Despite being popular for much of history, moustaches are now the style equivalent of wearing parachute pants on your upper lip. Thankfully, a few segments of the population continue to brandish their push brooms with pride.

Original Gangstas: The 7 Most Hardcore Blues Songs Written Before 1950

Your grandparents are full of shit. What they don’t mention as they grumble about the rap music destroying civilization, was that the blues they were listening to in the 30s and 40s could be every bit as violent, sexually explicit and sometimes just downright insane as the worst gansta rap has to offer. Compared to some of these vintage lyrics the members of N.W.A are levelheaded concerned citizens, and Eminem’s a regular feminist.


“22-20 Blues” by Skip James

“22-20 Blues” tells the tale of a woman who just won’t get her act straight. See, Skip James sent for her, on several occasions, and yet she didn’t show up! The brazen audacity! Of course in the world of blues there’s only one way to deal with minor punctuality issues – murder.

Big on punctuality.

A Few Choice Quotes

You know, sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don't wanna do
Sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don't wanna do
But I get my 22-20
I cut that woman half in two

Oh, your.38 Special
Buddy, it's most too light
Your .38 Special
Buddy, it's most too light
But my 22-20
Will make ev'rything, alright

Shooting your woman with a mere .38 pistol? That’s for pussies. Ironically James soon found himself humbled when Robert Johnson recorded a far more popular version of his song. The only real change Johnson made? He upped the calibre and named it the “32-20 Blues”. It was all about the gun size with those boys.


“If You’se a Viper” by Stuff Smith

More than a few rappers have based their careers on professing their affection for certain smokeable substances, a proud tradition that dates back to jazz and blues from as early as the 1920s. Apparently one of the worst side effects of pot is smokers’ inability to stop writing songs about it.

This guy liked to do drugs? No way.

A Few Choice Quotes

Talk about a reefer of five feet long
Not too fat and not too strong

Come on now, 5-feet? That’s just impractical.

Now when your throat get dry
And you know you're high
Everything is dandy
Truck on down to your candy store
Get you kicks off peppermint candy

Peppermint candy? The munchies sucked in the pre-Doritos era.


“Whoopee Blues” by King Solomon Hill

Another song about a poor blues man having to deal with a mean mistreating woman. King Solomon Hill isn’t one to settle for mere murder though, he wants his woman sent to hell to do it with the Devil, which strikes us as just a tad judgemental. We’re no theologians, but we’re pretty sure slashing your girlfriend to death with a razor is pretty much a one-way ticket to becoming Satan’s bitch.

Don't worry, he's in hell now.

A Few Choice Quotes

Wherever you been gone all day, that you may make whoopee all night
Tell me you been gone all day, that you may make whoopee all night
I'm gonna take my razor and cut your late hours,
You wouldn't think I'd be servin' you right

Undertaker been here and gone, I gave him your height and seize
I said, Undertaker been here and gone, I gave him your height and seize
You be makin' whoopee with the devil in hell tomorrow night

Apparently undertakers didn’t ask a whole lot of questions back then.

You made me love you, now you got me for your slave
Baby, you done made me love you, now I got me for your slave
From now you'll be makin' whoopee, deep in your lonesome grave

Ahhh, now we see. He did it because he cared too much!


“Mad Mama Blues” by Josie Miles


Obviously violence against women was a bit of an unfortunate theme of early blues, but as Josie Miles shows, female blues singers didn’t shrink from a bit of insane violence either. Josie doesn’t even need a reason, in “Mad Mama Blues” she’s out to wreck the city like Godzilla in a cocktail dress and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

A Few Choice Quotes

Now I could see blood runnin’
Through the streets
Now I could see blood runnin’
Through the streets
Could be everyone
Layin’ dead right right at my feet.

“Hello?! 9-11? Quick! You have to…oh God, she’s coming!”

Give me gunpowder
Give me dynamite
Give me gunpowder
Give me dynamite
Yes I’d wreck the city
Wanna blow it up tonight

“It’s Josie Miles!”

I took my big Winchester
Down off the shelf
I took my big Winchester
Down off the shelf
When I get through shootin’
There won’t be nobody left

“Send the police! The national guard! Before it’s too…arrrraaghaghh!”

“Shave ‘Em Dry” by Lucille Bogan

Odds are Lucille Bogan had just has sex when this picture was taken.

Looking at a picture of Lucille Bogan it’s easy to imagine her as the motherly type, making breakfast and scolding you for your dirty mouth, but in reality beneath the modest exterior was the queen of the “dirty blues”, and the writer of such classics as “Sloppy Drunk Blues”, “Tricks Ain’t Walkin’ No More” and the “Bull Dyke Women’s Blues”.

Her most infamous song was “Shave ‘Em Dry”, a 3-minute ode to her own humping prowess so filthy it would Lil’ Kim blush.

A Few Choice Quotes

I got nipples on my titties, big as the end of my thumb,
I got somethin’ between my legs’ll make a dead man come

You know it’s a good song when the first two lines reference necrophilia and thumb-sized nipples.

Say I fucked all night, and all the night before baby,
And I feel just like I wanna, fuck some more

You know how people ask which dead celebrity you’d like to meet if you could? We submit Lucille Bogan for your consideration.

Now your nuts hang down like a damn bell sapper,
And your dick stands up like a steeple,
Your goddamn asshole stands open like a church door,
And the crabs walks in like people.

Er, actually we take that back.


“Butcher Pete” by Roy Brown

So, there were plenty of old blues songs that were either horrifically violent, or sexually explicit, but Roy Brown wasn’t a man to be satisfied with just one or the other. His song “Butcher Pete” is about a guy who goes around the countryside “chopping up all the women’s meat” with his “long sharp knife”. Get it? This is a rare example where hiding the sexual content behind double entendres and innuendo somehow made the song a thousand times more offensive.

Jeez, this song is getting a bit offensive. Better add some graphic stabbings.

