Illustration for the Salad Dressing essay

Lizard Mating Dance

Drinks Only College Students Order

Of all the valuables lessons you learn at college, none is as important as how to drink until you almost die—unless you’re one of those nerds who doesn’t drink, and instead spends their evenings studying and anticipating with relish the inevitable day when all the jocks who used to mock them have to come crawling to the door of their lucrative software company, begging for a job (See Figure 1: How Are the Nerds Getting Revenge?).

Figure 1: How Are the Nerds Getting Revenge?

• Panty Raid

• Icy Hot on football team's jock straps

• Rousing speech

• Something involving computers

• Elaborate musical production

• Restore potion

• Saving throw

I never went to college, because I learned everything I needed to know on the streets—in the grimy back alleys and darkened juke joints; the smoky nightclubs and dead end avenues; the crazy criss-crossing maze of forgotten roads and grimy tenements that I grew to know like the veins on the back of my work-hardened hands—you prissy, pampered, ivy league fop. Actually, I didn’t learn everything on the streets, I also learned quite a few things on an Alaskan crabbing boat. And there was this old WWII vet who had half his face burned off, and when I was a kid I’d play chess with him—learned a lot of stuff from that guy. And I learned massage therapy from the University of Phoenix Online. 

One thing I definitely didn’t learn on the streets was how to drink like a college student. So when I began research on this chart, I had no idea what sort of drink names I would find. Had I known, I might’ve charted something less disturbing, like War Crimes or Feces Casseroles (See Figure 2: 15-Minute Feces Casseroles). 

FIGURE 2:  FUN 15-MINUTE FECES CASSEROLES

1. Sloppy Joe Shitpot

2. Crispy Crap Ragout

3. Steaming Excrement Sweetbread

4. Mushroom Manure Hotdish with Grits

5. Zesty Guano Guacamole Casserole

6. Bohemian Poopoolatta

7. EZ Number Two

8. Green Bean Carbonnade Feculence

9. Lima Bean Stool Bake

10. Granny Smith’s Hotpot Turd Surprise

11. Tetrazzini au Diarrhea

The names of drinks only college students order provides a revealing snapshot into the minds of young adults at a pivotal age—and that snapshot is the scariest photo I’ve ever seen. It’s like that blurry photo of Bigfoot, if Bigfoot was staring right at you, had a massive erect penis, and was wearing a Who Farted? t-shirt. That startling mélange of mystery, smut, and innocence is at the black, beating heart of drinks only college students order. They are simultaneously jaded and juvenile, appetizing and disgusting, innocent and profane. Witness the sophomoric sacrilege of the Dragon Dick, Vampire’s Woo Woo, Spunk Guzzler, and Fuck My Bum Crack. 

The profane names and scandalous nature of most of these drinks are an embarrassingly inept attempt for college students’ to assert their adulthood. “I can shittin’ swear if I dick-suckin’ want to, Mom! Pass the smurf-fuckin’ potatoes!” It’s like listening to a foreign exchange student try to curse in English. The desire to shock often supplants all other considerations, including plausibility (eg. Bear Fucker), desirability (eg. Sweaty Shit), and acknowledgement of cosmic irony (eg. Call an Ambulance).

No exploration of college drinking habits would be complete without mentioning that other uniquely collegiate tradition—drinking games (See Fun Drinking Games, on page xx). You can’t just suck down a drink as special as the Lick My Banana—it deserves pageantry, pomp, a special sacred process not unlike the changing of the guard at Buckingham palace, or that crazy dance lizards do before they have sex (See Figure 4: Lizard Mating Dance).

FUN DRINKING GAMES

Whether you’re partying with the guys or snowed in during nuclear winter, these great games are guaranteed to put the “fun” in “functional alcoholic!” Bottoms up!

QUARTERS: 

Here’s a fun game to play if you like to have fun and also enjoy drinking. First you’ll need a stack of a hundred quarters. Hide each quarter in a different spot all over the city. Then go into a bar and get shit-faced. When the bill comes, leave a treasure map detailing the locations of each and every quarter in lieu of payment. 

Modified version: Use nickels instead of quarters. This version is called Dimes.

BULLSHIT: 

To play this game you’ll need a deck of cards and a bottle of whiskey. After shuffling the deck, place it face down in the center of the table. Drink the bottle of whiskey. Think about how everything is such bullshit. Mutter the word “bullshit” over and over again between drinks. When the bottle is empty scatter the cards all over the room. 

DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON: 

Go to Spain and drink wine until you become a truly great author. Write very truly and very fully, standing as you bang out your stories on an old Corona. See a bullfight or two. Lay in a big bed with a plump thighed woman and drink cold sweating glasses of beer naked under the crisp white sheets and the spinning palm frond fan. Forty years later blow your brains out with a shotgun.

