Posts tagged ‘humor’

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May 4, 2013

Easy Alternatives to “At the End of the Day…”

by Derek Osedach

Easy Alternatives to the Phrase “At the End of the Day…”

attheendofthedayPeople say it too much. Period. “We can talk about this until we’re blue in the face, but, at the end of the day…yadda yadda yadda.” You hear it every day, sometimes twice in the same sentence. And I’m not joking. On one strange occasion, I literally heard it said twice in the same run-on sentence. I’d reproduce that sentence for you but, for the life of me, I cannot remember how exactly it went. Nor, for all of my powers, can I imagineer a realistic stand-in sentence; it would just be too goofy. All I know is that it happened. And that, afterwards, I took a very hot shower. As hot as I could stand it.

No. It doesn’t make you sound smart. It doesn’t make you sound like a successful businessman. It just makes you sound like you’re trying to sound like your dad (and succeeding).

Trust me, I’ve been observing this phenomenon over the past few years and, at the end of the day, I’ve found that people abuse the hell out of this phrase. It’s like they aren’t aware of the so many other, more colorful ways to communicate the exact same sentiment.

I decided to offer my readers a list of sturdy alternatives to this overused phrase. Please do us all a favor. Dare to be different. If you want to say “at the end of the day,” just go ahead and substitute in one of the following phrases.

Easy Alternatives to the Overused Phrase “At the End of the Day…”

  • When the dust settles…
  • When all is said and done…
  • When the shoe’s on the other foot…
  • When push comes to shove…
  • When shove comes to push…
  • When the fat lady sings…
  • When it comes to the showdown…
  • When the fat lady comes to the showdown…
  • When the smoke clears…
  • When John Locke and Kate encounter the smoke…
  • When Dr. Grant decides not to endorse Jurassic Park…

One more thing. While writing this article I racked my brain to come up with the most offensive overuse of “At the end of the day” possible. I basically held a one-person Manhattan Project tasked with splitting the “At the end of the day” atom. Here is what I came up with.

“I mean, I know it seems like he says it all the time, but, at the end of the day, Philip ‘At the End of the Day’ McArthur usually says ‘at the end of the day’ at the end of the day.”

Readers: if you feel you can out-“At the end of the Day” me, please give it a shot. At the end of the day you will fail, but I like a good challenge!

___

Learn how I feel about people who call you “boss!”

Posted in Editorial, Lists, Practically Humorous, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

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April 29, 2013

My Blog-Post is Getting Married!

by Derek Osedach

My Blog-Post is Getting Married!

Ladies and gentlemen, I have an important announcement to make. Two of my most “visited” blog posts have decided to do the right thing and make it official. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about 8 Reasons Men Keep Their Eyes Open When Making Out With Women and 8 Reasons Women Close Their Eyes When Kissed, the blogosphere’s favorite blog-post couple. And yes, I’m talking about marriage. Those of you who have been following the tabloids probably know by now that these two posts have been getting pretty serious over the last few months, and now, I’m so very pleased to announce, 8 Reasons Men Keep Their Eyes Open When Making Out With Women has decided to “put a ring on it.” I guess he’s scared of some other blog post showing up and stealing 8 Reasons Women Close Their Eyes When Kissed away from him. This consuming fear has nudged him into a whole new world of responsibility and commitment. Quite frankly, I’m shocked. I didn’t think he had it in him. I thought he valued his identity, his freedom, but I guess that kind of stuff doesn’t matter to him anymore. (Between me, you and the wall, I think he’s thinking with the “wrong head,” but that’s just my opinion.)

Anywho, the wedding is going to happen pretty soon now. The happy couple won’t give me an exact date; they’re going all Brad and Angelina on me. But when it goes down we’ll be here to invade the ceremony and give you all the details. What color will she wear? Who will he pick to be his best blog? Stay tuned folks!

Get caught up with all the latest gossip…

Read 8 Reasons Men Keep Their Eyes Open While Making Out with Women!

Read 8 Reasons Women Close Their Eyes When Kissed!

