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Author Archives: (Ryan) Michney


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Overly Harsh and Pedantic Takedown of This Shower Curtain Map

Doesn't look good under harsh bathroom lighting either

The World, from the same people who brought you liquid body soap

Allow me to get this out of the way right off the bat: I am not a cartographer. Sure, I may have a particular affection for the “Geography” section of Sporcle. And yes, I can spell Kyrgyzstan and know that Toronto isn’t the capital of Canada (even though it obviously should be). And I may have even drawn a map of the world from memory (along with everyone else in my class) as an end-of-year project in 7th grade. But those days are long past, and I have something significantly more important to tell you about: the bathroom users of this country are getting puzzling and inaccurate geographic information from one of the most popular shower curtains on the novelty shower curtain scene.

Sentimental views of crushing poverty have never been this geographic!

I am referring to the curtain available here which is well known enough that I had already seen it once or twice before picking it up last year. It even featured in a few episodes of the US version of Shameless alongside Emmy Rossum’s boobs (no, that link isn’t to her boobs, pervert). If they ever reboot Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiago? as some kind of edgy, morally-ambiguous, heist drama on AMC it’ll be in their bathroom as well.¹

Unlike Amazon reviewer “E. Foster” whose primary complaint was “Really Smelly!” most of my criticisms are based on the bounty of geographical oddities contained upon its rubber surface. Sure, it’s just a shower curtain, but it is one of the most massively influential shower curtains on the market right now! Here are some of the things that are strange about it:

  1. The Mercator Projection. Widely considered the wrongest of all preposterously wrong map projections. It’s a wild distortion of the relative sizes of various parts of the world that says to your typical mid-17th century colonialist “Why OF COURSE it would make sense for Norway to rule over the southern half of Africa.” Continue reading →


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Swimming Tips!

The Dear Leader before heading off to the giant Swimming Pool in the Sky

More like Swim Jong Il!

I recently took up the sport of swimming. It is a great way to get in some heart-pounding cardio while constantly feeling like you’re about to drown. I want to share some tips I’ve learned in the past few months to help other new swimmers succeed in this asphyxiation-inducing form of exercise:

  • Make sure to wear a brightly colored bathing suit. This will make it easier for the lifeguard/police divers to spot you/your corpse at the bottom of the pool/abandoned quarry basin.
    Sexy

    Perfect form!

  • Chlorine in pools can bleach or discolor hair, and some people wear swimming caps to avoid this. If you choose not to, don’t be surprised that 30-40 years of swimming regularly may turn much of your hair a white or greyish color.
  • Breathing enough air to perform the physically demanding act of swimming can be challenging. Yet, the theory that the human body requires oxygen for survival is just that: a theory. Scientific opinion differs on the exact mechanism of respiration, and though some in the mainstream scientific community have come to the conclusion that it is necessary, the winds of discovery often blow in unexpected directions. After all, it was once “mainstream scientific opinion” that the sun revolved around the Earth, how is this any different? Not to mention the suspicious fact that so-called “legitimate” biologists refuse to debate us. What are they afraid of? That their theory of aerobic respiration won’t stand up to scrutiny? An honest debate is all we ask. Just because we find the idea of life-sustaining yet invisible oxygen particles hard to “inhale,” doesn’t mean we should be pariahs to an orthodoxy-enforcing community unwilling to withstand challenges for fear of losing their lucrative grant money. Until we have a real discussion on the merits of Respirationism, you should consider the necessity of breathing air to be just one of many theories about how to sustain life. Teach the controversy!
  • Amphibian-American Michael Phelps is known to consume  upwards of 12,000 calories a day while training, and he is the greatest Olympic swimmer of all time. Try quintupling your usual diet.

    Dolphins respect Putin’s diabolical consolidation of power.

