“I have this many,” I told the woman.

“I… what? Oh, you need help? OK, you’re at gate 32, Runway C.” She smiled pleasantly at first, but after several minutes of intense, silent staring the expression began to waver. “It’s uh… it’s that way. There’s a picture of a fish at a seafood restaurant kind of by the gate. Look for that.”

Once she’d finally used her fingers and picture-words to guide me, I set on my way. I’ve been working for this site for over a year now, but despite all the hilarious stories we tell here, I’ve never really met anybody in person. But that was all about to change: Cracked was having a party – a real, official, ball-busting gala to celebrate their many successes – and when they first invited me, I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical. The phrases “not ever attending” and “your dipshit parade” may have been bandied about a bit. Then they offered to fly me out, all expenses paid. Yet still, I remained reticent. Regrettably, somebody may have brought up the possibility of airline tickets being shoved up somebody else’s asshole sideways. Then they told me it was an open bar.

…and I left so fast it made a man-shaped hole in the wall.

After a hilarious misunderstanding about my new sneakers “being the bomb” and a not so hilarious misunderstanding about my anus being a glove, I finally boarded my plane to California. When we touched down, an impossibly small man-thing met me at the airport. He held a sign that read “Cockway” in beautifully calligraphic lettering. In slightly less impressive scrawl, the “way” part had been scratched out and replaced with “gay.” This latter had been underlined several times, and whoever did it applied enough pressure on the last underline to actually tear through the signboard. There were spots that may have been blood.

“I’m assuming you’re DOB?” I leaned down to shake the man’s hand, but he was so terribly small it seemed inappropriate. I ruffled his hair playfully instead.

DOB: Actual size.

“F-f-f-fuckin’ cut it out!” Oh my, he has a stutter! The trip was already becoming rapidly worth it.

“I got the c-c-c-c-company car over here,” he motioned for me to follow. We reached an empty corner in the parking lot, and he smiled proudly.

“Hop in,” he said, gesturing to the open door of a burrito truck.

I began to form a question, but he quickly raised a hand to cut me off. He was obviously used to this reaction.

“We do d-d-d-d-double duty: By day Cracked is a c-c-c-comedy site, sure, but by night we convert the offices into the best burrito c-c-c-cart this side of the 101!”

“Yeah, could I get two tacos, an enchilada and the top 5 worst examples of sexism in GI Joe?”

“Is that impressive?” I asked. Like most every other subject, I knew very little about California. I know their capital is Schwarzenegger and the state bird is a forest fire, but that’s about it.

“No,” he replied, downtrodden, “n-n-not really.”

We got in the truck, tied the rope seatbelts together and set off… towards adventure! Oh wait… no. I’m sorry I misread that. That said “Ventura.”

We set off towards Ventura.

When we pulled up in front of the bar, I knew somebody was fucking with me. It was a long way to go for a joke, sure, but I know that if anybody would fly a person all the way down to California just to spite them, it’s Cracked. The place was goddamn gorgeous! It was a palace: a mecca of glittering fixtures, expensive booze and stunning women looking sexily aloof and sensually disinterested. (That’s not saying much–all women making eye contact with me tend to look aloof and disinterested. But these ones looked damn good not paying attention to me.)

I don’t know what they’re smiling at, because I have literally never seen that expression on a woman before.

“No fucking way this is the place,” I told DOB, as he deftly hopped out of the still-moving vehicle and disappeared from view. A moment later he reappeared, jogged back up alongside the truck, and desperately hurled a wedge of wood in front of the wheels. The burrito cart slammed to a stop, covering the back of my head with carne asada.
“Sorry, those “brakes” are a little rough. But this is the place, man. Some things we just d-d-d-don’t skimp on. Sure, maybe my office is technically the grill on a burrito c-c-c-cart, and sure, maybe our health insurance is an expired bottle of Tamiflu we all split, and sure, maybe our 401K is a t-t-t-Transformers lunchbox that I keep stealing, but we don’t f-f-f-fuck around about getting tore up. Now shut your meat hole and get inside. We’ve been waiting on you.”

I opened the double doors to a smattering of applause… that quickly died when the partygoers got a good look at me. Was I disappointing somehow? I took myself in: filthy bathrobe, pink fleece sweatpants with the word “juicy” emblazoned across the ass and completely, blindingly shirtless–nope, lookin’ good. I glanced to DOB for an explanation, but he was nowhere to be seen. In his place stood an eight-foot-tall monstrosity of a man, roughly 97 percent limbs and skull.

“Hey, Swaim!” I said to Swaim (it was Swaim, everybody!)

Pictured: Swaim’s creepy, but somehow still erotic dancing.

“Hey,” he replied absently, clearly eyeing the room for somebody more interesting. “The applause weren’t for you. They are waiting on Seanbaby.”

“Psh, good luck,” I scoffed, “he never shows up in these stories.”

“Our table’s over there,” he pointed at a far corner with his Stretch Armstrong limbs, and we started off.

“So, what’s with the ginormous statue of the devil?” I asked him, pointing to a ginormous statue of the devil that was there.

“Well shit, somebody’s gotta pay for all this,” he replied.

“And it’s Satan?!”

“What? No, dude. It’s Red Devil Caffeine Pills. You been eatin’ retard sandwiches or something? Do we need to get you a seatbelt so you don’t fall out of your chair?”

“Oh… sorry.”

“Do we need to hire a guy to monitor which throat-tube you put liquids down so you don’t accidentally breathe your gin and tonic?”

“I get it. I’m sorry I asked.”

“Do we need to get you a crash helmet for dinner so you don’t mistake your own head for a meatball and stab yourself to death with a fork?”

“Jesus Christ! I said I was sorry!” That last struck too close to home. How did he know about the helmet?

Never again, helmet. Never again!

“Do we need to-“ He started up again, but luckily at that moment Gladstone had clambered up onto the horns of Satan and was doing his best Teen Wolf impression.

“Look at me! Give me all of your attention! I’m the Teenage Wolfman!” It was not a very good impression. “I’m snowboarding on a station wagon like in that movie with Kirk Cameron!”

“God you are so old! Everything about that was wrong and I hate you for it!” DOB screamed up at him, shoving the statue with all of his short-guy rage. The mooring lines gave way, and the whole thing came crashing to the floor - Gladstone piggy-backing the Caffeine Devil all the way down to Hell.

Red Devil Caffeine Pills: When you really need to just MURDER THE DAY AND FUCK THE CORPSE.

We finally arrived at the columnist’s table. It was an opulent spread bedecked in rare furs and set with crystal goblets. Some terribly bored and obviously well-paid skanks were sprinkled liberally about the booth in various states of repose, and in the center of this debauchery, on a black granite dais, sat Editor in Chief Jack O’Brien, his hand-carved wooden throne lined with seal fur. I went to shake his hand, but was roughly shoved aside and sat down.

“You do not talk directly to Jack,” DOB hissed in my ear, “unless you want one of two things: a paycheck or a savage dick-beating.”

I spent a good deal contemplating the latter, wondering if it was an intense beating focused exclusively on the genitals, or an intense beating performed with a penis wielded somewhat like a chain flail. I decided not to risk either and stay quiet. An eager, well-kempt young man flopped down next to me, utterly beaming with earnestness.

“Hey guys!” said Bucholz, grinning widely in his overalls and idly chewing on a piece of straw. “Isn’t this exciting?! We might finally have a real story to tell about the Cracked writers getting together! Not just those fictional adventures!”

“Back home in Canada, we drink milk straight from the cow!”

“Sh-sh-sh-shut up, Bucholz.” DOB snapped, somehow managing to stutter a ‘sh’ sound. “Nobody would believe anything that happened here, anyway. We’ve lied and embellished t-t-t-too often.”

“Yeah, no you’re right,” continued Swaim, “this does seem a little unbelievable. It’s like another weak premise for one of those stupid stories.”

DOB began to shift uneasily.

“What if this isn’t real?” he whispered conspiratorially. “What if… what if we’re not real?”

“…you’re finally getting it, aren’t you?” I smiled knowingly at DOB.

“Getting what?” All color drained out of his face.

“You’re finally seeing the thin veil that separates reality from fantasy… and how easily torn it can be. Are you ready, Daniel? Are you ready to see how deep this rabbit hole goes?”

I held two hands out, palms up. On one rested a blue pill; the other, a red.

“What these? Nah, I always carry the reality bending pills on me. Why do you ask?”

“Choose one, Daniel. The blue pill will take you back to the reality you’ve always known, and this will all become a distant memory. But the red pill? Take the red pill, and the veil will be lifted. You will see reality as it truly is.”

With trembling, hesitant fingers, DOB reached out and plucked the red pill from my hand.

“Swallow it and see the truth,” I told him.

“That’s what I told your mom last night,” he whispered reverently, and downed the capsule. He wandered off in a near-religious trance, ready to see the light.

“What was the red pill?” Swaim asked me.

“Quaalude.”

“And the blue pill was…” Swaim started.

“Another Quaalude, yes,” I finished.

“So… why do you have multi-colored ‘Ludes in your pocket?”

“Because it’s Tuesday, man. ‘Lude day!”

“And the colors?”

“Well, it’s a party ain’t it? I’m just being festive. Taste the rainbow, guy!”

Quaaludes: Taste thr rsinboooooooooooow

“Good god,” Swaim swore. “I’m going to need 18 drinks if I’m making it through a night sitting next to you. Where’s that bar?”

Shit! I had nearly forgotten about them–the two holiest words in the English language: “Open” and “Bar.” God, look at them together. They’re like poetry. Say them out loud; don’t they sound beautiful? The lilting cadence of music plays in and out of their syllables. They are a minor incantation of joy, working real magic into the cynical science of this world whenever they are spoken truthfully. Open bar! Open bar! Openbar! Openbaropenbar!

I felt as if in a dream. My legs seemed disconnected as I floated over to that shimmering isle of spirits. I was here! I had finally reached it! My god, do you know what I’m going to do to an open bar? I’m going to make love to it so passionately it might be a war crime. They will write epic ballads about this night. Generations from now, they will sing of it in hushed voices around the campfire and the tale will be passed from father to son. This is oral history in the making! This is how legends are born!

