On behalf of Lushy (Or "Angry", if you prefer): Why did EasyJet lose my luggage?

I don't actually know any of the details, but I know she's furious, so I'm just going to speculate that whatever she would say would involve the following words. What, so, incompetent, jackanapes, douchefaces, under, kerosene, absolutely, no, faintest, complete, spork, pancreas, effigy, are, stab, Donovan McNabb. Please arrange them and fill in the gaps as you please.

Why is there a Kia commercial with giant anthropomorphic hamsters?

Lots of great TV commercials are based upon a clever piece of absurd juxtaposition. Some of my favorites are the herding cats commercial from the 2000 Super Bowl and the truly brilliant Terry Tate: Office Linebacker series. What makes these commercials so great (Aside from the sentence "You know you can't bring that weak-ass shit up in this humpy-bumpy!" which remains the single best way to bring about the instant adjournment of any meeting ever.) is the fact that they roll along totally normally until that "HAW HAW There are cats where there should be cows!" or "HAW HAW There is an angry linebacker where there would normally be a laser printer!" moment. The key is maintaining a familiar frame of reference until you introduce the twist.

Maybe someone should drop by Kia headquarters and explain this, because their giant hamster ad only maintains a familiar frame of reference for people who drive giant toasters or enjoy dressing their pet hamsters in clothing. (Fun fact: It is much harder than you might think to find clothes for hamsters online, although some hamster fanciers advise that you can squeeze them into clothes designed for rats which you can purchase from the TheAgileRat.com. Not sure if this might promote unhealthy body images for hamsters. Can we commission a study of this?) And I feel like the ad might have started off sort of reasonably with the goal being some sort of "HAW HAW There are hamsters where there should be people!" sensation, but it rapidly went off the rails. If they had just made the commercial some sort of hamster-trading-in-its-hamster-ball-for-a-Kia kind of deal, it would have been fine. But no, some copywriter decided that hamsters to hamster balls were way too linear, and he was being paid to CREATE, man. Next thing you know, the hamsters are driving Kias, toasters, washing machines and refrigerator boxes while embodying common African-American stereotypes and your commercial has gone out in a blaze of Dadaist glory.

Why doesn't the PAC-10 know what bombastic means?

Based on this video in which they advertise their conference's "uncommonly bombastic" quarterbacks (around 3:35), they seem to think it is a combination of "fantastic" and "bomb" and implies some kind of totally awesome explosiveness. Well, it's not, and it doesn't. It means puffed-up and overly-elaborate, and it is definitely pejorative. The quarterbacks of the PAC-10 may be many things, but until the day that you let Lane Kiffin strap on pads and take snaps under center, they're certainly not bombastic.

Why would you force your cat to be a vegan?

Those of you who have run afoul of a housecat can vouch for the fact that they are, for all their innocuous appearance and idiosyncratic captions, highly evolved predators. They are possessed of a wide variety of sharp implements which can be deployed in so many ways as to make an abattoir feel inadequate. All in all, cats are pretty much finely-tuned chipmunk-devouring machines. So why the hell would you feel like it is in any way a good idea to make your cat adhere to a vegan diet?

I've never really understood the appeal of veganism (partially because I really enjoy eating meat, and partially because I really don't enjoy eating rocks and grass), but I'm at least willing to grant vegans a begrudging measure of esteem for taking a principled stand. (Except you, Bagdis.) But extending it to your housepets doesn't really seem principled so much as, oh, what's word I'm looking for…ah yes, totally batshit insane. Your cat doesn't know anything about your crusade to reduce antibiotic use or curb corn subsidies or save innocent cows from death by rectal electrocution. It just knows that it has big, pointy teeth and sharp claws and doesn't really enjoy eggplant. You might as well wander the Serengeti handing out pamphlets about antelope rights to lions as try to explain to your cat why you're restricting its diet. If this is something you cannot come to grips with, then maybe pet ownership isn't for you.

