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Island Packet

With a massive helmet of Hagar the Horrible-thick hair, dry-rubbed Southern wit and considerable tallness, McAnally does not exactly fit into the Caribbean-escapist vibe conjured up by Buffett’s beach blanket blowouts.

But since the 1990s, the Mississippi native has served as Buffett’s onstage counterpoint, guitarist and producing and writing partner. (He also has, during performances of “It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere,” served as Alan Jackson.)

It's shocking how much time was not needed to locate this image

GateHouse — You know what Facebook could use is an increased level of unprovoked information about people’s kids, and before any of you jumpy gophers who leave a Facebook tab up “at work” to pounce on posts/comments like rabid animals get all “snarky” and “sarcastic” and “busy with quotation fingers” I know I put kid pictures on Facebook all the time too; I am not saying that I never do it or you should never do it, particularly if hypothetically your child was all sweet pushing his baby brother around in a stroller or that baby has a particularly lively reaction to your eerily accurate Swedish Chef impression. I am just saying that oh my God seriously if I see another child I don’t know sitting on a toilet I am definitely canceling the Internet service of the elderly neighbor/nonprofit I’m stealing wifi from, which is either “rutner house” or “Beaufort County Orphanage” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys.”

(Incidentally this is where my 8-year-old would roll his eyes and go, “Don’t listen to him, Dad’s being sar-castic,” not that I would put that on Facebook or anything EVEN THOUGH IT’S UNBEARABLY CUTE AND YOU SHOULD ALL KNOW ABOUT IT.)

And yet here we are, thanks to the Consumer Electronics Show, an annual gathering of people to whom I would normally ascribe a dumb, nerdworthy nickname like “coding goobers” or “zittlywankers” or “Parrotheads” except I’m sure that any one of them is capable of building a nanorobot 14 molecules high that could kill me in my sleep using an endoplasmic reticulum. If you haven’t read up on this thing take a look online; seriously, it’s like a “Star Wars” convention for nerds.

Well, make that nerds and their parents: Because of CES we will soon have access to a device that will weigh your Precious Little Angel and auto-fire the results to Twitter and Facebook, saving you the trouble of weighing your child on some vintage hand-cranked lead-painted off-the-grid scale from Service Merchandise in 1983 and using a whole separate app to bore everyone to tears manually.

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The Smart Baby Scale is produced by a company called Withings, which has, in the past, invented a device called the WiFi Body Scale, which auto-tweets results every time you step on a special scale because the Withings company is staffed exclusively by black-hearted Nazgul who want everyone to hate them on primal, pure level usually reserved for Dane Cook or Newt Gingrich.

Just kidding, Withings, this is actually pretty genius, setting up a system by which you either force yourself into fitness-by-accountability, or launch into the greatest fiesta of binge Dairy Queen-eating this world has EVER SEEN. (“@Jeff’swifibodyscale Um someone has been trying to work out some latent confidence issues with basically a beach party of large chocolate shakes hasn’t he, Chubbs?”) They also make an blood pressure app/device for the iPhone and iPad, which is pretty accurate but kind of hard to operate while driving.

See, this I just don’t get. I get putting baby pictures online; I get posting your kid’s stats and grades and report cards and pictures. (I mean heavens I’m not going to look at them, God never ever, but I get them!) But— and help me out, Facebook Users of America Or Other Nations If You Found Your Way Here Around Your Country’s Internet Censorship — is sharing baby weight really a thing? Do parents keep up with that? I have enough time navigating the usual passive-aggressive parental games of oneupsmanship about sports and GT attendance and reading level, do we do this with weight now too?

The Smart Baby Scale sells for around $180, which is $169.99 more than the last scale I purchased in my life, which was in 1997 and came from I think a Jewel or a Walgreens and also it was quickly broken. But seriously, $180! For a scale that talks to Twitter! It’s important to note here that approximately four American states have money to educate the children whose weight-gain issues will soon be broadcast all over Facebook (which means they’ve already been sold to every major corporation in America and the government of Dubai) and yet this is OK, spending hundreds of dollars on a device that sends baby-weight updates to your mom in Indiana?

(Incidentally the SBS can also track, chart and broadcast the length of your baby, via a device called a “roll of measuring tape,” which is sold separately and retails for $599.99. Please make checks out to “Jeff Vrabel.”)

Jeff Vrabel did not have to look up endoplasmic reticulum, and he resents the implication. 