  • Many swimmers find they can reduce drag by shaving their body hair. To gain an advantage you really have to shave everywhere. And I mean everywhere. You know where I’m talking about. Downtown. The basement. The sausage cellar. The Batcave. Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
  • If you’re a novice, stay out of the Shark Lane. The shark cannot tell the difference between different skill levels.
  • Humans are roughly 70% water. Try to use that to your advantage somehow.
  • Good form can be the difference between sinking, and being the next, even douchier, Ryan Lochte. Here is the formula for a perfect front crawl:
    1. Extend your main arm frontwise. Palm down with inosculated digits. The appendage containing your brain, mouth, and sense organs should be oriented orthogonally to your direction of motion. Pivot starboard (or anti-starboard, respectively) as you drag your main arm crosswise through the water.
    2. Repeat this action (mirror-reversed, of course) with your auxiliary arm.
    3. While performing Steps #1 & #2, pump your non-anterior appendages ventrally in a reiterant fashion. A good form mimics the elegant flap of a Sharp-tailed Grouse’s wing. To maximize efficiency, attempt to get the ratio somewhere around 5.67:1 kicks to arm cycles.
    4. Pull the dangling end to the left and then fold it back over itself to the right. Hold this fold, which will be the front loop of the completed tie, between your shirt’s collar points. Tighten by pulling on opposite sides and halves simultaneously. Repeat until the bow is the desired shape and tightness.
    5. When you complete your arm cycle, swivel your facial region in the direction of your auxiliary arm. Expand your diaphragm with your intercostal muscles to effect the intake of air.
    6. As you approach the far end of the pool, and prepare to flip-turn off the wall, think about all the mistakes you’ve made in your life. The friends you should have been kinder to, the elderly relatives you should have visited more often, the times you didn’t work as hard as you should have. If you’ve ever gotten embarrassingly drunk and thrown up on yourself, concentrate on that memory. It will ease the extreme discomfort of water rushing into your sinuses as you forget to strongly exhale during your underwater somersault. With your main and auxiliary arms at your side, tip forward around your proximal axis and use the memory of your romantic failures in high school to ignore the blinding pain of bashing your ankles into the edge of the pool during the flip. After pushing off, extend your distal appendages axially in both directions and rotate 180 degrees as you think about when you spilled red wine on your favorite shirt. Man, you really loved that shirt.


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Two Cats for the Price of One

Brrrow?

This is Venus, the internet’s favorite cat this week.

These are the Charons from the Star Trek TOS episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”:

Anyone else suddenly hungry for Oreos?

This cat-copycatting should come as no surprise: cats have always loved Original Series Star Trek. Dogs on the other hand (which, regardless of their other virtues, are well known to have terrible taste) tend to prefer Voyager. They can relate to Neelix.


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Veeping in the Name of

It’s since been surpassed in the news by some kind of medieval shaman revealing to women at long last that they possess hitherto unknown reproductive powers in the category of “ways to shut that whole thing down,” but last week something amusing happened to someone who shares Todd Akin’s pre-Enlightenment views on female autonomy: VP candidate and ex-professional hand model, Paul Ryan.

P-Ryddy got an unpleasant surprise last Thursday, when Tom Morello, guitarist of his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine, and aging Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino look-alike, penned a Rolling Stone editorial that called him “the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against.” He wonders which Rage song is Ryan’s favorite, “Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of ‘Fuck the Police’? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production?” Rage has got to be one of the most aggressively left-wing bands of the last 20 years, and not just primarily outside their music, like Bruce Springsteen or Avril Levigne—the songs themselves are about the evils of war profiteering and how cool Trotsky’s beard looked. (Fun Fact: “Political Views and Activism of Rage Against the Machine” has its own page on Wikipedia). So it’s kind of funny that a Mr. Burns-level arch-Randian conservative liked their music so much. My theory: he’s missing the irony. Like in ‘Bulls on Parade’ when they sing about “Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes…I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library” maybe he just thinks all that sounds like a good idea.

As the campaign puts more scrutiny on Mr. Ryan, we’re going to find out about more of the things he didn’t fully understand. Here are my predictions of the harsh revelations he’s about to receive in the near future:

  • Jefferson Starship was not a real starship.
  • Even though they were both played by the same actor, Han Solo and Indiana Jones are, in fact, different characters.
  • Maize is corn.
  • None of the people in The Crucible were actually witches.
  • ‘Ferris Bueller’ is not Matthew Broderick’s name in real life.
  • “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” is only a saying—you can’t just replace Medicare with apples.
  • ‘Rosebud’ was Kane’s sled, a symbol of his lost youth and innocence, not the name of a snowglobe company he tried but failed to acquire during his rise to power.
  • Even though it has ‘America’ in the name, we don’t actually own South America
  • The Eric Clapton song “Cocaine” was about drug use.
  • Cats are not always girls and dogs are not always boys.
  • Nabokov’s Lolita was not primarily a tribute to the motor lodges of the early 1950’s.
  • Crocodiles and alligators are different species. The resulting mix-up during the summer he worked at that zoo was his fault.
  • The music of Public Enemy is not about the supremacy of supply-side economics.


