Johann: Vending Machine Master

Recently, I've become something of a theater kid. I'm not as eerily flamboyant as a conventional theater kid, but since my casting in the last play I've been much more involved with the Theater department. On this particular day, I was slumming around the theater after school, when I overheard a conversation. Some girl was really hungry, but couldn't really leave rehearsal lest she risk the wrath of the Theater director. Now, it's a common practice for theater kids to take someone's money and buy their food for them, because students are frequently unable to leave the theater and rehearsals can drag on for hours. I offered to get her food and she handed me a dollar. When I asked her what she wanted, she vaguely replied "I dunno, something that will keep me awake. Skittles or chocolate or something."

Upon arriving at the vending machine, I inserted the girl's dollar and typed in the button code for a package of Skittles. The machine started to dispense the Skittles...then it gave up. The candy just sat there, staring me down and saying "Hahahahaha fuck you."

Oh, you paid for me? That's cute.

I stared at the machine in disbelief. I couldn't exactly return empty-handed; the girl expected her candy, and I was determined to see it through. I left my bounty, silently muttering "This isn't over...candy." I tracked down a janitor and asked if he was capable of opening the vending machines. In a voice slightly tinged with a Mexican accent, he replied "No, but you could probably try the front office." When I went to the front office, a woman with an absurd hairdo sat at the front desk. With a shrieking shout-like noise where her voice used to be, she yelped "Hi! How can I help you?" She drew out her 'hi' for a good 3 seconds. Wincing from the pain of hearing her talk, I said "Yeah, I paid for something from the vending machine, but it's not working. Is there any way to get it open?"

"Well, what you have to do is go to the Guidance center, talk to Ms. Lou, reserve an appointment with Mr. Brass and wait until he gets back from coaching soccer practice. He should be done sometime within the hour."

"...It's a bag of Skittles."

She heaved an exasperated sigh and said "Well, I actually do have some money here. How much do you need?"

"Eighty-five cents."

She opened a drawer and pulled out a roll of quarters. I watched uncomfortably as she struggled to open the roll. Finally, she got pissed and smashed the whole thing on the desk. Quarters flew everywhere, much to the surprise of her and absolutely nobody else. After retrieving my money, I left her to her quarter-grabbing and returned to the vending machine. I figured that, if I re-bought the bag of Skittles, then I could probably get another bag for free. I inserted the coins, entered the code...and watched one lonely bag of Skittles drop from its shelf.

"No!" I thought to myself. "I want those Skittles, damnit!"

After casting a furtive glance to make sure nobody important was watching, I chose what I believed to be the best course of action and tackled the vending machine (side note: apparently a lot of people are crushed to death by vending machines. Who knew?). Much to my dismay, the Skittles stayed firmly in place. However, a completely different bag of Mini Ritz crackers was dislodged and fell down instead.

Whaddup.

Satisfied with my display of dominance, I retrieved the spoils of my brief war with the now-defeated vending machine and walked away. I spent the rest of the day basking in the kind of glory that one can only get from tackling an inanimate object that is fully capable of crushing the life out of you at a moment's notice.

Crosswalk Buttons

So I went out to lunch with a friend of mine during school today. We were waiting at a crosswalk, making idle small talk, when suddenly, I encountered what must have been the most retarded girl in recently recorded history. Before I go into the grisly details, I'd like to preface the whole terrible story by explaining how crosswalk buttons work.

That was sort of a lie, because most crosswalk buttons don't technically 'work.' Sure, at some intersections, they'll activate that little white guy which signifies that you're safe to cross. But for the most part, crosswalk buttons are installed simply for the sake of giving the impatient and the idiotic something to mash while they wait for a light that couldn't really care less whether or not they're pressing it. By and large, crosswalk buttons do nothing to affect the speed at which a light turns from red to green. It's also important to point out that crosswalk buttons generally come with a huge sign or sticker that enlightens the reader as to what direction the button corresponds to. This is an important detail, so remember it.

Idiot-proof instructions. Except not at all.

When the aforementioned girl came within the vicinity of the crosswalk (which had not one, but two buttons), a look of apprehension and terror crossed her face for a brief moment. She appeared to be in the midst of some intense decision making, and I was very curious as to what she was so confused about. My unspoken inquiry was answered rather quickly when she started mercilessly smashing both buttons while screaming to her friends "OH MY GOD, I NEVER know which button to press! It's sooo confusing trying to remember which button goes which direction!"

Her friends apparently shared her hardship. "Oh God, I know just how you feel. I just let somebody else press it for me."