A Few Choice Quotes

Ever since Peter flew into town
He's been havin' a ball
Just cuttin' and choppin' for miles around
Single women, married women, old maids and all
It’s nice to know Butcher Pete doesn’t discriminate. Old maids need chopping too.

The police put Pete in jail
Yes, he finally met his faith
But when they came to pay his bail
They found him choppin' up his cellmate

Whoa whoa, wait. Chopping up his cellmate? Come on blues guys, you already beat rap to the punch when it comes to horrifying violence and misogyny, do you have to claim suspiciously gay lyrics too?


“A to Z Blues” by Blind Willie McTell

From Ray Charles to Stevie Wonder, the list of beloved blind performers is a long one, but as Blind Willie McTell proves, not all blind musicians are quite so cuddly.

The blindness was the only thing that limited his carnage.
At first the “A to Z Blues” seems to be a standard “my woman done me wrong” blues song, but then Blind Willie goes and gets creative. The result is a song that sounds like something that might have been created had Sesame Street ever been visited by Charlie Manson.

A Few Choice Quotes

I’m gonna cut your head four different ways.
That’s long, short, deep and wide.

Cutting heads is a lost art. Most kids today would probably know 2 different ways max.

When I get a rhythm of this rusty black handle razor
you’re gonna be booked out for an ambulance ride.
Cause I’m gonna cut A, B, C, D on top of your head
That’s gonna be treating you nice like mama you ain’t gonna be dead.

Keeping someone alive as you slowly carve the alphabet into them is one of the more liberal definitions of “nice” we’ve heard. Wait, why are you backing away? We still have 22 more letters to go!

I’m gonna cut E, F, G right across your face.
H, I, J, K, that’s where runnin’ bound to take place.
Cut L, M, N cross both your arms.
You’ll sell an’ peddle gal your whole life long.
Cut N, O, P, Q that’s gonna be trouble too
Cause I’m gonna grab you mama and turn you every way but loose.
Cut R, S, T to hear you cry
That’ll be the last time tears a run from over your eyes.
Cut U, V, W on the bottom of your feet.
That’ll be the last time you walk up an’ down 25th street.
Marking cross your bosom with X, Y, Z
When I get through with this alphabet
You’ll quit your messing with me.

Blind Willie’s dedication to educating as he horrifies is nothing short of inspirational really.

Nathan Birch also writes the not at all gangsta webcomic Zoology.

5 Ways Other People Can Make You Lose Your Goddamn Mind

We all like to think we have a firm grip on our sanity, but drop anybody into a group of people and they can, given the right conditions, go from level headed to frighteningly insane in the time it takes to shit their pants. You may want to remember this stuff for any future insanity pleas.


Public Panics

For all our stuffed crusts, miracle boner pills and other marvellous achievements, modern man hasn’t strayed from his primitive herd mentality as much we’d like to think. When our caveman ancestors were threatened, there wasn’t time to form a committee and canvas opinions on how to address the big furry thing dragging children into the jungle. In order to survive the group had to be able to act immediately as a coherent unit without any thought or coordination. While our mind’s ability to suppress our own personality and conform to the will of the pack on a moment’s notice certainly helped our ancestors avoid becoming sabre-toothed tiger poop, today it’s often the cause of a lot stupid and downright frightening behaviour.

Public panics represent this herd mentality in it’s purest form, with irrational fear spreading from one person to another like a disease, until people are convinced alien invaders are on their way, or that a Mad Max-esque apocalyptic wasteland is inevitable because their computer's calendar only goes up 1999. A particularly retarded event took place in England during the 19th century. A chicken began laying eggs inscribed with the message “Christ is coming”, inciting mass hysteria and countless religious conversions, that is until it was discovered the owner of the animal was simply writing the messages on the eggs and shoving them back in the chicken. God works in mysterious ways and all, but we’d like to think news of the second coming wouldn’t come out of a chicken’s ass.

Speaking of God, this next phenomenon was seemingly created by him as a gift to comedy writers. Genital retraction syndrome, or penis panics, involve all the guys in an area being overcome by the belief that their junk is shrinking/disappearing. There’s a good chance you’ve read at least one short story about this in the “What are Those Wacky Foreigners Doing Now?” section of the paper, since apparently this shit happens all the goddamn time. We chuckle at this, but take a second to imagine how you might react if you genuinely thought somebody was making your dong disappear.

Mobs are formed, people are butchered and hey, why not, let’s blame the Jews. It ain’t pretty. Cracked.com, not afraid to bring you the dark side of dick jokes.


Hysterical Contagion

Human beings have an innate need to mimic others. Subconsciously we’re constantly synchronizing everything from our moods to expressions to posture with those around us. We’ve all been doing it since the day we were born, as babies essentially learn how to be human by imitating every expression and emotion of their parents. Sometimes people take this mimicry far beyond moods and expressions though. In the case of hysterical contagion very real physical ailments or symptoms will manifest in people without any underlying cause. In most cases the spread starts with a single person who, more often than not, never had anything actually wrong with them in the first place. Turns out “fire!” isn’t the only thing you shouldn’t yell in a crowded theatre.

The most well known case of hysterical contagion was the 1962 June Bug Epidemic. It was a regular day at the Strongsville textile factory, or at least it was until one-by-one the women working there were stricken with dizziness, rashes and vomiting. The cause of this mystery plague according to the women? An evil June bug that could make you sick with a bite, which of course is absurd, but no other cause of the illness was ever found. What surprises us is the lack of any low-budget horror movies based on the incident.

There have been bigger, and much more stupid, incidents. In Portugal, teen soap opera with a filthy sounding name “Strawberries and Sugar” ran a storyline about a deadly virus. Soon hundreds of kids across the country were seemingly contracting the same symptoms as the TV characters. It got so bad 14 Portuguese schools had to be closed due to the epidemic. Say what you will about America’s youth, but at least we never lost our minds watching Saved by the Bell. Wasted them, sure, but we didn’t lose them.

This is what madness looks like in Portugal.

