Dead Tom's Junk Drawer

Hey there Internet! How are all of you doing this week? Me, I'm exhausted. Like, it's only ten at night at this very moment and I'm already fighting to stay awake. Mostly I've spent my last week catching up on schoolwork and such. I read The Color Purple which was surprisingly less racism-y and more lesbian-y and rape-y so that was a little out of left field. I also expanded part of the last point from My "Things I Hear People Say About America" article into a short essay for a Government class and redoubled my efforts to learn French and German, which are both going very well, thank you.
So I've been a busy me.
Where am I going with this? Well, unfortunately, you're not going to get to read about Christianity and Homosexuality right now. Honestly, I'm just way too tired and I don't feel prepared and I feel that it's an important enough topic that I should probably have the wherewithal to give it a proper treatment. Don't worry though! I am going to make this work out for you in the slightly-longer run! Tonight I'm posting a slightly shorter, just-for-fun piece and you'll get what you voted for tomorrow night. So you guys get TWO posts because I'm a wiener, isn't that great? On top of that, my school is holding a round table discussion on Gay Marriage so I'll come back swinging. It all works out! Like the Brady Bunch! Only...there's one of me...and they were wearing pants.

Blogging is very definitely my favorite pants-optional activity.

So without further ado, to-do, or Ski-doo's, let's get right to it.

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THIS WEEK'S TOPIC IS:

Dead Tom's Junk Drawer

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So the first thing I wanna cover is actually an order of business. As anyone who might've casually glanced at the poll this week may have noticed, I'm having a bit of trouble getting reader feedback. Only one person voted which isn't good because I know way more people than that actually read it. One of my goals with this blog is to have user-directed content, but I'm kind of struggling to get enough people to give an opinion which is something that, I'll admit, I did not expect on the internet of all places. 

The Internet; full of opinions and people who need to validate them by shouting absolutely everyone down.

Now, I realize the inherent irony of trying to solve a feedback problem by asking for direct feedback, but hear me out; go run to the comments right now and tell me if there's a better way to get your input, even if it's just asking you to leave some more comments on what you'd like to see. As a matter of fact; what WOULD you guys like to see? At this point I've covered Psychology, Literature, Basic Human Decency, and even some history, and frankly, I could go a lot wider than that if you guys wanted. One of my favorite parts about writing this blog is the research, so go ahead; throw me a challenge and we'll see if I can't make something out of it.

Now that business is taken care of, let's have some fun.

We live in the age of the spray-on tan and frankly, that's pretty horrendous. A lot of people will (pretty rightly) associate such a thing with the over-gelled, under-educated Guido douchebags a la Jersey Shore. This is usually followed by saying something like "Truly there is no hope for the human race" or "This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a duckface."

Okay, that one was just me. Still though, as completely intolerable as I find these people, I am more than a little skeptical when someone hails anything as a sign of society's downfall because almost every time, there's some kind of thing just like it that happened forever ago that no one remembers and things turned out just fine (or in some cases, better). Similarly, I feel there's a case to be made here as well. As some of you might know, the standard for hawtness wasn't always tanned, toned, and pincoushiony. Before the Industrial Revolution happened, it was actually way more attractive to be pale, plump, and frilly, because history likes its alliteration, apparently. The idea was "If you can afford to not work and eat a lot and subsequently be pale and well-fed, then you are obviously successful, and therefore attractive."

For those of you who didn't know this, go find a renaissance-era painting of a beautiful, wealthy woman. Too lazy to? Of course you are. Here's one. Don't say I never did anything for you.

click to enlarge. Even more. 

Notice the obscenely porcelain, almost dead-white skin. Notice the chubs, the rolls, the chin. This wasn't just a sexy woman; this is a picture of Venus, also known as the Roman Goddess of getting down and dirty. This was the ideal woman, once upon a time. Alternatively, today, she'd be sitting in the back of class drawing yaoi. If you don't know what that is, I advise you not to look it up. 

Where am I going with this? Being pale was such a big deal that once upon a time, people came up with the idea of powdering your face to make yourself even more pale and hell, let's add some rogue to make those cheeks even perkier. This was done (albeit, not universally) by women and men in the aristocracy and I'll be darned if they didn't look totally ridiculous.