Science, yo

GateHouse — IMPORTANT AQUATIC ANIMAL POLL / DRINKING GAME, DEPENDING ON WHAT TIME IT IS ON YOUR INTERNET:

Would you rather find yourself swimming in the ocean with a shark that is a hybrid of two other sharks, or a crab that has been named after American acting treasure David Hasselhoff? And no you can’t say both, no matter how currently paralyzed you are by the urge to do so.

Before you make your decision, let us realize first that the ocean is, of course, filled shelf to shelf with hideous terrors, like those fish that make their own lights, giant goopy squid and giant goopy squid that make their own lights, probably to aid them in eating humans. (There are also eels, of which I do not approve one little bit.) I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason the ocean is there, to serve as a huge Hideous Terrors Production Machine, as well as serve as a super-convenient dumping ground for our industrial waste.

But this week we can add two new items to the list, which is good, because I I haven’t experienced a pants-dampening fear of swimming in the ocean in a while. (Full disclosure: I’ve been snorkeling one time, and it was in Hawaii, and I was nearly devoured whole by a monk seal, which is a lie because they don’t devour people, but it looked mean, and also the snorkeling reef than went from 30 feet deep on one side to 90,000 feet deep on the other, and a manta ray was staring at me with serial-killer eyes and making a slashing motion cross its throat with its manta ray fins, and I am not exactly filled with the desire to get back in the ocean anytime soon. Also once my wife tried to kill me with a shark. Long story.)

Yet, if I were to ever re-enter the deep blue sea, it would not be in Australia, which is where the planet’s most bloodthirsty predators go to practice being more murderous. DO NOT THINK YOU ARE FOOLING ANYONE, WALLABIES.

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Now, Australia is also home to the world’s first Hybrid Shark, so named because it’s a crossbreed of the common black-tip and the Australian black-tip, and because it runs on electricity. Scientists have found 57 of them along the coastline, though, in answer to the very first thing you and everyone else is thinking, there’s no risk of the hybrids evolving into a monstrous homicidal “mega-shark,” like Jaws, or the one that battled Godzilla in that Akira Kurosawa film.

Now, needless to say, when scientists say something like “there is no risk of the hybrids evolving into a monstrous homicidal ‘mega-shark’ ” it means there is CONSIDERABLE RISK OF THE HYBRIDS EVOLVING INTO A MONSTROUS HOMICIDAL ‘MEGA-SHARK,’ otherwise the scientists wouldn’t have even brought it up. I’m pretty sure that by the time this column sees print most of the population of Australia will have been consumed by black-tip hybrid sharks, which will have by then evolved legs, lungs and the ability to forge crude tools out of eucalyptus trees and koala parts. It is not a real good time to be a slow-moving and overweight fish in Australian waters, is what I’m saying.

Note: Hasselhoff crabs cannot give the thumbs-up

Still, it’s definitely better to be dying in Australia then alive near the Hasselhoff Crab, or the Crabblehoff, or the Hasselclaw, a creature that combines the two objects you’d least want to find yourself swimming next to you in an unfamiliar pool. Indeed, British scientists have applied the nickname “The Hoff” to a newfound species of crab, for the understandable reason that both animals boast mad-hairy chests. So once again I offer my heartfelt thanks to British scientists for the morning vomit.

Thousands of these crabs have been found along those volcanic vents where superheated water pours forth from Earth’s crust into the cold seawater, and where 99% of all bizarre oceanic creatures are purported to live. But most pleasingly, they were discovered by unmanned, robotic submarines, because if you’re gonna discover a brand-new Hasselhoof-themed animal, you pretty much have to do it via unmanned robotic vehicle.

You can find me in da club

GateHouse — I don’t know about you, but I spent New Year’s Eve getting hammered at White Castle. Ha! That’s a joke, of course — as I’ve somehow ended up with children living in my home, what I actually did was nothing! Well, at least nothing that required me to apply pants that aren’t operated by a drawstring.

But if I had gone anywhere, it would have been to The Castle, because according to a newspaper article that has been received by the Vrabel family with something close to the reckless delirium we felt when the Bears won the Super Bowl, The Castle is considering expanding its current roster of menu offerings (Gruel, Gruel On Bun, Gruel On Bun Feat. Chili, etc.) to include beer and/or wine.

Now, first of all, why this is needed is a mystery. White Castle, of course, is a brand that needs no improvement, no upgrading, no bridge to the 21st century. White Castle is built on the idea of shoe closet-sized restaurants that serve construction paper-thick burger-type objects on synthetic breadsubstance, all delivered to you in an environment that would suggest you are eating the food of kings and queens, if your royal subjects were all 400 lb. NASCAR fans or on their way home from the bars and think they’re in a Taco Bell.