I tried to watch the entire exchange, but after a few seconds my brain cells began committing mass suicide due to the sheer stupidity of it all, so I opted instead to look onward and did my best to begin repressing yet another memory. 

Don't ever let somebody tell you you're stupid, because with a minimum of effort, I guarantee you can find somebody who doesn't know how to operate a goddamn button.

Mike the Headless Chicken

Sometime in September 1945, there was a little chicken named Mike who lived on a farm in Fruita, Colorado. One day, Mike was strutting nonchalantly when, much to his dismay, his master grabbed him and promptly removed his head via an axe. Shortly thereafter, Mike regained his wits and went about his day, sans head. This isn't uncommon, as poultry are known to continue kicking around for a while after their heads have been removed. Mike's owner apparently didn't think too much of this and left him alone. The next day, the farmer found Mike, and I quote, "sleeping with his head under his wing." The farmer decided that, since the chicken had apparently forgotten how to die, he would do his best to keep the thing alive. The farmer proceeded to use an eyedropper to drip feed milk, water and bits of corn into the tattered end of Mike's esophagus.

"Gurgle glub glub splutter." - Whatever was left of Mike's larynx.

Mike slowly became accustomed to life without a brain. There was a bit of a grace period, during which his movements were rather clumsy and awkward (on account of not having a goddamn head), but eventually he was strutting about like normal again. Unfortunately (and again I quote), "His crowing, though, was less impressive and consisted of a gurgling sound made in his throat, leaving him unable to crow at dawn." Mike's owner apparently looked at this pathetic neck-stump chicken zombie and decided that he could probably make some money off it. A week after Mike's beheading, the farmer packed his gurgling ass up and took him to the University of either Utah or Colorado (different sources cite different universities.). There, it was determined that the axe used to behead him had somehow missed his jugular. A clot had prevented him from bleeding to death, and he even had most of his brain stem and an ear left over from the ordeal. 

The farmer would tape the chicken's head on and pretend to be mortified every time it fell off. He was an asshole.

Mike's fame was eventually established and he found himself living the kind of life that most chickens can only dream of (Mike's own dreaming was somewhat hindered by the absence of his goddamn head). Mike was both valued at, and insured for $10,000, which in today's currency is a hell of a lot more than a gurgling stump chicken should ever be worth. Mike soon got a manager and embarked on a nationwide tour that saw him in almost every major city in America. Inspired by his fame, other farmers throughout the country decided to get a piece of the headless chicken fame pie, and proceeded to do so by beheading a shitload of chickens. Unfortunately, none of the chickens survived for more than a couple days. 

At some point in his nationwide tour, Mike and his crew stopped at a motel in the Arizona desert. In the middle of the night, Mike began choking. Unable to find his feeding and cleaning syringes, the farmer and his wife could only look on in horror as the life slowly drained out of their gurgling little money maker. Mike lived an astonishing 18 months without a head, and managed to gain around 4 and a half pounds in the process, which is absolutely hilarious in a deeply disturbing kind of way. 

Every single detail of this story is both incredibly wrong and incredibly funny.

Sources: 

http://www.miketheheadlesschicken.org/story.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken

http://farm-animals.factoidz.com/mike-the-headless-chicken/

Where I Used to Think Babies Came From

Like most people, when I was little I had no idea where babies came from. The question never concerned me much because, as an only child, I didn't come into contact with a whole lot of babies. My mom decided that churning out one crying meat lump was more than enough for her and never had a kid afterwards, so I didn't have any siblings whose origins I could ponder. That being said, I did devote some time to considering one of life's baser questions, and the theories I came up with were pretty solid (at least until they tried educating my 5th grade class about sex, and shattered my sanity by explaining, in gruesomely intimate detail, where babies actually come from). The theory had two slight variations.

Theory 1: Baby Trees

I was thoroughly convinced that babies grew on trees. Generally, babies only have hair on the top of their heads, and I reasoned that it was because this was the remains of their stems, which was very similar in construction to an apple stem. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I thought there was a baby farm. Little baby buds sprouted on tree stems, slowly growing until the baby became too fat and it fell to the ground. Migrant workers would presumably pick the babies before they fell, gathering them in bushels and sending them to be cleaned and sanitized before they were shipped out to the masses via delivery trucks. I think at this age, I was confusing babies with human trafficking. 

There also could have been baby vineyards. I liked to keep it open to interpretation.

