Vuvuzelas to Vikings

As anyone who spent any amount of time watching the World Cup knows, vuvuzelas are the horn-like abominations from South Africa that made you spend half of the match wondering if you were losing your hearing or if everybody in the room heard that weird buzzing noise. It may interest you to know that the vuvuzela is also known as the "lepatata", and that noise it makes that sounds like a terrified hamster attempting to escape from an air horn is typically around the B flat below middle C. Or you may just be in the process of trying to remove the stain of the vuvuzela from the dry erase board of your mind forever. Spoiler alert: No amount of desperate, squeaky erasing is going to save you. Look on the vuvuzela, ye mighty, and despair! Or get the psychological equivalent of a damp paper towel; "The Final Countdown." It will erase the sound of the vuvuzlea- and probably everything else you've ever heard- from your mind and replace that knowledge with a burning desire to sing along to "The Final Countdown." Your passion for this endeavor will be multiplied ten fold if the only lyrics you know are: " IT'S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN!"
After that short transfer from the train of thought onto the midtown bus of unrelated tangent, let me continue.
Another arguably fun fact about the vuvuzela is that it was inspired by a horn used to summon distant villagers to attend community gatherings. A little bit further North in the world, Vikings tended to come to community gatherings un-summoned. And not un-summoned in that lovely "We were in the neighborhood and just stopped in to say hi, remember us from college?" sort of way, more in that "Give us all your valuables and/or we will kill you, on second thought forget the 'or'" sort of way. Theoretically, if vikings and vuvuzelas had existed in the same place at the same time, vuvuzleas probably would have accidentally summoned vikings who would have destroyed the vuvuzelas and beaten the everliving daylights out of anyone using one, eventually leading to the downfall of the vuvuzela and celebrations among soccer fans everywhere (or at least everywhere that isn't South Africa.)

By the way, the best thing in existence related to vuvuzelas is The Fellowship of the Vuvuzela. Look that up on youtube, friends, and prepare for hilarity.

Arctic Foxes to Accordions.

Captain Crunch to Curling

Woah.
I haven't updated this thing in ages.
Sorry about that, you've probably been waiting with baited breath for the next post to show up. I'm sure you've all logged in about seven or eight times a day for the past week hoping to read a new post and, seeing that there were no updates, burst into tears screaming "WHY GOD WHY?!!!??!?? WHY IS THERE NO NEW POST?!???!!!!?? AHHHHHGGSHHHGAJH!!!!!!," at which point in an uncontrollable fit of rage you knocked over the table breaking everything in its falling path and almost cutting off your poor little kitten's tail on its way down. I know. And I'm sorry. I'll pay for the new table. (Side note: no I won't. It's your own fault.)
But anyway.
Captain Crunch to Curling.
Captain Crunch is delicious. This is a universal truth. It's delicious if you eat it all by itself, but that's lame. All the cool kids mix and match their cereals up to make a funky cereal concoction. That's one of the best things about college - the cereal bar. Every single morning you can go down to the dining hall, grab a bowl, and create your own unique type of cereal by mixing together all the other ones that are there. And there are always about six different options, so that means that you have about (hold on - taking a moment to do a math problem in my head that is waaay too much for me to handle this early in the day or actually ever okay screw this I'm using a calculator) 40 different combinations you can make. And that's pretty cool. My favorite is mixing Captain Crunch with Chocolate Rice Krispies and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Yes, it's intensely sugary, but my God if it's not one of the most amazingly delicious things you've ever tried. If you put milk in your cereal like I do, it turns your milk into chocolate milk. CHOCOLATE MILK IN YOUR CEREAL. It's so, so good. I'd go on and on about it, but I'm getting hungry and I'm nowhere near a cereal bar. Actually, if I really wanted to I could make my own cereal bar. And you can, too. Just go to your local supermarket and pick up one of those little travel packs of cereal that has like twelve different boxes in it and presto, you've got yourself your own little college-like cereal bar.
You don't even need to go to a supermarket to do all your food shopping these days, you know. Apparently places like WalMart and Target are incorporating supermarkets into their stores so that if you ever need to shop for anything ever you can just go to one store and get it all done, which I think is stupid 'cause the whole fun of shopping is schlepping all over the place and getting so exhausted that all you can do after is go home, blast the air conditioning, take a shower, then crash on the couch and fall asleep watching re-runs of Friends. And that's what shopping's all about - exercise disguised as walking around with heavy bags, trying on lots of clothing that ends up looking horrible on you and ruining your self-esteem for the next few hours, getting blisters on your feet from walking around all day, then going home and refreshing yourself and finally realizing that you actually did get some cute dresses and the food you desperately needed so things aren't so bad at that. But Target's screwing that all up, eliminating the fatigue, blisters, and ruined self-esteem so that you're happy all the fricken time while shopping. So selfish.
Anyway.
The logo for Target is, well, a target. Really, I applaud the guy that thought that one up. That's some innovative, original thinking that is. But anyway, that Target logo look thing is what defines the goal spots in the sport of Curling. If you don't know what Curling is, it's a sport in which players slide stones across a sheet of ice to a target area. In order to make the stones go faster, players take brooms and sweep the ice away really fast in front of the stone as it's moving. Basically Curling is one of my favorite sports, as it combines two of my favorite pastimes - cleaning things and sliding around on slippery surfaces - into an Olympic sport.