Posted in Editorial, Practically Humorous, Relationships, Unorthodoxy | 4 Comments »

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April 24, 2013

When There’s a Contact Lens Lost Inside Your Head

by Derek Osedach

When There’s a Contact Lens Lost Inside Your Head

contact1Anyone who wears contacts probably has dealt this particular scenario at some point or another. You’re ready to turn in for the night. You take contact lens #1 out of your
left eye and drop it into the appropriate side of the little contact lens container thing. So far so good. No problems. But now it’s time to deal with the other eye. This one doesn’t go so easy.

The contact doesn’t want to come out. It feels like it’s been blow-torched in there, fused to your eyeball. There’s no apparent line of demarcation between where the contact lens ends and the eye begins. With your dirty fingers you fiddle around in there, trying to catch a solid grip on that stubborn thing so you could peel it off and go to bed. No luck. And then you come to the horrific realization that you can’t grip the lens because it isn’t there anymore. It’s gone! Been gone for a while! At some point early on in your extraction mission your clumsy fingers must have somehow shifted the lens’ position on your eyeball just enough so that it slid back into your eye socket. You realize with horror that the lens is now floating somewhere on or around your brain, floating in the liquids of your head like Dennis Quaid’s miniature submarine in the sweet ‘80s film, Inner Space.

innerspaceYou feel powerless. You feel violated. You wonder: will it stay in there forever? Will it settle down somewhere it’s not supposed to be and cause you to hallucinate, start seeing giant glass domes everywhere you look?

And, most importantly, you’ll want to know…

How do I get this rogue contact lens out of my head?

As always, practicallyserious.com has the information you require. Here are three effective ways to get that rogue contact lens out of your head.

3 Things to Do When There’s a Contact Lens Lost Inside Your Head

  • Sneeze it Out This one pretty much speaks for itself. Just sneeze the thing out of your nose! Do like they do in the cartoons: grab a big fluffy feather and tickle your nose with it until you start to sneeze uncontrollably. Nine out of ten times this will solve the problem. If the feather doesn’t get you sneezing quite violently enough, go ahead and develop a cat allergy and then grab the nearest American Longhair and rub it all over your face like it’s Oxy 10. Keep doing this until you blast the contact lens right out of your nostril onto the coffee table next to the coffee mug you use all the time and never rinse out. Just try to remember, at least, to rinse the lens, preferably before you put it back in your eye.Self-cleaning-oven-display
  • Burn it Off  This suggestion draws inspiration from the modern-day marvel of self-cleaning ovens. If you can get the inner temperature of your head hot enough, anything that’s not supposed to be there will eventually disintegrate, turn to ash. And no, I don’t mean stick your head in an oven. That would be stupid. I’m talking about drinking a lot of coffee—three or four pots—and then trying your very very best to imagine a sequel to the nonsensical, rambling, clearly-improvised science fiction movie, Prometheus, that would somehow make the first one make sense and be cool. If you focus all of your hypercaffeinated brainpower on this unsolvable brain paradox, your inner head-temperature will quickly start to heat up in the same way an overclocked CPU will overheat on a PC when you have too many programs running. If you can get your brain hot enough, the rogue contact lens will soon disappear in a quick puff of smoke.
  • Watch a Michael Bay Movie  Okay, so, you know how if you detonate a thermonuclear device in the upper atmosphere it’ll send a static electric charge that will short out anything with an electric circuit directly beneath it (if not, please refer to the James Bond movie, Goldeneye)? Well that’s kinda like what happens in your brain when you watch any movie directed by Michael Bay. It pretty much shorts out your entire head, cleans the slate, kinda like doing a factory reset on your mobile device. In theory, such a major brain reset will remove anything in/on your brain that wasn’t there when you came off the assembly line. Yes, we’re talking about you, Rogue Contact Lens. You will be deleted like a corrupted Google Play app.

Read another classic article!

Learn about my landmark contact lens invention!

Posted in Editorial, Practically Humorous, Unorthodoxy | Leave a Comment »

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April 5, 2013

How to Feed Yourself on Five-Dollars-a-Week

by Derek Osedach

How to Feed Yourself on Five-Dollars-a-Week

The thing to do here is ration. Depending on what you’re starting with, I’d go ahead and separate it into five separate units. If you’re starting with five ones, this isn’t going to be hard at all—just take the ones out of your wallet and put them down on the table next to each other in a line—one for Monday, one for Tuesday, one for Wednes…you get the idea. If you’re starting with a five-dollar-bill, then I’d humbly recommend you break out a nice pair of Fiskars scissors and cut the bill into five equal-sized strips. Once you’ve done this, go ahead and lay the strips down on the kitchen table, one for each day of the week, just like I told you to do with the ones.

