Devil Pig: Vaudeville Sam and the Umbrella

This cartoon was originally published in the Columbia Daily Spectator on 10/3/05. Don’t get it? Don’t worry. Neither did anybody else.

Caffeine Free Diet Coke tastes just like Regular Diet Coke!

Don’t you wish that you had  a caffeine free diet beverage that tastes like its analogue diet beverage but without that washed down, caffeine free taste? Well I learned today that Coke’s dirty little caffeine free diet secret tastes amazingly like diet Coke, and it doesn’t have any caffeine! How do they do it?

Consider me blown away. This is a great victory for those that appreciate the smooth taste of the diet beverage without the jittery after effects of caffeine.

America’s next top challenge?

An alcohol-free moonshine: Great American spirits without the spirits!

An Original eBusiness - Communal Tax Preparation

Tax season may be over “per se,” but is tax season ever really over? Once one tax season stops, the next one begins. That’s what inspired the idea for my latest eBusiness: Communal Tax Preparation. It combines Web 2.0, Open Source, and the financial savvy of the average Internet user to make tax preparation easy for everybody.

How does this work? Users enter all of their important financial information (name, address, social security number, income, etc) onto the Internet, and good willed Internet user, likely skilled in tax preparation, files their taxes for them. And the best part? It’s free! We’re completely funded by contextual advertising.

Some may ask, “but Al, isn’t it risky to put all of your financial information on the Internet?”

I say that it’s risky to not put all of your financial information on the Internet. Made up statistics show that 90% of half of all tax returns are audited by the federal government. Isn’t that scary? And really, how can you trust these monolithic, for-profit companies to do your taxes? Wouldn’t you rather have it out in the open for people like you to do your taxes? As the saying goes, with enough eyes, all tax mistakes are shallow.

So when next tax season comes, instead of putting your trust in one guy that you may know that works for a reputable organization, put your trust in a whole lot of people that you don’t know at all.

Woes of Internet Dating

Dating has come a long way since the time of the cave man. Back in the paleolithic era, strong dating skills was a sign of leadership and essential for surviving, finding a mate, and eventually reproducing.

But resolution for this type of dating was quite low. Though cave men only needed to date animal tracks as fresh or not fresh, this did little to help them learn more about the world in which they lived.

This changed with the advent of radiocarbon dating, invented by Willard “Scooter” Libby in 1949 at the University of Chicago (go USA!). Radiocarbon dating allows us to find the age of organic compounds by measuring the carbon 14 content, a radioactive isotope of carbon with a well-known half life and decay rate.

Now, scientists post results from their carbon dating to the Internet, giving us Internet Dating. The exact process of Internet Dating begins when someone says, “hey, do you know how old _____ is?” A friend then goes onto the computer, searches it on the Internet, likely ends up clicking on a Wikipedia page, and finds the answer.

Though Internet dating’s contribution to society is that it makes dating accessible to everybody, it has its disadvantages. For example, sources on the Internet may not all be trustworthy. It can at times be difficult to distinguish between a radiocarbon dating expert and a nutball when both have poor Internet publishing skills. Additionally, with more accessible information comes a greater risk of the abuse of what we in the science community call “bullshitting.” This occurs when somebody takes a number such as a date out of context and pretends to know a lot about it, making bad extrapolations.

If you participate in Internet dating, make sure you know what you’re getting into, and don’t let the convenience of the Internet be an excuse to not deploy methods of “real” dating.

Devil Pig: Introducing the On-fire Clown Part 2

This cartoon was originally published in the Columbia Daily Spectator on 9/26/05 during the Spectator Cartoonists’ Strike of ‘05.

Al Observes Things - Dutch Pasta

In the Netherlands, locals boil pasta in “the oven.”

The Smartest Women of Baywatch

It takes more than just a one-piece swim suit and a tan to protect a beach: it takes mental sharpness. And from watching Baywatch, we realize that it takes mental sharpness to play the protectors of the beach as well. Today, we take a break from the daily posting of cartoons to take a look at the smartest women of Baywatch.