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?: 

This is a good “get to know you” party mixer kind of game. Have everyone stand in a circle. Turn to the person on your left and ask “Why are we doing this?” Then they turn to the person on their left and say the same thing. This continues until someone decides to say “Human interaction frightens me.” This reverses the order of play, and the person on their right now has to say “Alcohol numbs my fear.”

Any time someone screws up or says the wrong thing, they have to drink. Anyone who tries to break free from the circle is tackled by everyone else, dragged into the center of the circle and forced to make small talk with the least attractive person at the party. 

ASSHOLE: 

Any number of people can play this game, but you need at least four people to fulfill the following roles (in order of descending authority): President, Vice-President, Vice-Asshole, and Asshole. Each player has total authority over all the players below them, and can command them to drink at any time, or perform various menial and degrading tasks. 

Determining Roles: 

The most popular or feared person at the party is the President. The slightly shorter guy that agrees with everything he says is the Vice-President. The awkward introvert who’s too shy to admit he doesn’t want to play the game is the Vice-Asshole, and the social pariah who is so desperate for acceptance that he’ll do absolutely anything is the asshole. A crowd is also useful to embarrass the asshole in front of.

How to Begin:

Every round must begin with each of the players fulfilling their role’s prescribed duties.

President: Remember all the times you’ve disappointed your father. Visualize everyone as tiny pawns you move on a chessboard. Cruelly demean people based on whims. Dole out miniscule portions of kindness and bask in the resultant fawning gratitude. Wonder why homeless people don’t just get a job. 

Vice-President: Turn your fear of being demoted to Vice-Asshole into fuel that stokes your white-hot furnace of cruelty. Kiss the President’s ass. Visualize your fear of failure and social rejection as a scarecrow. Now put the Asshole’s face on that scarecrow; treat the scarecrow accordingly. 

Vice-Asshole: Take comfort in the fact that no matter how bad you have it, you have it better than the Asshole. Prove to everyone you’re not the Asshole by being crueler to the asshole than anyone else. Do not touch the Asshole, for fear that his bad luck might rub off on you. Scheme to become Vice-President.

Asshole: Reflect on the irony that you’re the only person not behaving like an asshole. Wonder why you’re playing this game, and then remember that even negative attention is better than being ignored. Pray to the god of your choice for deliverance/vengance.

ALTERNATE VERSION 1:

Add a deck of cards to the mix; move them around the table in meaningless patterns while everyone berates the asshole.

ALTERNATE VERSION 2:

The Asshole refuses to play the game, but everyone calls him an asshole anyways. He leaves the party, but continues to play the game for the rest of his life.

Another cover

Everything Explained Through Flowcharts cover

The cover of Everything Explained Through Flowcharts! is under development. Let the horror begin!

Alaska's State Bird: the Willow Ptarmigan

Chain Restaurants essay

Another essay for Everything Explained Through Flowcharts! This one is about chain restaurants, and won't totally make sense if you haven't seen the chain restaurants chart—but even with the chart probably doesn't make sense, so no big loss.

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CHAIN RESTAURANTS

Maybe you’ve had this experience before: You’re driving to Minnesota to buy a futon because you and your girlfriend broke up but still have to share the same apartment for the next six months, and she refuses to sleep in the same bed with you after what you did. You want to get a bite to eat, but you’re driving through some provincial burg that doesn’t have a McDonald’s or any other fast food that you recognize. It’s dark and raining. You haven’t eaten anything since post pre-dinner (also known as lunch 4, or early evening snack 2), almost two hours ago. You can feel your blood sugar dropping—the steering wheel swerves in your suddenly weak fingers, your eyes can’t focus; the road doubles and trebles through your rain streaked windshield. Is this how you’ll die? For a futon? The old gypsy’s warning suddenly makes sense. Then, a neon sign swims out of the darkness: Hamburgers. Uncle Jonnie’s Hamburgers.

The inside of the hamburger joint is like a hall of mirrors. The employee isn’t wearing a uniform, the decor is strange and unique, and the atmosphere is unsettlingly one-of-a-kind. You look at the menu, which might as well be written in Arabic. You ask if they have chicken Mcnuggets—they have chicken fingers. You ask if you can get a number two—they don’t understand. You ask if they have Big Macs—they have Uncle J’s Double Love Burger with Rattlesnake Sauce. You ask to speak to the manager, and instead of rolling his eyes at you, the cashier says “I’m Uncle Jonnie. What can I do for you?” You curl up into a ball and repeat over and over “I’m lovin’ it, I’m lovin’ it, I’m lovin’ it . . .” but the teleportation spell doesn’t work.

