Category Archives: Quote-Fingers “Science”

January 10, 2012

Hybrid sharks and Hasselhoff crabs: Why the ocean is trying to kill you

By Jeff Vrabel

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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4 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Quote-Fingers "Science", Vicious Animals

December 5, 2011

I for one welcome our new walking octopus / monstrous insect overlords

By Jeff Vrabel

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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8 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Quote-Fingers "Science", Vicious Animals

May 9, 2011

Up and atom: Will someone please count these molecules for my 7-year-old

By Jeff Vrabel

Fallout Boy MilhouseGateHouse — Over the past couple of weeks, the boy has become a pretty huge fan of molecules.

Molecules in the air, molecules in the water, molecules in the table. Molecules in space, molecules in him, molecules in his blanket. I spent much of Mother’s Day hopelessly attempting to calculate the number of molecules in the space between (holds fingers about a millimeter apart), and failing in spectacular, fiery, Cubs/Donald Trump fashion. If you know how many molecules are in that general area, I beg you tell me now, because I’m about 30 seconds away from tweeting Neil deGrasse Tyson, and he is SO TIRED of me doing that.

The problem with being interrogated about molecules by your 7-year-old, aside from extrapolating that I can probably go ahead and take these football helmets to the consignment shop, is of course that I haven’t the foggiest what to tell him. (We determined once that air is made up of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide. “Is carbon dioxide a molecule?” he logically asks, and I’m like DUDE I HAVE NO IDEA, hang on let me tweet Neil deGrasse Tyson.)

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Ozomatli – Cut Chemist Site (Live on ‘Morning Becomes Eclectic’)

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18 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Dad Stories / Parenting, GateHouse, Humor Columns, Quote-Fingers "Science"

March 15, 2011

TAKE US WITH YOU, SPACE BACTERIA

By Jeff Vrabel

At left: CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. At right: Just some rocks.

GateHouse — You guys might have missed this last week, as the news cycles were thick with unimaginable disaster (Japan) and unimaginable stupid (everything else, let’s just pick two random ones how about “Martha Stewart is a grandma” and “Timberlake/Biel split” whoa wait really?), but a scientist says he found life in space. This is an unprocessably big deal, the culmination of millennia of stargazing and decades of technologically wondrous exploration and hundreds of terrible, terrible movies with Will Smith in them, and yet as “confirmed alien life” does nothing for you in the page views department let me also very quickly mention that I can help you find out WHAT REALLY SPLIT UP JUSTIN AND JESSICA. (I don’t want to give it away, but Martha Stewart = totally involved.)

(It also doesn’t help that this guy has been more or less shoved given a metaphoric swirly by his colleagues, but as I’m just here to make dumb jokes, not get in the middle of a nerd-fight, let’s just press on.)

Anyway, a few weeks ago, late at night, on a corner of the Internet very few people frequent because it rarely contains information on the porny antics of a man best known for making cornball sex jokes on America’s second-dumbest means for delivering alleged comedy (you’re reading the first), it was reported that Science located evidence of extraterrestrial life. This, of course, is no great shakes, as we’ve learned that science is to be selectively ignored and distrusted, so it’s understandable that it took a little while for a story confirming the EXISTENCE OF ALIEN LIFE to find its legs, or tentacles, or amorphous bulbous glowing laser-firing appendages, whatever they have up there. (I’m hoping that at least there’s something akin to a tauntaun, but that’s just me, I get cold easily.)

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Spacehog – In The Meantime

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January 31, 2011

Scientists are cloning mammoths and other huge prehistoric beasts, because that went so well with Gamera

By Jeff Vrabel

Pictured: Science

GateHouse — There are, on the face of it, tons of reasons why cloning a woolly mammoth is a magnificent idea, if not one so awesome you can’t believe that America’s feeble, short-sleeved inventors haven’t thought of already (let me know how it goes with that “high-speed rail,” nerdlingers, while me and 12 friends are riding my brand-new new mammoth around the infield at the Daytona 500). Just think of a glorious, mammoth-filled future, the convenience, the ease of cargo transport, the chance to finally have a huge meaty rib delivered via roller-skating waitress to the side window of your rock car.

But, as it turns out, there are evidently some loser reasons against mammoth cloning, and not just the usual worries about being gored to death, being trampled to death or being trampled to death while being gored by the early, unsuccessful trial-run mammoth clones from the practice machines. God knows what those abominations could have on them — wings, dorsal fins, mouse faces. I’m not sure if you’ve ever given serious consideration to what happens when an entire subterranean cloning facility full of failed, bucktoothed, emotionally unstable almost-mammoths run amok and inevitably slaughter their creators — which obviously happens every time anyone clones anything around here, jeez — but I’m sure the aftermath would be something you’d want to wear the old shoes to mop up. “MAMMOTH DISASTER IN SCIENCE LAB,” the headlines would scream, and on the plus I guess the headlines would pretty much write themselves, leaving copy editors with more time to spend fleeing into the countryside, crazed with murderous fear.

I’m talking about mammoth cloning – I know, again — because it turns out that having successfully cloned every other animal in that Darwin book from the library, and also having fixed every other problem on Earth, Science has decided to try cloning animals that technically don’t even have firsts anymore, calling into question whether the word “cloning” is even accurate here, but whatever, we’ll leave that to the poindexters from the AP Stylebook.