Obviously, this is not a negative. This is what White Castle does, and it does it magically. Seriously if they started serving “salads” or “shrimp” or even burgers that were made of burgers I would be the first to lead the nationwide uprising. Ron Paul-college-volunteer style. “BRING BACK OUR WHITE CASTLE!” I would shout into a megaphone I stole from a hippie, “THESE NEW MENU ITEMS ARE DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO FOOD.”

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Regular readers of this column — and hello again to whoever showed up looking for “too fat for diver’s suit” — know that we Vrabels have some history with White Castle. The Castle in Whiting, Ind., sits just feet from both my grandparents’ old house and the massive church that’s served as home for most of our family’s major life events. Yet many of these events happened long ago, and since time has a way of bending and reshaping your memories, most of us now believe that our grandparents and many of my cousins were married in White Castle, probably, if the family history is any indication, with benefit of a coupon. So when I say that White Castle is in my blood, I mean it’s in my blood, and that sometimes there’s this tingling sensation on my left side.

Anyway, domestics there are $3, and wines are $4.50. It’s unclear what kind of wine they serve, though I’m going to guess their house wine, is something light and oaky and made of 45% unused bacon grease with a delightful whiff of pickles. I literally do not know why White Castle representatives are not writing these ideas down right now.

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Related, sort of

• Overweight man’s beef with White Castle finally connects “White Castle” with “beef”

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(Incidentally, this story’s Related Items include a headline “Local foods, healthful kids’ meals among 2012 restaurant trends,” which is obviously an indication that White Castle does not need your elitist left “restaurant trends,” and if it wants to serve heavily watered-down frat-daddy beer alongside its partially liquefied burgerslush objects IT WILL DO WHAT WHITE CASTLE WANTS TO DO. White Castle’s like the Rick Perry of fast-food joints, except with a much stronger chance of becoming president.)

Even the restaurant industry is taking notice. “It’s been a very challenging time in the restaurant industry … folks are trying all kinds of ways of driving traffic into their restaurants,” said Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant industry analyst, to The Newspaper. I couldn’t agree more! The answer here clearly lies in liquoring up consumers in a restaurant that offers drive-thru service, a place in which you can order 50 edible objects for $2.49 and still go home pretty much starving, a place that has been perfectly OK with its main food item being called a “slider” for 500 years, instead of something wacky like offering food.

This photo is not at all interesting to the average impressionable 7-year-old or anything.

GateHouse — The 7-year-old and I have been watching a lot of “MythBusters” lately. which is, needless to say, a fantastic idea when parenting a second-grade super-absorbent spongeperson who enjoys explosions and fire and large trucks crashing into other trucks to create explosions.

I justify this regular explosion exposure by sitting next to him and occasionally shouting “Science!” like the guy in that Thomas Dolby song. I mean, “MythBusters” isn’t an attention-deficit cartoon designed to overinflate action-figure profit margins or move units of cereal, right? Moreover, thanks to the wonder twins of DVR and Apple TV we get to skip the Commercials For Things, although I would probably feel a little better if Discovery could make with the less advertising of “Weed Wars” and that show about people’s first week in jail). Otherwise, it’s QUALITY TELEVISION. And if quality television so happens to involve endearing humans rocketing themselves down awesomely lengthy makeshift waterslides and crashing backhoes into things, well SCIENCE!

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Besides, let’s be honest. This show is awesome. It’s the stuff-blowing-up show. It’s like a Michael Bay movie for children who are smarter than Michael Bay (i.e., all children). I don’t know why every 7-year-old in the world doesn’t watch this show, except possibly for all the sequences involving bazookas? Pfft. Helicopter parents. (Last night I told Little Man that we could go to the grocery store for something tomorrow, and his instant response was: “Don’t forget the Diet Coke and Mentos!”)

Anyway, “MythBusters” recently aired a holiday special featuring a massive Rube Goldberg contraption, which, again, turned the Little Man’s brain do a viscous melted slush of awesomeness, so I thought, “Yay! Let us find more holiday specials!”

Which was fine, except one of the other holiday specials addressed the question of whether or not Christmas lights can make a Christmas tree spontaneously burst into flame, information that the second-grade sponge person absorbed with slightly more wariness than he has the episodes about backhoes.

