Rabid

Some contend that the recent rise in popularity of the zombie in television and film reflects our subconscious fear of losing our autonomy. Whether or not this is the case, we take comfort in knowing that the zombie is a fictitious being. We remind ourselves that there is no disease transferred through bite that drives the host insane, but this is a lie.

Zombies are real, and the disease is called rabies.

Fear²

Scaring people is great. There are few things more satisfying than choosing the perfect hiding spot, crouching down and breathing as quietly as possible as you wait for your victim. Your ankle starts to hurt, but you don’t shift your weight because it might make a noise. You feel the need to cough but resist, lest you spoil the ambush. Finally you hear those footsteps and tense up, ready to pounce.

“Rawwwrr!”

Mission accomplished. For a split second the person forgot they lived in a safe, normal world where nothing is trying to kill them. Logical thought processes are temporarily disabled as they react with pure instinct, usually spitting out  some stuttered jibberish or swatting at you. It’s these moments of raw behavior that reveal that our grasp on reality is a little looser than we’d like to think. We want to believe that if we saw a monster or an alien, or even a monster-alien hybrid, we would know that it’s a trick and not succumb to irrational fear of something that we all know does not exist. This is not true; what we see and feel is more powerful than what we know.

There are television shows which use hidden cameras to capture these raw moments as unsuspecting pedestrians are subjected to cruel comedic experiments. On one of these shows, a man acting as a zookeeper asks the target if they have seen an escaped gorilla. This all unfolds in broad day light in a busy public park, by the way. Several moments after the zookeeper walks away, a man in a gorilla suit charges the victim and they shriek and flee in terror. But hold on, why would someone believe that an escaped gorilla was wandering around a public park? There are many other scenarios on this show more ridiculous than gorillas in a park, and they all prey on the fact that emotion is more powerful than reason and that perception is greater than knowledge. In the moment when we are confronted with incredible and frightening situations, all that we know about the world evaporates.

Something that is just as awesome, if not more awesome, than scaring a person is allowing the person to scare themselves. If you scare someone enough times, or create situations in which the person expects to be scared, then your objective is completed before you’ve actually done anything. The old saying about the fear of the unknown is accurate, but to truly drive terror into someone’s heart you must also create the second level of fear – the fear of being frightened.

These two forms of fear are known as horror and terror. Horror is the sensation of observing something frightening or repulsive. and terror is the feeling of dread that comes before you see it. As an example, consider a child laying awake at night on his bed, frightened of the monster he believes resides beneath him. His mind is generating images of what might be under the bed, but he doesn’t look. It’s his terror that keeps from peeking below the frame and discovering something that might horrify him – he’s afraid of being scared.

Legendary horror fiction author, Stephen King, praises terror as the finest emotion, and this is what you must use against your victim. Simply ambushing someone and frightening them with  a loud noise, while gratifying, fails to generate penetrating, long-lasting fear. You must prey upon your victim’s terror – their fear of being scared – in order to create a haunting fear from which they never truly recover.

Your tactics need not be elaborate. Next time your favorite victim is in the washroom, simply turn the lights off in the living room and go outside; their own fear of being scared will do the rest. Then, a few minutes later, you can tap on the window or pound on the door, then enter and find them shaking in the corner with tears running down their face. Perfect.

Another simple method that works great on guests is closing the shower curtains in your bathroom. They must be opaque curtains, and your shower must be large enough for your victim to fill it with an imaginary murderer. As they relieve themselves they will glance at the curtain and think, “Hmm, there could be a person behind there, maybe even a murderer,” and they’re well on their way to being terrified.

Scaring people makes life more exciting.

First Languages

We all know that everyone has a first language, in terms of communication. We think, write and speak using vocabulary from the language we grew up with. However, this pattern exists beyond the language of oral and written expression and applies to individuals when first contact is made with any system. Whatever system you first encounter, metric or imperial, English or French, piano or guitar, you are eternally cemented in the framework of that system. No matter how intensely you study another system, you must always translate to your first language in your mind.

When someone attempts to learn the metric system, a centimeter is likely described to them as, “approximately half an inch.” Teaching by translation and conversion is slow, tedious and it encourages the mental translation which occurs in the student’s mind. This is not how we learn our first languages, so why do we try to learn new systems in this way? Think about how you first learned the length of an inch. Did someone tell you that it was one twelfth of a foot? Of course not. You learned the length of an inch by looking at something that was an inch long and associating that length with the term inch. This is how we should learn all new systems – observe, then associate.

If someone wants to learn to speak Spanish, they should not merely pick up a Spanish-English dictionary and read it cover to cover. If a person simply wanted to be able to recite Spanish translations of English words, then that dictionary is probably their best bet. Although this tactic may give them a large Spanish vocabulary, their ability to associate those words with objects, feelings or actions would be non-existent. In order to truly comprehend and absorb a new system, you must associate the new terms directly with the world around you.

Translation is the enemy of learning.

Comment Criterion

“But it’s true!”

You’ve certainly heard this defense shortly following a blunt, discourteous or obscene comment. Most of us have a compass inside of us that tells us which comments are acceptable and which ones are not. Though we may have never noticed this compass, it is certainly there, ensuring that our feet remain far from our mouths.

There are members of society who seem to function without this important subconscious device. It’s possible that by some unseen force, genetic or otherwise, they are not equipped with this feature, or perhaps they simply disregard its direction. When a thought manifests in the brain of these unfortunate folk, there is no system of testing through which it must pass in order to exit through the mouth. Example: “Oh my gosh, Melanie, your eyebrows are so bushy!”