If the unknown is the only thing you fear more than being thin, then you probably don’t care that chain restaurants contribute to the homogenization of American culture, the steady decline of hourly wages, the rising obesity epidemic, and whatever other crazy shit Upton Sinclair says from beyond the grave. But whether you like chain restaurants or not, you still eat at them, because if you’re not at home and need to eat, you basically have no other choice except for windfall apples and lichen.

Although the defining characteristics of chain restaurants—a group of separate restaurants rendered identical by an coldly calculating, controlling hive mind like the Borg—are identical for both fast food and casual dining, consumer perception of the two groups diverges drastically.

Fast food at its worst is viewed as a necessary evil, at its best a guilty pleasure—a mercenary industry we grudgingly support in the interest of convenience and economy. The categories on the fast food side of the chart reflect consumers' contempt: here’s the mexican place, here’s the place my friend got food poisoning, here’s the place I eat when I only have a dollar, here’s the place I only eat at because I don’t want to get off the turnpike.

Casual dining, on the other hand, occupies a more personal position in our lives, almost like family. While fast food is a necessity, like taking a shit or mowing the lawn, casual dining is a luxury, albeit a small one, like taking a bubble bath or masturbating at work. Casual dining is there for all the most important parts of lives, reflected in the three major categories: work, play, and love. You just got a promotion? Time for Margaritas at Chili’s. The bar just closed and you want waffles? Time for a triple stack at IHOP. You need to trick someone into thinking you’re interesting and attractive? It’s time for the Melting Pot.

Like a lover, casual dining often lies, but always for our own good; they’re white lies, intended to lift us from the dreariness of everyday reality. “Oh my god, look, we’re in the old west!” or “I’m your server and although we’ve never met, I’m super happy to see you! Here’s a song I wrote about it!” Unlike a lover, casual dining will never say the hurtful lies that are sometimes spat in the heat of an argument. “I never really loved you,” “I’ve had better,” or “Your charts are stupid, especially the one about salad dressing (see page xx).”

Casual dining may lie, but it’s a warm quilt of deceit, knitted to make us feel better and take all our money. Oh, wait, I forgot about that—chain restaurants are only nice to you because they want your money. So I suppose the whole “lover” metaphor doesn’t work. I guess chain restaurants are really more like a hooker. Regardless though, they’re not a hooker that will make you drive to Minnesota to buy a futon. (See how I tied this whole essay together at the end? It’s just like Finnegan’s Wake! But less readable!)

Tattoos

Another essay for Everything Explained Through Flowcharts! You'll have to imagine most of the additional charts and such. You'll also have to imagine that the writing is good, and that you're interested in my point of view.

How To Choose the Perfect Tattoo

You want to get a tattoo, but you don’t know what tattoo to get. You realize that the right tattoo could transform your life: motivate you to take that cross-country motorcycle trip, get that hot barista at Starbucks to notice you, and make your big belt buckle appear un-ironic. But you also know that that wrong tattoo could ruin your life: get you kicked out of drama club, send unintended secret messages to bisexuals, and prevent you from wearing short sleeves at family reunions. 

Choosing what tattoo to get is literally the most important decision you will ever make in your entire life, and if you accuse me of hyperbole I will never forgive you in a billion years. Like most important decisions, choosing a tattoo is something you’re not qualified to do on your own (same reason we have the electoral college). Luckily for you there is now a flowchart to answer the question that your pastor is too holier-than-thou to help you with. 

The Perfect Tattoo Flowchart™, using a combination of statistics, psychology, science, and good old-fashioned witchcraft, is guaranteed to lead you to the right tattoo for you. Perhaps you’re thinking “But I don’t want a tattoo off a chart, I want a totally unique, one of a kind tattoo, to reflect my completely unique and special-like-a-snowflake personality.” I hate to break it to you, but there are no unique tattoos left, and snowflakes are an optical illusion created by swamp gas. Everything that can be tattooed onto a person (or pot-bellied pig) has been, except for the following four tattoos (See Figure 1), and depending on when you read this, those may have been taken too, probably by Johnny Depp. 

Choosing a tattoo is a two-part process. You must not only choose the tattoo, but also its placement on your body, which will effect the tattoos meaning (See Figure 2). If you go into the tattoo shop and don’t specify where you want that ink, it could end up anywhere, even on someone else. Here’s an example of how the same tattoo in different locations sends vastly different messages.

• American flag on arm: You’re a proud patriot.

• American flag on thigh: You’re a patriot, but kind of shy about it.

• American flag on butt: You’re extremely unpatriotic.

• American flag on forehead: You’re a psycho.