I'm sure there exists a whole industry today built around producing vegan pet food and vitamin supplements to enable this particular lunacy, but I don't care. All I know is that there are few sadder sights than a confused and hungry kitten* trying to eat a bowl of alfalfa sprouts.



* As an added indignity, the kitten's name was "Tofutti Cutie".

Why didn't anyone tell me that having sides on your shirt had become hopelessly unfashionable?

I simply cannot believe that nobody thought to make me aware of the fact that the hot new fashion accessory for this summer is the exposed male nipple. But, now that I cast my mind back, I have often thought to myself while wearing a shirt, "This shirt is entirely too much like a shirt and entirely not enough like a frayed rag stolen from a bucket outside a car wash." Plus removing the sides of the shirt makes it much easier for all and sundry to enjoy this typo-ridden song lyric I've had tattooed on my ribcage beneath my elbow. Thank you, Cedar Point clientele, for showing me the error of my ways. I'm going to go get a pair of scissors and start remaking my wardrobe immediately.

Why do they let Pam Ward do football commentary?

I was just watching a replay of a football game on the Big Ten Network and it struck me that Pam Ward may be my least favorite football announcer of all time. She's worse than those paragons of terrible announcing, the Tonys Siragusa and Kornheiser, because at least they are clearly excited about the game (even if all that does is prompt them to talk about ham and family badminton matches, respectively). She's worse than Joe Buck because, for all Buck's ability to make Alan Greenspan look charismatic, he at least goes about lulling us all to sleep in a polished and professional manner. But Pam manages to be both soporific and amateurish while, and this is the really unique part, displaying a stunning ignorance of the game of football.

One of Pam's specialties is giving calls that are totally at odds with what's happening on the screen. Did a tackle clearly jump early? Well, Pam is right there to tell you that it was too many men on the field. She routinely says things like "And he's pushed out of bounds at the 25 yard line…*pauses*…touchdown, Northwestern," "Cousins drops back to pass and, actually, no, he handed it off," or "A 48 yard return…correction, 69 yards." In another game, she advised a team to spike the ball on 4th down if they wanted to have a shot at scoring on the next play. And, because mere ineptitude is the stuff of boom-goes-the-dynamite amateur commentators, she even managed to get caught on a live mic complaining about how an injured player wasn't getting off the field fast enough for her taste. Nothing but class, Pammy.

I know that it has to be difficult to fire the only woman football announcer for any major network, but every time she opens her mouth I'm pretty sure it actually sets the cause of women in sportscasting back about 10 years. She needs to be removed from the booth, all recordings of her need to be burned and, just to be on the safe side, all football fans should probably file a restraining order against her. Surely there must be someone out there more qualified for the job than she is. What's Matt Millen up to these days?

Why do people over the age of 6 have temper tantrums?

Let's say that you have organized an informal soccer game with some of your coworkers. ("Informal" in this context means that the on-field roles normally played by grass and lines are instead played by roots and two-inch-deep tire ruts; and on previous occasions we may have had to play with a volleyball because nobody had an an actual soccer ball.) You send an email out to about 30 people a few days in advance and get back a dozen affirmative replies. When gameday rolls around, one person flakes out and three extra people show up. Which of the following would you say constitutes a reasonable response on your part?
A) Go with it.
B) Express irritation at the people who couldn't be bothered to let you know in advance, and then go with it.
C) Get into a profanity-filled shouting match with several other people about whether or not everything is ruined, have the same shouting match again with different people when the first ones prove unsympathetic, storm off, show up to the game late and stand outside the field of play loudly complaining to nobody in particular, ignore the requests of the players to join play so the sides will be even, pretend to storm off again, come back, allow yourself to be talked into playing but then just wander around midfield disconsolately and intermittently accuse people of being offsides.

If you answered A or B, congratulations, you pass this portion of the Functional Adult Aptitude Test and may move on to Section 2: Wearing Matching Socks. Otherwise, well, we need to talk.