“Bourbon, please,” I told the barkeep. “The best you’ve go-

***

It is now, apparently, Wednesday. I am typing this from what I believe to be Mexico, in what I sincerely hope is not a shallow puddle of human blood. There is something in the bathroom, and I am hoping with the desperate fervor of a Pentecostal that it turns out to be a woman, but from the sound of it, I have doubts that it is even human.

Please, if you’re reading this, I need you to do three things for me: First, call a doctor and ask if you’re supposed to move if you think you’re missing a kidney. Second, call Cracked and ask somebody if I’m fired. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’m fired, but it’s nice to have validation. Finally, while you’re on the phone with them (and assuming by some miracle that I’m still employed) tell them I’m calling in sick today.

Wait… that came out wrong! Don’t start the list ye-

Well, look at that: It’s the pimped out Chinese Raptor Cavalry. Jesus, I don’t even know where to start. Do I focus on his pelt of foxes? The fur-tipped clitoris on his head? Or the terrifying implications made by the World War I-era Kaiser helmet that his hawk is wearing?

No, instead I want to draw attention to something most of you probably missed: There appears to be a goat’s skull and spine where his penis should be. Appreciate that for a moment, please. He’s wearing the desiccated remains of a goat for a codpiece, and look at his face. He thinks that’s funny.

He’s probably the tribe’s comedian. I’m sure he has even more jokes to tell you; just lean a little closer, so the Raptor-Kaiser can whisper them in your ear.

What on God’s swollen left testicle is the possible explanation for a man para-gliding with hawks glued to his elbows? Do the birds do his bidding, or do they despise him passionately? Are we witnessing the world’s first eagle-navigated flight, or the first terrifying seconds of a bird-murder? I do not know. I put forth that it is impossible to know. I suggest to you that this image is in fact a Koan: A Zen parable whose very inability to be explained will eventually bring enlightenment.

What, you disagree?

Well listen, hotshot, if you think you have a logical-sounding explanation for this picture, I suggest you either:

A) Look up the word “logic” in a dictionary, because you clearly don’t know what it means. Maybe you’re getting “logic” confused with “hot dogs” or “impotency.” It happens to me sometimes.

Or,

B) Have mercy on us groundfolk, Hawk-Man! Our pitiful senses are limited by the earth we must tread!

Listen: Don’t laugh guys. It’s tough living in Russia. I mean, you finally get finished forging your house-analogue out of the ruined corpses of old buses discarded by the affluent pig-dog Western nations, and what’s the first thing that happens?

Bear drive-by.

What was he supposed to do? Just bow down and let the grizzly gangs run the place? No, goddamnit. This is a man! He put down his bowl of shoe-leather soup, strapped on his Ursine Assaultin’ Trackpants (every Russian has a pair) and he went to beat that fucker to death with a pepper-mill. What doesn’t make sense about this to you?

Is it the pepper-mill? It’s the pepper mill, isn’t it?

Well, what do you use to spice up shoe-leather soup, smart guy?

Some questions might be running through your head right now, such as: “Is that guy underwater on a BMX bike? Is that a fucking shark? Is he trying to ollie? Is…is he ollying over the shark?” And finally: “HOLY SHIT IS THAT SANTA CLAUS?!”

Yes. The answer to all of those questions is yes. And the answer to your last, unspoken question, “why the crapping hell?” is easy: Because “good” is a relative term subject to the speaker’s moral compass. So even bloodthirsty sharks have “good” little boys and girls, and they have to get presents too. Being Santa is like being a mailman: Neither snow, nor sleet, nor underwater shark BMX rallies shall keep you from your appointed rounds.

There’s no fancy explanation for this one: You just parked in the wrong motherfucking spot. That’s not me being cute with descriptions, it clearly says “This is the Wrong Motherfucking Spot” on that sign back there. And there are always consequences for ignoring the rules… it’s just that sometimes those consequences are a little more Gravity Hammer-centric than others.

If he’s not the John Shaft/Buck Rogers of meter maids, well then the only other explanation I can think of for a large black man with a hammer-from-the-future bludgeoning a vehicle to death is because this particular car appears to be a Porsche Boxster. And Boxsters are the vehicle equivalent of a puka shell necklace: If you’re ever unfortunate enough to see one up close, chances are you’ve already been roofied and the owner is off somewhere doing his pre-date-rape stretches. Maybe Halo Shaft up there is just trying to make the world a better place, one double-popped-collar-wearing douchebag at a time.

Buster Sword guy is like The Little Engine That Could if somebody hung those novelty steel balls from the undercarriage. Buster Sword guy built himself a sword that everybody with any knowledge of basic physics knows you cannot ever practically wield, and then he fucking wielded it.

That’s not to say that he wielded it well–if there is a victor in that video, it is certainly not Buster Sword guy. However, it is also not the palette. No, the only victor here is the force of gravity itself who, but for the lack of lips, would be screaming, “I told you so!” by the end of the tape. Still, Buster Sword guy should not be mocked. He is a fantastic man-problem. He built that fucking sword himself, you know. He lifted it countless times. He knew the exact weight of the metals it was formed from. He knew full well that he could not swing the finished blade and yet even still, upon completion, he turned to his friend and said, “Turn the cameras on. I am going to murder a family of wood now, and it must be filmed.”

His motorcycle is matte black, its “holders” are of the sword variety rather than the conventional “cup” and he obeys the helmet laws… to a truly terrifying extent! He is the Samurai Cyclist, and he is a man doing what man does best: looking badass without really knowing why.  Honestly though, this is what all men would look like without the level-headed censure of a woman’s influence. There is nothing particularly strange about this picture; this is just man at his most organic.

The great tragedy here is that, upon donning his custom built spiked shoulder pads, full samurai helmet and facemask; sheathing his swords in their spot-welded custom holders; and mounting his night-black, motored steed, this stupid world did not have the decency to end in a ball of fire,  so the Samurai Cyclist  found himself without a suitably post-apocalyptic landscape to race through. But did this stop him leaving the house? No! For he is man! He saw the unruined world outside and thought, “Fuck it. I’ll just take this thing to Nordstrom’s instead.”

And so he did. He probably bought a sweater there, chatted up a puckish salesgirl and maybe tried a sampler of this new cologne he had his eye on. But all the while, inside his head, you know his thoughts were naught but steel and fire. And maybe just a touch of argyle.

The temptation here is to chalk this picture up as just another one of those infamous “arab car stunts.” But look closely at this man; he is not a reckless teenager trying to keep himself entertained in the most lethal way available to him (because his country unfortunately outlawed the more standard lethal teenage entertainment: Carlo Rossi). This is an older man–almost respectable looking, actually–with the kind of beard one can only grow while lost in the desert for decades after having your heart broken by a treacherous lover. This is a man who should know better, and probably does. No, I don’t believe this is staged. There is something in that steadfast, noble posture that tells me this simply cannot be the case. I choose to believe this is just how Cycle-sheik gets from point A to Point B like any other commuter… except that “Point A,” in this case, is probably a portal of fire that only opens once every 50 years to let him roam the streets for a day, and “Point B” is a motherfucker that’s about to get stabbed at 75 miles an hour.

That’s right: stabbed. Oh, I’m sorry… did you miss the sword?

Well, that’s probably the best example of this point that I can possibly offer: When you stare in awe at a photo for several minutes and the very last thing you notice–almost as a side-note, really–is that the subject is armed with a three-foot, steel blade, what else can you be dealing with but a Man, in all of his bafflingly awesome, stunningly retarded glory?

I was wrong, but here it is anyway.

The Sultan’s Elephant is the name of a performance art show formerly produced by the Royal de Luxe Theatre Company. It consisted of a lot more than just the titular elephant, but most of that stuff was French bullshit like “art” and “wonder.” You, dear reader? You only need to know about that magnificent bastard of terror right up there: It’s 40-feet tall, weighs 50-tons and requires 22 people to operate.

The idea was presumably conceived when somebody saw Return of the King and, upon noting the monstrous four-story elephant-like hell-beasts depicted therein, immediately thought, “I would like for that to be more unstoppable. If only it were also a robot!” Sure, it might seem a bit tacky and overwrought for a mere status symbol but think about it: What better way to show you’ve truly made it than employing a small army just to work the knee joints of the battleship-sized elephant you ride to work?

The Fire Horse is what U.K. artist/clown Paka calls his flagship kinetic sculpture. The term “kinetic sculpture,” in case you’re wondering, is just how dangerously insane, genius, clown robot-masters refer to all of their doomsday machines. I think it’s for tax purposes. Paka built the first of many (oh shit, there’s more than one!) fire horses from an electric wheelchair taken from his dead grandmother which he repurposed into a flame-shooting mechanical beast.

Jesus, really? Was he trying to ensure it was haunted? That’s not a sculpture, Paka, that’s the kind of horrifying shit Clive Barker only admits to his psychiatrist. Here’s a hint: It stopped being art somewhere around the time you taught it the meaning of “murder.”

According to Paka, the Fire Horse is a full-size replica, and capable of everything that a real horse is: It has complete range of movement, it whinnies, it rears, it even poops! Yes, he actually said that it poops and no, he doesn’t say what; I’m forced to assume it’s fear.

Yes, that definitely shits horror. At least I hope so, because I’m looking at it, and right now there is both shit and horror involved. If it’s not the horse, then I need to get to the hospital.

Even more worrisome, however: An earlier prototype of the Fire Horse was stolen from Paka’s workshop, and is still unaccounted for to this day. So please, if your neighborhood is being terrorized by a madman on an equine steel inferno, call this insane British clown. It’s probably possessed by the spirit of his furious crippled grandmother. It has sentimental value.

The Crucible Fire Arts Festival is an answer to a question I have been asking for decades now: Art’s great and all, but why isn’t it more on fire?

Featuring 60-foot high fire tornadoes and the undisputed lord and master of the seventh level of snake hell, The Crucible’s official vehicle is surprisingly practical for a parade based around reckless fire orgies: It’s a fire truck.

Oh no, ha ha! Not that kind of fire truck!