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“Movie” Review: Boa vs Python (2004)

Someone donated this DVD to my girlfriend’s library, and since adding it to the collection would raise all kinds of alarm bells, she was given it to take home, to avoid suspicion. So last weekend we watched it Mystery Science Theater 3000-style with a couple of friends who are connoisseurs of this genre, and it seemed only fair to share my insights on it here. What to say about one of these straight-to-video creature-features that hasn’t already been said? You may ask “Why would someone actually need to review something so obviously terrible, and from 8 years ago? Don’t we already know everything we need to know about this alleged ‘film’ from the title?” My response: who the hell do you think you are, telling me what I can and can’t write about?! Do I come down to your blog and tell you to stop posting pictures of your goddamn two-year-old and what you had for dinner last night? Of course I don’t, so shut the hell up and read my synopsis of one of 2004’s finest Snake vs. Snake movies.

We open in York, Pennsylvania, a strangely specific location for somewhere that no one has ever heard of. Obviously, a Mexican wrestling match is beginning, and the citizens of York are going crazy as the pugilists are introduced. The Boa and the Python. This is foreshadowing. A cigar-chomping bigshot who looks like a non-name-brand version of Tom Cruise sits in the front row and orders “a box of raisinets.” He is clearly a player. He takes a call from some goons driving a shipping truck and yells at them to do something. After hanging up, the truck explodes, allowing an enormous snake to escape and dive into a sewer entrance.

Really?

Just now, one of my watching companions discovers that this was filmed in Bulgaria, as the words “24 Miles Outside Philadelphia” appear at the top of a screen showing what is clearly the Bulgarian countryside. It is convenient that they were able to find a location that so clearly resembles the treeless steppes surrounding the major city of Philadelphia in all directions. Because one of the most interesting things about Philly is the way that despite being the fifth most populous metropolitan area in the US, the urban landscape abruptly stops at the city limits.

We are at the site of the truck explosion and the FBI is investigating the scene. One officer walks up to another inspecting a body and asks if this is body #6. The second officer replies that it’s “parts of bodies #2, #3, and #5” even though it is clearly a single person. An obnoxious news reporter reports the news obnoxiously, his cameraman has an Eastern-European accent.

Hey, watch those corners

Now we see Tom Cruise 2 on board his magic plane. He owns a 747-size aircraft for his personal use. The inside is adorned like a tacky Greek Temple. His girlfriend gratuitously takes a bath using a giant carwash-style sponge. It’s only 9 minutes into this film, but we’ve already seen everything, we’ve seen it all. A snake slithers into the bath so she angrily stomps into the bedroom to yell at TC2, but it is impossible to listen to what she’s saying because these scenes are just excuses to see her breasts. In the course of the conversation she throws the snake on the bed only to later sit down on it, toplessly, having forgotten that she had just thrown a snake on their bed 30 seconds ago.

This is around when we look at the cast list. Several men are all bit character actors, the women are all former porn actresses, the rest are Bulgaria’s finest. The Carwash Sponge was in Playboy Wet & Wild VIII: Bottoms Up; so it’s no wonder she knew how to take a bath. It’s good timing to find this out as we shift to a spring break party around a hotel pool. A bunch of bros are having a breath-holding contest as a blonde lady who is obviously another former porn actress says that she has breath-holding experience from being a Navy SEAL and challenges a giant guy who is whatever the Slavic equivalent of a linebacker is. This makes him good at going without oxygen somehow. They get in the water, and after 30 seconds she takes off her swimsuit top off. This somehow causes the Bulgarian Bruiser to run out of air and swim up to the surface. So she wins through trickery…how does that help you hold your breath during a Seal mission again? People hand her cash for winning the bet and she reveals a surprising proficiency for handling wads of wet $20 bills (how did this bet work again?). Anyway, she has been summoned by the FBI dude and the next scene is them in a car in West Virginia. Despite taking a plane to get there, she hasn’t had a chance to change out of her bathing suit. She is brought to team up with the world’s greatest herpetologist. He is in possession of a giant snake, this is a world where being a reptile scientist means that you create giant freaky reptiles.