Now, if you’re starting with five dollars in coins, it’s a little different: yes, you should separate the coins into five different piles; but, unlike what we did with the one-dollar-bills, you should ration the coins based on density, NOT value. For instance, if you have most of the five dollars in pennies, and the rest in quarters, you should NOT treat the quarters as equals to the pennies. Value-wise, quarters are better than pennies, I think we all know this, but they’re not equal food-wise. Twenty-five pennies will fill up your belly much quicker than a quarter would, so keep that in mind.

Once you figured out the whole rationing thing, then it becomes a matter of self control. Just eat the Monday money for Monday and the Tuesday money for Tuesday. Don’t eat Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday all on Monday. That wouldn’t be good.

Dollars and/or coins tend to be a little bland by themselves, so I’d recommend adding salt and pepper to taste; or honey, if you don’t mind all that nasty stickiness.

Bon appetite!

_____

If you liked this post, check out my very informative How to Prepare a Chicken for Dinner

Posted in Practically Humorous, Unorthodoxy | 4 Comments »

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April 3, 2013

Blogging Phenomenon: “Darkcontent”

by Derek Osedach

Simulated Large Hadron Collider CMS particle detection data indicating the presence of “darkcontent” in practicallyserious.com’s archives.

In a controversial paper published earlier today, practicallyserious Space Agency (PSSA) astrophysicist Leo Foley offers what he considers mathematical proof of a blogging phenomenon known as “darkcontent.” Darkcontent has long been considered a possible explanation for why practicallyserious.com is able to exist for extended periods of time without offering any new blog posts. A relatively new idea in blogging-physics, darkcontent’s existence is inferred from gravitational effects on visible blog content and gravitational lensing of background wordpress radiation, and was originally hypothesized to account for discrepancies between calculations of the mass and quality of practicallyserious.com’s archive, considered in the context of how long the blog has been in existence.

“Basically, there’s a major discrepancy between how long this particular blog has been in existence, and the general quality and quantity of the writing,” said Foley during a Q & A held after his initial presentation of his findings. “Something doesn’t add up. No writer can remain mediocre for so long without showing at least marginal improvement. This is common sense. Even without trying, the writer would have to improve, if only a little bit. Well, my latest series of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern suggest that this blog has, indeed, gotten better, a lot better, only we can’t see it. Therefore I propose there are well-written, high quality posts hidden in those ever-growing gaps between the real blog posts. We have no physical proof of their quality, yet we can infer their existence by the massive blocks of time between each new post. Gravitationally and creatively speaking, they must be there, or else the blog would simply fly apart.”

Foley boldly suggests that darkcontent may account for over 99% of practicallyserious.com’s total mass. “The good stuff is there, I’m tellin ya. We have the numbers to prove it, we just don’t have the technology to see it. Yet.” According to Foley, there’s still hope that practicallyserious.com can one day be a top notch, world-class blog. “Darkcontent is waiting, lads, waiting to be discovered, and it’s high quality stuff. It’s funny as hell, or, at the very least, decently-written. If we can better understand it, we may be able to one day see it, harness it, bring it to the foreground with the rest of practicallyserious.com’s sporadic ‘lightcontent.’

For more practicallyserious.com Space Agency antics, check out this story:

“Creativity” Rover Cleared for Launch 

Posted in Editorial, Practically Humorous, Practically Serious News | Leave a Comment »

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December 6, 2012

Navigating Your Way Out of a Big City in the Days Before Smartphones

by Derek Osedach

NYCGrid

Life Before Smartphones 5 of 5: Navigating Your Way Out of a Big City in the days before Smartphones

Let’s say you’re driving in a city you never visited before—feeling cool and confident and hip—and then, when it’s time to go home and tell the tribe of your daring adventure, you discover you’re not quite the homing pigeon you thought you were. You haven’t got a clue how to escape the madness of the busy streets, back to the peace and quiet of your nice little suburb!