Oh, and the toxic woman mentioned in this previous Cracked article may have also been an example, but it’s more fun to believe she was a gamma ray emitting mutant from the lagoon of death.


Cryptids and Folk Monsters

We’ve all been taught that monsters don’t exist, and yet somehow tales and sightings of legendary creatures continue to be pervasive. These legendary beasts are known as cryptids, and believe it or not, not all of them are the fabrications of moonshine swilling hillbillies. For those who believe, their experiences with these creatures can be very real, and in some cases these delusions can become widespead in an area. A possible explanation could be Folie à deux, a rare phenomenon in which a fullblown mental disorder can be trasferred from one person to another.

Mental disorders such as the delusional belief that this cuddly fellow exists for instance…

Despite looking like a refugee from the pages of “Where the Wild Things Are”, back in 2001 the Monkey Man of Delhi caused some serious apeshit to hit the fan. Delhi was driven into a frenzy, with countless people witnessing the critter. People would show up with wounds supposedly caused the Monkey Man (most of them self inflicted), midgets were mistaken for the creature and pummelled, and reportedly as many as 3-people leapt to their deaths trying to “escape” it. One of the last sightings of the Monkey Man was of him boarding a Russian airliner. Not saying we believe in all this, but if the Cold War sparks up again, I think we know who to blame.

Some monster scares involved more human threats. Take for example Spring-Heeled Jack, a shadowy figure that terrorized England during the 19th century with his claws, glowing eyes and amazing leaping ability. There continues to be debate over whether he actually exited in some form, but he kind of looked like Batman, so he couldn’t have been all bad.

Crazes

If public panics are the result of fear, crazes occur are when people become insanely enthusiastic about something. While ancient defence mechanisms may explain public panics, it’s not as clear what causes people to become irrationally passionate about something. A contributing factor could be Collective effervescence, a powerful, usually positive energy people perceive when in a group of people. It explains such timeless mysteries as why people still cheer for the Cubs and why nobody at a rave realizes how retarded they look. Sometimes this collective effervescence can escalate into full-blown mania, with people suffering hallucinations, delusions and totally losing control of their actions.

Take Dancing Mania for example. Kind of sounds like the title of Time Life CD collection, but it’s not as harmless as you might think. The Dancing Plague of 1518 involved hundreds of people feverishly dancing for nearly a month straight, only stopping when most of them died heart attacks or exhaustion. At least the dancing plague took place during the 1500s and not the 1990s; nobody should have to die doing the Macarena.

Dance of the damned.

But forget dancing mania, let’s talk nuns gone wild. During the 15th century nuns in one convent after another began taking chomps out each other, as nun biting mania spread across Europe. Around the same time a large convent of nuns in France decided to up the crazy stakes, and all began meowing together, only stopping when the police theatened beat them with rods. To be fair, a life of forced celibacy mike make us want to do a bit of meowing and biting ourselves.

For a more recent example we head back to the crowd based crazy capital of the world, India. In 2006, the residents of Mumbai claimed the water in their creek had turned sweet and the craze was on, with thousands of people flocking to drink the water believing it was a divine miracle. Yeah, turns out now so much. The creek in question was one of the most polluted in India, receiving tons of raw sewage daily, and officials believe people thought it tasted sweet simply because, for whatever reason, the river was temporarily less contaminated. India, where temporarily having less shit in your drinking water is considered a miracle.

Riots

So crowds can make you sick, drive you insane with fear, and make you drink shit, but what happens when instead of going into defensive mode, as in a public panic, a crowd lashes out in anger? Well then you’ve got a riot, and you’ve got some serious trouble. Riots usually form around a single aggressive person (or perhaps a small group of them), willing the make the first violent move, and then spreads, with normally peaceful people getting caught up in the frenzy. But hey, people wouldn’t riot without a good reason, right?

Well, no. Of course there’s a long and proud history of people getting way too worked up about their favourite sports teams, dating back to the 6th century when Constantinople was rocked by the Nika revolt, a riot that would put the work of Britain’s best soccer hooligans to shame. Started over chariot racing, by the end of the riot half of Constantinople was destroyed and approximately 30-thousand people were dead.

But it’s not just sports fans that like a good riot; music fans can get in on the fun too. During the 19th and early 20th century it became fairly commonplace for the performance of new classical music pieces to degenerate into melees. Riots at concerts continue to this day, like the one that rocked Woodstock ’99 after a performance by this modern day Mozart…

The power of crowds made thousands of poeple lose their shit over this douchebag. Be afraid.
Nathan Birch also writes the hysterical webcomic Zoology.

Star Dreck: The 7 Stupidest Trek Alien Races in the Galaxy

Anyone who questions the existence of life on other planets has obviously never watched Star Trek, because if they had they’d know our galaxy is positively swarming with aliens sporting all manner of exotic forehead ridges and snug sequined outfits. Not all Trek species are created equal though. While the Vulcans and Klingons have inspired sweaty, creepy, nerd devotion for decades, the aliens on this list mostly prove just how retarded the final frontier can be.


The Iotians

Appeared in: Star Trek, Episode 49 “A Piece of the Action”.

Looking to score yourself some bootleg Romulan ale, a few green hookers, and the best damn cannoli in the quadrant? Well head on over to Sigma Iotia II, home of low-down dirty space mobsters, the Iotians.

Never before has a man looked so smug wearing a straw hat and purple bow tie.

Now you’re probably wondering, why the hell is there a planet populated entirely by cartoonish Italian mobster stereotypes? Don’t worry, there’s a perfectly logical answer. See, 100-years before Kirk and crew stumbled upon them, a previous Federation ship had visited the planet and some dope left behind that classic piece of 22nd century literature “Chicago Mobs of the 1920s”. Upon finding and somehow decoding the book the Iotians, in a perfectly reasonable move, decided these drug peddling mass murderers would be the perfect folks to model their entire society after.

Then again, maybe the mobsters described in “Chicago Mobs of the 1920s” weren’t so bad. A kinder gentler breed of gangster. What else could explain the fact that this dork takes over the entire planet within the span of 30 minutes?