Marine Biologists got to get paid y’all

This is when they start talking about “her equipment.” Despite being ~25 and having already spent at least a few years ascending to the top of the Navy’s most elite and challenging force, she is also the world’s greatest neuroscientist, because she has managed to create a computer interface to an dolphin brain. A system that would allow you to see through the dolphin’s eyes, control their actions remotely— it’s such a remarkable achievement that it is hard to believe we don’t need to spend more than 10 seconds talking about it. Rather, it’s time to repeatedly belittle the World’s Greatest Neuroscientist by referring to her work as her “equipment” or “implants” over and over again. Also we need to install it in the freaky giant snake— it’s like the old saying goes: “the only thing that can kill a giant snake is a giant cyborg snake”

Now TC2 assembles the world’s greatest hunters to go down into the sewers. A surprising number of them, including the cowboy stereotype with a giant American flag on his truck, seem to hail from Eastern Europe again. What a funny coincidence.

Imitation Tom Cruise lights a cigar with his magic flame thrower

A bunch of pointless things happen for the next 40 minutes. TC2 and his hunting team searches for the snake in the dense woods surrounding Philadelphia. As the python draws closer to the city, more Bulgarians perish from its fury. The World’s Greatest Neuroscientist goes into the sewers with Giant Boa Man to track their snake. You can’t help but wonder whether all that stuff about snake surgery was not significantly different than putting a camera and GPS on a snake. The hunting team doesn’t realize that if shooting the snake with bullets didn’t work the first time, it won’t work the second, third, and tenth times. Tom Cruise 2 dumbly describes his hunting technique as “one shot, one kill”—despite multiple instances where we’ve seen volleys of bullets bounce off the snake. He then switches from guns to a flamethrower, which can’t make up its mind whether it’s the kind of flamethrower that merely projects fire, or the napalm-kind that sprays a stream of flaming gel— it keeps switching. The Python and Boa have sex in the sewer system and instantly lay a bunch of eggs. I don’t know anything about snake reproduction, and won’t insult your intelligence by merely looking it up on wikipedia, but any resemblance to things that could actually happen in reality has to be coincidental at this point.

Carwash Sponge meets her maker

Most of the people tracking the snakes get killed, and the former Navy SEAL (and star of Playmate Pajama Party) uses her breath-holding abilities, genuinely for once, to hide in some water while the python kills a bunch of people. Eventually, only TC2 and the Boa Implant Squad remain, and they head up to Philly’s hottest dance club— a dank, cramped bar with 15 patrons and 10 writhing fluorescent painted nude dancers. The python comes up through the basement, and as the army arrives on the scene, TC2 inexplicably murders about a dozen soldiers with his magic flame thrower. If his reason for doing this was a desire to kill the snake himself, he’s made a mistake, since he is now out of napalm. Suddenly, he decides to bend the laws of the universe by taking off his empty tank and shooting it. Despite being EMPTY it explodes in a magnificent burst of flame that blows away part of the building but doesn’t injure anyone standing 10 ft away from it. The python eats him anyway.

Boa Implant Squad chases the two snakes down to the subway (Philadelphia has a subway now?) and as the good snake and bad snake bite and wrestle each other, the Python gets hit by a subway car. CyberBoa slithers back into the depths of the sewers. After all this, the subterranean giant snake count remains at 1. Has goodness prevailed? We have all lost the ability to care. What part did the heroes play in saving the city? Well, I suppose they released an equally deadly snake into the sewers and got lucky. There. Stop asking questions.

A new day dawns over the suspiciously Eastern Bloc-style architecture of Sofia Philadelphia

—

Grade: H-
Like Kyopolou, a traditional Bulgarian relish made primarily from eggplant and garlic, this “film” is a gross-looking puree of ingredients so bland and pointless that you have to wonder why anyone bothered. Just as a Balkan dip won’t fill you up, Boa vs Python leaves you hungry for something more substantial, with a bad taste in your mouth, and yet, you knew what you were getting into when you minced the bell peppers and tomatoes.

Pointless.


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Ask a Nazi Officer who is Frantically Reacting to the Invasion of Berlin

Ask Klaus!

General Klaus Himmerschmidt answers your questions on life, relationships, and constructing defensive urban fortifications.

Dear Herr General Himmerschmidt,

Last month my Husband bought a car without telling me. I came home one day to find a shiny new SUV in the driveway. We were overdue to replace his old car, and I don’t think he’s having some kind of mid-life crisis, but we have always discussed important financial decisions like this in the past. He says he did plenty of research and it is his car after all, but I can’t help feeling miffed that I was left out of the loop on a major household purchase like this. Am I overreacting?