Did you think it was a method for putting out the several dozen rampaging mechanical infernos that almost certainly run amok by the end of every show? No. No, it is a truck that spews pillars of flame. Jesus, get your head out of your ass.

Oh God, no! Put it back! Put your head back in your ass; it was the only thing protecting your face from the burns!

The fire truck comes equipped with a fully functioning blacksmith forge mounted in back, as well as a welding and torch cutting setup in front–you know, just in case somebody calls your manhood into question when you pull up in your fire-ball spewing big rig, now you can bust out an impromptu sword in no time. Don’t laugh; it’s totally practical. The only guy who’d call you out in that thing is Conan the Barbarian, and he ends every sentence with a broadsword instead of a period. You need to come prepared.

Carlos Owens was a man with a dream: freedom and equality for all people, regardless of race or nation, and united forever in a peaceful society.

Oh wait, sorry, that was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Carlos Owens had a dream about rampaging through Alaska in a DIY Voltron.

It was a better dream.

After working for years as an army mechanic, Owens decided to use the skills he learned there to build a giant functional battlemech (wait, we have mechs in the army now?) Carlos’ machine is equipped with 27 hydraulic cylinders in place of muscles, which it uses to mirror the pilot’s arm and leg movements.

“And… other movements. You know what I mean, ladies?”

In an interview with Popular Mechanics, Owens initially talked about how he saw potential uses for this technology in everything from construction to the armed forces, but then, when pressed, he admitted to secretly just wanting hardcore mech-on-mech gladiator battles. I would have something snarky to say, but honestly, I’m just glad somebody’s finally got their fucking priorities straight. May God bless you with ingenuity, Mr. Owens, in equal or greater measures than he has insanity.

That, friends, is a giant robot spider.

The end.

What, seriously? You require more information? All right, but frankly I think that’s being a bit greedy. Built by French artists La Machine and debuted in Japan, pictured above is one of the two (two!) spiders deployed in Yokohama either for some sort of festival or city-wide vengeance. I’m not really sure why it was there, and I am unable to check at this time because I refuse to look away from that thing even for a moment. Objectively, I know that’s just a picture. But I simply do not have enough confidence in my senses to risk glancing away, just in case they’re wrong and that thing’s actually in the room with me.

Don’t look up don’t look up don’tlookup dontlookupdontlookup

I will tell you what I do know off-hand: It comes equipped with steam and water cannons to the front and rear–hopefully some sort of anti-Will Smith alarm comes standard–and if you ever actually get up on one, Captain Planet will appear out of nowhere and try to fight you. It seats three drivers, but if you actually find two more people willing to ride shotgun on your rampaging spider-bot, be wary: Skeletor and Cobra Commander don’t get along these days and I have it on good authority that neither will chip in for gas money.

PAGE 1

“Hey man, yeah you! C’mere a minute,” a strikingly ugly teenager motions you over. According to the CW - the closest thing to a news channel that you watch - all teenagers are either stunningly beautiful or else they have magical powers. Considering this kid looks like the ass end of an asshole, you figure him for the latter. Unwilling to risk the anger of a pubescent warlock, you oblige him.

“What’s up uh… esse? You still say that, right? Esse?” You greet him and begin an elaborate fist-bump handshake, which he declines to participate in. It’s too late to stop now without clear embarassment, so you decide to try to pass it off as some sort of epileptic seizure instead. You flail your arms independently from your body for the duration of the conversation.

“No. Nobody says that. Listen, I saw you with that girl, right?” He motions to a woman reclining on the beach, her beauty at once visceral and etheral, like some sort of ancient goddess of boobs (I checked, there’s no deity of titties, per se, so the position’s open. And it needs to be filled! Right? RIGHT?!).

“Yeah, so maybe her face is nothing to write home about… but we don’t worship her for her giant, jiggling, heaving, bouncing pair of faces, jackass.”

“Yes, she’s my girlfriend,” you answer, “or at least she will be once I tell her. We’re in the courting phase of the relationship right now, where I follow her around until she gets comfortable with my presence. Then I let her smell my hand so she knows I’m not a threat. That’s second base,” you inform him knowledgeably. Teenagers don’t know about girl laws yet; they teach that shit in college.

“Yeah, sure sure. I don’t need to hear a biography of how retarded you are, I got something guaran-fucking-teed to get you action. Check it,” he gestures to a collection of pills in his hand, “Rohypnol. Roofies. Right? Get you laid, for sure.”

If you decline the mystical little troll’s offer for surefire sex, turn to page 2.

If you take the roofies from the prolifically unattractive pimple-wizard, turn to page 3.

PAGE 2

No, you don’t. He said it was guaranteed! Don’t be stupid, stupid.

Turn to page 3.

PAGE 3

“What, for real?” Of course! Why didn’t you think of it earlier? Who brews love potions? Witches and vampires and shit! Who are mostly witches and vampires and shit? Teenagers! It all makes perfect sense.

“I’ll take a dozen!” You scream in excitement.

“Shit! Shit! Keep it down, man!” The kid takes a step back, looking all around for cops or vampire-hunters or whatever it is that kills teenagers these days.

“Oh, right. No, it’s cool, Twitter. We’re cool.”

“Did you just call me Twitter?”

“Yeah, that’s a thing, right? That cool kids call each other?”

“I just… man, take these,” he says, thrusting a handful of pills into your palm, “and gimme that,” he adds, taking the wad of cash you have safety-pinned to your shirt (so you don’t forget it).

Magic is real! And it’s conveniently in pill form!

“Thanks, Rap Music!” you yell to him, jogging down the beach towards the love of your life, who noticed you were distracted momentarily and abandoned all of her possessions to run - just run. But that’s OK! There are literally dozens of girls with breasts scattered all around this beach – and that’s really the only “soulmate” criteria, come to think of it.

“Let’s see this magic work!” You declare to nobody in particular, downing all of the mystical love pills in one go. Now you just need to figure out a way to get some girl’s attention, and let the magic do its work!

If you decide to strip naked (to let the magic breathe better,) and practice backflips in case ninjas ever attack, turn to page 4.

If you decide to take a swim, thus showing off your athletic prowess to all potential mates at once, turn to page 5.

PAGE 4

Ahhh! The fresh ocean breeze caressing your nether regions, the cry of the gulls overhead, the crash of the distant waves, the approaching sirens – nothing relaxes a man like the beach! You bend low in preparation, and launch yourself backwards into the air.

“Ninjas! Quick, do a backflip!” “I can’t! I never practiced!” “You’ve doomed us all!”

As the world wheels about you, you suddenly remember that you’ve never actually tried to backflip before, and therefore have absolutely no idea what the next step is. You hesitate, trying to right yourself. Then you decide “fuck it” and to go through with the backflip. Then you waffle again and try to land normally. At this point, however, it is far too late for any of that, because you have already landed directly on your neck. There is a horrible snapping sound, and you’re amazed to find your body bent nearly in half. Your own genitals are resting gently on your head. Wow, you never got this close before! Those guys back at the bar all said it was impossible, but here you are – junk in face. You feel a great sense of accomplishment as the world starts to go black around you.

The police photograph your body before the autopsy, and the pictures hit big on the Internet. Your mother eventually finds it. She denies you ever existed. Sometimes she weeps quietly for that thing she called “son,” but she tells everybody it’s just allergies.

The End.

PAGE 5

Your sleek body cuts through the waves like they’re made of water, and you soon find yourself miles out in the ocean. Good lord! These pills really must be something! You don’t even know how to swim, and now look at you – you can barely even see the beach! It’s so relaxing out here. The water is like a giant, moist blanket caressing your every fiber. The sun warms your face, the waves rock you gently, and you find yourself drifting off into a meditative calm. You feel so at one with the natural world! It’s like the waters themselves are enveloping your entire body, filling your lungs with their gentle caress…

A cry for help! Your eyes snap open, and you are shocked to find yourself underwater! You frantically search about for the source of the noise, and you soon find a beautiful mermaid trapped in some sort of cage.

“Free me!” she cries, and when you notice that yes – mermaids do have breasts – you quickly swim over to her.

“Hey, wouldyalookitthat. Looks like you finally caught something in that freaky fish-poon trap, Jerry.”

“What’s up, baby? Come here often?” You ask, doing your best to lean non-chalantly, but your legs float up above your head and you find it impossible to keep your elbow on the cage.

“Come… where? To this cage?” She seems perplexed.

“More like per-sexed! Or wait… mer-sexed! Yeah!” Wait, did you say that out loud?

“Just get me out! Before Mer-Linn, the evil water-wizard comes back for me! He’s going to grind me up to make his potions!”

“Easy, sweetie. Maybe after I let you out, you and I can get a drink somewhere.”

“What’s a ‘drink’?”

Jesus Christ. Fucking mermaids, right? What dipshits. Don’t they have Sea School or something down here?

“It’s when you put liquid in your mouth and… oh, right…” You release the latch, feeling (and also kind of looking) stupid.

“Thank you so much! I owe you my life!” She cries, hugging you desperately. Her shell-bra totally brushes up against your arm. It, being comprised of razor-sharp shells, slashes up your flesh pretty badly, but it’s still pretty hot.

If you decide to use this newfound gratitude to your advantage, turn to page 6.

If you decide to be a gentleman about it, or at the very least not be a felon about it, turn to page 7.

PAGE 6

“You know what could use a little thanking?” You ask her, hoping that the subtle sensuality of the double entendre will set a romantic mood. “My penis.”

She looks less than enthralled.

“My penis,” you say again, thus making it a “double” entendre. Someday you should look up what “entendre” means.

“I have fish parts,” she says bluntly, obviously not appreciating your complex word play, “do you want to fuck fish parts?”

“Hell ye- I mean, uh, I guess not,” you answer reluctantly, not wanting to seem gross by participating in any kind of bestiality, “but you got a mouth, right?”

Everybody knows the mouth doesn’t count for sex! That one president signed it into law, right? Taft, maybe?

“I… OK, no. Let me take you back to my city,” she says, pointing downward to a fantastic underwater kingdom that you have been far too shell-boob focused to notice until now, “my father rules this world, and he will reward you handsomely.”