And in the spirit of awesome world sports... Vuvuzelas to Vikings. (And you can't just say that they're basically horns and Vikings have horns on their hats.)

Androgyny to Alka Seltzer

I love androgyny. Men who look like women, women who look like men, individuals who could go either way, I think it's fantastic. This is primarily because androgyny remains fantastically attractive while still confusing the everliving fuck out of people. In my opinion, this is the best kind of attractive you can possibly be. People need lines blurred occasionally. It builds character. There is also a kind of defiance inherent in androgyny. You're very visually not pinned down within a gender role, you just are who you are. That kind of freedom and individualistic beauty is something that often appeals to people who want to challenge their society's standard perception of the world. Let me just amend that to say, awesome people.
Performers sometimes use androgyny to challenge those perceptions and make a rebellious statement, for better or for worse. For better, David Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust period. For worse, Marilyn Manson with breasts. Go on, try to get that image out of your mind. No, pouring soap in your ears won't help. No amount of hopeless clawing at the sides of your head will erase the pale, grey, nipple-less.. You know, I'm probably not helping here. Moving on. Other things performers sometimes do include mass amounts of substances that might kill them. Many of these things are illegal, but one of them that isn't is alcohol.
Not to encourage irresponsible alcohol consumption, but during the actual drinking stage of its usage, that shit is awesome. Note that I say it's awesome during the actual drinking stage. There is a point at which consuming alcohol suddenly ceases to be awesome and rapidly becomes the worst thing you have ever done, ever. This is the point directly between when you tell that impossibly attractive person that you really, really love bratwurst in a near romantic sense and the moment when you realize that the blindingly white death bubble you were gazing into is actually a toilet bowl and what you assumed was the shrieking of a thousand damned and suffering souls undergoing similar punishment to your own is actually your friends debating whether or not you're going to die in their bathroom. From that point onward, alcohol ceases to be your friend. It may have been engaged in a romantic, dizzying tango with your brain, but at that point it switches partners to begin the forbidden dance of death with your liver, and like any awful chaperone you will regret leaving them alone together for the rest of the night.
After that point, you do not want to think about what will happen in the morning. The morning after a night like that is what Alka Seltzer was invented for.
Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, feel what real damnation is.

Captain Crunch to Curling.

Marshmallow Peeps to Moldova

If ever you find yourself depressed, sad, angry, or just in need of a good pick-me-up, get on the internet and go to the Peeps website. I swear if a smile does not immediately appear on your face there is something inexplicably wrong with you - that website is the most cheerful thing I've seen since the Polyphonic Spree's "Light & Day" music video (this one - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVaqXGGh9kk). The best part of the website, I have to say, is the "Peeps fun facts" page. I've learned more about Peeps in the last minute and a half than I had ever thought I'd learn about Peeps in a lifetime. Did you know that it takes six minutes to create just one Peep chick? Amazing. Also, apparently there are over 200 unofficial Peeps websites out there, which does not surprise me at all. Die-hard Peeps fans are CRAZY. They dress up Peeps, explode Peeps, re-enact classic movie scenes with Peeps, cook with Peeps, figure out 100 ways to kill Peeps (not kidding, it's a real website), and pretty much do every crazy thing possible to feed their unhealthy Peep addiction. Which isn't that unhealthy, seeing that each Peep has only 32 calories and 0 grams of fat in it (thanks, Peeps fun facts website). But anyway. Peeps fans are crazy, but I bet there are crazier fans out there. The weirdest fan club I've ever heard of is the Rat Fan Club. Which is, you know, a fan club for rats. As in those rodents who screwed everything up in the middle ages by carrying all sorts of horrible diseases which ended up killing about half the population of Europe. There are people out there who keep these things as pets (or "companions" as they prefer to call them, which is infinitely creepier), and even subscribe to a newsletter called the "Rat-a-tat Chat" which is written by the club's founder, the aptly nicknamed "Debbie The Rat Lady." Membership to the RFC is free, and it only requires that you sign up for the online chat room. Chat rooms are places where people from different parts of the world can communicate with each other about their shared interests. For instance, someone in America could sit by their computer and have a conversation about how much they love dressing up their rat companions with someone sitting by their computer somewhere in Europe. Moldova's a country that's somewhere in Europe. Right? I know about as much about Moldova as I used to know about Peeps before I came across that website. And that's pretty much nothing.