Pictured: Nicolas de Vermont

I mean come on, even their hair was outrageous.

Point is, there will always be douchebags and they will always go out of their way to be ridiculous and honestly, the more we allow ourselves to be flabbergasted by their complete attention whorishness, the happier they are.

NEEEEWWWWW TOPIIIIIC!

So I wrote a poem which is weird because I never do that. Like ever. I can't overstate that enough; I have never in my life felt the urge to write poetry and have happily not acted on that lack of urge except for very recently. Initially, I was just going to let this fall by the wayside into Facebook oblivion, but people kept pestering me to post it, so fine. Personally I don't think it's great because I dramatically shift meter and can't decide if I want to rhyme or not, but whatever, here it is:

Don't fear the bombs.

Don't fear the bangs and booms

that hurt your ears

and screw your eyes shut.

Don't fear the rat-tattat-tat

or the soldiers marching in lines.

These could all kill you without one word,

but they'll never do it by lying.

Fear, instead, the leaders of men;

the chieftains, mayors, and kings.

Fear, instead, men of power

with fancy clothes and shiny rings.

Fear, instead, the quiet change

which seeks to go unnoticed.

Fear, instead, what's 'for your own good'

to keep the peace and order.

But most of all, fear yourself;

you are the soldier, subject, and rioter.

And most of all, fear yourself;

before your own mind, no poison is quieter.

So there's that. I think that's quite enough artistic expression for one year. Let's go back to analyzing other people's expressions, please?

Moving right along, does everyone remember the lady who sued McDonald's a few years ago because she burned herself with coffee? Wasn't it hilarious agreeing how completely stupid it was that she could get away with a lawsuit that netted her millions of dollars because her dumb ass is clumsy? This story has officially come into urban legend status on the grounds that nearly everyone's heard of it and nearly no one knows the right version of it. 

As can be seen in this rather hilarious cracked.com article, just about everything you generally hear about the story has been nooged, exaggerated, or just flat out made up. The first thing you should know is that the coffee in question wasn't just "hot" or "Pretty hot" or "ow, ow, my tongue" hot, it was "third degree burns in seven seconds" hot. Quick question; why are we drinking coffee that hot? Not being a coffee drinker myself, this baffles me. This coffee was so hot she sustained third degree burns to 6%-16% of her body and needed skin grafts as a result. 

Third degree burns are nasty, so here's an adorably baby human, instead. If you're feeling brave, you can find the picture here.

Now, that alone should be enough to shut most people up about this but wait, it gets better.

Initially, she tried to get McDonalds to pay for the skin grafts to the tune of $20,000 because hey man, this shit's expensive and you're the ones who serve coffee from the surface of the sun. The clown wasn't hearing it though, and it was only after that they went to court, which the lady in question won. How much did she win? Millions and millions, right? Actually, it was $640,000 which, counting court fees and skin grafts, can't stretch too far. On top of that, the court reduced the compensatory damages portion ($200,000) by 20% because they agreed it was about 20% her fault. 

Now can we please stop talking about this? Seriously, She's dead. This story has long outlived the lady it was about.

Now let's finish this off with some mindblows. 

If you flip 3.14 horizontally, it spells "pie"

If you touch your big toe and your nose at the same time, you'll feel your nose just a split second faster every time.

You can cure a brainfreeze almost every time by pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth.

If you watched cartoons from 1982-present, Elizabeth Daily probably voiced at least one of your favorite characters.

The arrow on the Amazon logo goes from A to Z. The FedEx logo has a hidden arrow in it.

No one ever says the word "Jawa" in any of the Star Wars movies.

The "Bwan Bwan" sound from Inception that played whenever something awesome happened was actually the two notes from the baseline of the song they used to count down until waking up. The implication being that the characters in the movie actually heard this sound. 

If you go to any random article on Wikipedia and click the first link over and over again (skipping parentheses and disambiguations) you will almost always end up at the page for Philosophy.

Well that was fun. I mean that was really fun. Maybe if I start to get an overpiling of topics to cover, I'll do a few more junk drawers. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it as well. I hope to get this week's real post up sometime tomorrow and in the meantime, be sure to vote, comment, do a silly dance, and share me with your friends. I like to be passed around like that. I'm such a dirty girl.

Thank you, goodnight.