You know a person like this, and you can’t understand why they are unable to imagine how others will feel when they speak. Since these people can’t seem to tap into their comment compass, here is a chart to guide them:

This three-dimensional choice matrix illustrates possible conditions when making a comment, indicating whether or not it’s appropriate to proceed. The first dimension (x) represents the attribute being defined in the comment, which could either be positive or negative in nature. A positive attribute would be one that most would consider desirable, such as beauty or skill. The second dimension (y) indicates whether or not the statement is true. The third and final dimension (z) describes the gender of the target of the comment. Although the chart’s accuracy varies depending on cultural convention and expectation, this is undoubtedly an important component.

So according to the chart, telling a girl that she isn’t ugly is not a good idea, even if she’s beautiful, and calling anyone heavy when they are, in fact, overweight is unwise. Pretty simple, huh? Even for us normies, this is probably a good refresher, as our compasses have been known to malfunction now and again.

Now just print this out and keep it in your wallet, or better yet, have T-shirt made up.

Hose & Bucket

If someone asked you to fill a bucket with water from a tap, your options for doing this are very limited. You must simply rest the bucket under the tap and allow the water flow into the bucket. But if someone asked you to fill a bucket with water from a hose, how would you do it? Basically, you have two options:

  1. Hold the hose above the bucket, allowing the water to fall a short distance into the bucket. This method can produce splash-back and there is potential for the water to miss the bucket entirely.
  2. Put the hose in the bucket. This method requires less effort, is less messy and does not require you to aim. Since the hose is inside the bucket there is almost no chance that the water will not land in the bucket. Also, since the water is not falling as far, there is little or no splash-back.

So the question is which is the better method for filling the bucket?

The correct answer is that everyone should sit down when they pee. Just because guys have a hose does not mean that the bucket should be filled any differently.

Another consequence of standing while peeing is additional noise. This method is much more audible than sitting and most of us would rather not hear that sound.

Standing also instigates the battle over toilet seat position, which has driven many relationships to ruin.

Just in case it’s not clear, here’s a comparison:

Come on, guys. Put the hose in the bucket.

Better Days

Most people don’t like working and would rather spend that time socializing, cultivating a hobby or sleeping (unless you took the red pill). When it comes to booking holidays, many choose to book around weekends and statutory holidays in order to maximize their effectiveness. For example, booking off the Monday after a long weekend, thus stretching the weekend to four days. Some strategies work very well to optimize your time off, while others do not. Let’s find out how to make your vacation feel as long as possible.

First, the obvious statutory conjunction. When a statutory holiday falls near your planned vacation time it is best to bump your vacation up against the statutory holiday – adding that extra day helps a lot. If you are planning on taking four or more days off, you can use what is known as the stat sandwich. This method involves planting your vacation days in the same week as the holiday in order to achieve a full week of total vacation. Combined with the surrounding weekends, we can get nine days off for the price of four. That’s a vacation efficiency rating of 225 per cent!

But what about the question of which days of the week to book off? Some people enjoy several short breaks instead of one or two larger holidays. Often they will book one or two days off at a time so they can stretch out their vacation over several weeks or months. These folks are pretty smart, usually incorporating tactics such as the statutory conjunction, but there is often confusion about which days to choose. So which days of the week are the best days to take off? Here is their ranking in order of worst to best:

Tuesday: A foolish choice. Your weekend stopped on Sunday, then you worked one day and now you get a break? What a waste.

Wednesday: Often attractive, as it appears to break the week in half, but we run into the same problem as with Tuesday. The holidayee may not feel as though they need the day off after only two days of work. This also produces a strange effect where one work week morphs into two smaller, more deadly weeks.

Thursday: Usually underestimated due to its lexographical and locational similarity to Tuesday. You may feel as though Thursday would be a premature and inadequate taste of the weekend, causing Friday to drag on in eternity, but in fact, taking Thursday off serves to accelerate the approach of the weekend. Upon completing the Wednesday shift, an unexpected gift is bestowed, and then the only day remaining is Friday, which usually goes by quickly anyway.

Friday: There was a large debate regarding the supremacy of Friday as the ultimate day to book off of work. This debate was resolved with the election of U.S. President Barack Obama. Friday is a great day to book off work, but its key weakness lies in the sheer delight experienced by empolyees as their Friday shift approaches completion. As the final day of the work week, Friday seems to slide right past us because our attention is so focused on the impending weekend.

Monday: The champagne of days. Truly, if you’re going to book off only one day, make it a Monday. Both Monday and Friday increase the length of the weekend, but unlike Friday, Monday is a work day worthy of dread. A bonus feature of booking off Monday is that it cuts into the week following your vacation, not preceding it. And, as we all know, you eat your dessert after your dinner, not before.

Have an efficient and optimized holiday.

Ash

Children often fantasize about living in worlds that they see in movies, television shows, or video games, though adults are not above this method of escaping reality. These worlds are appealing because they offer a clear distinction between right and wrong, a simplified view of the world and they are usually wrapped up nicely with a happy ending. One of the worlds that many children longed to experience was the world of Pokemon. They imagined how awesome it would be to travel around town capturing critters and leveling up their Charmander, then roasting some poor kid’s Bulbasaur. Vine Whip ftl.

Now before you allow your thoughts to wander back to this imaginary world, you should know something. This world does exist! You can choose your companion, feed him, train him, teach him to fight. Then, once he is strong, you can battle other people’s pets and enjoy the sweet juicy taste of victory.

It’s called dog fighting.

Dog fighting is almost identical to training and battling with Pokemon, but instead of cute little animals speaking gibberish as they shoot water at each other, we have dogs ripping each other’s throats. Instead of battling at the local Pokemon Gym, fights take place in poorly lit basements on blood-stained concrete. Instead of winning respect of the town for your victories, you win some cash and then get suspended from the NFL, and instead of taking your losing pet to the PokeCenter, you drown or shoot it.

Parents, if you hate dog fighting do not let your children play Pokemon games or watch the television show.