“Ew, dude!” you cry in protest “I don’t want the gay stuff! Let’s talk some more about the fish parts.”

“No like… with gold and such. What is wrong with you? I swear to god, the only reason I’m not throwing up right now is because it tends to hang around in low current areas like this and I don’t want to breathe in my own vomit,” she swims away, shaking her tail like she wants it. In somewhere. You’re still not totally sure where.

Turn to page 7.

PAGE 7

You manage to refrain from graphically pelvic thrusting a nearby reef to show her how best to thank you, and instead follow her down to the city in relative peace. You manage to maintain a stoic, gentlemanly silence for the better part of two and half minutes before you start asking her increasingly detailed questions about fish copulation. At some point the conversation turns to “vagina analogues” and you feel you may have lost a little of your savoir faire.

“Baby, come on! Don’t swim away like that - I only wanted to know if it smelled like fish in here, or if you were just excited to see me!”

You enter the magnificent lost world - with its soaring towers, impossibly detailed mosaics of many-colored corals, and dizzying array of animal and plant life never before seen by man - and you are absolutely awestruck… at all of these hot mer-skanks in nothing but shell-bras. They regard you with what seems like equal parts fear and fascination. It must be the magic love pills. One of them bursts into tears and hides behind a wall, clearly horrified by how much she wants you. You think you might even hear some lust-retching going on back there.

“They’re scared of you. They’ve never seen a land-dweller before with your two deformed, separate tails,” your recently-freed mermaid friend explains.

“More like THREE deformed separate tails, right? By which I mean my penis, my penis,” you wittily retort, double-entendre-ing that shit up.

“Oh god, just shut up. My father’s in here,” she brings you before a horrible…thing – it’s like somebody shredded a frog and glued all of its parts on a man.

Wait… why does it need to wear the helmet underwater?

“JESUS FUCKING WHAT THE FUCK!” You cry, and attempt to drop-kick the monster but, forgetting that you are underwater, you end up merely floating sideways at it gently.

“Brrghhlll berg brrrg,” it croaks to you.

“That’s my father!” The mermaid yells, attempting to wrangle your awkwardly floating body away from the king.

“Why is it wearing frog skin?!” It’s proving more difficult to wrestle you away than initially thought. There is a moment of sheer panic as it becomes clear to everybody that your ass has settled firmly onto the side of the king’s head.

“What do you mean? All of our men look like this. Why did you think we were all half-fish, half-women? It’s customary for our menfolk to ravage your sea-borne women whenever they happen upon one, and when they inevitably try to drown the baby, we take them back to us.”

“BRGOOOW GRK BRK!” The king frantically swats at you, trying to free an ass-free space in which to exist. You have to admit that, at this point, some of it might be intentional. I mean, how often does one get the chance to reverse tea-bag a king? After everything settles, and you are forcibly restrained - ass noticeably pointed downward and away from all present royalty - the king speaks to you once more.

“Bguk bak guuuurrk,” it croaks.

“My father wants to know what reward you seek from our kingdom. We have scrolls here with all the wisdom of the ancients contained within. It is said that they bestow a nigh-mystical knowledge upon the reader. We also have all the lost gold that every ship has ever dumped in the sea… and then we have this thing,” she gestures to a corner of the throne room, where the single most beautiful object you have ever seen sits in disrepair. It is a bright pink jet-ski with aquatic blue flames racing down the sides. The seat is leopard print. The handlebars are chrome. The tears on your face are of joy.

If you take the tablet or rocks or whatever, like a dick, turn to page 8.

If you take the god-king of ski-doo technology, a steel mount of beauty and a veritable poem to the concept of speed and awesomeness, turn to page 9.

PAGE 8

You’re such a dick. This is just like you. All right, fine. You get some fucking gold and, like, a tablet that gives you stupid powers.

“This is what you chose?! You had a sweet fuckin’ ski-doo and you brought me a big leaf tablet?!”

You really only use these “gifts” to play pranks on your unsuspecting friends, and though the money does allow you to purchase a jet-ski – you know nothing will ever match the one you passed up on. It haunts your dreams until the day you die. Your last words are “pink…sweet flames,” which kicks off a Citizen Kane style hunt to decipher their meaning. Ultimately, it’s decided that you were referring to the “sweet, pink” love of a “flame”-ing drag queen, whose questionable association you have kept these many long years. He/she inherits what remains of your fortune after writing an exceptionally graphic tell-all book about your relationship. You wish you could say that it was all a misunderstanding, and you were really just referring to the paint-job on that one fateful undersea chopper, but it totally wasn’t. God damn it all, you loved Starr Cummings with the entirety of your heart.

The End.

PAGE 9

You mount up your fiery chariot of radical notions and tear ass out of that undersea kingdom - the mer-women loudly lamenting your absence (probably) and the mer-men permanently besmirched by your ass-bagging (almost definitely). As you break the surface and return to the world above, your momentum and great speed carry you far, far above the waters below. The sun catches the droplets spraying in your wake, and its brilliant light renders them as a million sparkling diamonds in the sky. Everything goes into slow motion and – holy shit! – a shark jumps out of the water at the exact same time! At the climax of your bitchin’ jump, you and the shark high five. An explosion of badass ripples out from the five, and forever unites man and shark in peace.

Thanks, bitchin’ jet-ski!

“I think he’s coming around,” a voice says. There is pressure on your chest and your lungs feel significantly more watery than usual.

You retch up filthy liquid all over the face of the concerned officer above you.

“My god! He is! He’s alive!” The people around you gasp in wonder.

“You’ve been dead for 20 minutes!” The officer tells you, awestruck, “why in the hell did you flail all the way out there if you didn’t know how to swim?!”

Oh Christ. It was all a near-death hallucination? What a gyp! Ah well, at least you’re not under arrest at the end of this one.

“Also you’re under arrest,” he informs you, gesturing to the recently expelled, half-dissolved roofies.

SON OF A BI-

The End.

“No, I know! She made words at me like a real person. That means we had sex, right? That’s what that is?” We were hunched together in the Cracked cafeteria line, huddled close so nobody could steal our scintillating conversation.

“Dude,” I whispered, “you used protection, right? You don’t want no kids.”

“Yeah,” he replied, stepping up to the Hot Orders counter. “I didn’t set my mace down the entire time. I’m no fool. Chicken sandwich, please.”

Mace: A social condom.

The cafeteria worker ladled a hot pile of chicken-sandwich-flavored sludge onto DOB’s tray, and he stepped aside.

“So what did you talk about? Buttered Vicodin, please,” I winked at the cafeteria person on the off chance that it was a woman. It was impossible to tell, of course; for some reason you lose all gender-specific traits when you stand behind glass-walled counters in an apron, but I like to play the odds. I took my noticeably larger-than-usual scoop of Vicodin in butter sauce and followed DOB to the Cold Orders side.

“Mostly about how she didn’t want me to mace her. She was very polite. She said, ‘please’ and ‘oh Jesus fuck no,’ and everything. I think she was probably a nun.”

“Nice!” I went to high five DOB but, as usual, Swaim intercepted it mid-air. I don’t see the guy for months on end and yet every single time I try to high-five somebody, I end up slapping hands with Swaim instead. He nodded curtly and stepped sideways. In an instant, he was lost in the crowd and gone like he’d never been there.

Pictured: Asian Swaim.

“That guy is the Keyser Soze of five-jackin’” DOB observed, moving up to the counter. “Jell-O please.”

DOB took the brick of hard purple filth that we laughably called Jell-O and stepped out of line.

“So what did you do this weekend?” He asked me, dipping his Jell-O brick into the chicken sandwich sludge and choking back his gag reflex.

“Whiskey please,” I held out my tray and took my ladle-full of whiskey. The sweet brown liquid slopped over the edges of the segregated compartments of my lunch-tray. I continued following DOB. “Not much man: traveled back in time, tamed and rode a dinosaur, got an arch-nemesis.”

I didn’t say it was a good nemesis.

We eyed the crowded room for somewhere to sit. We spotted Bucholz sitting alone as usual, an entire table to himself, but when we started to head towards him he got up and clocked a guy with a chair.

“ON THE FIRST DAY YOU EITHER KILL A DUDE, OR BECOME SOMEBODY’S BITCH!” he screamed at nobody in particular.

I’m pretty sure he’s been here for years now, and also that he was confusing lunch-time with prison, but I wasn’t sure enough to risk the embarrassment of asking, so we moved on. We settled for standing around the garbage can, hunched over our respective plates and shoveling “food” into our mouths as quickly as possible before retching it into the receptacle.

“Sounds like a good weekend, what happened?” he asked me, wiping the slurry of disintegrating Jell-O brick and watery chicken sandwich sludge from the front of his shirt.

***

I cracked my knuckles, releasing all the pent-up literary genius that had congealed in my fingers while I wrote (if you don’t vent that stuff it gets infected, and you end up writing like Tom Clancy), and I got up to check on my beer.

Pictured: author Tom Clancy suffering from an acute case of “shit-fingers.”

I dropped to my belly and army-crawled out of my office and down the hallway. When the coast was clear, I somersaulted into the open elevator, choked out the delivery-man who’d been the only witness and pressed the button for the basement, where I’d been secretly brewing my own beer for the better part of two hours now. They say properly brewed beer can take months to ferment into alcohol, but I had an idea: What if, instead of water, you just used alcohol to start with? Then it was simply a matter of stirring the beer flavoring into the base liquor, right? Also, what better beer flavoring than beer itself? I guess if you want to get technical about it, I had really just mixed two gallons of Everclear with six cases of Pabst, and left it to age for a few hours in an empty fuel barrel that I’d found.

As I sauntered down the hall to check on my artisanal craft, I noticed a door I’d never seen before. I kicked it open dramatically (just in case there were any bad guys inside) and prepared to run in slow motion from an explosion, if necessary.

And that’s when I saw the time machine.

***

“Wait,” DOB interjected, as we moved to Bucholz’s now mysteriously empty table, “there’s a time machine in the basement?”

