The NFL regular season has started this week according to facebook statuses on my feed from people who care about that sort of thing and I am just bursting with apathy for the 2013 NFL season!



I just can’t stand football. Don’t like it. Never have, never will. I hate the fact that plays take 45 minutes to line up and then last about 3 seconds. I hate the set of rules that make Quidditch look simple. I hate the fact that people lose their fucking minds over this sport more than any other.



There’s a hundred reasons for me to hate football and not a lot of reasons for me to love it since I’m in Minnesota and our team seems to eat shit every year.



Even though I can’t stand the sport, I always end up in conversations about it. At work, with friends, at a bar or on the road there’s always going to be conversations about football just because that’s what guys talk about. I’m almost convinced that other guys don’t like football either but it gives them something to talk about with other guys. Without football we’d all be looking around nervously, breaking the silence occasionally with awkward little statements like “So… that Syria thing’s pretty complicated.”



So, rather than throw a monkey wrench into conversations by saying something boring and pretentious like “UH ACTUALLY I DON’T CARE MUCH FOR THAT SPORT I THINK IT’S FOR TROGLEDYTES HOW ABOUT WE DISCUSS WORLD POLITICS HHHHMMMMM?” I’ve just learned how to blend into football conversations without knowing anything about football. It’s a little tricky in a one on one conversation but pretty easy in groups of three or more. Here’s a few tips and tricks.



Christian Ponder sucks – You only need to find out one player in the whole league who is awful and then just use him as a punching bag in conversations. According to my facebook feed, this year it’s Christian Ponder. Berate him, mock him, verbally eviscerate him. He is our sacrificial lamb. Serves him right for playing poorly or whatever.

When watching a game at a bar, just cheer when everybody else cheers – You have to be good with your timing on this. Miss a beat and they’ll sniff you out but time it just right and total strangers will be giving you that one armed side hug in celebration. Touchdown!



When asked about the game yesterday or last weekend, just go “Ugh. Can you believe that shit?” Nine times out of ten they’ll just start extrapolating on the shit that you can’t believe that went on in the aformentioned game. Most of the time football fans just want a willing ear to hear them bitch about football. Just nod and smile.



With these tips you can successfully survive football season and then people can get back to talking about stuff that actually matters like movie adaptations of comic books.

I remember when I was a little kid, and my peers all wanted to be astronauts. To go to space and eat space ice cream and do space things. We would come up with all sorts of things that had to be done differently in space, like drink water and brush your teeth.

It’s pretty much the coolest thing in the world.

But if you had told those kids how difficult one task was, they would have said things like “eeew!” and wrinkled their little noses, and giggle at the idea of it like the the 5-7 year olds that they are.

Apparently, on of the most complex things to do as an astronaut is go to the bathroom.

Let’s start with the human body in space. Specifically the kidneys. One of the many things they do is act as a kind of “potty gauge,” to keep an eye on your bladder’s urine levels and let you know if you getting too full. One of the essential tools it uses to do this is gravity.

So when someone gets shot into space, the kidneys loose their grip on how full they are and start signalling to the rest of the body that they need to find a rest stop after about 2 hours or so. And it doesn’t matter how much mission control reminds them to use the potty before they go. Astronauts all become that whiny 4 year old in the back seat, crying “but MOM! I need to go to the bathroom NOW!”

Gravity is also an important factor in toilet function. We always talk about things going down the drain, but without gravity, there’s no “down” for things to go, and nothing to pull things into a container an hold them there.

There’s nothing to keep your shit together. Ahem.

So of course scientists have created very high tech toilets to circumnavigate this issue. For urine, they have a hose attachment with a light vacuum to pull the pee into a container. Each person gets a different personal funnel to use with this hose.

Apparently, even male astronauts are dudes at heart and continually ask for the largest funnel before getting properly fitted.

The shitter (technical term) also works off of a light vacuum technology. It’s a toilet seat with a 4 inch hole that you very carefully position your asshole (usually literal, but sometimes metaphorical) over. It’s such a precise piece of technology, that the astronauts have to go through classes on how to use it.

That’s right- astronaut potty training.

Come on, you guys. This isn’t rocket science!

I love all my childhood games. Up until 5 years ago, I still owned my apple IIe with 300 baud modem, and old floppy disks with games like Wishbringer, Oregon Trail, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

First off, I think my son’s childhood is a little less awesome for not having the Carmen Sandiego game show growing up. He told me they were going to start some kind of Carmen Sandiego cartoon, but I’m afraid it’ll end up like Dora the Explorer. Or Go Diego Go.

Go, Sandiego, Go. I can see it, and it makes me sad.

Luckily, it looks like they may be rebroadcasting old episodes. Which really pleases me. A lot.

To celebrate, I bring you a few emulators for the old classic games.

Let’s start with the 1990 version for you 90’s kids. It’s a good emulator, though the Java Applet is a little wonky if you scroll at all.

For you Nintendo kids, there is the slightly later (1992?) release of Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego. I played it a couple times as a kid, but it never felt quite right to me. Still, I won’t begrudge you your nostalgia if you don’t begrudge me mine…

One of my favorite sites, Virtual Apple, has the exact game from my childhood. As soon as I booted the disc and got those midi gunshots, footsteps, and police sirens, I was 8 years old again at Dad’s computer.

*sigh* I remember the days I used to be nostalgic.

One more note: I discovered you can follow Carmen Sandiego on Twitter. That just seems like cheating.