Category Archives: Updates

A traditional update in the grand update tradition

Garbage Pail Kids

Updates

I’ve figured out a way to debunk the idea that violence in the media can influence a child’s behavior. If it were true that kids imitated what they saw even just a little bit, our generation would be the most insanely violent group of people in the history of time: we had Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. Basically, these were cards targeted toward kids that featured the most disgustingly bloody and traumatizing pictures ever created. We all thought that they were pretty funny at the time, but if I ever saw a kid with one of these cards today, I’d grab it from their hands and burn it, and then wash out their eyes with bleach so that they may never remember the horrible thing which they have seen.

It’s kind of weird looking back at it, but I remember that in the 1st grade you’d hear kids on the playground say things like, “OK, I’ll trade you the Garbage Pail Kids card where the little boy gouges out his eyeballs with a butcher knife for the one where the girl is eating a baby’s skin.” Then they other kid would be like, “If you throw in Diarrhea Dan’s card, it’s a deal.” If you aren’t familiar with these cards, or have blocked them out of your memory, I have included links to some examples to prove that I’m not exaggerating:

Taped Tate The card manufacturers were concerned that kids weren’t having quite enough nightmares, so they decided to make this card about a kid pulling off his flesh with common household tape.

Boozin’ Bruce This card taught us that it was OK for kids to get drunk and wander the streets alone at night.

Tinsel Tim What better way to celebrate the joy of Christmas than to cut up a small baby and place him on your Christmas tree in a mangled mess of vomit-inducing terror?

Trick or Tricia Every Garbage Pail Kids card either dealt with blood, snot or vomit, or a clever combination of all three.

Yicchy Mickey All of the kids depicted in these cards had puns for their names. This one is a picture of the nastiest person in the history of the world, so it’s called “Yicchy Mickey.” See, the cards are funny and revolting!

These are just some of the more tamer cards they made; my basic human morals prevent me from showing most of the others. Still, the company who made this shit didn’t seem to care that small kids were buying the cards, and they even included sticks of gum from the early 1940’s as an added incentive. Additionally, these cards could also be used as stickers, and so kids would peel them off and stick them on their lunchboxes. The funniest part about all of this is that nobody seemed to care. I guess that’s the 80’s for you.

Fire drills

Updates

If I try hard enough, I can understand why we had to have fire drills in elementary school. While it was probably obvious to most of us that when the fire alarm went off, we were supposed to leave the building, I can maybe see that there could have been a few kids who needed the extra rehearsal that fire drills provided. So, even though we had to go outside into the cold without any jackets on whenever the alarm went off, I guess that, somewhere, this practice has probably saved a couple of lives. But here’s the thing: In my residence hall, we still have these fire drills. Apparently, there are people living here who haven’t quite grasped the concept that leaving a building that is on fire might not be that bad of an idea. Or maybe they just haven’t equated the loud, blaring alarm sound to the possibility of fire. Or maybe there are people here who don’t know how to exit a building.

It’s a good thing we have these drills, though, because otherwise everyone would be saying, “Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me to go out a door when there’s a fire? And that a “fire alarm” means that there’s probably one of these fires somewhere in the building? Christ, let me get a pen to jot this all down. Are you sure we can’t have some kind of drill for this? This is so complicated. What were we supposed to do when there’s a fire again?” Hell, even somebody like that would know the procedure after twelve years of fire drills throughout grade school.

Now that I think of it, if there ever is a fire, a lot of people would assume that the alarm is just related to another drill, and they’d all stay inside and get burned up. So, in the end, fire drills do serve a purpose–they kill innocent people.

It cost a lot of money to eat at the cafeteria, and the food isn’t that good, yet somehow they have the nerve to serve us french fries that are shaped into little happy faces. I think this is the cafeteria’s way of saying, “Fuck you.”

Horoscopes

Updates

My zodiac sign is Cancer, which probably means that I’m nature-orientated or creative or open-minded or something like that. Sometimes I like to read my horoscope in MSU’s The State News, because not only do they tell you how your day is going to be, they also proceed to rank the difficulty of your day on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the easiest). According to their assessment of my day:

“Today is a 5 — The people at the top of the food chain will be even more aggressive than usual. You find that rather annoying. Why should you be put out because somebody else didn’t manage their time properly? Probably because that’s your job.”

What the hell does that even mean? According to them, my job is to tidy up after the people at the top of the food chain. My horoscope today is so rude. “Why should you be put out? Uh, hello. Probably because that’s your job, dumbass.” I don’t even work today.

The problem is that horoscopes are so vague that they can be interpreted in a thousand different ways. I’ve never seen a horoscope that’s like, “Today, you will wear a blue sweater and somebody will comment to you, ‘Hey didn’t I use to play soccer with you in the 4th grade?’ Later, after eating at Burger King, you will find a dollar bill on the sidewalk. Don’t pick it up, as it is infested with the herpes virus.” I’m going to make up a horoscope for everybody reading this to demonstrate how arbitrary the process is:

“Because of your wise nature, you prefer to be around the company of others. But today, be wary of somebody who might aspire to question your sense of self. Also, you will read a horoscope today. And why should you be put out because of somebody else’s lack of organization? Probably because that’s your job, fool.”

Science class

Updates

Whatever provoking anecdote I was going to offer today has been accidentally replaced in my memory by the fact that the density of Quartz is 2.65 g/cm^3. Science class is so sweet. You know, I think I’ve had the exact same lab where I was supposed to identify a bunch of different minerals using several scientific experiments about every year since the 6th grade, and I still don’t know how the hell to do it. This is going to catch up with me in a few years when some guy holds up a gun to my head, hands me a beaker of water for the water-displacement test, a penny, a nail and a file for the scratch test and a mystery mineral, and then asks me to tell him what it is. Thankfully, if this doesn’t happen, it won’t ever really matter that I can’t tell the difference between a piece of Olivine and a chunk of goddamned Pyrite.

I recently found out that an anagram for my name is “a racial jerk,” which I guess means that I’m probably really racist. I apologize for this, but you can’t argue with anagrams. What’s an anagram for your name?