• American flag covering entire face and both fists: You’re a government engineered superhero.

People often decide to get a tattoo because of a dramatic life change—a difficult breakup, whirlwind summer in Thailand, or mob initiation ceremony. Be careful not to let the emotional turmoil of that moment cloud your tattoo judgment. Remember that that tattoo is going to be inscribed in your flesh for the rest of your life, until the day you die and are denied burial in a Jewish cemetery because you defaced your body and broke your grandmother’s heart.

Luke Giordano's Heavy Metal Band Names List

The charming and talented Luke Giordano came up with this list of currently available, copyright free heavy metal band names for inclusion on the Heavy Metal Band Names Chart.

Imaginarium's Fall
Gun Knife
Pregnancy StairKase
Judas' Hammer
Lord Metal and his Axe-Slingers of Death
Murder Wizard
Slikk Kitty
Baby Graveyard
Bones-2-Bread
Angel Smashers
A Quiet Party in Hell for Two
Anger Force
The Drums of the Anti-christ
Spies of Saruman
Transylvania Pie
George Harrison's Brain Pudding
Lovecraftian Tryst
The Miracle and the Sleeper: A Black Metal Tribute to the Music of Dream Theater
Rapelings from Planet X
Goddkil
Gargoyle Nightmare
Hitlarious
Heavenshitt
Edje Ridor
Curb Stomp Tango
Belt of Souls
Purgeatory
Spleen Karkass
Death Ride
At the Summit of Mt. Sorrow
Rings of the Succubus
Sword Cunt
Handicapped Sacrifice
Premature Decapitation

Minor Disappointments

100 MINOR DISAPPOINTMENTS

 1. Fortune cookie empty

2. Antique worthless

3.  Season finale inscrutable

4. Hot tub tepid

5. Spouse aging

6. Long story pointless

7. Mall Santa slightly Asian

8. Caricature looks nothing like you

9. Potato chips baked

10. Savages not noble

11. Picnic rained out

12. Summer camp friends drift apart in the Fall

13. Au pair not attractive; not even French

14. Vacation too short

15. Revenge hollow

16. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

17. Mentor lecherous

18. Sasquatch sighting faked

19. Outfit that looked great in the store looks not so great at home

20. Cookies eaten by roommate

21. Grandparents racist

22. Amish village touristy

23. Organic food unhealthy

24. Pancakes too filling

25. Company outing business-like

26. Triscuits unsalted

27. Twist ending predictable

28. Crossword puzzle difficult

29. Magic eye picture not working

30. Comedian tragic

31. Birthday ignored

32. Presents crappy

33. Holiday stressful

34. Prayer unanswered

35. Nature buggy

36. Ebay bid outbid

37. Innocence slowly eroded

38. Sex anticlimactic

39. Star Wars prequels

40. Party not wild

41. “Best years of your life” okay

42. Nostalgia unwarranted

43. Foreign film hard to follow

44. New haircut funky—not in a good way

45. Swimsuit unflattering

46. Master’s degree useless

47. Foreplay cursory

48. New sweater not complimented

49. Blog ignored

50. Friend request denied

51. Toast burnt

52. Poem unintentionally hilarious

53. Daughter plain

54. Altoids not as intense as their marketing claims

55. Hero rude

56. Bin Laden uncaptured

57. Cat unaffectionate

58. Baby ugly

59. Sermon soporific

60. Imported cheese smelly

61. Portion too small

62. Fancy cigar like sucking on a bundle of burning leaves

63. Really cute heels uncomfortable

64. Leftover french fries inedible

65. Beach crowded

66. Film you loved when you were a kid not so good anymore

67. Three day weekend wasted

68. Role model sexist

69. Boxing match civilized

70. Chicken salad sandwich dry

71. Dog disobedient

72. Puppy to sleepy to play

73. No room for dessert

74. Youth fleeting

75. Second place

76. Psychiatrist preoccupied

77. Old person not full of wisdom

78. Art unappreciated

79. Retirement boring

80. Christmas not white

81. Circus ratty

82. Fortune-teller vague

83. Exercise regiment effects gradual

84. Solar eclipse unimpressive

85. Vending machine out of order

86. Soda flat

87. Expensive wine tastes like regular wine

88. Buffet selection limited

89. New cubicle same as old cubicle

90. Sequel not as good as original

91. Awesome dream just a dream

92. Son not good enough to play major league ball

93. Pen pal dorky

94. Lap dance perfunctory

95. High five left hangin’

96. Scrabble triple word score word disputed

97. Inspirational quote uninspiring

98. Monkeyhouse closed for cleaning

99. Limerick not bawdy

100. Disappointment list depressing