Well, without a Smartphone to provide you with extremely detailed directions via GPS satellite, you’d have to reach into your leather satchel and pull out a fresh roll of parchment and, with quill pen, start compiling a hand-drawn map while you methodically drive through every street in the city one by one. If you’re fastidious enough you’ll eventually end up with a basic idiot’s map of the entire city. Of course, a city map wouldn’t mean anything to you by itself. It’s just squiggles and lines. Very confusing. You’d have to study the map for hours, searching for patterns in civic engineering that might suggest where the ancient city planners intended for the primary flow of traffic to enter and exit the bustling prospective metropolis. Then you could merely visit these points one by one until you found the on-ramp to the freeway.

I can pretty much guess, verbatim, what you’re thinking: oh, those clever pre-Smartphone humans! Getting from Point A to Point B was so much simpler and easier back in their day! We sure could learn a thing or two from their long lost, yet surprisingly-well-developed navigational methods! The old ways are the best ways, so on and so forth.  But are they? Let’s think about this for a minute or two, Readers. Yeah, sure, at first glance it certainly appears that in the days before Smartphones, if push came to shove, people sure knew how to find their way out of a big city. But if you really sit down and think about it for more than a few seconds, it starts to become evident that the methods described in the above paragraph are rather old fashioned and unreliable. I mean, put yourself in their place. What we’ve discussed demands an awful lot of logical thinking on your part, and if you got so terribly lost in the city in the first place you’re not exactly tommy-gunning me with confidence here. I mean, are you really going to be able to logically analyze a hand-drawn city map and get on the same mental wavelength as 200-years-dead Harvard-educated builders and city- engineers? More than likely you’d get bored and start drawing squiggle lines all around the border of your map. And hearts. In some extreme cases, you’d do this until you starved.

No. No, I’m pretty sure finding your way out of a big city is much easier with a Smartphone by your side. You can just plug in your home address and the Smartphone will tell you exactly how to weave your way out of the scary city and get there.

__________

Nobody cry, but that about wraps up our 5-part educational series “Life Before Smartphones.” If you have studied hard and read every article in the series, you are probably qualified to know whether or not life was more convenient before or after Smartphones. And—though I’d love to take your word for it—there will be a brief quiz in the following post to help reinforce what we have learned. But don’t sweat it; though I will not release an official “study guide,” you can prepare for the quiz by re-reading and “liking” all five lessons, twice.

Don’t screw this up. I’ll even make it easy for you. Here are the links to every post in this groundbreaking educational series:

Life Before Smartphones

Playing “Angry Birds”

Making a Late Night “Booty Call”

Taking Down a Girl’s Number

Taking Snapshots

Navigating Your Way Out of a Big City

I cannot talk to you anymore until after the quiz.

Posted in Editorial, Lists, Practically Humorous | 1 Comment »

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September 22, 2012

Space Shuttle Caught Performing Lewd Act with 747

by Derek Osedach

Space Shuttle Endeavor was taken into custody earlier today for allegedly performing a lewd act with a Boeing 747 in public airspace. On top of being perceived by many as grossly indecent behavior, such open displays of affection are, as a condition of recently-passed Prop 431, against the law.

“I mean, my kids were looking up from the recess field and they saw this!” said Mary Marmahol, a third grade teacher for Los Angeles Unified School District. “I told them to cover their eyes!”

Two F-22 fighter jets were sent up to try and frighten Endeavor off the 747, initiating a chase that coincidentally took the shuttle and its lover to various points California, many tied historically with the space shuttle program. The low-altitude humpchase roared over Griffith Park Observatory, the Hollywood sign, the Getty Center, Queen Mary, Disneyland, and Derek’s house. The shocking spectacle was witnessed by millions of Californians.

“This was a completely consensual,” said LA city official Phil Cougin. “That’s not the point. The point is: couldn’t these two get a freakin’ hangar?”

At 20-years old, Endeavor is set to be retired after a distinguished career operating in low-Earth-orbit. In recent years many have criticized the space shuttle program for the advanced age of its three space-worthy shuttles.  “He’s just an old lecher looking for one last fling before the end,” said an eye-witness to the spectacle, a mother of two. “He should be ashamed of himself.”

Retired shuttles Discovery and Enterprise are each under investigation for similar lewd conduct.

