Fun Fact Friday - Let Them Eat Cake!

I am sorry if that title leads you, dear reader, to believe that I will be discussing Marie Antoinette. I rarely speak of her. So, no, I will not be discussing Miss Beehive 1772. Instead, I turn my attention to urinals.

"My hair is bigger than my ass." - Marie Antoinette

Fun fact: A UK company has developed urinal video games.

"What?" I like to imagine you asking mid-stream. The company, Captive Media, has designed urinals that sense pee-flow and can be used, for example, to control a skier racing down a mountain. This is not new news, necessarily. I first heard about these urine games a while ago, but the first urinal video gaming is now coming to the U.S.

And there are a lot of puns that the company behind these fun-time urinals and prospective advertisers have made. And you know that I love the puns. You know I do. But not today. No. Because I want to play games while I pee. But I can't. What do I get? Cold ass toilet seats. And tampon robots just staring at me from the corner. No one wants that!

Men already get to pee vertically and aim and don't have to struggle to avoid getting a stream of urine on their trousers when taking a leak on a McCain Palin campaign sign on the side of a darkened back road in the wilds of New Hampshire. Not to mention the pay gap and pregnancy and all that other shit we be-vaginaed folk have to put up with. And now they get to amuse themselves while peeing. I just feel cheated.

So, to all you men on your fucking way to Allentown, PA to piss your cares away with skiing down a virtual mountain and learning about prostate health, go fuck yourselves. Because yeah, masturbation is also easier for you.

Fun Fact Friday - How To Hypnotize a Chicken

I'm sorry I've been absent for so long, dear reader. I am, as you may or may not be aware, a college student working on a thesis, which occasionally consumes a large part of my time. But this fun fact is the most fun. I hope it will make amends.

Fun Fact: Chickens can be hypnotized... by Al Gore.

Damn, that's an erect cock!

That's right. Former Vice President Albert Gore can hypnotize chickens. Perhaps this is not news to you, dear reader. Perhaps you were a fan of 60 Minutes in 2000. Perhaps you were lucky enough to witness Mr. Gore confess that as a boy in Tennessee he learned how to hypnotize a chicken.

But enough about Al Gore! Because I am sure you are all wondering if you can get a hypnotized chicken to do a strip tease or perform its finest imitation of Colonel Sanders. Alas! I don't think that is possible.

As it turns out, if you get a chicken's head on the ground and draw circles or lines around said head, you can basically just get a chicken to be very still. Which maybe is exciting, but first you have to wrestle the squirming un-hypnotized chicken's head to the ground. It honestly seems like a bit of a hassle to just watch a chicken sit still, but for those of you who are into immobile hens, here's a video I procured from the interwebs.

Well, until next time, dear reader. And may you be as hypnotic as Al Gore!

"Why, hello!" - Al Gore

So fucking hypnotic.

Secular Sunday - Holy Shit!

Jesus is everywhere. Even Ohio. And even in bird poop.

"Poo unto others as you would have them poo unto you." - Jesus Howard Christ

Yes, that is a picture of bird poop that Jim Lawry and his son witnessed being shat onto their car windshield while driving in Cleveland. Apparently Mr. Lawry has said of the incident, "I am blessed. It's been an incredible experience."

Honestly, I think it looks more like a stormtrooper helmet than Jesus...

... but that could just be my nerd showing. In any case, I think it's time we had a frank discussion about what constitutes a religious experience.

I am not a religious person, but as a general rule, if something you worship appears in poop, you better hope it's an accident. I mean, assuming for a moment that Jesus does actually appear in objects (which has its own problems, but we'll get to that), would he really choose to appear in poop? Poop? Maybe. It's been a while since Jesus and I were bros. Maybe he's into that shit now.

But it turns out there is a name for these kinds of shenanigans. It's called pareidolia. And it happens everywhere. In the corner of my room, there is a blob in the stained wood that looks like a woolly mammoth. In Ludwig Bemelman's book Madeline, "a crack on the ceiling had the habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit." A blob of glue looking like Homer Simpson fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars. As mentioned one Fun Fact Friday, for a while people thought there was a face monument on the surface of Mars.

I also happen to be from New Hampshire, and our state symbol is the Old Man of the Mountain. It was a Lincoln-esque profile of a man in the side of a mountain in my fine home state. (He fell down, and we kept him as our state symbol because quite frankly we don't have a whole lot going for us.) And as much as I glow with New Hampshire pride, it's all pareidolia. Clouds, constellations, stains, burnt toast... people have a tendency to create familiar shapes and faces from a random collection of stimuli.

And maybe Mr. Lawry wants to cherish this holy shit, but it's poop. And it happened Cleveland, which is the least likely place for any deity to appear. Ever. So pull it together, human race!

Related: Friday I was eating some delicious chicken tenders. One of them could have vaguely looked like Christ all snuggled up in his tomb for nap time.

"No man cometh unto the Tender, but by me." - Jesus Howard Christ

I did not put this on eBay. I ate it. And it was fucking delicious.

Fun Fact Friday - For Leg Lovers

That almost felt like too much alliteration in the title there, huh? But only almost. Anyway, here's a quick fun fact for you, dear reader.

Fun fact: Daniel Sickles, a Civil War general, lost his leg at Gettysburg but often visited it in the Army Medical Museum.

"At least I still have my mustache!" - General Sickles

Now, I know this fun fact probably doesn't need an explanation. I mean, it's the classic tale of man loses leg, man donates leg to museum, man visits leg on their anniversary. But just in case you haven't watched that many rom-coms, I'll elaborate.

General Sickles was a Union general during the Civil War and was having what I can only imagine to be a lovely day when a cannonball up and hit him in his leg, Righty McWalkable. It had to be amputated. Though the general dried his tears with his bushy mustache because cruel fate had separated him from his one true love, he knew there was hope. A new museum was opening in Washington, D.C. - a museum that was looking for bits of bodies.

Sickles donated his leg (and the cannonball) to the museum. On the anniversary of the amputation, the general would visit his leg. I assume he also took it out to dinner. Or gave it a pretty necklace.

"I miss my general..." - Righty McWalkable

The leg can now be found in the National Museum of Health and Medicine. If you'd leg to pay Righty a visit, I am sure he will recount fondly his time with Sickles. I have heard though that since Sickles passed in 1914, Righty has had a rather torrid affair with James A. Garfield's vertebrae, which also apparently hangs out at the NMHM.

A love affair for the ages, dear reader! Much like ours...