Seriously, who thinks this is an appropriate way to behave? Not only is it terribly unbecoming of you to act like a petulant child, it makes it totally awkward for everyone around you that has to politely pretend that you're not acting like a petulant child. I fully appreciate that sometimes it's irritating when things don't work out as planned, but if you find yourself uttering the phrase "This is no fun anymore! I'm going home!" perhaps it is time to re-evaluate your conduct.

Why do people watch Hell's Kitchen?

From the continuing annals of "My Roommate Has Terrible Taste In Television" (although, to her credit, even she doesn't really like it), I bring you Hell's Kitchen. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show's intricate and carefully crafted premise, it's a British guy whose name I can't be troubled to look up screaming at every contestant on the show with so much profanity that they don't so much need to bleep out the cursewords as unbleep the clean ones. There is also some supposed component involving cooking, but that appears to be mostly accidental. It's terrible, pointless, repetitive and frequently unintelligible. It's the "Macarron, Chaccaron" of reality TV.

Why do people say "kiddie-corner"?

Cater-corner is a word which has suffered greatly at the hands of idiots. It's not exactly something one needs much outside of describing to relatives your visit to Four Corners National Monument, and once people stopped recognizing the French root of "cater-", it degraded rapidly into "catty-corner." Hell, even Google suggests "Did you mean catty-corner?" when you search for it, which means all attempts at preservation are no longer rearguard actions so much as fullblown British-Expeditionary-Force-booking-it-back-to-Dunkirk retreats. I have made my peace with this, although I do reserve the right to gut like a fish anyone else who tries to tell me that the word actually derives from a cat's tendency to pounce on any object sticking out around a corner.

But this concession doesn't mean it's open season on linguistic corruption, and I am drawing a line in the sand at "kitty-corner," and I will not even discuss its ghastly cousin "kiddie-corner." This poor word has suffered enough. There's no reason to expose it to further depredations because you want it to sound cuter. And if you're too much of a failure to distinguish voiced phonemes from unvoiced ones, then I don't think you should even be attempting to use words longer than two syllables.

So just back off, people. Leave cater-corner to live out its mangled life as best it can. Why don't you go pick on some other French borrowing for a while? I saw someone writing "riposte" as "repost" the other day, I bet you can still get in on the ground floor of that.

Why do men think that wider tie knots are better tie knots?

Today I had to meet with one of our salesmen. As you would expect a salesman to be, he was dressed nicely, wearing a suit and wingtips. He had an expensive looking spread-collar shirt on and a well-selected necktie with a meticulously tried WIndsor knot. Clearly, the man had put a lot of effort into looking his best. Too bad he looked like a total pinhead. Literally.

The man had an at-most average width head, and having about four inches of neckwear perched immediately below it made it look comically narrow. I don't know when the width of a man's tie became the new measure of his manhood, but it's really not a good look unless you have the physique of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. Pick a reasonable knot and tighten it up properly, or else risk ending up looking like Beaker. You know, with more coiffed hair and a slightly more expansive vocabulary.

Why are there the ESPYS?

While I am possessed of absolutely no desire to watch any sort of awards show ever, I at least understand the motivation behind their existence. People want to be able to say "I win at movies," and that's hard to do unless you have some way to keep score. But guess what: We already have that for sports. It's called "keeping score."

Sports already have clearly defined winners and losers. By and large, they have championships, and even if those championships aren't controversy-free, they're certainly more justifiable than a bunch of ESPN staffers sitting around and saying, "Hey, whom do you think we can sucker into attending our stupid awards banquet? Well, they're probably the best then."

And if winning isn't a sufficient accolade for you, well, most sports of which I'm aware have MVP's and Heismans and Golden Items of Apparel and/or Equipment. Thinking it over, I'd say that niche is pretty well filled and Drew Brees isn't sitting home at night wondering, "Am I better at football than Shaun White is at snowboarding?" In point of fact, nobody is. ESPN, Why don't you just go back to what you do well? That is, chasing Brett Favre through high school parking lots.