-Confused in St Louis,

Dear Confused,

We will never surrender! Our cause is just. Our leaders are virtuous. The German people wield a sword of purest righteousness! —(Just put the metal wastebin next to the window and burn the files in there)— A hellfire of reckoning will rain down upon the Allies.

Dear Herr General,

I have just moved to a new city and I am having trouble making friends. Everyone at my job is much older than me, and it isn’t as though I can just introduce myself to a bunch of people at a bar. I am friendly and extraverted, but it seems like the only way to meet people completely out of the blue is through online dating sites and I’m not in a place in my life where I am looking for a boyfriend. Do you have any advice for how to find some potential friends?

-Lonely in Las Cruces

Dear Lonely,

How far away was that one? Has the general fallen back over the river? We will be stronger if we mass our forces on the other side of the bridge. The soldiers must understand that desertion will not be tolerated. Have the reinforcements from the south arrived? Cowards! Order the men to raze the market building if they must, the artillery must have a clear line of sight on that side. The Volkssturm conscripts have no training, keep sending them to the front to buy us time. The Fatherland must be defended to the last man!

Dear Herr General,

I have temporarily moved about 50 miles for a new job. I am getting along fine with my new coworkers but the office I’m in now is much smaller than my previous place of employment and I don’t have much in common with anyone. My wife told me that she was planning a birthday party and wanted to invite my new workmates but I’m not interested in getting to know these people, since I’ll just be leaving in a few months. My wife says I’m not being open to new experiences and wants me to be more outgoing. Is she right?

-Party of One

Dear Party,

Over there, burn the train schedules too, we must leave no evidence. Lieutenant, come in. So you were the one in charge of defending the telegraph lines in and out of this building and you allowed them to be cut, correct? I don’t want to hear your excuses, you have failed your country in the hour of its greatest need. Have the Lieutenant put to death as an example to anyone else thinking of abrogating his responsibilities to—oh God, that one was closer— they must summon the fire brigade immediately. What are they shouting about down on the street?

Dear Herr General Himmerschmidt,

I have been dating a perfect girl for four months and everything is wonderful. Except for one thing: she insists that we share each other’s email passwords. I don’t have anything to hide, but at the same time, I need a certain amount of space and just don’t feel comfortable having someone looking over my shoulder. I feel like she might take certain things out of context, or end up seeing things from friends that they want to keep private. She says we shouldn’t have any secrets from one another, and is becoming suspicious that I’m hiding something. What should I do?
-Jealous in Jersey
Dear Jealous,

I can see them up the street! Where is the artillery?! The men must stand their ground, our weakness emboldens the enemy. How are the Communists doing this, they don’t even have rifles or boots! Oh no, the files shouldn’t be making that much smoke…
—What were you saying? Oh yes, tell your girlfriend that you can’t build a strong relationship without trust, as well as a respect for a partner’s space. If she can’t handle the most basic requests for privacy, take it as a warning sign and get out now. There are plenty of (less jealous) fish in the sea!—Oh God, they’re coming up the stairs! Where did I put those cyanide capsules? Greta, I am so sorry. What have we done? Germany, what have we done?


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Welcome back to me, Internet!

It’s been a while, online world. I had a ponderously-titled blog called Topography Of Ignorance* over on the blogspot, begun in 2005, but it petered out in ~2008 as grad school became more and more “interesting.” Nowadays, the thought of my many witty observations going unnoticed as Dave’s go ‘noticed’ fills me with dread, so I have forced him to join forces in the form of this blog, a force of verbiage to be reckoned with. Dave’s sperm have already been mentioned, so I think we are off to a pretty good start.

What to say about myself? I’m a gentleman, a scholar, and a third thing which is the punchline of this sentence. Like most other grad students, I’m studying for a PhD because I have no other interests and my underdeveloped social skills preclude my spending much time in non-science situations. “First, master talking to the nerds” I said to myself. I am from Rhode Island, so I’m one of America’s only rightfully discriminated-against minorities. I am studying astronomy, so I’m basically being discriminated against by Congress and the American people the minute they stop looking at photos from the Mars rover. And I have “thinking of the third thing inability disorder” so medical science has it in for me as well.

My previous blog billed itself as “Astrophysics, Esoterica, General Complaints”; though some time has passed, I am still devoted to those 3 things so I’ll try to use this site to provide history’s greatest insight on them.**

*From a Oliver Wendell Holmes Quote, to relate to the everyman

**Intended in the same sense that people use when they refer to the late Kim Jong-Il as the World’s Greatest Golfer.

About to do something awesome?