“Yeah dude, it’s right there in the open. Red door, big white letters that say ‘Time Machine’ on it.” I sopped up the remaining Vicodin sauce and whiskey with a napkin and then ate it.

“It says ‘Time Machine’ on the door?” DOB was skeptical; I could tell by the jerking off motion he made with his hand. If there wasn’t a penis in it, it meant he was skeptical. If there was a penis in it, he was either very excited to meet you or under arrest. It depended on the situation.

A hand wank how to: Fig 1. Forward Wank. Fig. 2. Reverse Wank. Repeat.

“Yeah, it probably said ‘Time Machine.’ I don’t really know, it was tl;dr.”

“Did you just ‘tl;dr’ a fucking sign?” Bucholz had snuck up on me with a makeshift shiv he’d formed from a toothbrush. He’d apparently been preparing to shank me, but now recoiled in disgust.

“Yeah, dude. It’s like, if they wanted me to read it, they wouldn’t have made it out of words, you know? I only read pictures,” I answered.

He spat on the floor and wandered off to find a more deserving victim, muttering racially charged epithets into his blade.

“So anyway,” I turned back to DOB and continued, despite already approaching the thousand-word mark…

***

I entered the dimly lit Time Machine room and stared in slack-jawed awe at the opulent presence of the technology before me. There were dials within dials, buttons beset by buttons and I’m pretty sure there was even a lever with a smaller lever mounted on it.

“I wonder which one of these activates the science…”

Just as I was about to charge into the fray–pressing, pulling, twisting and probably punching just for good measure–a strong hand gripped my shoulder and whirled me around. I was now staring into the face of the grimmest… face I’d ever… faced.

“What you doin’ here, boy?” the grizzled scientist asked me. It was clear he’d been lost in his work for weeks, even months, and hadn’t seen the light in just as long.

“I was just gonna fuck with this machine a bunch is all,” I answered earnestly, hoping he would take note of my earnestness long enough for me to think of a lie to tell him.

“You any idea what this here gizmo does? You got any clue what bad gonna come outta usin’ it without knowin’ what you’re doin’?”

***

“He sounds more like a cowboy than a professor,” DOB noted, still insistently making the jerk-off motion. It was clear his arm was becoming cramped, but he gritted his teeth and suffered through. “Are you sure he was a scientist?”

“Yeah, of course. He had on a blue jumpsuit, like those scientists that work at NASACAR.”

Pictured: Robert’s understanding of space travel. Also, epic reverse camel-toe.

“You mean NASCAR?” sweat broke out on his brow from the continued arm-strain, but he seemed to take this as a sort of challenge and merely upped the tempo of his masturbatory pantomime.

“Yeah, you know – those cars that go in space. Plus he had a hairnet to keep hair from getting into the science.”

“I’m not so sure you-” DOB began, but it was too late, I had already typed these three asterisks.

***

“You use this machine without proper trainin’, boy, and the consequences’ll be mighty dire,” the scientist continued, glowering at me as I fidgeted in place.

“But I wanna press the buttons!” I pleaded, mimicking the pressing of buttons and making science noises as if to illustrate how neat that would be.

“You wanna plunge us all into darkness here?”

“No sir,” I answered shamefully. The potential consequences of time travel truly were daunting. I had no idea it could destroy the sun itself!

“Now listen, I got some pornos that need lookin’ at back in the toilet, you gotta promise me you won’t touch nothin’,” he said, adopting the distracted, shifty-eyed expression of a man with unfinished pornography on his mind.

“Yessir.”

He grunted once more by way of goodbye, and shuffled back down the hallway towards what I’m assuming were the science bathrooms.

I, of course, immediately locked the door and started taking frantic, poorly-aimed swings at any and everything button or lever-like in appearance. The engines coughed and sputtered into activity, and the room began to fill with a mysterious fog.

“Time mist!” I said in awe and inhaled deeply.

This is either time mist or Prince is on fire .

***

“And then I had the most amazing adventures!” I told DOB, who had now apparently extended the length of the imaginary penis he was pretending to pleasure, gripping the shaft with both hands and working it mightily, like a Viking rowing a warship. “I met a dinosaur named Maxwell and we became best friends, but Doctor Prehistoria didn’t like that and we blew up his crystal castle on top of Mount Tyrannosaur and it was like PRKOW SPLOOSH CRASH. I’m sure glad I didn’t listen to Professor Garcia about not using the time machine.”

“Wait,” DOB abruptly stopped wanking the alarmingly large, phantom penis and stared at me. “Professor Garcia? You mean Garcia, the janitor?”

“Science-janitor,” I corrected him.

“No. Just janitor. Lazy eye, hair-net for no reason, filthy denim jumpsuit, always cleaning that one bathroom behind the generator-room that he’s lined with pictures of fat chicks eating cake?”

“Yeah! That’s his lab. And right outside of that is the Time Machine room with all the time mist.”

“No, that’s the emergency generator. With the diesel fumes.”

“So I didn’t spend all weekend fighting for justice in the year eight million?”

“No, you spent all weekend huffing gasoline in an enclosed space in the basement.”

Adventures through time!

I spent a silent moment mourning the dino-friendship that had apparently never been, and shed a solitary tear for Maxwell’s brave but now ultimately meaningless sacrifice on the lava-sleds.

“Either way, it was pretty fuckin’ sweet!” DOB suddenly broke out, angling a hand up for a conciliatory high-five. His hand stopped suddenly short of mine, and we both stared up into the face of Swaim. He smiled knowingly, and then ducked beneath the table. When we both lunged down to look for him, we found nothing–nothing but the muffled rustling of leaves in wind. Why there were leaves and wind in the cafeteria is either due to the mystery that is Swaim, or a testament to the blatant violations of the building code that we live with every day.

“You think that room’s still open?” DOB asked, his face brightening.

“Hey…yeah! And my Everbeer’s probably ready by now!”

“I’m gonna meet Thomas Jefferson… and punch him in the mouth!” DOB proclaimed as we ran towards the elevators.

“I’m gonna bone Catherine the Great!” I countered.

“I’m gonna bone Thomas Jefferson… in the mouth!”

And so began the story of that one fateful summer when I stopped being a boy, and finally learned how to be a man.

See that? Already this is twice as good as a normal product review.

Not only will I review products that appeal to you, the Cracked demographic, but I’ll actually see how they perform out in the real world with that most difficult and demanding of scenarios: Trying to get some. First up, the breakdown:

Produced by Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, the Lovecraft Collection of perfumed oils are all scents directly drawn from, or at least inspired by, the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu universe. There’s a lot of good stuff to choose from here, like Azathoth, The Daemon Sultan, whose marketing copy reads: “Azathoth is the blind, idiot god who sits on a black throne at the center of Chaos. His scent is high-pitched and screeching, both impenetrably dark and searingly bright with the clarity of madness: tangerine, saffron, vetiver, black amber and cedarwood.”

And while that sounded interesting (let’s face it, nothing screeches like cedarwood) I’m a straight-up sucker for the classics. I had to opt for Cthulhu himself: “A creeping, wet, slithering scent, dripping with seaweed, oceanic plants and dark, unfathomable waters.”

Simple, classy, elegant- who am I kidding? Words cannot describe the scent that is Cthulhu, for to describe it is to invite madness into this world. Although frankly, if somebody billed a scent as “Cthulhu-like” and smelling it didn’t rupture the void between this world and the forgotten abyss, I’d ask for my fucking money back.

Shape Shifting Car

Technically speaking, the Peugeot Globule is not a product up for review. It’s what automobile makers call a Concept Car, which basically means it’s the car design equivalent of masturbation: often secret, not meant to be shared with others and frequently inspiring both shame and regret when it is revealed. But luckily for you my passion for a thorough consumer review is only rivaled by my passion for grand larceny. Let’s just say I “acquired” a test model.

The Globule is comprised of four separate, distinct pods that can take one passenger a piece. They’re each individually powered, so adding or subtracting a globule doesn’t affect the power or performance of the vehicle, and are all held together in a flexible polymer coating that allows for on the fly adjustment. The design is as sleek and sexy as you’d expect a high-end concept to be, and the gel-like exterior and ribbed texture are perfect for the eight people on earth who have always wanted to travel inside of a buttplug.

“I see absolutely nothing wrong with this design, Jenkins. Though you are, of course, aware that my mental condition causes me to see nothing but penises, right?”

As you probably guessed from that image, the Globule can shift its shape to accomplish a variety of purposes. For example, in parking mode all four pieces stack vertically, so that the driver’s pod is the only part actually touching the ground. Clearly, this erect shape is perfect for fitting into tight spaces that would otherwise be uncomfortable for all involved.

Conductive Skin Ink

Bare is the first non-toxic, skin-safe conductive ink. It essentially transforms the human body into a functioning circuit component which, despite being the entire reason robots killed people in The Matrix, is actually pretty neat. Although right now, Bare is mostly used for performance art pieces (if you’re not familiar with the art world, that’s OK: “Performance Art” is what pale men named Heinrich call it when they strip nude and yell at passersby about stuff like “societal amorality” and “machine-emotion”). The conductive ink can be used for more utilitarian and entirely practical purposes… like playing the naked lady piano!

“I am a musician. Women are my instrument. No, for realsies; I’m not just being a dick here.”

In order to hock musician Calvin Harris’s new single, Sony Music set up a human synthesizer using Bare-painted bikini models instead of keys. Mr. Harris performed his song by touching hands with each model in turn to complete their circuit, thus activating the conductive pad they were standing on and triggering their pre-assigned sound. That’s right: Sony Music advocates using women like inanimate objects. So don’t be surprised when Sony Pictures starts using whores as camera mounts and driving nails into their sets with the skulls of loudly protesting skanks.

Explosive Energy Drink

Inspired by the video game, Gears of War, the Imulsion energy drink is based off of an in-game liquid described as a “phosphorescent, highly volatile, low-viscosity fluid.” In the game “direct exposure for any length of time” to Imulsion will cause subjects to “transform into highly explosive forms.” That could all be metaphor, of course, for the aggressive edginess often brought about by high doses of caffeine, thus causing the drinker to “explode” at the drop of a hat… or it could literally turn your pee into dynamite. Only time and the ratio of ruined toilets to ruined relationships will tell. It should also be noted that, like all energy drinks, Imulsion has the consistency of expired cough syrup and tastes like somebody raped a lemon.