Why would you check a file into the main repository only to then build a binary with a wholly different version of the file and move it to production?

THIS IS WHY WE HAVE SOURCE CONTROL! THIS IS WHY! I want the last five hours of my evening back, goddammit.

And, relatedly, why does my employer have absurdly strict policies concerning the beheading of coworkers and the mounting of their severed heads over one's desk as a warning to others?

Why does the Pass It On ad campaign exist?

It was bad enough when they just had generic virtue-extolling billboards distributed liberally along highways in the greater Midwest. Hell, there were even times when I was even glad to see one of those stupid things just because it would reassure me that I wasn't just trapped in some Groundhog-Day-esque loop of the same central Pennsylvanian section of I-76.

It got a little worse when they moved to the bus stops and subways in New York. (In fact, the "Nola Ochs, Age 91, World's Oldest College Graduate" one irks me to this day, since that patently does not mean what they intend it to mean.) Now it looks like the masterminds running the operation have decided that ambushing random passers- and drivers-by is insufficient and have purchased TV time so they can blast you with sanctimony from both barrels as you sit unsuspecting on your couch.

I find these commercials totally mystifying. They are of a drastically inferior video quality compared to anything else on TV, and something about them just seems dated, like someone unearthed a time capsule from the early 90's filled with middle school educational videos. And the content of that ads is even more off-putting than that of the print versions. The print versions stick with pretty indisputable sentiments like "Einstein was smart!", "Nuns are good people!" and "Pushing a handicapped child in a marathon is good exercise!" But the TV ad shows a kid being asked for an answer on a test by his friend and then passing his pal a note, which the teacher intercepts only to find that it says, "Let's not cheat :-)". Nuns and nuclear physicists are perfectly fine, but this kid? This kid richly deserves every wedgie, swirly and wet willie which his peers will be visiting upon him the second the teacher's back is turned.

While the world may need more virtuous people, it certainly does not need more self-righteous goodys-two-shoes*. I mean, Harvard can only admit so many people**.

* I have no idea how one pluralizes "goody-two-shoes."
** Maybe Yale would be more appropriate here, but I just used them as a punchline a couple days ago.

Why is Jesse Jackson ever allowed to speak?

Everyone knows you've got to dance with the one that brung you, but Jesse Jackson's comments today that Dan Gilbert's response to LeBron's departure constituted a slave-owner mentality were beyond the pale even for a man who declared in front of a live microphone his desire to castrate Barack Obama. His accusations were so deranged that I'm pretty sure Louis Farrakhan sat up and said, "Whoa, dude, that's a little excessive, don't you think?"

Look, JJ, we all know you wouldn't be where you are today if you hadn't blazed new trails in generating controversy, but maybe you should save your race-baiting for the political arena and leave sports well enough alone. Besides, we already have Jason Whitlock for that, and last I checked, he was busy advocating putting Ball State into the BCS championship game. Even you aren't that extreme, are you?

Why is there a store called Babesta Cribz?

More specifically, why is there a store on my walk to work whose website says with no apparent irony:

For your cool babies, toddlers and kids, Babesta.com offers everything from Che tanks, Ramones concert tees, record player retro raglans and Trumpette sneaker–socks to the tunes that they really tune into–like Music for Aardvarks, Putumayo Kids’ Reggae Playground and Dan Zanes’ cult favorites. You decide if his genetic marker for cool came from the X or the Y (probably both!), but he’s a Babesta for sure if he snuggles up with Ugly Dolls and Pooki pets, and insists on mischievously modern furniture from standouts like Oeuf and Duc Duc New York.

I…I have no words. Well, I have words, but they all begin with "What the" and end in some combination of monosyllabic gibbering, threats of arson and derogatory remarks about Yale University.

Why does LeBron James make Dr. Ford look good at breakups?