Thought the ending to the Sopranos was bad? Their original idea was even worse.

By the way, this was hardly the only time Trek producers had the crew dress up in stock costumes and romp around some Hollywood backlot. How do you top space mobsters as villains though? Well…

We would have given them their own entry, but there's a limited amount of hilarity to be wrung from the Third Reich.

Video Evidence of Iotian Lameness

Thrill as Kirk defeats the big bad gangsters with a game of 52 Pickup!



The Xyrillians

Appeared in: Star Trek Enterprise, Episode 4 “The Unexpected”.

Sex and Star Trek don’t mix. Almost every episode that’s approached the subject has crashed and burned as fast and hard as a Trekkie at speed dating. Even the birds and bees, a subject we trust 7-year olds to be mature enough to handle, is enough to make the Trek writers lose their goddamn minds. For proof of this we refer you to the Xyrillians.

In the 22nd century this is considered irresistible.

Xyrillian impregnation requires only minor physical contact, the men carry the children, and only the genetics of the mother are passed on. So in other words, a brief brush of the hand with a woman and suddenly a guy is stuck carrying a baby that isn’t even his. If this society were at all realistic the guys would all be wearing full-body condoms 24-hours a day, or would have long since split the planet down the middle using a giant wall with “NO SMELLY GIRLS ALLOWED!” written in 50-foot letters on it.

The questions just keep coming (at least they do assuming you read your grade 7 health textbook). Why would a male sex even continue to exist if they don’t pass on their genetic material? Why would women continue to sport obvious mammalian breasts and childbearing hips under their shiny silver jumpsuits if they have nothing to do with carrying the babies? Where do the writers who came up with this crap live so we can go punch them in the face?

Oh and yes, Futurama fans may recall an episode in which it’s revealed Zap Brannigan’s assistant Kif reproduces similarly to the Xyrillians. Trust us though, the cartoon made a hell of a lot more sense.

Video Evidence of Xyrillian Lameness

We could only find this brief trailer for the episode the Xyrillians appear in, but it hits the major notes. Commander Trip Tucker having the hots for an alien that looks to be descended from a salamander, pregnant dudes, people making lots of silly faces and of course the wrist nipple. How Rick Berman and Brannon Braga managed to survive 2 more seasons as the top Trek producers instead of being immediately shot out of a cannon after writing this episode we don’t know.



The J’naii

Appeared in: Star Trek The Next Generation, Episode 116 “The Outcast”.

Considering the Trek writers couldn’t even deal properly with an episode about where babies come from, you can imagine how well things went when they tried to tackle the complex subject of homosexuality.

The J’naii are a genderless androgynous race, which deeply opposes any kind of sexual activity. Now most men would likely be deterred in the face of overwhelming cultural opposition and a confusing genital situation, but Commander William T. Riker isn’t most men.

Once Riker hits the planet and starts spreading his beardy musk around, a J’naii named Soren immediately decides he/she wouldn’t mind a ride on his “number one”. This brings up the question, are the J’naii actually genderless or are they just a race of aliens with bad haircuts and primitive bra technology? It doesn’t help that the Trek producers had women play all the J’naii, making them come off less androgynous, and more like a planet of lesbian man-haters.

The result is the episode’s message ends up completely garbled. Intended as a condemnation of homophobia, the episode instead comes off as the story of one woman’s brave quest for cock in the face of lesbian tyranny.

It's worse than I thought. My sensors indicate a Class-5 bowl cut.

Video Evidence of J’naii Lameness

From Soren and Riker’s least-sexy talk about sex ever at the beginning to Worf’s hilarious casual misogyny at the end, these may be the most uncomfortable 10-minutes of Trek ever.



The Kohms and Yangs

Appeared in: Star Trek, Episode 55 “The Omega Glory”.

It’s common for aliens in the Trek universe to be metaphors created to address contemporary political or cultural issues, but in the case of the Kohms and Yangs subtlety was set on fire, strapped to a dump truck full of dynamite and rolled off a cliff.

The Kohms all look to be Chinese, wear goofy Russian fur hats and are generally a bunch of jerks. The Yangs on the other hand are white, blonde, manly men who love freedom. It doesn’t take Kirk long to deduce that the Yangs were once known as “Yankees” and the Kohms were “Communists”. The Yangs even worship a replica of the United States Constitution and use an American Flag as their symbol.

So how did these space Americans and Commies come to exist? Time travel? Uh, tachyon rays? M-rays? Some sort of rays? Nope, apparently this exact mirror of the cold war during the 1960s developed purely by chance. It’s explained that this is perfectly plausible due to Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development, although we think Gene Roddenberry’s Law of “Let’s Get This Goddamn Script Done so We Can Hit the Links” is what was really at work.

Video Evidence of Kohm and Yang Lameness

Kirk’s patriotic speech is stirring and all, but he seems to have forgotten he represents the Federation, not the United States, and in fact according to the Trek timeline the US hadn’t existed for over 100-years by this time. Also he’s played by a Canadian, and you know you can’t trust anything they say.



The Greek Gods

Appeared in: Star Trek, Episode 34 “Who Mourns for Adonais?”

“But wait” you say, “the Greek Gods weren’t aliens!”

Well, that’s what you think. Thankfully Star Trek knows better. See turns out the Greek Gods were a race of aliens that lived on a planet named Pollux IV and traveled to Earth 5000-years ago to dick around with us. By the time the Enterprise arrives at Pollux IV, only Apollo is left for no particularly well-explained reason (other than a limited casting budget).

MORTALS! PULL...MY...FINGER!!!

If you’re expecting a twist, wherein it’s revealed Apollo is a fake, don’t. The episode plays it completely straight. Apollo is an actual god who can make giant green Enterprise grabbing hands appear in space and throw lightning bolts, which comes off as completely out of place in a series that usually goes to ridiculous lengths to come up with “scientific” explanations for all the silly shit that happens in any given episode.

