If you have a small child, I recommend forcing them to complete dot-to-dot activities. There was nothing I enjoyed more as a child than drawing lines between consecutive numbers to determine the true identity of an object that looked precisely like a snowman missing an outline. When the picture turned out to in fact be a snowman, I’d be shocked and amazed–and delighted that I’d invested fifteen seconds into solving such a fantastic mystery. Here is a typical dot-to-dot:

What is this enchanting picture? Is it a bear with a predilection for mathematics or some other, non-bear object that somehow nevertheless has a bear head, bear claws, and bear feet? I ran the picture through an advanced computer simulator scholars call Microsoft Paint and came up with this:

It appears to be a bear after all, but there were a few surprises. First of all, it turns out he’s wearing a one-piece rectangular outfit that looks even shittier than I anticipated. Also, notice how he actually hates math. If your first exposure to math was an inane exercise in connecting dots in numerical order, you wouldn’t like it either.

Did we ever figure out what the hell those farm animals were doing on the old Garfield cartoon? It was called “Garfield & Friends,” but Garfield would never make friends with such tedious retards. Everybody I knew hated those farm animals. It was like, “Oh ha ha, that duck is wearing an inner tube all the time. He’s afraid of everything. That’s terrific. I’m so glad I’m being dicked around by these farm animals instead of watching Garfield.” I liked that cartoon better when it was a novel by George Orwell called Animal Farm.

Here’s a very short recap of the 2004 election.

The disorientated octogenarians supervising my polling place had set up two lines according to the first letter of voters’ last names: one for letters A through O and the other for letters P through Z. Please note that this is not an equal division of the alphabet. That might seem like a subtle detail, but it effectively forced me to wait in the backlogged A through O line for 50 minutes while the second line was brisk and frequently empty. As a final insult, when I’d at last advanced to within three spots of receiving my ballot, the woman operating the second line suddenly had a revelation and summoned over everybody with the last names K through Z. This allowed me to move up two spots, but it made me not want to vote so much as to kill.

I voted on everything, whether it was for a state senator or for the pathetic state treasurer. This is despite the fact that I have no idea what a state treasurer does, let alone the actually identity of the people vying for the position. In my mind they’re tasked with guarding a giant treasure chest filled with gold coins and bejeweled lamps, and they frequently take Scrooge McDuck-like dives into the chest to swim a few laps, but that can’t be right. How do you vote for a treasurer when you couldn’t possibly care who wins? I could have left that part of my ballot empty, but I wanted maximum value for waiting in such a needlessly long line. Eventually I just decided to use the strategy I’d devised in 2000, which is to pick candidates for supplementary positions based on my overall opinion of their names. I think most people would admit to doing this. If somebody named Gonzo McBoolin ran for state treasurer, he would win in a landslide. He could be a convicted bank robberer, and I wouldn’t care. I would trust somebody like Gonzo McBoolin to guard Michigan’s bountiful treasure.

And how about the results of the presidential election, hey guys? Go USA, am I right? OK, well, I’ve got to go. I think I just choked on some of my own blood.

miss when I was more apathetic. Now I have opinions on things I don’t even care about. With one day to go before the election, this puts me the position of treating the Presidential race as though it were the biggest sporting event in the history of time. For months now I’ve been watching the CNN pre-game show, keeping tack of daily poll numbers as if they were Vegas betting lines, and reading newspaper article upon newspaper article in preparation for tomorrow. Everybody’s made up their mind by now, and nobody wants to hear me whining about politics anyway, so I won’t. But this website does endorse Senator Kerry for President of the United States, which should help Kerry secure the critical “fourteen people who accidentally ended up at some random guy’s website while searching Google for old Nickelodeon game shows” demographic.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s a short article about baseball cards, just in time for missing the entire baseball season.