__________

*I am a huge fan of NASA and the space shuttles, but I couldn’t pass up on this joke.

Posted in Practically Humorous, Practically Serious News, Relationships | 6 Comments »

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September 19, 2012

How to Prepare a Chicken for Dinner

by Derek Osedach

How to Prepare a Chicken for Dinner

First thing to remember is that a chicken has a natural instinct to want to eat. It doesn’t have to be prepared for this—it already knows how, even when it’s still just a little chick. You put a little birdseed in your palm and hold it in front of the chicken, the thing’ll just instinctively peck peck peck and swallow swallow swallow. Later it’ll poop poop poop. All the time completely on automatic. No preparations, no lessons, no nothing! Just like you don’t need to learn how to suck at your mother’s teat when you’re a baby.

So, if your chicken is about to have an important dinner, you don’t even need to worry about teaching it how to eat food. All you’ll need to do to prepare it is to dress it in a good pair of slacks, a nice clean collared shirt. Shoot some Binaca on or around its beak (watch the eyes if you can). Then go ahead and get a human condom and a hole-puncher. Punch out a little hole in the latex, and then take the little circle of latex that fell down when you punched the hole, and put it in the chicken’s wallet.

Tell the chicken to think with its big head, not its little head. Slap it on the chicken-butt as it waddles out your front door to the taxi.

Your chicken is about as prepared for dinner as it could be. Hopefully it doesn’t screw things up!

Very easy stuff.

_____________

For more practicallyserious “food preparation” tips, check out this article!

Posted in Practically Humorous, Unorthodoxy | 2 Comments »

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September 7, 2012

Creativity Rover Ready to Test “Word” Laser

by Derek Osedach

The Creativity rover team has completed an elaborate set of diagnostics on eleven of the rover’s twelve science instruments. According to PSSA, the final instrument—WURDCam—will be tested later this afternoon. WURDCam, of course, is arguably Creativity’s most valuable scientific asset. This MIT-designed instrument will fire a military-grade laser at specifically targeted posts from practicallyserious.com’s archives, creating a fine mist of worddust that can be analyzed to determine the presence (or absence) of humor in the blog’s archival records.

“We’ve been taking this nice and slow because—pardon my French—we don’t want to muck this up,” said PSSA administrator Benny Shmogston. “But I’m pleased to report that, so far, we have a healthy rover on our hands and we’re about ready to do some real science here.” Shmogston says that the Creativity operators fully expect the WURDCam test to be an unqualified success.

Later this afternoon WURDCam will fire a sequence of three laser pulses at a preselected blog-post from the recent past. “Of course we’re not expecting to find any humor in a modern blog-post. If there’s humor on this blog it’s certainly not right there on the surface. Anyone can see that. But this exercise will give us a chance to calibrate our systems and get ready to finally stretch our legs.” Shmogston added that, barring any unforeseen obstacles, Creativity will be ready to begin its primary mission in the coming weeks.

Creativity landed on the surface of practicallyserious.com at 10:32 p.m. Pacific time on August 6, 2012, looking for signs of past or present humor on the dismal surface of Derek’s unfamous blog.

___________

To find out what happens next, click here!

To follow Creativity’s mission from the very beginning, check out this post!

Posted in Editorial, Practically Humorous, Unorthodoxy | Leave a Comment »

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September 2, 2012

Latest Blog-Post Recovered Alive!

by Derek Osedach

Derek’s latest blog-post, declared missing two days ago, has been recovered alive and intact. At exactly 11:47am this morning the blog-post titled “The Sea Train” was located in the abyss of Derek’s “Documents” folder. Shivering and poorly-written upon initial rescue, “The Sea Train” has since been treated, revised, and finally transferred from Microsoft Word to the draft folder of WordPress.com. This is a happy ending to a story that could easily have ended in tragedy.

“We’re all very jazzed,” said Thom Fogerty, rescue coordinator. “Unfortunately the post is just another lame flash fiction story, nothing too awesome, but still we’re jazzed because we’re getting all this press. Hi mom!”

“The Sea Train” will make its premiere on Memorial Day, 2012 Labor Day, 2012.

__________

To follow this story from the beginning, check out this link.

Posted in Editorial, Practically Humorous, Practically Serious News, Unorthodoxy | 3 Comments »

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