(Actual fact: The 7-year-old just saw my blog, which in an inexcusable parenting error has been on the screen for six seconds instead of YouTube Lego train movies. And he told me, “You should write a story on the burning tree.” And here I think, “Yes! Yes I should!” So now he’s gonna be all demanding with the agent fees and residuals, and then he’ll buy a new iPhone and he’ll get 35 other funnier clients and probably need to fly to Reno this weekend. I’d be more concerned about this, but frankly Agent is a much more lucrative potential business future than Idiot Humor Writer so I’m basically like sure son how many minutes do you need and what size Dolce and Gabbana suit would you like?)

Anyway, the tree. It’s not going to burst into flame. The show proved that it’s not going to burst into flame, unless you plug it into flammable unregulated sockets from 1956 and paint the lights in animal fat and tie them together with oil-soaked rags and cover the tree in hairspray?

Yet after the MythBusters prove the tree is not going to burst into flame, and because this show is awesome, they on purpose make it burst into flame! And even after assuring my son that we cannot replicate this explosion in our home because we don’t have, among other things, unstable-dictator-levels of explosives, all he sees is BURNING TREE ON FIRE, which, coupled with his best friend’s recent lively interest in ghosts, is not making sleeping a lot easier this Wondrous Season.

So every night, at bedtime, we unplug the tree. Every time we leave the house, we unplug the tree, which, now that I think about it, is what you’re “supposed to do.” WAIT. That means this show is both science-y and educational and safety-oriented! Someone is getting a HUGE box of Diet Coke and Mentos this year.

Type "Christmas snake" into Google Images. It's fantastic

GateHouse — There are things that are OK, and there are things that are Not OK, and there are things that are Super Not OK, and there are things that are So Not OK That They Make You Slap Your Face And Run To Your Momma, and that is what brings us to the headline “Two Families Find Live Snakes Hiding In Christmas Trees.”

If you needed any more evidence that it’s just wiser to buy a plastic, Taiwanese factory-produced tree at Lowe’s, slap it in a stand and be done in time for the Steelers game, may I present you with the notion that your fancypants Real Tree You Mightily Chopped Down In A Field With The Help Of A Bearded Woodsman Named Fjurg The Sweaty probably contains snakes.

Christmas trees, according to everyone, are the second least-favorable places you can find a snake, the first being, say it with me, the toilet. This is my fourth-greatest fear in life, snakes in the toilet, directly behind clowns, the Fox Business Channel and having my picture taken while scuba diving in the ocean but then having the photographer start gesturing wildly and flailing around because there’s a whale swimming up behind me. That scene in “Finding Nemo” where the whale fades into view and eats the neurotic fish and Ellen? YEAH, WORST FEAR OF LIFE. Most of my more acute fears in life end up in Pixar movies. Weirdest thing.

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Anyway, this past week snakes were discovered in the trees of a families in North Carolina and Idaho. The former, one lovely North Carolina evening, went to shut their tree’s lights off and found a corn snake dangling off a branch, which is deeply not OK for the following reasons:

1. The tree came to their house with a snake in it.
2. The family decorated the tree without knowing the snake was in it.
3. The snake didn’t notice that it was being decorated around, meaning that it’s a dumb snake, which makes it MORE DANGEROUS. Even if it was a corn snake, which are, um, apparently nonvenomous, docile and popular as pets. That’s what “Science” tells you anyway, and Science has never been less popular than it is right now, so you can believe whoever you want, Facts Gathered By Years of Study And Observation or me, some guy on the Internet telling you that corn snakes are basically like the basilisk from the end of the second “Harry Potter” movie except they’re 40 times as big, have human organs dripping from their teeth, curse in German and they eat all of your pets, even the fish. Actually I only have fish so that’s about as bad as things could get, pet-missing-wise, and I don’t even know how many fish I have come to think of it. I should check that.

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So let’s just throw it out there: What do you do if you find a snake in your tree? You squeal like Glenn Beck, flee the house, call Animal Control, wait for Animal Control to call one of those squinty-eyed 65-year-old chain-smoking animal-relocation specialists who don’t have an office and only accept payment in tobacco and rifle parts, have them remove the snake, then take the tree out back, light it on fire and move to another state, right? RIGHT. Good answer. Yet THIS IS NOT WHAT THESE PEOPLE DID. These people KEPT THE SNAKE. These people MADE THE SNAKE THEIR PET. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOU, NORTH CAROLINA.

