Your letters:
Lewbone:
So, after watching that documentary on Magic Johnson, I want to address the below questions:
-Do you think Magic Johnson knows who he got HIV from?
-Do you think the person who gave Magic Johnson knows that she (he?) gave him HIV?
-If yes to the above 2 questions, do you think Magic and said partner have talked since Magic was diagnosed HIV positive?
It's surprising that we don't have any good answers as to how Magic ended up getting infected. All I could find was some Wiki Answers page that says the source was a "beautiful, Bahamian cousin of Michael Thompson." Not the most reliable report on Earth. You would have thought that the National Enquirer would have solved this by now, or that some enterprising young lady would have stepped forward to claim the title. But Magic has managed to keep the story focused on his incredible triumph in the face of what many people assumed was a death sentence. The hows and whys of how it all started have largely been forgotten. But somewhere out there, there's someone who has a good idea of just how this whole thing came to pass. I hope the sex was halfway decent.
There are people who argue that men absolutely can't get HIV from women, implying that Magic contracted the virus from another man, but this site explains the biology of it in great detail:
It's much harder for men to get HIV from women, but it does happen... HIV can enter at the opening of the tip and through cuts or sores on the shaft.
GAHHHHHHHHHH. I wonder if Magic was having sex so often that he got sores on his shaft, then got the virus through the sores. Getting a good mental image of that? I hope you're eating lunch.
I'm sure there are people out there who suspect they gave Magic the virus, but I think he purposely never went back and tried to discover the source because he didn't want to cause further embarrassment to his wife and family. What's there to say at that point anyway?
MAGIC: Hey, I think you might have given me HIV.
SOURCE: O RLY?
MAGIC: Yeah.
SOURCE: Well, this is awkward. GOOD LUCK WITH THE DODGERS.
Robert:
My girlfriend was telling a friend of her's how she had just finished reading "The Girl Who Played with Fire." I know for a fact that she listened to the audio book in her car. Does this count as "reading" a book? I say no.
As long as it's unabridged, I think it counts. I know you might think of an audiobook as cheating, but if someone is willing to sit there for eleven hours while Steig Larsson breaks down the contents of Lisbeth Salander's fridge, then I think they've earned the star for that book. If I were driving and listening to an audiobook, I'd fall asleep at the wheel and take out a truck full of day laborers within three minutes of pressing PLAY.
That said, your girlfriend shouldn't have said she "read" the book. She should have said "I just finished the audiobook." I don't think people would think less of her if she gave full audiobook disclosure.
Dan:
Classy, no?
Little bit of Mississippi mud in that driver's seat.
Billy:
10 years ago, somewhat serious and somewhat joking, I was walking down the hall at work after getting what at the time seemed like good news and I jumped to click my heels, not so much because I am a nancy but more so to be a jackoff. Well, I was much fatter and less nimble than I remembered, and I tore my ACL while attempting to stick the landing.
In your defense, clicking your heels together is much harder than it looks. I remember I hooked up with someone once and I wanted to click my heels together the next day to celebrate, like I was in a cologne ad. I couldn't even get the heels to touch. I bet the girl would have unhooked up with me on the spot if she had caught me doing that.
It's amazing how lacking in agility you are as you get older. Kids really drive the point home. We were in the basement and my kid set up an obstacle course of sofa cushions to jump over. Well, I thought I'd be all daring and try a daffy while jumping over one. HUGE fucking mistake. Daddy needed twenty minutes resting on his back to make a full recovery. No more daffies.
Tripp:
From Jacksonville, FL. The little family people stickers really bring it all together.
The neon yellow truck nutz alarm me. That might be Frank Miller's car.
Jon:
My wife is pregnant with our first kid and I've started to wonder: how do parents watch shows with violence and/or nudity like Game of Thrones? Do you have to wait until the kids are asleep and turn the sound down?
If so, watching TV with children sounds a lot like when I was 16 and would try to watch late-night softcore porn on Showtime.
You have to wait until your kids are asleep. The volume doesn't bother them. It's much more likely to annoy your wife, sitting right next to you. I've been trained, like an electrified hamster, to keep the volume low, and I resent it. I want to be watch TV with the sound jacked up to the volume of a fucking Slayer concert. No dice.
My oldest child has begun going to sleep later, and it's starting to ruin my after-beddie bye TV schedule. I'm falling farther and farther behind on proper adult television. I've never seen "Game of Thrones," or "Veep," or "Justified," or many of the truly awesome shows that everyone but me gets to watch. I'm WASTING my life raising these kids instead of seeing REAL TV shows, and it's killing me. My hope is that, one day, my kids will grow old enough to be able to watch shows like "Game of Thrones", and rebel against their mother and demand to watch them as loudly as possible. I will join them in the revolt. I may get my six-year-old hooked on "Breaking Bad" now, just to get the ball rolling.