1. Carmen Electra.  The actress that played Lani McKenzie in season 8, is well known as a Playboy model and the replacement for Jenny McCarthy in MTV’s Singled Out, but did you know that she also graduated from Princeton*? Estimated SAT score: 1510.
2. Donna D’Errico. On screen, she was Donna Marco, life guard. Off screen, she is a supporter of Ron Paul, Republican. Estimated SAT score: 1370.
3. Yasmine Bleeth. Caroline Holden may have just been eye-candy to most viewers, but underneath the lifeguard facade is is Yasmine Bleeth, formerly a member of the United Nations** and bilingual in French and English. Estimated SAT score: 1520

Note: Before we get to all of the caveats of the info above above, let me just preface by saying that this has been one of the more difficult blog posts to research. No where on the Internet did I find anything about any actresss in Baywatch going to college, and this includes the actresses in Baywatch: Nights! Of course it’s hard to say that there’s a direct link between one’s college education and how “smart” he or she is, but it’s the most obvious metric to use for a 200 word article about the women of Baywatch. That said:

*Princeton High School in Sharonville, Ohio

**United Nations International School in Manhattan

All estimated SAT scores are based on the original 1600 scale before the writing portion was added.

Devil Pig: Introducing the On-fire Clown

This cartoon was originally published 9/16/05 in the Columbia Daily Spectator after all of the regular cartoonists died in a freak gasoline fight accident.

Devil Pig: Orphanage and Ice Cream

This cartoon was originally published 9/12/05 in the Columbia Daily Spectator. What were they thinking???

East vs West: Fireworks

Growing up in the US, I’ve always associated fireworks with Independence Day and New Years celebrations. On these special days, big cities and hillbillies would light up the sky with fireworks displays, and everybody would go, “ooh… ah…”

But fireworks weren’t always used for this purpose. Back when the Chinese invented gunpowder sometime between 9AD and 12AD, they originally thought, “wow, this stuff is loud. Let’s use it to scare away demons,” marking the beginning of the use of fireworks in festivals. (Little did they know that loud noises only scared away harmless, loser-demons).

A short time after that, they decided, “wow, these things are neat, let’s stare at them in awe,” marking the beginning of the use of gunpowder in fireworks.  And of course, the jerk in the crew saw it and said, “wow, let’s use this to launch projectiles at our enemies.”

Thanks to the prolific trade between Europe and the Orient in the 13th century, some guy from Europe saw the gun powder and thought, “wow, launching projectiles! Let’s just go with it!” And thus he harnessed the power to destroy armies and level towns.

Jumping ahead to modern times, both the Eastern and Western worlds still use gun powder as weapons similarly (inside firearms pointed toward neighbors), but our uses of gunpowder for fireworks have diverged slightly.

Specifically, a common fireworks display in the United States involves loading a barge full of explosives and lighting them over water in a manner that allows spectators to enjoy the light show from a safe distance. In many cases, music is played in sync with the fireworks.

In Taiwan, however, fireworks are brought closer to the audience. For example, on the New Year’s celebration of 2008, the skyscraper Taipei 101 was rigged with tons of explosives to serve as the launching point for Taipei’s fireworks. On a side note, I like the guy who said, “Now that we’ve spent several years building the world’s tallest skyscraper, let’s rig it with explosives to celebrate the New Year of the less historically significant of the two calendars we currently use.” Ehh, okay, to be fair, this sounds a lot more reckless than it really was… unlike the Yenshui Fireworks Festival, which is as reckless as it sounds.

In the Yenshui Fireworks Festival, fireworks are brought even closer to the audience in a participatory BYOFMHTCT-style celebration. That is, Bring Your Own Fireworks, Motorcycle Helmets, Thick Clothes, and Towels. In this celebration that dates back to the 19th century when fireworks were used to fight plague, fireworks are fired in all directions within the crowd itself. Participants, wearing home-made body armor consisting of thick jackets, a motorcycle helmet, and a towel, try to get hit by them for good luck.

Now, before you start your own Yenshui style festival, remember this: these nuts have been doing this for centuries, and though they were the descendants of the same guys who thought fireworks could fight plague, they do have some idea of what they’re doing, as opposed to you. Fireworks cause people to lose things that are attached to them and that they want. Bleeding is often involved. Don’t do it.