Every few years I select a box of Cookie Crisp from the grocery store, having dismissed my previous dissatisfactions with this cereal. If nothing else, I reason, I’ll be getting an entire box of snacking cookies. However, these irregular discs of dehydrated high-fructose corn syrup taste so abstract from the idea of a cookie that they make me miserable for the entire day. And by the way, General Mills should be relieved that their cereal tastes nothing like actual cookies, because the stupidest thing you could do to a real cookie is mash it up into a bowl and pour milk upon it. Why does everything need to be made out of cookies all of a sudden? Cookies are supposed to be a special treat.

It could be argued that many cereals snare you in with this sort of false association. Golden Grahams taste nothing like actual graham crackers; Cinnamon Toast Crunch nothing like actual toast; Cap’N Crunch nothing like actual Crunch berries. However Cookie Crisps are especially conniving because while they sort of resemble Famous Amos cookies, they have an unpleasant mealy taste and are abrasive to your palette. They should change the name to Dookie Crisp, because if you fed this cereal to the Cookie Monster he would literally get diarrhea.

Today’s producers of Top 40 music are making some promising advances in developing the worst music imaginable, but it seems unlikely they’ll ever write a song more stupid than 1958’s “Splish Splash,” by Bobby Darin. The music itself is an inoffensive 1950s rock & roll arrangement and nothing to be concerned about, but the lyrics are grotesque:

Splish splash, I was taking a bath
Long about a Saturday night
A rub dub, just relaxing in the tub
Thinking everything was alright

Right away we are assaulted with this vile image of Bobby Darin bathing in his tub; and not only bathing, but splashing about like a child. It’s as if somebody had stolen the music to a bubble bath commercial from the early ’90s and then went back in time in some bizarre plot to make Bobby Darin a commercial success. And why should this be successful? The 1950s were not so long ago, but I cannot understand a culture that would allow this to be an acceptable subject for a song. I find it easier to comprehend segregation, and I’m barely even a racist. We should have segregated this song into a garbage can.

Well, I stepped out the tub, put my feet on the floor
I wrapped the towel around me
And I opened the door, and then
Splish, splash! I jumped back in the bath
Well how was I to know there was a party going on?

“How was I to know there was a party going on?” I don’t know, Bobby, don’t you fucking live there? Now we have this monstrous notion of Bobby Darin wrapped in a towel and strolling into his living room, where he unexpectedly encounters some sort of party. Bobby’s mysterious reaction to this is: “Oh well, I guess it’s back in the old tub for me.” What is wrong with this guy? He should have yelled: “Hey, not to be a nuisance or anything, but would you people mind clearing the fuck out before I call the police?” Don’t just jump back into your lukewarm bathwater you lunatic!

To make a retarded story short, the rest of the lyrics describe Bobby’s return to the party. He “puts his dancing shoes on” and forgets “about the bath,” and then begins caterwauling on about a-splishing and a-splashing and a-rolling and a-strolling and a lot of that type of horseshit. There is no real conclusion to the song, and absolutely nothing in the way of an explanation. Maybe it’s best not to decipher 1958 pop songs, but I would nevertheless like to condemn this song on the grounds that it is idiotic and insufferable. It is easily one of my ten all-time least favorite songs about bathing.

People like to claim, “Whenever God closes a door, somewhere else he opens up a window.” What kind of a dick move is this? I’m a grown adult and am certainly not about to crawl through a window. Come on, man, just unlock the door. Why the fuck did you even invite me over?

Imagine you’ve got a friend coming to visit your house, and as he’s walking up the driveway you open the door to greet him. But then when he gets to the porch you suddenly slam the door in his face. Moments later you pop your head out an open second-story window and yell, “Well come on up, dipshit! Time to find a ladder, hahaha!”

I’m not saying there isn’t a time and place for such antics, but please be advised that you’re not teaching anybody a life lesson about overcoming adversity in this scenario—you’re temporarily inconveniencing them for a laugh. They may as well change the aphorism to, “Whenever you try to open the passenger door to God’s Subaru, he locks it right before you lift the handle and starts laughing. Then he pops the trunk and says, “Get in, you little bitch!” Yeah, God, real mature.

I’m very displeased when a Magic 8-Ball says “cannot predict now” or “ask again later” or some other similar horseshit. What could a plastic die floating in blue slime possibly be doing that it’s too busy to answer my question? Maybe these snide non-committal messages are meant to be some sort of a joke, but in practice the only logical response to them is to immediately just reshake the ball. Why are you wasting my time in this fashion? The equivalent to this would be if in every Tarot deck there was a card that said, “Sorry, we can’t really figure out your fortune this hand. Fuck you, reshuffle the deck.” Magic 8-Ball manufacturers should just create a fewer-sided fortune die and throw the neutral messages in the garbage, because that would really save me a lot of time late at night when I’m trying to determine whether a girl likes me. And there’s nothing “magical” about dicking people around.

I can tell backgammon is a classy game because it often comes in a little briefcase, which is more than I can say for games of chance like chess. Sometimes I imagine commuting to work carrying my backgammon briefcase—who’s going to stop me? I have important business to attend to. It’s called playing backgammon. Backgammon should come with those handcuffs you sometimes see douchebags at the airport attach to their briefcases. If somebody stole my backgammon briefcase, I have no idea how I’d ever recover that data.

If I ever needed to deliver a briefcase full of cash to somebody, you can probably guess which kind of case I’d secretly bring along. I’d slowly turn the briefcase toward the druglord or whomever, and his eyes would begin to light up in anticipation of the cash. Then I’d pop open the case, and boom—backgammon. I’d be lost in hysterics as they proceeded to shoot me in the face, but what the hell were they expecting? I don’t have that kind of cash. My laughter nerves would probably still be activated for two or three minutes after they shot me, like how mammals’ limbs sometimes twitch after death. I’d just be lying there dead, laughing my ass off.