Two Reasons OFT Isn’t Being Updated Today

• I’m not feeling super up to it right now.

• Oh. Oops. I did it again.

Update (February 22nd, 2018): Here’s a not very comedic accounting of the matter at hand.

This Valentine’s Day, please allow me to share a list of ten inspirational phrases said to me by the wrappers of Halls sugar free cough drops as I struggled with a cough.

• Don’t waste a precious minute.

• You’ve survived tougher.

• Fire up those engines!

• Flex your “can do” muscle.

• Dust off and get up.

• Inspire envy.

• A PEP TALK IN EVERY DROP™

• March forward!

• You got it in you.

• Don’t try harder. Do harder!

Halls actually paid someone to come up with this idea, as well as to write and/or crib these little phrases. What a world we live in.

Recently, while sating my desire to eat food out of a cylinder, I stumbled upon something rather disturbing. It seems Pringles has a new social media campaign. On the top of each tube is this message:

Once I saw this, I was forced to wonder if I’ve been using Pringles wrong my entire life. I contemplated how else one might make use of Pringles, and came up with a brief list. I recognize that even mocking this ad campaign is enhancing the mindshare of Pringles, and thereby playing right into the hands of the Kellogg Company, but so it goes.

An Incomplete List of Things You Do With Pringles Besides Eating ’Em

• You use ’em to duck yourself.

  
  Quack.

• You use ’em in the bedroom. I don’t know how, and I don’t wanna know how, but rule #34 ensures that someone has found a no–doubt–deeply–unsettling way. Frankly, that’s immediately what I assumed this meant, and I was fairly grossed out.

• You share one with that dog who’s sitting patiently at your feet.

• You teach a geometry lesson with ’em. (OK, that’s actually pretty good.)

• You eat ’em, then you digest ’em, then, well, you deposit ’em into the sewage system.

Ultimately, however, the results of a Twitter search for the hashtag “#YouDontJustEatEm” prove that people mainly do two things with Pringles. First, they eat ’em. And second, they tweet to ask just what the hell else folks are doing with ’em.

An Incomplete List of Lengths of Time for Which One Can, and/or Ways One Might, Chill

• …for a sec(ond).

• …for a minute.

• Netflix and…

• …for awhile.

• …’til the next episode.

That’s all for now. Until the next post, you should chill for one of the above lengths of time, and/or in one of the above ways. Or perhaps you’ll chill in some other as-yet-unlisted fashion!

An Incomplete List of Major League Baseball Players Who May Be “Greek Fellas”, According to My Father

• Nick Markakis

• Mike Moustakas

• George Kottaras

When it was suggested to him that Didi Gregorius might be a Greek fella, my father sagely replied “I don’t think so…”.

Didi Gregorius? Not a Greek.

Happy birthday, Dad.

Previously in lists of baseball players: A Comprehensive List of Outfielders Who’ve Played Baseball for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and Share a Last Name With a Type of Fish

An Incomplete List of Things People Clap for, in Increasing Order of Stupidity

• Rock Concerts
  Admittedly, the band is right there and they can hear your applause, so this one isn’t horrendously dumb. However, everyone knows they’re going to do an encore and it doesn’t actually have anything to do with how much you cheer. You’re not fooling anyone, popular music band!

• Airplane Landings
  Listen, I too am ecstatic that we didn’t plummet out of the sky during our flight.¹ But this is the way things are supposed to work. It’s the way things do work, tens of thousands of times each day. You don’t applaud when your cab driver gets you to your meeting, nor when the elevator reaches your floor.

• Movies
  Unless you’re at a film festival, no one involved in the making of the film is present. So, to whom exactly are you showing your appreciation? The surly teenager working the projector could not care less.

• Sunsets
  I just can’t even I mean what the UGH!

Footnotes:

1. Or simply disappear altogether, for that matter. ↩︎

• SERVICE EMISSIONS SYS

• HOOD AJAR

• REGEN BRAKES DISABLED

• SERVICE BRAKE SYSTEM

The fact that someone coded the car’s dash system to be able to cycle through so many messages is kinda concerning. More troubling, perhaps, than the apparent lack of brakes the aforementioned cab possessed.

Previously.

After seeing this ridiculous (but very real) city government form, the idea of other inappropriate uses of Comic Sans arose. Submitted for your consideration:

Ten More Entirely Inappropriate Uses of the Font Comic Sans

• Death Certificates

• Paternity Test Results

• Sexual Predator Disclosure Notices

• The 9/11 Commission Report

• Diplomatic Cables (STOP USING COMIC SANS STOP SERIOUSLY THOUGH, STOP STOP)

• Pink slips

• STD Test Results

• Declarations of War

• Bris Invitations

• Suicide Notes (Non-Clown)

[This list compiled during a virtual Algonquin Round Table with @toldorknown and @moltz.]

Jerry Rubin famously told us “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Lesser-known 60’s radical James Simon Kunen wrote “I agree in principle, but I think they ought to drop the zero”. While amusing, both sentiments are perhaps overly broad. As such, I’ve started keeping my own more specific list. Join me as I share my intolerance!

An Incomplete List of Untrustworthy Adults

• Adults who wear Crocs in public

• Adults who return from a Caribbean vacation with their hair in braids

• Dick Cheney

• Adults who lick their fingers to turn a page in a book or newspaper

• Adults who drink Mountain Dew