Theory 2: Potato Babies

Very similar to the first theory, except that babies grew out of the ground instead of from a tree. Much like the leafy bits on a carrot, the babies' hair grew out for...well, I never really figured that out. Come to think of it, I still don't know why carrots have leafy tops. 

?

Anyway. Much like carrots, the farm hands would grip the babies' hair and use it to yank them out of the dirt, once again gathering them in bushels or baskets and sending them off for cleaning. 

The end.

Aww, he's got his mother's malformed noodle arms!

Videogames Make Me Violent

If asked, most of my really close friends could easily identify the quintessential videogame that practically defined their childhood. One guy may have fond memories of Super Mario 64, while another may experience waves of nostalgia at seeing old screenshots of Diddy Kong Racing. They could easily recount every shortcut, every glitch and all  the little tricks that permeated their respective game because, due to the amount of time they devoted to playing it during their younger years, it's practically become embedded in their DNA. I myself am no exception. When choosing the videogame that defined my childhood, I'm conflicted between Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. In my opinion, they're both unforgettable and timeless classics that I would absolutely love to play through again. So imagine my surprise this past weekend when, through a series of unusual circumstances that I won't bother to regale you with, I ended up with my very own Nintendo 64 and a copy of Ocarina of Time.

Clear the way; shit's about to get real.

When I acquired the game, I was in the company of my friend Javier. As Javier was the only one out of the two of us who owned an N64, we quickly made our way to his house to play it. Bursting with excitement, I eagerly inserted the game and started the console. The N64 logo flashed for a second, then faded into the beloved Hyrulian landscape that I knew so well. The opening musical notes were concentrated beauty, burning through my thick layers of sarcasm and cynicism and reminding me of a time when the entire world was a brighter place.

SO MUCH CHILDHOOD

A bit of background information: Javier has 2 younger sisters, one of whom is 6 years old. The other sister's age is of no real significance because she's in middle school and, as we all know, every middle schooler's status as a real human being is temporarily revoked on the grounds that they've been scientifically proven to be the worst things in recently recorded history.

Don't look into its eyes, that's how they eat your soul.

Anyway. Javier and I had a nice set-up in his basement, in which the N64 was hooked up to a massive flat screen TV and I was comfortably situated in a nice little rocking chair. It was surreal because the TV's high-quality features only served to amplify the ugliness with which the game has aged. Javier's 6 year old sister (who, for no discernible reason, will be referred to as Doorknob for the rest of the article) had been throwing a fit and, at some point, ended up crossing in front of me. Unfortunately, Doorknob's foot got snagged on the wire of my controller. Suddenly, the Nintendo console came crashing to the ground. The AV cables became disconnected and, for a brief moment, I thought that Doorknob's carelessness had just wiped away the last hour of my gameplay. After recovering from my shell shock, I turned my gaze to the little girl who had come so close to destroying my game progress. Still pouting, she said "Johann should watch where he puts his wires."

Whether she was trying to be funny or not is irrelevant. The fact is, I have never been so close to hitting a 6 year old in my entire life. 

She interrupted my childhood. I ended hers.

At the time, the console had been sitting in a rather precarious position on the rocking foot rest when it was knocked down. With all the delicacy of handling a newborn, Javier and I gingerly moved it to the top of a much more secure table and resumed our gaming. The console came crashing to the floor again half an hour later when Javier's dad came in to vacuum the floor and carelessly knocked it off the table. By this point, I was absolutely paranoid and ready to eviscerate anybody who came within spitting distance of me and my game.

The next day, I took the N64 (Javier had given it to me) and my copy of Ocarina of Time and brought it all back to my house. They now both reside in my room as a monument to all the hours I sunk into it. It's been over 10 years since the last time I owned a Nintendo 64 and, despite all the time I spent playing it, I've never actually beaten Ocarina of Time. It is now my life goal to remedy that.

Basically, the first 7 years of my life can be summed up by an aging fantasy adventure game that I nearly killed a 6 year old over. Life well spent.

Idioms

I've always thought idiomatic English expressions were always a bit random. Sure, they usually make sense, with a few out-of-left-fielders, but for the most part they're relatively sane. For example, a shot in the dark is a random guess that you're making with very little to no prior knowledge. If someone is taking a shot in the dark, then they're making a haphazard guess about something completely outside their experience. This makes sense because, if you were to actually shoot a gun in a dark place, you could hit a puppy or a child, and then people would wonder why you're senselessly brandishing a firearm in a dark room full of cute things that really don't handle bullets very well. That actually doesn't do anything to prove why it makes sense. Moving on.

My wildly irresponsible guess work ended in disaster. For the love of God, don't turn on the lights.

