Sound O' Text!

NNNNEEEEERRRRRRR

PEW PEW PEW

KKKAAAABBBBOOOOMMMMM

Don't waste water. Pee in the shower.

Because you've demanded it, I want to share with you all this commercial from Brazil urging you to conserve water by peeing in the shower.  I also hear that it helps cure athlete's foot:



Or do like our good friend Howard Hughes and store it in jars. Either way its good for the environment.

 

Howard Hughes: Ahead of his time.

Top 5ive: Top Five Lists

Welcome to a new feature of To The Upstairs: Top 5ive (see how five is spelled with the number 5 replacing the letter 'F'? Pretty clever!). I'm going to try to put up a new list every week so be prepared for some good, old fashioned controversy.

This weeks Top 5ive has an interesting theme: the best "Top Five" lists of all time. These lists come from various sources across history such as literature, movies, and the interwebs. I know I'm going to forget someone's favorite Top Five list but I did my best to cover all the classics. So with out further stalling for time:

Top 5ive: Best Top Five Lists of All Time

5. Top Five Most Degrading Ways to Make Your Serfs Toil
    (The Feudal Lords Atlas, 1342)

4. Top Five Hobo Names that Begin with 'Boxcar'
    (Boxcar Willy's Journal, 1922) 

3. Top Five Illnesses Caused by Masturbation
    (Official Papal Decree, 1713) 

2. Top Five Most Hilarious Mammoth Trampling Deaths
    (A cave in what is now the south of France, 10,000 BCE) 

1. Top Five Ways I Would Totally Wreck That Chick at the Bar
    (The now defunct website MadBroSkills.com, 2002)

 Suck it Letterman. I only need five.

Really Brits? Cockney cash machine?

The British do some odd things and their accents are really annoying but this is too much.

Bank Machine, a company that manages ATMs in England has installed a few ATMs that use the Cockney slang language.  Besides being problematic cause it makes no sense to normal people, Cockneys are generally poor and don't have money. So why would they need an ATM in the first place?

 

A wanker withdraws his last Pound so he can see a footy match.

That's all they do in the UK, right?

Article here.

Aquacise!

So I swim laps at a local gym after work most days of the week. I usually swim for about an hour and a half before calling it quits and heading home to the missus. Lately though, my Tuesdays and Thursdays have been rudely interrupted by that last bastion of exercise for the morbidly obese, the very old, and a people who are both those things. I'm talking, of course, about Aquacise. If you're unfamiliar with Aquacise or Water Aerobics, as they are often called, I've provided this video to better aquatint you with the "activity."

Let's watch!

As you can see, the class consists of all they types of people I described above and as an added bonus, a douche and a lecherous old man. The water aerobic activities mostly consist of jumping up and down in the water and using "weights" for added resistance. In theory, this is a great workout for them because its low resistance (broken hip lady) and the water help keeps them buoyant (so overweight that gravity is a nuisance and living on land has become dangerous). And while I don't doubt that this may be marginally helpful for certain people, almost all of the people taking the class are too far gone for this type of "exercise" (oh yeah, sarcastic quotes coming on strong) to help at all.

Now, my problem is that a class that does essentially nothing for these people interrupts my actual workout. Their bouncing creates waves in the pool and these a big people mind you. As such it makes it impossible to breathe properly without swallowing a gallon of water. Being big people, the Aquacisers take up a lot of space so I'm forced to swim around them. Seeing as how swimming is mainly done in straight lines, swimming around is an epic hassle. And to top it all off, they don't shower before the get in the pool. Take a look at the above video again. Notice anything about the color of the water? Yeah, old people can't control their bowels and fat people have food stuck in their fat folds.

See? Yeah. Gross.

Movie Hype and the Nerds That Love It

I want to make sure that everyone knows there is a new Quentin Tarantino out today. I also want to make sure you know that it will be rad. I mean super rad. No, wait, I mean badical, the greatest form of radness that can be achieved!

See what I did there. I hyped up a movie I haven't seen yet. I did so by saying it was going to be "badical" even though I've only seen the trailer and I know that Tarantino makes rockin' movies. In reality, the movie might suck (fat chance, it is a QT Joint), but the great thing about hype is that its a magnifier of excitement, specifically anticipatory excitement. Its the kind of excitement that, at least for the briefest of moments, makes you proud to spend $10 on a ticket.

But hype is a double edge sword and a gamble. Hype sets the bar higher, so much so that once you reach a certain level of hype a movie's quality loses all middle ground. It either blows or blows your mind. There is no more okay, just good, or meh. If you hype a movie and it blows, you feel more than dissatisfied with your purchase - you feel betrayed. How dare it not live up to your over-exaggerated expectations! You spent $10 and this is what you get? What a rip off. But if on the rarest of occasions you hype a movie and it blows your mind, then that movie was better for you then it was for everyone else in the theater who saw it with you. Except for that fat nerd who downed two buckets of popcorn and a giant coke. He's been on the interwebs for weeks, trolling movie sites and forum threads, building up his hype like it was a bad smack habit.

Hopefully, he just got his fix.

So awesome I can't even describe it

cause I haven't even seen how awesome it is.

Happy Birthday Coworker

Is there anything more pathetic and sad then the office birthday party?

No.

Well, maybe the fact that I'm writing a blog entry about it, but let's ignore that for a moment.

The entire office b-day party/charade hinges on the person getting the cake. The fun party hats are never fun, the decorations, if any, are always half-assed, and the ratio of sincere to insincere birthday wishes on the birthday card is heavily weighted towards insincere. So the only really enjoyable part is the cake and even then its enjoyable for only one out of three people (this is the studied and proven percentage of people on this planet who genuinely like cake. Everyone else hates it.).

So my advice for the office party cake:
1. Don't let the fat secretary pick up the cake. I know your instinct is to delegate a menial task like this to your underling. But she will get the kind she loves and you can bet your ass it will be some kind of butter cream monstrosity that's overly sweet.

2. Erotic cakes are only awkward or offensive in an office environment. They are hilarious everywhere else.

3. The smaller the cake the better. If you get a huge cake then that will be the talk of the office for the rest of the day cause people in offices are usually impressed by lame shit like a big cake. "Oh man, did you see the size of Jamie's birthday cake? I had a piece and it went straight to my thighs! AHAHAHA!" PUNCH. "Ouch. Why did you hit me?"

Quickly! To the upstairs!

I'm sure this is how most blogs start, out of boredom. It's how mine is starting and maybe someday yours, if you're bored enough. Until then consider yourself lucky you haven't experienced this level of boredom. A boredom so deep, so maddening, that you turn to putting your thoughts on the interwebs, thinking that some how it will make them more important. I think that's the overarching flaw of blogs, or of the people that write them. Just because its easy for others to read what you wrote doesn't make your ideas an more important than they were when they were swimming through your head. In fact it cheapens them, taints them with the sent of manure, and makes them less important.

But I am the exception.

"But how can this be? My diatribe on the state of celebrity in America was snarky and well informed and used at least two pop culture referenced per sentence!" You ask with a huff and furrowed brow.

I am the exception because I know none of what I say is important, at least not yet. But soon, someone will start following my blog. And then, someone else. And maybe a third person. At this point I will call for my followers to rise up and cast of the shackle of society. Then my words will have meaning and purpose. I will lead you all to the upstairs where we will eat pizza rolls, watch Phil take down GoldenEye, and know what its like to be free.