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Related, sort of

• I cannot help but notice that no one is fleeing in terror from all of the giant snakes

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Meanwhile in Idaho, a family bought a Snake Tree from a horticulturalist named  Crickett Rudd, which is either the best name of any horticulturist in the history of horticulture (Sept. 1975-current), or the best fake name anyone has furnished to a reporter in Idaho all year. Crickett told the local TV station that “sometimes on rare occasions little critters and animals can get inside the wrapped Christmas trees, during the delivery process to try to stay warm,” AND HE SAID IT JUST LIKE THAT, LIKE IT’S JUST PART OF THE JOB.

Like you know how sometimes if you’re a bartender you may have to pick up an extra shift, or if you’re a doctor you have to stay late to finish charts? Right, if you’re a horticulturist in Idaho YOU MAY SELL TREES WITH SNAKES IN THEM. This is the only industry in which occasional snake infestation is something that can be made to sound not only like that big of a deal, but sort of adorable. Insurance premiums for those guys must be a nightmare.

Anyway, if you’re at home wondering, “But Jeff, how can I be sure there are no snakes in my Christmas tree right now?” the short answer is: you can’t. There’s almost certainly a snake in your tree, right now, laying eggs in your nutcrackers while you sleep. And if there are no snakes, there are definitely some venomous spiders, or maybe a smallish bear. So yeah, it’s too late, but next year Rudd recommends vigorously sweeping the tree to shake out anything that has taken up residence in there. I’d do that right now but I’m afraid a whale would fall out.

Abject horror from Gizmodo

GateHouse – The good news: The world will officially not end as a result of the disastrous tsunami of semi-coherent pepperoni-mouthed idiocy that would have defined The Herman Cain Presidency! The bad news: It will probably end as a result of one of the following:

1. Octopi that walk among us, or
2. Giant Air Jordan-sized insects that eat carrots and look like they could punch people in the face.

There are two horrendous animals you should check out on the Internet right now, which is weird, because the Internet is mostly used only for cute animals, such as puppies and kitties and squirrels playing harmonicas.

But in this case the Internet has given us a video in which an octopus at a marine reserve is seen swimming around in the water, which is where octopus usually go. The water is where octopi do octopi-like things, such as admire their own arms and destroy Captain Nemo’s submarine and make fun of those commercials where wankers buy each other Lexuses for Christmas. But in the video, after a few seconds, the octopus WALKS OUT OF THE WATER ONTO THE LAND, while onlookers gape and holler and burst into tears and riot and rightfully flee into nearby mountain terrain, WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY SHOULD BE DOING because octopi DO NOT WALK ON LAND, which you know already if you attended school, even ones in Kentucky.

(Incidentally I’ve just been told that it was actually a giant squid that destroyed Captain Nemo’s submarine, but I can’t think of anything unusually evil that an octopus has done in movies  so I’m leaving it. If anyone knows of some seriously evil octopus shenanigans, email me.)

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Now, if you’ve never seen an octopus walk … well you can pretty much click the video thingy. But if you’d prefer to have it described for you by a “humor columnist” who can barely keep from retching violently onto his MacBook right now, it looks like what would happen if during a double-lung transplant the surgeons dropped the two lungs on the ground and the lungs each sprouted eight legs and went to the hospital cafeteria for a dinner made of beets and Jabba the Hutt’s tongue and four quarts of vintage pudding, then dumped the beets and tongue and pudding on themselves and undulated down the hall to await the return of the mothership. So seriously you should check it out!

You should not, however, check out the Giant Weta, which the Internet tells me is a “cricket-like insect” but what is clearly a guinea pig that has shed all its skin, spot-evolved a crispy exoskeleton, sprouted grasshopper legs and antennae and goes around CREATING NIGHTMARES AND EATING CARROTS AND ONE DAY PEOPLE I AM SURE OF IT.

The Giant Weta is seven inches long, which, when converted into Insect means it’s 47 feet long, has teeth and looks like it’d be perfectly comfortable biting the heads off of everyone on the bus with you.

Luckily, the Giant Weta can currently only be found on a probably theoretical place called “Little Barrier Island” in New Zealand, which frankly doesn’t sound very big and, as a result, will be easy to avoid even on the more comprehensive “Lord of the Rings” site tours. But that will only hold until the Weta rides to a larger, less fictional landmass, probably on an even larger insect with sails and/or the ability to successfully captain a pontoon boat. Our only hope is that before these massive insects make landfall they’re attacked and eaten by walking octopi.