I've seen some bad breakups in my life. There was the time my 14-year-old cousin decided to dump his girlfriend by just never speaking with her again up to and including when she showed up at the door demanding an explanation. There was the time my friend Chris decided to make out with a girl during calculus class despite his girlfriend being in that same class two rows over. There was that "YOU'RE GOING TO GET A C ON YOUR THESIS JUST DEAL WITH IT" incident and, of course, the Fordpocalypse. Well, move over all of you, because LeBron James just raised the bar.

I'm not going to bother rehashing the details because ESPN has done everything short of sending Stu Scott with a crowbar to jimmy open your door and leave informational pamphlets on your nightstand to make sure everyone is updated on King James's activities to the microsecond. But really, if you're going to spend two months toying with a fanbase only to royally dick them over so you can go hang out with your friends, maybe next time you should skip the nationally televised ceremony.

What's really got to rankle for LeBron is that, even after all his efforts, Art Modell is still going to sweep the Biggest Douche in Cleveland Sports History championships.

(Obligatory inside joke for friends, since I'm pretty sure they're the only readers of Lushy's that I haven't run off: Well, at least LeBron didn't get back together with his old girlfriend, Crazy St. Vincent St. Mary's.)

Why have people lost all grip on what constitutes a martini?

This evening, I was out drinking with some coworkers (and am still somewhat drunk, so any typos should be blamed on the fact that my keyboard keeps rather whimsically leaping in random directions) When it was my turn to get the next round, I asked everyone for their drink orders and was a little taken aback when a girl who had been slugging down saccharine rieslings all evening asked for a martini. But since I am never one to discourage the consumption of proper booze, I simply asked her how she wanted it.

To preface, there is a very limited set of correct responses to that question. To the best of my knowledge, they are "Up," "On the rocks," "With a twist/olive/onion," and "Dry/Very dry/Extremely dry/Just put it next to the vermouth bottle for a few seconds". "Dirty" may also be acceptable, but only if someone with you will follow it up with "That's what she said!" and at least 15 seconds of sophomoric laughter (high fives and fist bumps optional). However, her response was: "With Malibu."

Now, I have no idea what she was really asking for and don't want to know, but I blame this on the modern explosion of insanely misnamed cocktails like appletinis, passion fruit martinis and pomegranappleelderflowermarshmallowtinis. I'm sorry, but if you want to call what you're drinking a martini that badly, you'll have to tough it out and drink gin and vermouth. Vodka is alright too, as long as you sleep with Ursula Andress afterwards.

P.S. Why the hell isn't there a 'booze' tag on this blog? The fake football blog has at least six. Lushy, you have let me down. I'm just going to use the 'peter jackson' tag instead.

Why don't people understand the difference between having a picnic in the park and building a shantytown in the park?

Look, everyone wants to spend the Fourth of July weekend relaxing out of doors, tossing around the football and watching some fireworks. And what better place to do that than a waterside park, right? So, while I'm generally not the biggest fan in the world of indolence and small children, I was feeling benevolent towards the crowds I expected to find.

What I was not expecting, however, was to find myself in a scale reproduction of a favela with slightly less heroin and slightly more strollers. I don't mean to be unreasonable or anything, but I think at the point where you are setting up structures with roofs (Lushy would probably write that 'rooves'.), you've probably exceeded the bounds of good taste. Or, since I don't want to appear draconian, how about we just draw the line at any structure that requires you to actually sink supports and guy wires into the ground? Also, a good-faith renunciation of any and all power tools would be a nice gesture.

Come on, people. It's a holiday to celebrate independence, not Hoovervilles.

Why is there email spam?

Would anyone on earth respond to an email like "Hello I am friend write reply again HELP in London AND crazy but passport stolen if you can I would THANKS THANKS --your love Daniel"? Or a sequence of random letters and numbers with the phrase "er3ct1le m3ds" thrown in a couple of times? I just can't imagine that, at this point in time, even the most technology-illiterate grandmother is going to reply to one of those saying "Oh hello sir, my social security number is 245-67-2459. I hope that helps you with your predicament."

