I had an annoying dream the other night where I was in an airport and missed a flight. I woke up, shook it off, and then went right back to sleep. And you know what happened? The dream CONTINUED. I shut my eyes and was right back with the fucking gate agent. You know how many times I’ve tried to keep a sex dream going, only to fail? And THIS is the fucking dream where I finally manage to achieve continuity? I’m livid. This is horseshit. I’m donating this stupid brain.
Okay, time for your letters:
Adam:
Can I get a ranked list of knives? I go straight past the butter and steak knives and choose the biggest we had (obviously), to great endangerment of my fingers. You know, the kind a serial killer in a slasher movie would use. A “That’s not a knife, THIS is a knife” knife, and all. Is a Bowie #1 on name recognition alone, or Swiss Army?
I had a Swiss Army knife when I was a kid, and the dirty secret of Swiss Army knives is that they’re useless, apart from showing yours off to other kids (“Dude, check it out: TWEEZERS”). The knives are dull. The scissors could barely snip a hangnail. The corkscrew was famously unnecessary to tweens. And unless you’re fastidious about cleaning it (thirteen-year-old me was not), the whole thing rusts in place after roughly two weeks. One time I used the fish scraper and that pretty much ended the knife as a whole. This is why TRUE MACGYVERS carry a Leatherman around instead of a stupid toy.
Anyway, I digress. You wanted a ranking of knives, so let’s get to it. Now, you could really blow out this list to include all blades, including swords and saws and machetes and scythes and all kinds of other cool shit. But I think it would be better just to pare it down to basic knives you use every day, either for cooking or general handiwork. Let’s go:
1. Chef’s knife. I don’t own one of those fancy chef’s knives that has Japanese lettering on it and comes wrapped in a velvet cloth, but ONE DAY, by God. One day I will go to the local knifemonger and pick out some 18” behemoth that can skin a whale. Big cooking knives are great for chopping because they’re nice and sharp, and they put less strain on your hands and wrist, and they look like a Norman Bates murder weapon. I have a shitty chef’s knife from Ikea that cost $8 and I wield it like I’m a goddamn samurai.
2. Hunting knife. This is the one that comes in the leather holster with the little snap button, like you’re undoing a onesie before you set about field-dressing a dead moose. I want a knife like this specifically so that I can stand inside a very cold cabin and eat summer sausage with it, like Sean Connery does in The Untouchables. That’s good eatin’.
3. Steak knives. They come in their own case! That always kills me. When it’s Steak Night, I get to bust out the knives like they’re the crown jewels. They should really make steak knives the official male engagement gift. She gets a ring. You get an 8-piece box of pure American Carnage. My mom has these steak knives with bone handles. I still don’t know what kind of bones they are. Dinosaur? Shark? Human? Rabbit? Regardless, it feels good to be holding a knife possibly carved from the very animal you’re about to eat. Insult to injury, really.
4. Switchblade. Never stops being fun to push that button. Still more fun than a butterfly knife, which is only cool if you have fancy butterfly knife moves. Every school has at least one weird kid who knows how to properly use nunchuks and butterfly knives and is somehow even less cool because of it.
5. Poultry shears. They’re so, so useful, and you get to cut through chicken ribs like they’re construction paper. Murder has never felt so effortless. They come with every knife set for a reason, you know.
By the way, it’s supposedly bad luck to give people knives as gifts (unless, according to superstition, you tape a penny to the knife and then give the penny to the giver to ward off the zombies). One of my friends did not get the memo about this, and gave me knives for my wedding. We still have them, and nothing bad has happened yet!
[flying circular saw disc comes out and slices my head clean off]
6. Santoku knife. This is a knife with a rounded tip and a razor sharp edge, with little indentations along the blade so that whatever you’re cutting falls off easily (like potatoes, which stick to everything). They are cool.
7. Paring knife. Good for slicing apples and jabbing would-be robbers with lethal efficiency. If you break into my joint, I will grab the littlest paring knife and then poke holes in you like I’m gonna keep a pet frog inside your body.
8. Dinner knife. Honestly, the steak knife should just be the dinner knife. The only reason it isn’t is because the kids would butcher each other with them. BOOOOOOO I want my bone knife when I’m digging into this Salisbury steak.
9. Butter knife. Whatever. Who gives a shit.
10. Bread knife. You are 50 times more likely to inflict a horrible injury upon your extremities with this knife than any other knife. If the bread is even a little stale, a shitty bread knife will slide right off and then take your index finger with no remorse. It sucks. Good for cutting tomatoes, though.
11. Fish knife. Fucking worthless. There’s nothing a fish knife can do that a fork can’t readily accomplish.
Aaron:
Different types of weed are all bullshit, right? I mean, sure there’s dirt and good stuff - but when people start talking about indica vs sativa I want dump out the bong and waterboard them. It reminds me of people who could allegedly differentiate between Beast Light and Natty Light in college.