Also as far as Gods go, Apollo is a complete loser. Kirk is less afraid of him than a trip to the dentist and in the end of the episode Apollo decides to end it all because a chick he met a few hours ago rejected him. Seriously, what a pussy.

Video Evidence of Greek God Lameness

See what happens when Apollo dares to step to the real God of the Trek universe, William Shatner. Also, that gold toga/miniskirt is something isn’t it?



The Sky Spirits

Appeared in: Star Trek Voyager, Episode 24 “Tattoo”.

Okay, so the Trek writers turned the Greek Gods into aliens. Big deal, right? It’s not like anybody really worships them anymore. No, to really offend people they’d need to do something like write an episode where it’s implied Native American culture was entirely the creation of aliens who flew to Earth thousands of years ago to educate the “savages” living there.

Wait, they actually wrote an episode like that? In 1995? Christ.

The episode stars Commander Chakotay who, when stranded on a strange planet, does the logical thing and gets naked and wanders into a cave, where he runs into a bunch of white, blonde haired aliens who by completely implausible coincidence have the same tattoo on their faces as he does.

Also, I've got a pretty cool Tazmanian devil on my bicep.

They explain the whole “we’re responsible for your whole culture thing” which Chakotay takes entirely at face value, since doing otherwise would have required him to show emotion and for once not be one of the most boring Trek characters ever. Then Chakotay flies off and his discovery, one of the most culturally significant revelations in human history, is never mentioned again.

Video Evidence of Sky Spirit Lameness

Watch as the Voyager writers trot out one cliché about Native Americans after another until you half expect Chakotay to start weeping at the sight someone littering. Also featured; the most drawn out crash-landing sequence ever!



The Catullans

Appeared in: Star Trek, Episode 76 “This Way to Eden”.

Oh yeah baby, it’s time for the Catullans, aka the Space Hippies. Far out! Now man, now! Wavy Gravy! Okay, that’s enough of that.

Apparently the Trek make-up artist confused hippies with Oompa Loompas.

So anyways, the Enterprise is tracking a stolen spaceship, which they manage to catch up to when the irresponsible layabouts piloting it let the engines overheat. The ship stealing aliens are beamed aboard, and upon arrival they immediately start busting out trippy tunes on their space guitars and rebelling against the Man, rudely chanting “Herbert” at Kirk whenever he tries to talk sense into their thick hippie skulls. Come on guys, be cool, if you just got to know Kirk you’d realize the only reason he keeps hanging around is because he’s hoping for an orgy to break out.

Spock gets all chicks.

It seems the Catullans are on a quest to find a planet named Eden, and after seducing the crew with rock music and their brazen navel-exposing women, they take over the ship. The Catullans find Eden and beam themselves down, but when Kirk and the crew follow only minutes later they find the Catullans have all accidentally killed or injured themselves eating poison fruit or walking on acidic plants in their bare feet. Silly space hippies, if only you’d listened to authority!

Christ, we leave you alone for five minutes...

Oh and by the way, the main hippie who dies from eating poison fruit was named Adam. Get it? Adam? Eden? Consider your mind blown man.

Video Evidence of Catullan Lameness

Charles Napier in rainbow colored hotpants jamming with Commander Spock? The seamy seduction of Ensign Chekov? We take it back, the Catullans are awesome.



Nathan Birch also writes the far out webcomic Zoology.

6 Superstitions We All Believe and Why They Actually Make (Some) Sense

Superstitions are only for the gullible, and old men to bark at you from their front porch while waving canes, right? Perhaps, and yet you’re probably not going to walk under a ladder if you can help it, there’s always that twinge of regret when you break a mirror, and you spent most of last weekend making sure that voodoo doll of your ex looked just right. Where do these almost universal superstitions come from, and could their origins be more logical than we think?


Breaking a Mirror

Break a mirror, get 7-years bad luck. It may seem silly, but you probably still take extra care never to drop one, and generally do your best to avoid hall-of-mirrors shootouts and kung-fu battles.

Where the Hell Did This Come From?

After a hard day clubbing various things to drag back to his cave and hump, a caveman wanders to the lake for a drink and sees his own handsome sloping brow reflected back at him from the water. Having no knowledge of optics (at this point mankind’s still struggling with pointed-stick technology) it was a logical leap for him to believe that this reflection was a duplication of himself and shared a part of his soul. This way of thinking stubbornly held for millennia, with the belief being that damaging a mirror would damage a part of your soul or cause it to be trapped in the mirror forever.

There’s also a more simple explanation. Glass mirrors (as opposed to less breakable ones made of polished metal) weren’t really available until the 16th century and were very expensive luxuries reserved for the upper classes. If the servants that cleaned these mirrors were to break one, well, let’s just say it was a lot easier to replace a human being back then than a mirror. Also, if a more middle class family were to buy one and then break it, it would probably take quite a while to scrounge up the money for a new one (say around 7 years). Well, unless they sold off a few kids.

Spilling Salt

Spill salt and you’d better toss a pinch over your left shoulder or you’ll be in for bad luck. Oddly though, if you do the same thing after spilling the ketchup people tend to get all offended.

Where the Hell Did This Come From?

Salt’s ability to cure infections, purify water and make your wife’s shitty cooking tolerable if you dumped enough on led to it being worshipped by much of the ancient world. But wait a minute, tears were salty and plants wouldn’t grow anywhere salt had been dropped. The message from God was clear, salt was pretty awesome stuff, but if you let any fall, watch your ass.

Aside from that, salt simply used to be very valuable (the term “salary” comes from the fact that Roman soldiers were paid in salt). Mindlessly spilling the salt at a host’s table back in the day would be the equivalent today of taking their fine china out back for skeet shooting practice, or accidentally sitting on their purebred Lhasa Apso’s head.

This thing is a Lhasa Apso. Explaining jokes makes them funnier.

But why toss it over your shoulder? Well people used to believe that evil spirits, or the devil himself, hung over your shoulder waiting for you to slip up. The goal of throwing salt over your shoulder was to nail that asshole in the eyes, a technique repeatedly proven effective by numerous 80s pro-wrestlers.