I know nobody ever went broke betting on the stupidity of mankind, but there is no way those emails can be worth the effort at this point. Once my shipment of Rolexes and generic Viagra get here, I am going to just start deleting them without bothering to read them at all.

Why is Canadian football insane?

Disclaimer: Before last night, I had never watched a single CFL game, so I might be even more profoundly wrong about this than I am about most things.

In the past five years or so, I've watched hundreds of hours of NFL games, and I have seen an intentional, self-inflicted safety exactly zero times (The Lions' decision to let Dan Orlovsky touch the ball in his own end zone doesn't technically count). I have heard of it happening once (2003 Broncos-Patriots game) and can maybe come up with one or two other instances where it might have been a valid strategy. Bottom line, they don't happen much.

But you know how many there were in last night's CFL game? Two. Both in the same quarter. They came when the teams were, respectively, trailing by 14 and leading by 16. In one instance, the team had been stopped inside their own five and were forced to punt from deep in their own end zone, in the other, the team was stopped around their own 15 and were punting from just about the goal line.

I remain totally mystified by them on all levels. In a game where defenses would be just about as effective if they were all replaced by Asante Samuel FatHeads, it's not like the extra 30 yards or so of field position you gain from the safety kick versus just punting the ball away can possibly be worth two expected points. And even if it were close, which I can't imagine it is, scoring on yourself is just plain lame no matter how tactically advantageous. If it really is the right call, then they really ought to change the rules so it's not.

I am really tempted to ascribe it all to stereotypical Canadian politeness. "Hey buddy, that was a pretty nice defensive stand you put up there. How about we just give you two points for it, eh?"

Why can't anyone make a decent Nazi zombie movie?

It's long been an established fact that, if you're making a movie and you need a villain who will cause absolutely no controversy, your choices are limited to Nazis and the undead. Anyone else, and you're bound to get picketed or sued by someone, but with those two, you're pretty much safe. And there have been lots of great movies made on this principle. But for reasons I can't understand, nobody has managed to combine the two and make a great film about Nazi zombies.

That's not to say nobody has ever tried. I have seen virtually every Nazi zombie movie of whose existence I am aware, although that is only two out of three (I haven't watched the third because I've heard it's really just French softcore porn with periodic reanimated corpses in jackboots. (Now there's a sentence you're unlikely to hear very often.)), and none of them fulfilled its potential. I can't quite put my finger on why Shock Waves (billed as "The greatest underwater Nazi zombie movie of all time") or Dead Snow (Tagline: "Eins. Zwei. Die!") were such disappointments, but they were. My theory is that having to explain why there are still Nazis around decades after the end of the Second World War necessitates making them sentient to the point that it puts too much strain on their zombieish qualities.

So here's my suggestion: just set the whole movie during WWII. The internet informs me that this is already the plot of some add-on to Call of Duty, and it's not like anyone's been shy about making video-game-based movies lately. Besides, I am positive that Saving Private Ryan would be noticeably improved if the maudlin scenes where we get touching glimpses into Tom Hanks's character went more like this:

*Tom Hanks comes upon Matt Damon sitting alone, tears running down his face*

Matt Damon: I...I can't even remember their faces.

*Hanks sits down next to him, putting his hand on his shoulder and makes the kind of face that he makes before delivering a homespun speech which you will have to hear quoted by idiots for the next 30 years*

Tom Hanks: Well when I think of home, I... I think of something specific. I think of my, my hammock in the backyard or my wife-

Matt Damon: HOLY SHIT IT'S THE RAVENING UNDEAD AND THEY'RE WEARING SS UNIFORMS RUN FOR THE HILLS AAAAIIEEEEE!!!

*A ravening undead horde eats Tom Hanks's brain*
*Tom Hanks suddenly understands what it feels like to watch Castaway*

Tell me you wouldn't watch that.