No, different types of weed really ARE different, although I wouldn’t know quite how because A) I don’t smoke often enough and B) I will smoke weed however it comes. I don’t give a crap if it has seeds in it or anything. If you’re like, “Here’s a joint,” I won’t turn it down. I am a whore.
Also, I’ve had bad highs, where I’m all paranoid and shit, and good highs, where I feel like I’m floating inside a balloon. I dunno if that was because of the weed, or the environment in which I was smoking it, but the difference can be stark. When I went to buy legal weed in Colorado (so cool!), I specifically asked the lady at the dispensary for the Do Stuff weed, and not the Sit There And Stare At The Fucking Wall weed. And the weed she gave me was spot on. I was eminently functional in between bouts of furious masturbation. I wasn’t a drooling moron.
I think weed is like wine, where people who are really into it can glean subtle differences between each strain and, on occasion, delude themselves into exaggerating the “notes” to the high. And I’m sure some bad shit is overpriced and some good shit is underpriced. All I know is that good weed should make you feel good. Don’t steal that. I’m making that the slogan of my retirement pot farm.
Alex:
Giri wrote an article about how it’s okay that Tebow was eating guacamole straight with a spoon. Can we have a ruling here? I think Giri is nuts.
As someone who will eat the Sabra hummus right out of the container like a dipshit, I don’t have much of a right to judge… BUT I don’t think it’s optimal. Salsa tastes fine on its own, but you’d still rather have some chips, right? The chips help make it. Same with guacamole. Like, I’ll eat it plain (which I think people do strictly for health reasons), but no one thinks it’s BETTER that way than served with a big fucking basket of warm cantina chips. That’s dumb.
And I know a lot of people now like having avocado straight up, like as a quick lunch. BIG AVOCADO has hacked directly into the lunch mainframe of every living Californian. You halve one, then drizzle some oil and lemon juice on it, and then add salt and pepper. It’s good, but it would still be better tucked inside a pork fat taco. I am under no illusions.
Carlos:
What would the implications for the modern world have been if a time traveler had presented one dozen Little Debbie Fudge Rounds (not in the cellophane wrappers, because witchcraft) to Henry VIII? I assume Suleiman the Magnificent or Moctezuma II would not have been impressed, but a fat English guy? Heads would have rolled until he sat on a throne of those fuckers.
Yeah, he would demand to know the source of the Fudge Rounds, and then behead you for not having a useful answer. Chocolate was one of many New World commodities like cinnamon, pepper, and gold that got olde-timey European rulers rock hard. And given that Henry VIII lived before chocolate was introduced to the continent, he’d shit his dick if you gave him chocolate in its sweetest, most palatable form. Then history would proceed as normal.
If I were a time traveler presenting the Little Debbies to him, I would be forced to lie. I would tell him that the fudge comes from THE ORIENT, and is guarded by a big dragon, and that I would need 100,000 guineas (and a set of steak knives) to amass a fleet of ships and stout crew to go to Fudge Mountain and claim it in the name of England. Then I would pocket Fatty’s gold and flee to Italy. I assume nothing would go wrong with this plan.
I’m not gonna rank Little Debbie cakes today, but I just wanted to end this answer with a shout-out to Oatmeal Cream Pies, Swiss Cake Rolls, and Star Crunch. All of those are worth fighting wars over. A Star Crunch is evil wrapped in cellophane.
Nate:
I got a letterman jacket in high school because I was a semi-decent athlete and it was the cool thing to do and whatnot. But that was nine years ago and I haven’t worn my letterman jacket in, well, nine years. I can’t really give it away because it is personalized, but I can’t wear it anymore because I don’t want to be that guy who tries to relive his high school glory days. For now, it lives in a closet at my parents’ house and sometimes when I am there I take it out and look at it. What does one do with an old letterman jacket?
I think you’ve actually handled it correctly. If I had a letterman jacket (I never got one…), I would NEVER throw it away. I earned that shit (or, in this alternate dimension, I would have). I would keep it and secretly cherish it like a gold medal, or any other personal sports memento. I have flag football title t-shirts I still prize like back issues of Superman #1. I’d frame that goddamn jacket. I bet 50 percent of all old men who still have a varsity letter jacket put it on while naked and then browse old Facebook photos.
By the way, I rarely see high school students in my area rocking letter jackets. I’m sure they’re still huge in, like, Texas. But they seem to be anachronisms in other areas, phased out in favor of team-specific shell jackets and other swag. I think, if I were 18, I’d still want the proper letter jacket. I WANT TO FEEL LIKE A BIG MAN.