Androgyny to Alka Seltzer.

Nachos to Nietzsche

Nachos bring to mind a rather painful incident in my not so distant past, when my friend bet me all the change in her purse that I couldn't eat all the jalapenos off her nachos. Being someone with a lot of laundry to do, I jumped at the chance to win myself some more quarters and a new degree of respect for my gastric fortitude. There is a lot to be said for demonstrating your native courage and lack of flammability to your friends, especially when you feel this is going to be very easy and reasonably impressive.
Eating forty-seven jalapeno peppers for spare change is, in a much more legal way, like doing coke of a hooker. You CAN do it, but you shouldn't. Multiple jalapenos on your tongue are the equivalent eating lighter fluid and chasing it with matches. At first it just tastes like shit, and then your face is on fire. Let me tell you this now, four dollars in quarters is so far from worth that level of pain that the two concepts can only be photographed together from space. It's not even so much that you feel like you're eating a flaming porcupine, it's more that you're pink and gasping and crying and trying to look stoic through the slow death of your pride and digestive organs and everyone in a four foot radius is laughing at you. Not that you don't deserve a little mockery; at this point in the eating jalapenos process you realize that you have actually sacrificed your sense of taste for those four dollars. Through the flood of pain and mind-scalding heat, you know that you will never taste ice cream, or pickles, or sugar again and that you have done this to yourself for one fucking load of laundry. This is not even going to be worth two full months of clean underwear. You have sacrificed a fourth of your perception of the world to shrink your jeans in the dryer.
Jalapeno peppers are evil.
Speaking of gastric distress hitherto unknown to man (jalapenos are like those things in Alien. Eating them is just the beginning.) Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844-August 25,1900) suffered from horrific digestive problems throughout his life. Actually, according to Wikipedia, Nietzsche appears to have had almost every disgustingly awful disease there was. To give you just a sampling, over the course of his life he suffered from migraine headaches, dysentery, diphtheria, syphilis and voluntarily hanging out with Richard Wagner. No wonder he thought that God was dead.
On the plus side, he also had a pretty bitchin' mustache.

Marshmallow Peeps to Moldova.

Kangaroos to Kraftwerk

When most people think of Kangaroos, they think of Australia. Me, I think of Jethro Tull. I mean yes, when I think of the actual animal all hopping around with its convenient little built-in tote bag and such I totally picture the ones you'd see in the outback, but when someone says the word "Kangaroo," all I can think of is that part of "A Passion Play" when Ian Anderson goes off on this whole anecdote about "The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles." At the beginning of the second part of the song, the guys just sort of take a break from rockin out to tell us all a children's tale about this poor little Hare who starts panicking because he can't find his stupid glasses. Anyway, the reason I associate "Kangaroo" with this madness is because the whole reason Hare starts freaking out in the first place is because a kangaroo runs by this owl at the beginning and starts talking to himself, whispering that "the hare has lost his spectacles." Pretty much from there on the Hare and all his other furry friends in the forrest go ballistic. The best part of this whole thing is that it is told by Anderson, who, in my opinion, has one of the world's most ridiculously silly Scottish accents. The following is an excerpt: "Kangaroo were hopping mad at this sort of talk. She thought herself far superior in intelligence to the others. She was their leader; their guru. She had the answer: 'Hare, you must go in search of the optician.'" (I think what you can figure from this story is that Scottish people's ideas of Kangaroos are that they're intelligent, snobby, schizophrenic, and like to cause trouble. And all Americans' think of is Australia. I'll go with the Scots on this one, they seem like they're out for a good time.)
Needless to say, this story in itself is a piece of brilliance. YouTube it or something. Trust me, it's worth all four minutes and forty three seconds of your precious time. But anyway, back to Jethro Tull. If you don't know who Jethro Tull is, go away, listen to "Thick As A Brick," then come back and tell me that they are not the best thing you've heard all day. Basically they were a British rock band from the 70's and so on. Well, technically, they weren't a rock band, they were a progressive rock band. Progressive rock is a form of rock music that developed in the late 60's in which the artists tried to break the boundaries of what had been previously considered "rock music" and elevate the genre to a whole new level of artistic credibility. Progressive rock artists would use all kinds of weird instruments and things to create new sounds, not unlike what the German experimental electro-pop band, Kraftwerk, does with electro music. Oh hey, we made it to Kraftwerk. Boom.

Nachos to Nietzsche.