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The Roots – Clones

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9 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture And / Or News, GateHouse, Humor Columns, Quote-Fingers "Science", Vicious Animals

January 4, 2010

Orange billionaire sends Spandau Ballet into space; they did “Rock Me Amadeus,” I’m pretty sure

By Jeff Vrabel

Pictured: Spandau Ballet, or Dexy's Midnight Runners, or possibly Taco

GateHouse — As it is the New Year and a time for rebirth, rededication, refueling, rebranding and at least three weeks of semi-consistent exercise which will gradually taper off and then eventually plummet to a zero-baseline in what will almost certainly become a fiesta of couch-sloughing and chocolate frosted donuts by early February, I would like to make several Important Proclamations for my little columns in the year 2010:

  1. No more hidden messages; reading each first letter down vertically will no longer reveal coded instructions to any of the secret societies to which I once belonged. My apologies, Order of the Sphinx Bullfinch, but you’re just going to have to figure out some other way to control Parliament.
  2. I officially retire the belief that if you say something funny to me in an email or IM, I both own and thought of it, which I am doing entirely of my own volition and not because of any threatened legal action or anything, so just stop looking at me like that, all judge-y.
  3. No more puns about cows. Nobody likes them, and they tend to put readers in a horrible moooood.
  4. No more embellishing, outlandishing, stretching, fabricating, exaggerating or embiggening things to make for “better stories” or “dramatic tension” or “because the things that actually happen to me are not remotely funny.” And this very instant by promising to you, the reader who is killing time waiting for something to load in the other tab or for the dryer to beep already, that I know this much is true:


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1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Music Writing, Quote-Fingers "Science"

October 9, 2009

Attention, The Moon: Your days are numbered, jerk.

By Jeff Vrabel
moon_clementine

Look at The Moon, being all smug.

GateHouse — Well, everything seems under control down here: What’shisname, the dingus politician, is off “Dancing with the Stars” because of a deviated coccyx or whatever; Jon and Kate have been quietly locked away and are, with any luck, currently being tortured; health care reform is pretty much done, except for the details about excluding the very short. There’s only one thing to do when things have reached such a state of calm, measured stability here on Earth: destroy the moon, immediately.

Luckily, NASA’s with me on this excellent plan, though they have been resistant to some of my awesome other ideas, such as the Scaffold to Jupiter and the Space Crocodile and the Buzz Aldrin Memorial Floating KFC, which was scuttled when I couldn’t secure funding from KFC and it was also revealed that Buzz Aldrin was not dead. Last Friday morning, the organization, which once actually got a bunch of federal dollars to do this kind of space stuff, catapulted a spacecraft named LCROSS into the moon’s South Pole, to kill off all of its remaining penguins.

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1 comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Quote-Fingers "Science"

June 30, 2008

Sarcasm: Not only fun, it will probably save your life

By Jeff Vrabel

GateHouse — I have good news today for the edgy people out there, the embittered, the dark, the endarkened, the snarky, the snippy, the snooty, the ensnarkened, the tragically comic, the comically tragic and everyone that I am related to or friends with.

A study recently published by a group of neurophysiologists at the University of California San Francisco (in those rare moments they weren’t hacky-sacking in the quad and drinking PBR) argues that using sarcasm — the ability to make people feel silly if not insignificant in an vain attempt to raise your own self-esteem by tiny, ultimately futile degrees — is not only something that’s fun to use when trying to get out of a conversation with people you can’t stand, but it’s actually a vital evolutionary survival skill.

Yeah. So, to recap: Sarcasm is a basic, essential key to life.

Oh, there‘s something I needed to know. Hey, University of California San Francisco, thanks for spending a couple of thousand bathtubs full of taxpayer money figuring that out. I bet your parents are really super-proud of your extremely important graduate work, and your really expensive degrees. They should totally give you guys a raise, or a shiny new cafeteria, or a new Nerd Room, for all your Nerding.
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2 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Culture And / Or News, GateHouse, Humor Columns, Quote-Fingers "Science"

April 29, 2008

Science ruins time travel for everyone

By Jeff Vrabel

GateHouse – Science has already ruined a number of important things for me, such as my high school GPA and pretty much all of religion, but this past week they really took the taco: It was announced that I really, truly, once and for all, can’t travel back in time. Not even with a cheesy 1980s-looking car, not even if you have directions to a nice local wormhole, no matter what Huey Lewis and the News say.

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1 comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in GateHouse, Humor Columns, Quote-Fingers "Science"

April 17, 2008

This is the no-see-ums’ world, we’re just periodically allowed to visit

By Jeff Vrabel

How I loathe you, animal

Island Packet – One could make the argument that all animal bites are displeasing developments, and that if possible, it’s best to avoid putting any of your valuable, delicious skin into the path of the teeth of something. It’s what biologists call “evolutionary theory,” and what most other people call “trying to avoid becoming dead.”

So it’s a little disingenuous to be writing a column about how one local animal’s bite is much, way and totally worse than all other local animals’ bites — especially when the animal in question isn’t an alligator, a development that can’t be sitting well with the local alligator community. I imagine they’re feeling a little like Ron Santo when he gets passed over for the Hall of Fame every time, like, “Um, what else do you need us to do here?” (I’m pretty sure they grumble about this during their council meetings before going back to doing whatever it is alligators do, which, according to every time I’ve seen one around here, is lounge around doing nothing really useful and being partially submerged in a pond of standing water, kind of like Sean Hannity.)

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6 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune, Quote-Fingers "Science", Vicious Animals

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