JJ:
I have a colleague who frequently uses a highlighter. However, he doesn’t highlight the important words - he circles the phrase or sentence with the highlighter instead. He’s insane, correct?
Yeah, he’s a moron. And you know what? You never need a highlighter anyway. I remember in school when kids would highlight half the fucking book. What a bunch of suck-ups. They weren’t retaining jack shit. If there’s an important passage in something, just note it in the margin. You don’t have to go fastidiously tracing over the text like a weirdo. I can barely highlight in a straight line anyway. The only reason people use highlighters is to show off all the shit they’ve highlighted.
Also, the highlighter is the only pen in the pen drawer that ever has any ink left in it. Irritating.
HALFTIME!
Omar:
No double meaning here, but can you actually make juice from a banana?
You can make nectar from it, which is thicker and cloudier than normal juice. It’s not the sort of thing you’d want out of a juice box; it’s more for blending into other fruit juices or tasty daiquiris. Some otherwise good fruits are oddly repellent in plain liquid form, and bananas happen to be one of them. Strawberries, too. When’s the last time you saw someone down a tall glass of strawberry juice? It never happens.
That said, some nectars are pretty tasty on their own. You can find peach and pear and guava nectar at the store, and all of them are good mixed with booze or champagne. But sometimes I like to have a little taste of the nectar on its own. It’s like 5000g of sugar in a tablespoon. Mmmmmm… sweet sweet diabeetus.
Ben:
Let’s say you find a guitar that magically gives you Hendrix’s skills and Jagger’s voice, how far can you get in a year? Platinum? Grammy? Or will you spend it being ignored by record labels and end up playing at Open Mikes?
The latter. I’d end up as a session musician or in some Vegas tribute show. No one buys rock albums anymore, and even if I had those insane skills, what if I still can’t write a song for shit? All of the big TV singing competitions like The Voice are littered with people who can skillfully cover a song and do nothing else. When that’s the case, your ceiling is Broadway.
You need to the material to go with the musicianship. Otherwise, it’s wasted. Plenty of good musicians write terrible songs, and plenty of bad musicians write great ones. I remember Jerry Cantrell used to make fun of Kurt Cobain’s guitar playing, but of course none of that mattered because Cobain wrote fantastic rock songs. The technical aspects of it are irrelevant to casual listeners like me. I don’t give a shit about complex time signature shifts. All I want are BADASS RIFFS.
Tom:
I’m a new dad and as I was just rocking my daughter to sleep I thought to myself, “I wonder if Trump EVER rocked his kids to bed”. The obvious answer is of course no. I doubt he touched his kids until they were out of diapers.
Not a fucking chance. You ever see someone hand a baby to Trump at a rally? He handles them the exact same way I did before I was a dad. When you hand a single man a baby, you may as well be handing them a live bomb. “What is this thing and how quickly can I get rid of it?” Trump isn’t cradling that baby. He’s not cooing at it. He’s a selfish prick AND he’s part of a male generation where women were expected to handle all the baby stuff. So not only does he not care about babies—not even his own—he finds dealing with them to be beneath his standing.
I bet he wouldn’t even let Baby Barron eat at the dinner table with him. The baby would start drooling and Trump would be like, “Oh wow, that baby is eating like a pig! Melania, you need to get that baby to stop doing that. TERRIBLE!” He has no awareness of how babies work, or other humans, for that matter. He’s just a big stupid asshole.
Luke:
Imagine a scenario in which Brady, Belichick, and the Patriots begin losing every game they play. For whatever reason they go 0-16 next season. They continue going 0-16 the next season and the next and so on (still the core group with an ageless Brady and Belichick). At what point in time would you feel bad for the Patriots and their fans? At what point in time would you actively want the Patriots to win a game?
Never. NEVER. Fuck them blind. Why would I ever want to leave schadenfreude heaven? I’d cheer every loss as if it were the graduation of my own child.
I live in a town that’s home to a fallen dynasty. Trust me: All that losing after a taste of glory only makes fans worse. Skins fans are awful. Cowboys fans are worse. And Lakers fans are even worse than that. All of them treat their losses as more important than your losses specifically because they used to win so much. They act like they have a personal legacy at stake when their dipshit team loses 10 in a row. I promise you that Boston fans would be just as insufferable, if not worse. They’d stew and moan and blame everyone and then punch your mom. IT JUST MEANS MOAH TO US! Watching the Pats suck would never get old, no matter how many “Curse of the Stolen Jersey” books Shank pooped out.
Evan:
If you had to secede and start a new country with 8 states regardless of geography (let’s just say we can pick the states up and move them somewhere else on earth all together), which ones would you choose for the best new nation? If you take the good things from the state you also have to take the bad, whether it’s politicians, sports teams, celebrities, etc.