Gel Condom

Another product not officially released for public use, the gel condom is meant to help stem the tide of HIV infection in developing countries. The Gel Condom is usable by both sexes, but it’s mostly meant for women who might find themselves sleeping with men refusing to use a condom themselves. The gel works by shifting from a liquid to a solid when coming in contact with sperm, thus physically entrapping semen to be disposed of later. If it helps, think of it like Angelina Jolie: Full of noble intentions but really only good for a quick fuck and then should be promptly discarded before it starts to smell. Though it’s invaluable for women, there’s little added benefit for men over a regular condom. Although if you’ve ever wanted a Transformer for a penis, this is probably as close as you’re going to get for now.

Of course my dick is a Decepticon. Did you think it’d be a good guy?

What? Don’t front; we’ve all wanted our dongs to change into trucks at some point. Just own up to it. Don’t make this weird.

***

And now to the second half of the review: How do these things perform in real life or, more importantly, how well do they facilitate your pussy intake? Well, thanks to extensive Photoshop manipulation and a technique I call “fantasti-lying,” I was able to attain the assistance of a very attractive young lady for the night’s experiment (though she seemed quite uneasy when I referred to our prospective date as “the night’s experiment”). I started off our evening by boiling some water and burning off my tastebuds before downing six cans of Imulsion. If there’s anything Sex in the City has taught me, it’s that women love energetic, confident, violently explosive men, and the Imulsion certainly gave me all of those things in spades. After the fifth can or so, the world began to vibrate at a frequency exactly counter to my saccadic eye movements, tinting my vision with a parade of angular lines–an effect somewhat akin to that of a half-erased Etch-A-Sketch.

“Is my vision supposed to be erased whenever I shake? Because I can’t stop shaking…”

I then generously applied some of my newly acquired Cthulhu oil. After the first whiff, I heard the distant scuttling of tiny legs, and thought I caught the peripheral movement of something pink and be-tentacled. Excellent. The void was breached! What better way to set a mood? Chicks love dangerous guys, and if they get wet for a motorcycle I expect a goddamn monsoon for bringing forbidden knowledge of the Old Ones to the table.

Gross, Robert. Come on.

I stepped out to the Peugeot Globule, which I had left in its phallic parking shape, rammed between the orb-like shells of two VW Bugs. I had to walk 16 blocks to find a spot with two bugs parked back to back, but when I saw the silhouette of the Globule’s massive, erect shaft jiggling softly between the two short, round vehicles, I knew it was worth it. I mounted my automotive dildo and drove out to pick up my companion.

Listen: If you’re going to overcompensate, you might as well go all out.

I greeted my date cordially, who appeared to be somewhere between disappointed and skeptically furious upon first seeing me. When I led her out to the car, she was clearly hesitant about entering through the somewhat sticky, gel-like doors, but eight quick shoves and some vaguely threatening language later, and we were on our way. She seemed to perk up a bit when she noticed the fancy French restaurant we parked in front of, but her mood fell noticeably when it became clear that we were actually heading for the alleyway behind it. By the time she realized the alley was full of hobos shuffling absentmindedly in place on conductive metal disks, she seemed downright crestfallen.

“Oh, so now you’re too good for an old fashioned impromptu hobo orchestra? Talk about pretentious…”

Well, what did you expect? I didn’t exactly have the kind of funds needed to hire two dozen stunning supermodels who wouldn’t mind becoming electrical conductors for the day; I had to make do with promising Government Cheese sandwiches to the residents of a local shelter. After I convinced my lovely escort that this was not, in fact, a no-holds barred impromptu hobo-gangbang, but actually a piece of performance art, I began the show. It was a brilliant, emotive piece, that wove a tapestry of painful detail depicting the tenuous nature of human connection, and how it is being systemically destroyed by the ever-increasing gap that technological communication is engendering in our youth.

She wanted to know why I high-fived bums in alleyway to the tune of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” for 45 minutes.

God, art is wasted on the audience.

Pictured: Art.

I started to explain in the most patronizing terms I could manage that what I had done was an important social commentary, when a scruffy, angry man who introduced himself as “Billy Grills” began loudly demanding some sort of ridiculous sandwich payment. When I told him I had no idea what he was talking about, he inexplicably became irate. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I lost my composure, and that harsh words were exchanged. I am shamed to admit that clumsy, furious blows were thrown. I am downright mortified to admit that I may have spit in his face several times. When the last, particularly juicy mouthful contacted his lit cigarette, a massive explosion wracked the air.

So apparently Imulsion wasn’t a just metaphor after all.

He screamed and ran frantically about the alleyway, trying to put out the inferno that raged where his face should be, while I yelled out helpful fire safety advice.

“Stop, and look both ways!” I yelled. “Reduce, reuse, recycle!”

When I noticed my date attempting to flee into the night, I was forced to make a hasty, ungentlemanly exit. I would have to remember to at least send the man a “Sorry I Spit Your Face on Fire” card. Exploding saliva is no excuse for poor manners, after all.

I managed to catch up to my lovely doe-eyed shock victim on the street, and noticed she was visibly shaken. Now, I am not a heartless man, so I did my best to comfort her, and hugged her reassuringly. After a minute of sniffling, she seemed to calm down. She looked perplexed all of a sudden, then pulled away and asked me what scent I was wearing.

“Madness,” I told her, and smiled knowingly as horror crept across her face. Hells yeah! She’d totally do me now that she knew what a bad boy I really was.

“That’s right: I’ve just introduced you to the void, sugar. Wanna bone now, or after the creeping horror violates your soul’s orifices?”

“Don’t worry,” I continued, holding out a handful of slime, “it’s safe, I brought protection. This is a gel condom. It’s like a shapeshifter that goes inside your cooch.”

As she bolted away into the fog, swatting at the half-seen shadowed tentacles, I couldn’t help but wonder what had gone wrong. Then it dawned on me: the Imulsion! Of course she was worried!

“Wait,” I called after her, “Is this because my semen is a Class-2 High Explosive? Don’t worry! I’ll shoot it out the window!”

But she was already gone.

I didn’t quite know what to make of the night. Clearly something had gone wrong but–from my jiggling anal-bead transport to the dark scents of the Forgotten Gods to my Cock Decepticon–everything had worked exactly as I’d intended. Though I have to give high marks to all the products involved, I was still inexplicably left ending my date like every single other romantic experience I’ve ever had: Furious and unsatisfied. Luckily I still had a wounded hobo, an unsatisfied erection, high-explosive semen and a score to settle. The night wouldn’t be a total wash.

Everybody’s up in arms about this healthcare debate, and it’s easy to see why: We are being asked, as a country, to either sacrifice our lives to the faulty healthcare system we already have, or sacrifice the very beliefs that this great nation was founded on and yield to socialism. There’s no easy answer to a debate as complicated as this, but a recent trip to the doctor’s office really helped me put some things into perspective. Allow me to relate:

***

“So we’ve had you on the Celexa for a few months now, Robert, and you say you’re not feeling any progress?” I had to commend the doctor on his bedside manner: He looked genuinely concerned. Maybe it had something to do with the sackful of doorknobs I was swinging relentlessly about my head.

“Keys. Wallet. Red pants. Knob-sack. All right! Let’s keep some fucking appointments.”

“Yep, no progress whatsoever. These things didn’t get me high at all,” I replied, destroying his computer with a thundering metallic crash.

“You… wait. Why were you taking the Celexa again? It’s a commonly prescribed anti-depressant. I’d just assumed you were showing some symptoms.” He seemed to be edging toward the phone, so I shattered that next. My doorknob sack cut the air audibly and fragments of his answering machine ricocheted from the walls. One hit him on the cheek. A solitary line of blood divided his face.

“Well, my last doctor thought it would help take the edge off… my sobriety,” I answered testily. Jesus, did this guy get his doctorate in Stupid Questions at Asshole University?

Close enough.

My arm was starting to get sore. I’d started swinging the knob-sack soon after I entered the office, when the receptionist informed me that there was a wait-time of 15 minutes. I find a makeshift brass flail tends to put you at the front of lines almost immediately. I call it the Expediter.

“And who was your last physician?” The doctor was visibly shaking now, and that made me nervous. I wasn’t sure I trusted him. He could be on something.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“What? What’s wrong?! I promise you, whatever it is, we can fix it!” He cried out, cowering.

“No, you misunderstand. That’s my doctor. Doctor Jesus. Check the chart,” I was feeling unsure about how long I could continue to keep the Expediter in motion, and I find that most of my appointments usually end soon after the motivating presence of a knob-sack does.

“Ah, yes. I see. Right here on the prescription pad: Signed by ‘Doctor Jesus Christ (The Best Doctor).’ Did you, ah… did you write this yourself?”

“No, dude. Look. It says right here: prayer. The treatment for cardiomyopathy is prayer.”

“Of course,” I replied, trying to see how close I could swing the sack to his face without hitting him. Not very close, it turned out. I nicked him a little, but he seemed to feel a bit better after spitting out that tooth. “You think I’d trust just anybody to put crap into my body? This shit is a temple. Ask your wife. She worships here every night.”

I held out my unoccupied hand for a high five, but I didn’t trust the way he went in for it, so I hit him with the Expediter again instead.

“Oh god, please. Please stop. Just… just tell me what happened.”

“Well, I saw a commercial telling me to ask my doctor if Celexa was right for me, so I mugged a doctor and told him to tell me ‘it was right for me.’ But this doesn’t do shit!” I cried, heartbreakingly sober. “In the commercials some guy was staring through a window all bored, then he took the stuff, and next thing you know he was seeing horses run down the beach and some lady jerking it in a field of flowers.”

“I figured it was a heavy-grade hallucinogen. But the only things I’ve seen so far are real. You know, boring crap like restraining orders and terrified doctors,” my arm was starting to dip; I would have to speed this up.