One other thing: The limited amount of TV you get to watch as a parent makes you all the more angry when a show turns on you and wastes your time. This is why I wanted to beat the shit out of everyone involved with "The Killing" and "The Walking Dead". I get only get so many of these shows to watch, and picked the two that made NO goddamn sense in the end. So, so annoying. Fuck you two. I hate you.
Sam:
My friend's dog raping another dog in the face. Enjoy.
Kinda looks like the black dog is prepping for a belly-to-back suplex.
Graeme:
Every time I do the dishes, I hand dry the big knives pretending that I am a criminal wiping my fingerprints off the weapon. Assuming there is no semen on the weapon, how many CSI-type investigations would be foiled if actual criminals practiced cleaning their prints during mundane everyday chores?
What I don't understand is why knives used as murder weapons aren't immediately thrown in the dishwasher. I always thought that if I were going to kill someone, I would make sure to put the knife in the dishwasher afterwards and use extra Cascade to wash the blood away. Then the knife would be SPOTLESS. Who's gonna ever know, apart from the gallons of residual blood I left lying around?
If I were the enterprising sort, I would invent a gun washer. You fire your gun to kill someone, then you take it to the gun washer, place it in the slot, and dunk it down into the soapy bristles, like a golf ball washer. I love golf ball washers. I love seeing the dirt magically come off every time the ball pops back up. SO COOL. I use them even when my ball is perfectly clean. I clearly enjoy working the shaft. YOU'RE A LITTLE MONKEY WOMAN, AREN'T YOU?!
Frail Blazers:
I was on Facebook today and ran across a girl with the name Jenica. Now I'm all for unique names, but not when they're forced like that. If as a parent your idea of being creative is to combine Jessica and Jennifer, two of the most generic American girl names ever, into one "unique" name, you're failing.
Still better than Danica. I checked out the top girl baby names from 2010, and from there I devised this list of future mashup names for white baby girls:
• Madibella
• Chlomia
• Emmaphia
• Avily
• Bethivia
• Graceley
• Samella
• Halyssa
• Lilexis
• Sofashley
Those will all be coming soon to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
John:
Pretend for a second you meet a psychic Genie who offers to share one of the following two pieces of information. 1: The winning lottery numbers for that night (say ballpark $3M purse). 2: Full knowledge of a perfect NCAA tournament bracket before the first round tipoff. Which do you request?
I like that John categorized the Genie as "psychic." You rarely see a supernatural being who has additional powers, like a vampire ghost or a telepathic Sasquatch. Anyway, despite the relatively low lottery payout, I'd take the $3 million. Even though it would be fun to submit a perfect bracket, win a bunch of contests, and have everyone think you're crazy smart when it comes to sports, I would prefer the lottery because you don't have to fill out any forms or register with Pizza Hut or any of that horrible shit. All you have to do is buy the ticket. Far less paperwork. Also, if you submitted a perfect bracket to a bunch of different contests, people would begin to suspect that you somehow gamed the system and declare you a cheat. They'd freeze your payouts, call you a liar, and make your life miserable. No thanks. Best to take your $3 million and call it a day with no one being any wiser about the PSYCHIC GENIE helping you out.
Chris:
We occasionally hear one of our neighbors having sex. I have been married 10 years and have 3 kids. I am usually intrigued and hopeful that it might inspire my wife to get things going, but she reacts with disgust and gets irritated with me for thinking about sex at that time. What is the appropriate reaction to hearing neighbors having sex?
Do you live in an apartment? I'd say it's time to snake a camera through the heating duct.
Chris (again):
Play-doh sucks. My kids think it's awesome and it receive some points for entertaining them for 20-30 minutes. But that stuff gets everywhere and it's impossible to clean up. I just throw away all the scraps instead of trying to merge them. Thirty minutes with no crying or asking for stuff is awesome, but picking dried Play-doh off the table and out of the carpet for the next week is probably not worth it.
You can use Play-doh to help you pick up other stray bits of Play-doh. It's kinda fun, actually. I feel like I'm building a little tiny snowman. But in general, you're right. Play-doh sucks because kids don't know how to play with it properly. They're too weak to use the fun factory (which gives me a chance to make the spaghetti on my own and show off my incredible hand strength), and they NEVER keep the colors segregated. By the time my kids are done with a Play-doh set, they've merged all the colors together into one muddy-colored lump of shit. And forget stamping out shapes. They'll press that turtle shape down into the rolled out dough and then give up without getting it to press down all the way through. FINISH UP STRONG, YOU LITTLE SHITS.
HALFTIME!
Warren:
I win the Powerball. With these newly found riches, I'm going to pay you $750,000/year. The catch is that you have to weigh, on average throughout the year, either more than 375 lbs or less than 130 lbs. Do you take it? If so, are you gonna be fat or anorexic?