My initial list is probably something like:
California
New York
Pennsylvania
Washington
Hawaii
Virginia
Ohio
Colorado
Ohio? What am I gonna do with Ohio? Ohio is a port-a-potty. And Pennsylvania is nothing but trucks and losers. I think you nailed it with Colorado, California, New York, and Hawaii. That gives me beaches, mountains, cities, trendy poke bowls (or as I call it, LAZY SUSHI), legal weed, and fine wines. So that’s four. Then I would add the following:
Louisiana. GUMBO GUMBO GUMBO! For real though, we have to keep at least one Southern state because the South has lots of alcohol and spacious patios. So we may as well keep the one that has the best food, the best music, the best culture, and the funniest accents. This also allows me to exclude Texas.
Florida. I really wish we could just take the bottom half of Florida and leave the top half to rot, but that’s not an option for this exercise. Anyway, Florida is full of insane assholes but everyone goes on vacation there for a reason.
Montana. The eastern half of Montana is basically Black Hole Dakotas, but I’ve been to the nice part of the state and it’s everything Sam Neill dreamed of in Red October. We can use the bad half of the state for nuclear testing if Trumpistan ever invades.
Michigan? I guess I have to pick a state in the Midwest, huh? They’re all pretty much the same, man. Maybe you were right about keeping Washington instead. All I know is that New England is now officially on its own. EAT SHIT!
Josh:
I am not a parent. Which one would be more valuable: having a child who never needed a diaper changed, or slept 9 hours uninterrupted every night?
The sleep. Diapers aren’t that big of a deal except when it’s a diarrhea fountain. You can deal with all that and more if you have enough sleep. All my kids are old enough to sleep soundly now and it’s a joy. I never have to go back to waking up at 2am to cradle a baby for an hour and have it throw up all over me. Do you know how nice it is to know that’s all in my past? I feel so FREE. It’s like I got out of prison.
Tom:
Which sport’s athletes have the worst opinions? Gotta be baseball, right?
I know Curt alone would normally tip the scales for baseball, but you’re forgetting about MMA fighters. Those people are fucking insane. MMA is the Infowars to baseball’s Breitbart.
Andrew:
Woah or Whoa? How do you spell it?
Whoa. Woah is just a bad Utah baby name.
Quincy:
When do you read? If I replaced the time I look at my phone with a book... wait a second...
Not to go all Arianna Huffington on you, but it’s always good to read before bed. Not only do you get to feel and smart and learny, but reading for 10 minutes or so relaxes your brain and makes falling asleep much easier. You can actually choose a dull book on purpose to help the process along. I read some dry-ass David McCullough book once and my eyelids would turn to lead with just a couple pages. I slept like a corpse. If you go right from watching TV or staring at your phone to lights off, your mind will still be all over the place. It’s bad for you.
Also, if you can, don’t bring your phone into the bedroom. I keep it in the kitchen when I fuck off to bed, and that’s how I avoid temptation. If I’m staying in a hotel and the phone is right there on the nightstand? I’m fucked. I’m checking that thing four zillion times and waking up at 5 a.m. That phone on the nightstand will take years off your life. Don’t do it.
Rob:
Why do people wish their kids Happy Birthday on Facebook? I’m not talking about a mother posting Happy Birthday on her 18-year-old son’s Facebook timeline. I’m referring to the people who post Happy Birthday wishes to their 2-year-old child on Facebook – ex. Wishing a Happy 2nd Birthday to my handsome little man, we love you Hunter!
Parents do that so that everyone else on Facebook wishes the kid happy birthday, so that they can go tell the kid, “Hey Hunter, your Uncle Billy, who is not actually your uncle but just an old classmate of dad’s, says happy birthday!” And then the kid drools applesauce all over himself to commemorate the occasion.
Also, it’s another cheap way of fishing for compliments. You post a photo of your kid face planting into a piece of cake, and then everyone goes, “SO CUTE! [smiley emoji]” And then you are emotionally fulfilled. Facebook is nothing but parents endlessly bartering meaningless compliments.
Email of the week!
Ben:
So I was sitting on the couch with my wife and I had my ice water placed between my legs, due to the lack of an available table as well as general laziness. Not to mention the coolness on the testes. During this time I ripped a loud fart, basically directly on the glass. I then proceeded to drink the ice water as usual because I’m lazy and generally against wasting water.
My wife was disgusted. My excuse was that there was one layer of clothes between my ass and the glass and it’s not like it was pressed right against it. (There was only one layer because I was in PJ pants and was going commando). Was that bad?
No. Your fart doesn’t penetrate the glass. It doesn’t carbonate the water. If you took a shit directly onto the glass, that would be one thing. But otherwise, you’re free to drink from the fart cup.