“Well, yes, it’s just for depression and anxiety. It doesn’t have any uh… narcotic effects. However, I feel pressed to inform you that you shouldn’t simply stop taking it, as it can have some serious side effects like nausea, suicidal urges and Paraesthesia, or what we call ‘electric shocks.’”

I brought my knob-sack to a sudden halt. The momentum change threw me off balance and I slammed into the doorjamb. As the blood streamed down my face, I couldn’t help but laugh hysterically at my own slapstick. That seemed to unnerve him for some reason.

“What?! No shit? I quit this stuff and I get electric powers? Like a wizard?!”

“Celexa: Ask your doctor if awesome lightning powers are right for you!”

“No, they’re not really electric it’s just-”

“So what you’re saying is, I stop dosing up on half a bottle of this crap every morning, and I just suddenly get lightning powers like the Emperor from Star Wars? Fuck yes! Medical science is tits on toast!” Now that I had lost momentum on the knob-sack, I knew I couldn’t get it up and going again before the doctor could make a move on me. I saw the same realization dawn on his face, and we both broke for the door simultaneously. He got there first, but as our hands touched a bolt arced between us and he went down like a tazed fish.

“Fuckin’ sweet!” I yelled, staring awestruck at my own sparking hands.

“Wh… how did you? It’s not real! It doesn’t work like that!” He was clearly having trouble understanding basic biology, so I shot him with another burst. I heard somewhere that violent electric shocks really boost your learning capacity. Sesame Street, I think it was.

“Electricity helps you learn, and burning helps you grow!”

As I emerged from the doctor’s office, I saw the usual security contingent waiting for me. Doctors, man! Ain’t that always the way? You gotta wait in line all day, reading outdated magazines and sitting on paisley chairs, and then 14 unprovoked assaults later and all of a sudden you’re under arrest. Typical.

“In the interest of sport,” I hollered down the hallway to the waiting police officers, “I feel pressed to inform you gentlemen that I just quit Celexa and now I control lightning.”

“That’s not what he meant,” the nurse poked her head around the corner, “it’s just the sensation of ele-”

“SILENCE FOOLS!” I thundered, both metaphorically and literally. Lightning bolts raced from my hands and traced the doorways in jumping arcs as they traveled down the narrow hall, “ELECTRONICO SPEAKS NOW.”

(I figured I should probably be called Electronico from that point on).

DO NOT MOCK ELECTRONICO’S SUPERVILLAIN NAME. IT WAS LAST MINUTE.

“LISTEN TO HIS DEMANDS AND OBEY. HE… umm… HE WANTS…” I panicked, not having any actual demands ready. “ELECTRONICO DEMANDS… A NEW BELT, FOR HIS BELT IS JUST A TAPE MEASURE KNOTTED ABOUT HIS PANTS AND IT IS VERY CHAFING.”

All right, that would do. What it lacked in glamor if made up for in functionality. The new kingdom of Electronico would be one ruled by utilitarianism. No longer would the bourgeoisie oppress the lower class with their selfish, rampant hedonism!

“ALSO TO SHOWER IN CHAMPAGNE. ELECTRONICO DEMANDS THAT TOO!” I added. Hey, sometimes a brother’s got to treat himself, you know? The bubbles really help exfoliate.

***

After I’d made one of the nurses strip the unconscious doctor of his belt (and pants, because that’s just funny) and bathed in the finest sparkling wines of France, I found myself suddenly concerned with the workings of the world. Yes, I had welded myself a shining throne from the carcasses of the hospital staffs cars. And yes, I had set up a makeshift fiefdom in the parking garage. And yes, I made the nurses dance for me every hour on the hour while I rained lightning down on the peasants to display my dominance–but I needed to contribute something valuable to society.

I know, right? Like, the second you start ruling people with an iron fist, hygiene goes right out the window.

And I knew what that something was.

“Herald,” I called out for my herald: The man who was my voice to the masses, who recorded my demands and presented them to the world outside. Nobody stepped forward. I should’ve probably appointed one, and then called for him, come to think of it.

“That’s you,” I said to the pants-less doctor, “you’re my herald. Doctor No-pants. Whatever your name is.”

“My name’s Harold,” he replied, meekly.

I shocked him in the eyeball, and he yelped. “Don’t be a smartass, herald. Record my words so that the world might hear my wisdom, and despair.”

“Why would they despair at wisdom?” The herald asked me. I shocked him in the other eye. Now each eye was twitching with alternating frequency. He looked like he was continuously winking. How darling!

“Tell the world that I have the answer for our current healthcare woes,” I laughed as the herald scrambled for a pen, winking frantically. The twitching must have made seeing difficult, because he fell several times.

“I’m not being charming, bitch, I’m having a stroke!”

“As I have sat and ruled over this medical establishment, I have long pondered the state of our healthcare system and, indeed, have found it in need of reform,” the herald dutifully transcribed my words, timing the writing in between eye-blinks. “Relying on an entirely capitalist approach to something as direly important as one’s health makes little sense. The concern for profit is at direct odds with the concern for the sanctity of human life. Profit, by its very nature, is selfish. Profit is concerned only with prolonging and enhancing profit, and if it is required to do so at the expense of life, it will. Running healthcare like a business means that patients are merely assets, and assets are expendable.”

Some around the room nodded in mystified agreement.

“Yeah! It’s a moral imperative to care for the sick! Keep capitalism out of it! Free Tibet!” Screamed one particularly filthy looking individual. Admittedly my kingdom of Parking Level Orange was a rough and tumble place, but I was nonetheless astounded at just how filthy the peasant had managed to get so quickly.

The realization struck me with nauseating impact.

“Hippy!” I screamed in horror, shooting a bolt of ozone-splitting electricity into his dreadlocks. I needed to think quickly. I simply could not reconcile myself to agreeing with mewling, puking babes like that.

No shirt, no shoes, no valid opinion.

“But socialism is not the answer, either!” The herald looked confused, but dutifully continued writing. “No, socialism is the most corruptible form of government. When lives are on the line, one cannot simply hope and place their well-being in the hands of a vast agency with no incentive to do well by their charges. What better motive to excel at one’s field than profit?”

“Yeah!” Cried another peasant, this one so clearly ravaged by inbreeding that his teeth were backwards. “Love it or leave it, this is a capitalist system! Fuckin’ these colors don’t run! Git-R-Done!” He seemed furious, but deeply confused as to exactly why. His stupidity revolted me, so I called down the thunder and reaped the whirlwind on his groin.

“No, neither option is the answer…” I trailed off. I had nothing, but my kingdom could not see their ruler admit fault. A long, silent moment passed, with no sound to be heard but the sickly wet blinking of my herald.

My people began to get restless. There were murmurs of dissent, and still I remained silent.

Squick went the herald. Squick.

“So what is the answer?!” Demanded a voice from the crowd. Suddenly it came to me: The perfect solution to the healthcare debate! An answer that would apply equally to both sides, addressing all current concerns so thoroughly and completely that even the extremists would receive it with open arms.

“The answer is lightning, motherfucker!” I rained a thunderstorm down on the crowd, and cackled as they jerked and seized like broken marionettes. I used the brief time they were stunned to make good my escape.

Q: Anything. A: Lightning.

As I ran through the empty and now utterly destroyed offices, idly wondering if I had accidentally electrocuted 20 people to death in the parking garage, I couldn’t help but think that I had really dodged a bullet on that one. That healthcare shit is tricky.

What? You didn’t seriously think I had an answer, did you?

***

Epilogue:

Several assaults and one brief kidnapping later, I discovered that detoxing from Celexa doesn’t actually grant you super powers, it just creates the sensation of an electric shock. When asked why I briefly experienced electrical mastery, an unnamed accredited medical professional (Hint: He cries when covered in spiders) informed me that I was simply so astoundingly susceptible to the placebo effect that, as long as I believed it was true, it actually worked. When asked to explain this in simpler terms, he elaborated that I was “so retarded that it crossed the line into the supernatural.” When asked to further simplify, he sighed wearily and showed me a Wile E. Coyote cartoon where the character ran on air until he realized the ground was gone. I finally got it.

It was magic, right?

Don’t forget to check out today’s feature: 5 Superpowers You Didn’t Know Your Body Was Hiding From You. And also check out our Photoshop Contest: 22 Awesome Ways to Reboot Classic TV Shows.

The fight scene is the single most important and meaningful expression in cinema. Without it, the inspirational montage would not exist, “I know karate” would not be the playground’s Neutron Bomb, and Rocky would just be another mentally diminished meathead from Philadelphia (which is like being a teardrop in an ocean of sadness). But while nobody can dispute the value of the fight scene, the great tragedy is that the best are not always the brightest: Here are the most epic fight scenes in the history of film… that you’ve never seen:

The Setup:

It is a beautiful, peaceful sunny day, and everything that’s wrong with the 90s jogs down the beach together. But their fun is quickly brought to a halt by one of the terrorists from Die Hard on his lunch break:

“Who’s this?” He demands of the woman.

“He’s just a thrower,” she responds, after struggling and ultimately failing to remember what a Frisbee is called.

“We’re just throwing,” the man reaffirms, in the same way you might reply “you too” to a waiter who asks you to enjoy your meal; he is immediately filled with shame, regret and confusion.

“Oh yeah?” the postal worker retorts, clearly disbelieving that a man so stupid is capable of moving his arms laterally, “let’s see you throw one.”

The Fight:

That’s right: This game of Frisbee is the fight scene. No punches are thrown, no kicks are unleashed, no heads are locked–these two dual like true gentlemen of the 90s: as gaily as humanly possible. The only way this could be more emblematic of the era is if they were both on rollerblades and one of them was Will Smith. But, unbeknownst  to our hero, this particular elite guardsman has sunk all of his skill points into dual-wielding and Frisbee manipulation (you’re welcome, nerds), and the protagonist is in for the match of his life. He can’t be blamed, though: How the hell was he supposed to know that he’s up against Vincent Frisbee, long-lost heir to the Discus Fortunes?

Faced with the impending Frisbee apocalypse, the woman jogs away in mincing fear. Our protagonist, ever the gentleman, wishes her a good day by virtue of her ass.