I think most people would reject the deal outright. I've weighed 280. It feels awful. You feel slow and lethargic (because you are). Your thighs chafe and get red from rubbing together when you walk. Swamp ass is a permanent condition. You feel like you're having a heart attack nine hours a day. I can't even imagine how much worse 375 feels. I'm sure I could get used to it, but would you really trade your physical and mental health for that kind of money? I think most people would come to their good senses and forget it. Would you take that salary in exchange for having cancer? No. Of course not. This isn't that far from the same thing. Now $10 million a year, then we're talking real money. That's a decision.
If you HAVE to take the deal, you go with being overweight, by the way. I'd rather be miserable and eating than miserable and starving.
Oscar:
My co-worker has an infant. Therefore she pumps breast milk in her office. I'm on board with all of this as I strongly support moms in the workforce at all levels.
However, when she's done, she puts her breast pump equipment in a special Ziploc bag with water and heats it in the shared kitchen microwave to sanitize it. When she finishes, there is a very distinct warm milk smell and I'm sure there are vaporized milk particles floating around in there. I was gonna heat up some soup, but I don't really want to use it after that.
Granted, with about 10 people sharing the microwave, there's bound to be plenty of gross stuff in there, use at your own risk kind of situation, but isn't daily heating of breast milk equipment going over the line?
You have to understand the pressure these breasty ladies are under from doctors and other breastNazi moms who think that giving your child formula is akin to giving it daily bleach injections. The second you have a kid, there are lactation consultants who march into your hospital room and start in on you. All of them are middle-aged women who have been perfectly trained in Minnesota-style passive-aggressiveness. "Are you trying to nurse? Well, it takes a bit, but I'm sure you'll get there. Just be sure to pump every three hours." They always make these demands while smiling and that just makes it fucking worse. My wife nearly bit the head off the hospital consultant when she came in. Fuck those people.
That's a long way of explaining why I think it's all right to use the office microwave for warming up tit milk. If she's being sanitary about it and not heating it in a Garfield coffee mug, then all is fair. People heat up fish curry in the office microwave and the resulting stinkbomb can last for hours and hours. That poor appliance gets abused like no other. I think you'll live with a whiff of breasty goodness. That lady has to sit in her office and have a pump sucking on her nips for fifteen minutes at a time, then she has to go home and get up three times in the middle of the night to do it again. Breastfeeding moms get their tits sucked, pinched, squeezed, and bitten, and not once in the name of sexual gratification. All to avoid the smiling scorn of these lactation consultant ladies. It's the worst.
Doug:
Remember that Mia Hamm vs. Michael Jordan commercial? "Anything you can do, I can do better?" Right, that one:
It's obvious that Michael would destroy Mia in 1-on-1 hoops, but what about 1-on-1 soccer? I am talking about open field, 1-on-1, with a goalie. My friends and I have been disagreeing on this since whenever that commercial came out. We are pretty evenly divided and each side is FIRMLY entrenched in their positions. In fact, each side sees the issue as so black and white that we think the other side is crazy.
Well, soccer one-on-one is kind of a whole other animal from team soccer. If it's just two people on a pitch with no defensive backup, then whoever can run the fastest is pretty much guaranteed to win, aren't they? Once you've gotten past your single opponent, there's nothing to stop you. And I think it stands to reason that Michael Jordan (and we're talking about Jordan in his prime, not Fat Surly Old Jordan) would be able to outrun his female opponent. All Jordan would have to do is kick the ball down the field, get to it before Hamm, and then get it past the goalie. If Hamm were slower, she'd have to battle Jordan all the way down the pitch before getting a shot off.
The goalies would play a big role because we're assuming that Prime Jordan has no formal soccer training (though as a world class athlete, I'm sure he's dabbled, or he'd be a quick learner). If it's two average goalies in the net, then Jordan wouldn't have much of a problem. But if it's clones of Tim Howard on either side of the field, then maybe that aids Hamm's cause. Maybe Jordan gets the ball past Hamm easily, but finds himself repeatedly stymied once he has an open shot. I think that might happen initially, and then Jordan would gradually get his sea legs and start getting a few into the net. I think Jordan wins the match. And you know why? BECAUSE GIRLS ARE LAME.
Christian:
I'm not sure if I'm just out of the loop or my friends are sick fucks but they said that when they were younger to practice for the "big show" they would have their dogs lick their dicks so they would be more experienced, they said they saw it in a movie so they all did it. So was I strange or is this a messed up case of bestiality?
Take it from someone who humped every inch of the house as a teenager: NOT NORMAL. Even I didn't go so far as to try and receive fellatio from a dog. Oh, sure. I CONSIDERED IT. Any horny teen would be a fool not to. There's a free tongue right there to be used! But I held off, and you know why? Because raping a dog's mouth is wrong. That's hard to remember when you're thirteen and you desperately need to have sex with something, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
What movie did your friends take this "lesson" from? Was it the part in Top Secret when the British guy in the cow suit gets blown by a calf?
WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS IN SUCH A BLOODY RUSH?!
David:
How many blockbuster movie ideas have you let slip away by not being able to recall what the hell was going on in a dream the night before? I always wake up thinking "Whoa! That was awesome! Wait, why was it so awesome, again?"
About 10 years ago, I had a dream about a movie called Cocoville, and the premise was that all Hollywood special effects were REAL, and that all the dinosaurs and aliens were housed in a special town to use for movies as needed. The dream even featured Rip Torn in a supporting role. I woke up and thought I was the greatest movie idea ever, but that's only because it came to me in a dream. In reality, it's a fucking horrible idea. But it was my DREAM, and so I wildly overrate it. I think that happens a lot. I think creative people dream of some idea, and then take it as gospel just because they want to believe that their subconscious can't possibly be wrong. If it came to me in a dream, it must be brilliant!
By the way, Twilight was the byproduct of a dream. Make of that what you will.
Trevor:
You've developed super powers. But you can only tell 3 people or else your super powers will vanish - who do you tell? Parents are out because they're too fucking old, spouse? But what if you divorce? The president? Chief of police? What friend makes the cut?
I'd have to tell my wife so that she wouldn't think I was out getting blowjobs from dogs. But you can't tell your kids that, because they'll go blabbing about it to every goddamn person. Kids can't be trusted with any valuable information. You tell your wife, you tell your best friend (played by Kevin James in a HILARIOUS cameo!), and you tell your lawyer. That's the list. The lawyer's gotta know. He'll tell you if you're within your legal rights to make a frost bridge from your house to the moon. That's important.
By the way, my super powers would disappear in five seconds. I have a big mouth. I once I had this exchange with my Dad.
DAD: About 15 years ago, they found a growth in my head. They almost had to take my face off to remove it, then stitch my face back on again.
ME: SD;KGJHWERGQOE'R;JGQWERGLQEJKRGRL
DAD: But then the growth stopped growing and I'm fine now. They didn't have to remove my face.
ME: WHY DIDN'T YOU FUCKING TELL ME?!
DAD: We told your sister. We can't tell you anything.
I hope you other fathers out there will tell your sons when a doctor says that he's pulling a Nic Cage on you.
Matt Z:
I saw this and immediately pictured the car in a terrible mangled wreck
with body parts smeared across the road and the driver screaming up at
the sky, "Wwwwhhhhyyyy!??!?!?"
Range Rover: Official car... of God!
Time for a GREAT MOMENT IN MOUSE KILLING HISTORY:
Zach:
I was living in a studio apt shortly after college and had recently gotten a pet bird. One day I saw a glue trap to catch mice sitting outside my front door but shrugged it off. A short time later the apt manager informed me they placed it there because someone had reported a mouse squeezing under my door. This still didn't faze me much as I'm not afraid of mice. One night my gf and I are playing Guitar Hero and she screams. She claimed she saw a mouse jumping up and down in our bird's cage to the beat of the song. I didn't exactly believe her at first but then I saw it with my own eyes. I'm not a Dad but I did go into protecting my bird mode and chased it away, freaked out that it might attack her. Fast forward to about 4 am and I wake up having to take a piss. I stumble to the bathroom half asleep and assume the arm on the wall to hold you up while you piss position while you just want it to end so you can go back to sleep. As I finish I whirl around still looking down and see the mouse staring up at me, completely still and then the following happened in about a 0.8 second timeline:
We lock eyes and my body pumps out a burst of adrenaline equivalent to Travolta giving Uma the shot to her heart in Pulp Fiction. I did a complete 360 pivot where I grabbed my gf's bottle of saline solution off the counter, as it was the only weapon that my eyes registered in this split second turn. I grabbed it and brought it down as hard as I could on the mouse. Three or four times, I can't remember. I yelled as I did it like I was bashing someone's head in a Braveheart battle. I think any sane person yells to alleviate the horrible act you are doing by murdering a creature. I really am an animal lover and this was my only violent act to any creature other than a bug. Fuck spiders. I beat it to death to protect my bird and that was my first instinct. As a hope to be Dad some day, I am glad I have this gear. It turned out to be an entire mouse family of eight. After the Saline Solution Incident I went down to the local hardware store and purchased an arsenal of mouse traps. I did try the humane traps first but you may as well light $30-$40 on fire. Next, I caught one with a glue trap and DON'T use that as a warning to everyone. They are alive and you have to drown them. Awful. I settled on snap traps for the next six and my gf and I would hear them going off in the middle of the night and just sigh… RIP to another mouse. Had to be done for our bird…