As another example, shooting fish in a barrel is a relatively easy thing to do. Fish don't generally do much outside of water, and if they're trapped in a barrel, they are limited to twitching and the occasional gasp for breath. This makes it fairly easy for you and your gun-toting self to senselessly blow them to little fish chunks and back to whatever aquatic god(s) they believe in. So the phrase easy as shooting fish in a barrel makes sense because it's relating the ease of your current task with that of slaughtering Nemo and all of his friends and family. 

That gimpy fin isn't a birth defect, it's a God damn war wound.

The point is, I've always thought English idioms were a little odd. I usually wonder what must pass through other peoples' minds when they're unfamiliar with English and they hear some of our quaint little expressions for the first time. 

Until the other week, when I was Skyping with a friend of mine who lives in France. I had informed him that I had gotten a new guitar for Christmas, and he jokingly replied "ca dechire sa tante la cochone qui mange des frites le mardi!" 

When I saw the sentence for the first time, I got a little confused and asked him for a translation, because I didn't think I was reading it right. I awaited his reply, slowly trying to puzzle out the sentence. He replied "that's as cool as your aunt the whore who eats fries on Tuesdays."

It was at that moment that I decided American idioms really weren't that bad. And the French, just like in every other story they're ever involved in, proved without a doubt that they're irrevocably insane.

Marlin was horrified to see, on returning from his vacation, a slutty middle aged woman dining on all his friends and family in the form of fish fries while she used a darkened daycare center as a firing range to shoot children whom she had trapped in a barrel

I Hate English

English is simultaneously both a very efficient and woefully moronic language, and the more I learn about it the more conflicted I feel about it. We'll do this in 2 parts.

Part 1 - What's good about it: Efficiency

The efficiency of English is due in no small part to a little something called the Saxon genitive. Here's a small example: a kid named John has a bike. In French, if we were to express this bike in a phrase, it would be le velo de John, or "the bike of John." If we were to describe his bike, we would say something like le velo de John est un piece d'ordures, or "the bike of John is a piece of garbage." This sounds rather weird to my fellow native English speakers and I. Were we to describe his bike, we would simply refer to it as John's bike. That little 's at the end of John is used to denote his owner ship of the bike, and does a great deal to shorten phrases. The 's, or Saxon genitive, is an incredibly useful linguistic tool that is used to decrease the amount of time explaining something. While other languages have similar morphemes, most of them are expressed as a different conjugation of the word, whereas English speakers are fat and lazy and prefer to just tack a 's or ' on the end of everything (a simple ' would be used if the subject ends with an s, such as Francis' bike or Jesus' teachings). English has all sorts of little tricks like this that make it terrifically easy for speakers to express ideas in a clear, succinct and precise manner.

If you wish to express the phrase "the tank of Phil has turned into a terrifying bird of death," you might want to reassess your priorities and focus more on running away from the thing.

Part 2 - What's bad about it: Everything else

This poem pretty accurately illustrates why I don't like English. Because English lacks accents or any indicators of pronunciation, the way you pronounce words is based largely on completely arbitrary rules that will randomly get up and leave depending on what word you're using. We have nothing to indicate which syllable to emphasize, whether it's a hard or soft c, if a word ending with the suffix 'ain' is pronounced like curtain (sounds like kerten) or pertain (which actually sounds like it's spelled). A thousand different kinds of problems arise because whoever invented English decided to be a trendsetter and chose to omit the accents that were becoming all the rage with other languages. This was a terrible idea on their part.

This next problem is more of a personal irritant than anything else, but English is decidedly more difficult to rhyme than other Romance languages. Take Dante's Inferno, for example. Were one to read Inferno in its original Italian tongue, they would probably find that it contains a pretty consistent rhyme scheme. That's because just about every word rhymes with each other in Italian. However, when reading an English translation, the rhymes are infrequent and completely optional, because one would really have to stretch in order to express all of Dante's ideas while maintaining a rhyme. English' nature is that of a very blocky and efficient language, one that excels at expressing ideas and couldn't give less of a shit about artistic endeavors or foreigners who are unfortunate enough to try to pick it up as a second language. Hell, I think most English-speaking rappers should get an award for linguistic proficiency because they are seriously using one of the most ill-suited languages ever to convey complex ideas and tell a story, all while preserving a consistent rhyme.

Hauling around 3 and a half pounds of metal on his teeth can't possibly make his job any easier.

So yeah. I don't actually have a way to end this post...but here's a picture of Ralph Nader.

Yo.