. "Scientists rather quickly desist (from their careers) after their marriage, while unmarried scientists continue to make great scientific contributions later in their lives," said Dr Satoshi Kanazawa. His research found similar effects on the creative output of married musicians, painters and writers. Most interestingly, the mind-numbing effects of marriage also hinders criminals, who tend to stop committing crimes after tying the knot, whereas criminals of a similar age who remain single continue in their lives of crime. The doctor theorizes that there is a "single psychological mechanism" which is responsible for both the competitive edge among young men to fight for glory and to gain the attention of women.WEIRDEST BOOK TITLE
In September, we discovered a new champion in the unofficial Curious Times Weirdest Frickin’ Book on Earth competition! Leave it to the Japanese, of course, to win this category, with Hiroyuki Nishigaki’s How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday? Malarkey? Or Effective Way? I shit you not. This is the actual title of an actual book which you can actually order at Amazon.com. There are even a few customer reviews, including this nugget: "This book is better than lithium. I was depressed for years until I came across Mr. Nishigaki and his incredible anus book. I was skeptical at first, but after only a week of the recommended anus exercises, I could feel my spirits lifting...whenever I get down or feel as though I might need to abuse myself, I simply stop, concentrate on crushing the imaginary walnut in my anus and-BLAMMO!-all depressing and/or criminal thoughts are gone in a single squeaky fart."WORST SHOT
In May, the New Delhi Pioneer reported that a guest of the bride at a wedding ceremony (who had probably had a few too many glasses of champagne), took it upon himself to grab his gun and fire a celebratory shot into the air. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite aim high enough in the sky, and fired a bullet directly into the groom’s skull, who is now lying comatose in a hospital bed in critical condition.MOST USELESS INVENTION
In August, a dog expert in England unleashed his new invention, the "wagometer," a device which can tell a dog’s exact mood by analyzing the wag of its tail. According to Dr. Roger Mugford, "a happy dog tends to have a wide and horizontal wag. A very high tail that only wags at the tip indicates the dog is ready to attack." His device, which goes on the dog’s back and includes sensors on his tail, analyzes the speed, direction and arc of the wag, and then tells you whether the dog is happy, angry, or about to attack. The wagometer was released in Britain at what sounds like a fascinating event called the Wag and Bone Show.BEST GETAWAY
In a move which most of us fantasize about but never have the guts to try, a man in Philadelphia took a $729,000 Ferrari for a test drive in November, and then drove off into the sunset, never to be seen or heard from again. Police say a salesperson took the man for a spin in the Italian roadster, then let him get behind the wheel for a few miles. The man then pulled over and asked the salesperson to drive him back to the showroom. When the salesperson climbed out the vehicle, the Ferrari sped off, probably into a waiting trailer and then overseas to be sold on the black market.WORST ATTEMPT TO FOOL THE AUTHORITIES
An American army doctor stationed in Germany was sentenced to one year in jail after eating and smoking hashish and then botching his attempt to give a fake urine sample to officers. Capt. Dean Munnell, 33, pleaded guilty to the charges after taking a trip to Amsterdam where he smoked hashish and ate a hashish-laced brownie. To prepare for any unexpected random drug tests, Munnell had put aside a clean urine sample in his office. Unfortunately, when the surprise drug test came, his cunning plan unraveled as he tried to inject the clean urine into his bladder. "It didn’t work as I intended," Munnell told the court. "It caused uncontrollable penile bleeding." And so we have the year’s most unfortunate combination of words, the phrase no man ever wants to hear or utter: "uncontrollable penile bleeding."
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