The Rabbit’s Foot

While not particularly lucky for countless bunnies left dragging bloody stumps around, millions of people each year buy rabbit’s feet hoping they’ll bring them good luck and prosperity.

Where the Hell Did This Come From?

The simplest explanation is that rabbits’ ability to pump out offspring faster than a Catholic Angelina Jolie resulted in them being connected with potency and good luck (in other words, you may want to watch out if you find a few in a girl’s purse guys).

Rabbits are also nocturnal, and thus have long been associated with the moon. Easter, the actual most important Christian holiday on the calendar for those who worship more than buying shit, is also determined by the phases of the moon. Combine the moon tie-in with rabbits’ legendary humping abilities (which signifies rebirth) and you see how Jesus somehow got associated with these fluffy rodent-ey creatures, and surely anything Jesus/Easter related has to be lucky (just ignore the whole crucifixion thing that precipitated the holiday).

But why is the back foot specifically lucky? Well hares (which are often confused with rabbits) are one of the very few 4-legged animals whose back feet hit the ground before their front feet while running. The bar for impressing people back in the day was apparently set pretty damn low, and the strange tracks hares left were enough to convince people the back foot must have magical qualities.


Four-Leaf Clover

This Irish symbol is possibly the most well known good luck charm in the world, which is somewhat odd considering the whole “luck of the Irish” thing is a bit of an oxymoron.

Where the Hell Did This Come From?

The simplest reason the four-leaf clover is considered lucky is because they’re so rare, with only around 1 in 10,000 clovers sporting four leaflets. At least they were rare, as these days there are numerous places to buy your very own four-leaf clover online (although if you’re the type of person who thinks paying 25 dollars for an clover on the Internet is a good idea, the problems in your life likely have little to do with luck).

The use of clover as a lucky charm dates back to pre-Christian times when Druidism was the religion of day in Ireland. Druids, basically the hippies of the day, were sun/nature worshippers and clover tends to spread in sunny areas, possibly explaining why druids felt a connection with the plant. The four leaves also have a fairly obvious cross-like appearance, which was a revered symbol even before Christianity.

Clover is also edible and in fact, quite nutritious (some people think it even helps fight cancer). The Irish probably considered finding a patch fortunate, if only because it was a change from all the goddamn potatoes. Oh, and the four-leaf clovers are totally the best marshmallow shape in Lucky Charms.

For those who don't have the time to wait to develop diabetes.

Groundhog Day

Every year on February 2nd people put their faith in the amazing weather predicting abilities of the noble groundhog, hoping he won’t see his shadow and doom them to 6 more weeks of snow, ice and numb testicles. Hey, why not? Its predictions are probably as likely to be accurate as any weatherman’s.

Now as you see here, my weathercock is balls deep in Indiana. Balls Deep.

Where the Hell Did This Come From?

Folks have always kept their eye out for the reemergence of hibernating animals, logically seeing it as a sign that spring was on the way. February 2nd is also the date for Candlemas, a holiday mostly celebrated in Europe (yes, there’s another Christian holiday out there that starts with “C” and ends in “mas”, please don’t tell Hallmark).

Like most Christian holidays Candlemas is basically an old Pagan tradition with fancy new Jesus decals slapped on. While the holiday is officially devoted to the purification of the Virgin Mary, in practice it was mostly used as the due date to throw out your Christmas tree and watch furry critters emerge from their holes. Germans had Candlemas traditions similar to Groundhog Day (except they used hedgehogs) and when they immigrated to America they tossed out all the religious parts of Candlemas, keeping only the fun “waiting around a varmint-hole drinking” stuff. The groundhog was chosen since it hibernated in the winter, sorta looked like a hedgehog (which aren’t native to North America) and because too many people got eaten when they tried waiting outside a bear’s cave.

But why does the groundhog seeing it’s shadow and returning to its burrow mean 6 more weeks of winter? Well there’s actually some meteorological truth to it. A winter day sunny enough to allow a rodent to see his shadow is likely to be colder than average since cloud cover actually insulates the earth. In other words, there’s nothing mystical going on here, Mr. Groundhog just went back inside because he was freezing his furry little ass off, and if it’s still too cold for him there’s probably more winter coming.


Black Cats

You’re walking down the street and freeze for a second as a strange black cat saunters by. Now in reality the cat was simply crossing your path because he saw a nice patch of unspoiled dirt he wanted to poop in, but superstition tells us we’re about to be visited by bad luck and death.

Where the Hell Did This Come From?

So how did something oh-so-cutesy and fluffy get associated with death, devilry and witchcraft?

Saints preserve us! It's a basket of Satan!

Well, a number of pre-Christian peoples such as the Norse, Celts and Egyptians had cat Gods, or at least considered the animal sacred. Once Christianity became the sexy new religion in town though, old beliefs were branded witchcraft and cats found themselves guilty by association. Often simply owning a cat was considered proof of witchery and there was widespread extermination of cats during medieval times, which kind of backfired when they were no longer around to kill plague-infested rats, which in turn wiped out half of Europe. Whoops. But hey, at least they were safe from those goddamn witches.

Cats have a few other habits that had a tendency freak people right out. They like to seek sources of warmth (sorry, Mister Fluffynuts doesn’t like sitting in your lap just because he loves you) and have an odd fascination with examining human faces. Often when a person passed away from fever or a baby died mysteriously in the night, they’d find a cat perched on their chest or in the crib staring into their face, and the logical assumption was made. No, not that the hordes of rats in the streets might be making people sick, or that feeding your baby narcotic filled soothing syrups then putting them to sleep in a crib full of toys made out of lead was bad for them, but that cats were harbingers of death that could suck the very life from you body.

I can has ur soul plz?

As for why black cats specifically were feared, well, you don’t need us to tell you that black has traditionally been associated with eeeevil. There’s a reason Darth Vader didn’t spend his time strutting around in a sporty magenta or mint green get-up.

Nathan Birch also writes the magically delicious webcomic Zoology.

Dickonomics: The Sneaky Ways 5 Ordinary Businesses Take Your Money

The economy is in the proverbial pooper and many are trying to cut back, but unfortunately few things in life are more difficult than sticking to a budget. The good news is it’s not entirely your fault that you came back with a new hi-def TV and 10-gallons of discount mayonnaise last time you went to buy bread. We’ve already detailed the advanced advertising techniques being used to turn us into a society of shambling Baconator-craving zombies, but the manipulation certainly doesn’t end once they’ve got you into the building…


The Grocery Store

How many times have you stood in your kitchen, packed with enough food to feed a starving African village for a day, and yet found you had nothing you actually wanted to eat? You’re not alone; 60 to 70 percent of grocery purchases are unplanned, as supermarkets employ an endless array of tricks to ensure your fridge always has 10 different types of pickles in it, yet no milk.

Rats in a Maze
Supermarkets are carefully designed to be migraine-inducing labyrinths, with the essentials tucked away in the outer reaches of the store. Food’s often shelved in seemingly random ways and stores reorganize their shelves every few months to keep you on your toes and send you scrambling again to find the Super Sugar Chocolate Breakfast Nuggets.

Supermarkets are designed to keep movement as slow as possible, with displays stuck in the middle of aisles to create bottlenecks, cart-slowing carpets placed strategically and smaller floor tiles in expensive aisles (cart wheels click faster over them making you think you’re travelling quicker and thus you subconsciously slow down). Oh, and we suspect something might be up with every shopping cart on the planet having at least one bad wheel.

Using Your Kids Against You
Walk into any supermarket and you’ll be greeted at the door by the mash-up of smooth jazz and at least a dozen squalling children. Candy, cookies and all the diabestest cereals are usually grouped together in a single aisle feared by mothers everywhere, with the most expensive stuff all shelved at kiddie eye-level. Some supermarkets even offer kid "cooking" classes, which teach a lot more about brand recognition than cooking. Your kid might not know his ABCs, but at least he knows I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter now has even more butter taste.

“Deals” That are Anything But
Most sales or discounts actually cost you money as typically only the most expensive items are marked down (your 10-cents off five pounds of beluga caviar coupon might night be the hot bargain you think it is). Beware “Buy 5 for 5.99!” style offers, as frequently it’s actually less expensive to buy the items individually. Also your friendly neighborhood grocer isn’t afraid to blatantly steal from you at the checkout, just ask the guy who, unlike most, decided to actually pay attention to the scanner at a supermarket where you got free items if you were overcharged. By the end of the year he took home $4,000 in free food.

Grab Bag of Douchebaggery
Supermarkets keep the lights too bright and Muzak overly loud because making you uncomfortable will keep you from making smart shopping decisions. Even those delicious cubes of cheese on toothpicks they give you are a scam (they don’t care about selling you cheese, they just want to get your gastric juices flowing). We suggest next time you’re hungry you save yourself a headache, grab a rock and see if you can’t nail yourself a squirrel for dinner.

The Restaurant

But perhaps you prefer to leave the tiresome business of food preparation to others. Well don’t think you’re avoiding being screwed (and we’re not just talking about the gallon of waiter and busboy fluids you’ve consumed due to your lousy tipping).

Eat and Get the Hell Out
There’s nothing casual about “casual dining” chains. Their goal is to make you spend as much as possible as quickly as possible then clear you out to make room for next minivan full of jalapeno popper hungry mouths. To keep you from lingering, chairs are ass-numbingly uncomfortable, the restaurant is divided up into sections to prevent a social atmosphere, and as many tables as possible are “un-anchored” away from walls or partitions (we tend to feel uncomfortable sitting out in the open and won’t stick around). Warm colors have been shown to make us eat more and move on quicker, as has fast paced music (as a rule don’t eat anywhere with “Flight of the Bumblebee” playing over the speakers).

Getting Less for More
In troubled economic times everyone becomes united in a single goal; chiseling as much money as they can out of everyone else, and restaurants are using the current economy as an excuse to raise prices while simultaneously cutting down on portions.

Plates are subtly reduced in size and raised in the middle, concealing reduced portion sizes. Even silverware is taken into account, as restaurants will use lighter forks, making the weight of the food on it more noticeable, causing you to think your bites are more substantial. The quality of ingredients is also dropping, with food being aggressively recycled, even picked right out of the trash, and less expensive ingredients are substituted for what’s printed on the menu (hey, it all tastes like chicken anyways).

Menu design has become an exact science with the most profitable items placed in the upper left-hand corner (the 3rd dish down is always the most popular item on any menu). Menus today are basically porn for fat people, with the emphasis on big sexy pictures and over-elaborate descriptions, with prices obscured or spelled out (instead of using numbers) so you won’t notice them until you’ve already become smitten with a particularly alluring chunk of meat.

The Dreaded Bill
Heart jump a beat when the bill arrived? Could be they were charging for those obligatory breadsticks, or pouring you bottled water instead of tap. They may have automatically included a 12 – 15% tip “for your convenience” which often leads to accidental double-tipping (and those automatic tips usually go straight to the owners, not the servers). If you don’t have enough cash to pay for the surprise total, they’ll add on surcharges for using your credit or debit card as well. It’s enough to drive a person to drink, speaking of which…


The Bar

There few things more easy, profitable (or fun) than scamming drunks, so it comes as no surprise that bars have their own list of ploys. Let’s look at a few of the ways you’re getting cockslapped along with your cocktail.

Less Socializing, More Drinking
Every time you use your mouth for frivolous non-drinking related activities like talking you’re costing the bar money, so they try their hardest to make sure your interactions remain at the basic head nodding and pointing out hot girls level. Music is pumped up to ear splitting level making conversation impossible and lights are kept dim, partly to disguise how dirty most bars are, but also because we feel uncomfortable talking to someone we can’t see clearly.

Your “Friend” the Bartender
There are many ways to cut down on the amount of precious alcohol actually getting into your glass. Taller, thinner shot glasses appear larger but actually contain less volume, and in fact simply tilting the glass toward the customer slightly while pouring creates an optical illusion making you think you’re getting more than you are. Measuring cups may have washers in the bottom ensuring you don’t get a full double, and narrow pourers are used on bottles ensuring a 3-second pour gives you less booze than you might expect. Oh, and in perhaps the most diabolical trick, fruity girl drinks may have the rim of the glass coated or straw filled with alcohol with little to none in the drink itself. Come on bartenders, if you’re not there to get girls sloppy on oversized pink beverages what exactly are you there for?

Of course as the night wears on the need for such intricate schemes melts away and bartenders will start charging whatever the hell they want on a person-by-person basis, using the “would I like to bone them?” scale. Also never offer to pay for your group’s drinks as most bartenders assume anyone generous (and dense) enough to do such a thing won’t mind them adding a dozen or so extra drinks to the tab.


The Mall

Ah the mall, the Mecca of North American culture. What makes it, and its shops, so enticing that people will refuse to stop shopping for anything, even the risk of being consumed by flames?

Rats in a Maze Part 2
Like the supermarket, malls aren’t actually designed for convenience, but to force you to do as much walking past as many storefronts as possible. This is why the up escalator is usually on the opposite end of the floor from the down escalator. Stores appealing to certain demographics are spread around the mall; you manly men will never find the beef jerky store next to the shiny new electronics store, nor will nerds ever have their dreams of a Taco Bell next to the Gamestop realized. On the plus side this extra walking is probably the best exercise most Americans get these days.

Malls are also filled with mirrors, which slow us down then make us feel like shit since we’re all vain, self-loathing bastards at heart. That “oh God, I look terrible” moment has sent more than a few people scurrying into shops for new clothes. Also when you first enter the mall just keep moving for the first hundred feet or so. There are two phases to shopping, deliberation and buying, and they’ve found that buying even a minor item will break us out of the deliberation mindset and get us spending freely, thus chintzy impulse items are kept near the entrance. That trip to the dollar store may be the foreplay leading to a spending orgy that ends in you tying a cashmere sofa to the roof of your car.

Little Retail Shop of Horror
Things don’t get better once you enter the stores themselves. First off, go left when you enter the store. Research has shown that most people go right, and thus the items most profitable to the store are on the right, with the best bargains hidden off to the left. A lot of “deals” this time of year are blatant bait-and-switches; a low price is advertised, with the truth that you have to pay for an expensive warrantee or buy the item as part of a bundle only revealed at the cash register. Salespeople use the “disrupt-then-reframe” sales technique, hitting you with sales pitches so complicated they may as well be speaking a combination of pig Latin and Swahili, then reframing it in an over-simplified way. We have a need to understand things, so when we get that “ohhh, now I get it” spark, our sales resistance is broken down. Electronics salesmen are masters of this, but then pretty much everything they say is a constant stream of verbal diarrhea.

Leading us by the Nose
Traditionally overlooked (except by uncles with fingers that chronically require pulling) our sense of smell is being preyed on by retailers with increasing frequency. Smells are impossible to escape or ignore, and scent marketing has been shown to increase buying by up to 300%. As a result most stores now have their own carefully researched scents. Scents have even been shown to increase gambling by up to 45%, speaking of which…


The Casino

Casinos are the kings of making ordinary people spend like MC Hammer at the billowy silk pants store. They kind of have to be, as they don’t actually offer any, you know, goods or services for your money. So how do Casinos get you to blow the kids’ college fund when clearly the hookers out front offer a far better value for your dollar?

Outside World? What Outside World?
Sunlight, fresh air, remembering the fact that you have a house payment to make this month; these are the enemies of the big casinos. Most have few windows and no clocks, and attempt to artificially simulate a daytime or outside environment, creating a world where time has no meaning.

Some even block cell phones; tearful calls from your kids asking where you’ve gone and why you’re not at their birthday party can really kill your mojo.

The Gambling Trance
There’s a specific fast-paced rhythm to everything that happens in a casino, making it difficult to break from the money hemorrhaging haze (especially when you’re half-wasted on free drinks). Oh, and there’s a reason every casino you hit is Vegas is packed with hot women, and it’s not your raw animal magnetism.

Casino managers don’t let any of your senses go neglected. Music is soothing and loops frequently contributing to your trance and loud ugly carpets and low hanging canopies keep your eyes focused on the one-armed bandits in front of you. Casinos pump up the oxygen levels to keep you alert and some have even been accused of spreading pheromones through the ventilation system (possibly explaining why people still get way too damn excited over Wayne Newton).

You Can Beat the Casinos. Really! You Can!
There’s no way to beat the casinos that won’t land you in jail or under a bright light in a backroom with a broken hand, but casinos love to make us think we can. Why else would Vegas fund and stage glamorous showings for movies like 21, a film built on the premise that your A in math class could allow you to legally scam casinos out of millions while having sex with Kate Bosworth?

The floor is filled with the sweet (and these days, usually artificial) sound of jangling coins and “loose” machines are placed in high visibility areas to give the impression payoffs are more frequent than they are. Slot machines are also designed to deal out a high number of “near misses” with, for instance, the first two reels set to land on the “Jackpot” far more often than the third reel, dealing you more false hope than your high school girlfriend.

Finally don’t be fooled by posted payout percentages. A machine might say it pays out 97% of the time, which sounds low-risk, but that’s a hypothetical number based on an infinite number of spins. Spin 10 times and you may lose 9, spin 100 and you may lose 50; you would have to pull that handle a massive number of times for it to finally even out at that 97% (a theory being put to the test by blue-haired slot jockeys nationwide).

So now that you know what kind of dickery our economy is based on, get out there and hold your head high knowing every time you’re screwed over you’re doing your part to fight the recession. Maybe, if we’re all just gullible enough, we can get through this thing.

Nathan Birch also writes the comic you can’t afford not to read, Zoology.