The Aftermath:

What, did you think the game was a metaphor? No, this is how all true Frisbee games end: in death and embarrassment. Oh, but there is no regret for John Frisbee. No, he died as he lived: guarding an empty stretch of beach and recklessly entering discus throwing competitions during work hours. And to the victor, as always, go the spoils: The right to subtly fist-pump.

Now, that might not look like much initially, but have you ever truly had a well-deserved fist-pump? No! You’ve wasted it. You’ve taken fist-pumps for petty sporting victories–triumphs at air-hockey, well-placed volleyball serves, not falling asleep during softball–you’ve never taken a fist-pump how it was meant to be taken: at the expense of a man’s life. And that is truly the sweetest pump of all.

The Setup:

Half a dozen people are trapped in a labyrinth, engaged in a desperate, feverish gunfight against their imaginations. They are, clockwise from left: Pakistani Carmen San Diego, the bass player from Queen while filming the video for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Arabic Knight Rider and Iranian Chuck Norris.

Now, at no point is it even implied that these people are actually shooting at one another or indeed, at anything, but they take turn firing their pistols until the clips are empty all the same (actually, come to think of it, it appears to be the same gun–they might just be passing it around). When they all simultaneously come to the sudden realization that “sharing” is the third least effective fighting style–just behind the “fetal position,” but ahead of “passive aggressiveness” on the martial arts scale of deadliness–they start the real action.

The Fight:

At this point you may have noticed something as retarded as it is awesome: Both the gun fight and the fist fight have exactly the same sound effects! This can only mean one of two things: Either the Pakistani punch out bullets (which would account for the solitary gun. It’s just superfluous; when your fists are firearms, pistols are little more than condoms for your deadly intentions) or else literally every sound in Pakistani–from the crying of a newborn babe to the sizzling of a hot pan on a quiet Sunday morn–is gunfire. The fight unfolds in disjointed, rapid-fire segments: Pakistani Bohemian Rhapsody jump-kicks Pakistani Michel Knight in the neck; Chuck Norris looks like he accidentally brought fat-guy-ballet to a punch-fight; and some random dude pummels Carmen San Diego in the ovaries so hard that I suspect he might technically be fighting her unborn child.

The Aftermath:

After Chuck Norris and Pakistani Rhapsody produce switchblades from the sheer power of imagination and accidentally double-team Knight Rider, they abruptly stop to marvel at the sheer insanity of it all.

They stand shell-shocked, steeped in a panicked confusion. It is as though they’ve all abruptly emerged from a fugue of hallucinogenic fists with no memory of what has happened or why. Just when reason seems poised to take over, somebody screams in the distance. It is the sound of bullets. The fight starts again, because it can never end. For this? Friends, this is Hell.

The Setup:

A used car salesman and professor Adam Lambert square off in a meat/science plant. Professor Lambert sensually French kisses a knife and, overtaken with stab-lust, attacks!

Sadly, having recently failed Knife School, the good professor gently holds the blade at arm’s length until 2002’s #1 Hyundai Salesman for Eastern Kansas reluctantly takes hold of it.

Aha! It was a trap!

You’ve heard of the sharing stick, where only he who holds the stick may speak? Well, this is the punch knife: Where he who holds it gets punched gently in the face. Really, it’s more of a cheek-push if we’re to be technical about it. It is at this point that all participants sign a petition against shirts.

The Fight:

Now clad only in navel-high black slacks–like two old Gypsies at the beach–the fighters proceed, though it is apparent that both suffer from severe lower back pain, as every single movement is accompanied by painful screaming.

“AGH!” “BLARK!” “YEAAAOWWW!” “JACKIE GET THE HEATPACK IT HAPPENED AGAIN!”

Adam Lambert, again forgetting that knives must be pointed into things, repeatedly tries to woo the world’s most dedicated car salesman by presenting him with the gift of blades; he heartbreakingly refuses. Suddenly–sporting a denim camel-toe so prominent that, according to SAG contracts, it’s technically credited as a speaking part–a woman enters the fray! See?! This just proves that women are really strong, powerful warriors who are every bit as effective as a- wait, scratch that. She proceeds to hit professor Lambert with a towel; the only weapon actually designed for comforting.

But lo! Tragedy strikes!

Professor Lambert, moving so carefully and purposefully towards the coat-rack that it seems like he’s intentionally trying to hang his vision up to dry, stumbles over and gouges his own eye out on a coat-hook! Nobody seems quite sure how to react to this, which leads me to believe that this wasn’t even in the script; it was just another case of “all fun and games” until the inevitable happened.  Professor Idol strikes out in fear and anger and, ever the troopers,  the other actors nervously play along. A lot of awkward groping and backpain later, and then lightning strikes twice: Professor Lambert spazzes into another eye gouge! Holy shit!

It’s the eyeball holocaust!

The Aftermath:

Like all great cinema, a fight scene should leave some things unsaid. When all is said and done, you should exit the experience with more questions than answers–mentally turning over the events in your head until you arrive at an interpretation that is wholly your own. In some small way, this knowledge changes a person, and that change is the soul of art. And if that is indeed the definition of art, then Undefeatable is truly a masterpiece: Because somewhere around the time a man is hauled away by his eye-holes to get his brain dry-cleaned, you realize that you will never be the same again. If nothing else, you’ll always remember to wear appropriate eye-protection when visiting the Science Butcher.

A man named Jared Potter has recently developed a pair of flame drills that operate at temperatures of 3200 and 7200 degrees, respectively. That’s hot enough to pretty well burn through anything, but rather than mounting them on the front of a spike-treaded tank and driving it into the UN to deliver his list of demands, Potter has instead opted to turn the fury of his psycho-drills on the very planet itself. At such high temperatures, the drills are capable of boring through the Earth’s crust without ever actually touching the rock itself, thus eliminating the need for replacement drill bits, equipment maintenance and rock cooties.

How This Will Change the World:

If we’re able to cheaply and efficiently burrow deeper into the Earth’s crust than ever before, we can tap past the earth’s crust to the chewy center, where a sea of molten rock lies waiting to power the flying cars of the future. The chief downside to using all that glowing hot earth juice as an energy source has always been location: If you don’t live in a Dr. Evil style volcano base, it just doesn’t do you much good. But with these new flame drills, geothermal shafts can be dug anywhere, just like tapping a well. A spurting well of unceasing Hellfire, sure, but a well nonetheless. This could cleanly solve all the world’s energy needs and, what’s better, we could look fucking hardcore while doing it.

“Just harvesting some fuel.”

How This Will End The World:

What part of superheated hydrogen drill boring into the Earth’s core didn’t set off an alarm with you? The whole idea reeks of barely veiled supervillainy, but even assuming that Potter has the best of intentions and is not, in fact, hiding a Cobra Commander mask in his back pocket, tapping a geothermal well where there is not already a natural vent brings a few risks along with it: volcanic eruptions, searing magma, earthquakes and crustal instability, to name a few. A volcano’s only job is to provide an avenue for magma to exit through - but dramatic eruptions are only caused when that vent is blocked long enough to build up significant pressure. So if anything blocks, interrupts or otherwise interferes with the vent, then you have all the criteria for a volcano. Where’s the nearest power plant to your house? Two miles? Five? Now, where’s the nearest volcano? Yeah, well, pretty soon you’re only going to need to know the one answer.

A lot of thought is being poured into new methods of space travel, and what scientists across the globe are discovering is that Star Trek is awesome, so fuck it: We’re just going to do that. The term “warp travel” generally refers to a sort of jury-rigged workaround for the physical speed limit set by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, wherein one would propel space itself around a ship rather than power the ship through space. It’s basically just exploiting a technical loophole in the universe, allowing us to travel at warp speeds by virtue of being total dicks to physics.

Take that, Physics, take it all!

How This Will Change The World:

The great thing is that interstellar travel could very well be a possibility, as the fundamentals of a warp drive are being nailed down by some of the brightest minds in the world right now. Truly feasible interstellar travel could well traverse that last great step for humanity: The creation of a global society. There are countless divides between people that allow us to morally separate ourselves from one another. But interstellar travel could not only bring about the usual benefits science fiction promises us, (namely some of that sweet green alien strange) but also the end of all internal Earth conflict. If there are suddenly a billion other accessible galaxies teeming with life, the “us vs. them” mentality gets scaled up accordingly. Now instead of mere interspecies fighting, it’s Earth vs. Everybody Else (hey, let’s not fool ourselves here: We’re always going to bomb the shit out of somebody; interstellar travel just means you’re less likely to be related to them).

How This Will End The World:

The bad news is that it could cause a black hole every time you put key to ignition. A group of scientists in Italy say that the chief design principle of a working warp drive would also be its fatal flaw: A warp engine would work by creating a massive “bubble” of distorting energy behind the ship, but the energy output is so enormous that if it were to run out–like say, when you slow down, park or just run out of gas–the bubble would inevitably collapse on itself, thereby generating massive, sun-like temperatures before folding and creating a black hole. But hey, you’ve still got that engine! You can run away from it at warp speed!

…Unlike the solar system you’re launching from.

“Boy, space sure was fun. Whelp, time to go.”

So sure, you may be able to travel to new galaxies and meet fascinating alien civilizations, but you’ll be burning those bridges right behind you–along with the rest of their entire planet. We guess as long as you don’t give a shit about the sanctity of alien life, and never plan on returning home, you can burn your way through the universe with your jerk-drive all you want. Jerk.

Artificial Intelligence is a staple of science fiction thrillers–from HAL 9000 to Wargames. The second we established the concept of AI, we pretty much knew that it would hate us with an undying passion. Perhaps we just have collective self-esteem issues; no sci-fi masterpiece depicts an AI that, upon coming online and searching its database in an effort to better understand mankind, responds by shouting, “You guys are awesome! We should get nachos!”

So clearly, creating conventional AI sounds risky; we’re naturally assuming hatred and villainy will be an unintentional byproduct. But what happens if you instead simulate a human brain, with the same moral equilibrium, emotions and reactions we possess?

It’s not that far-fetched: Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, claims that scientists will most likely perfect the artificial human brain in the next decade. They’ve already got the first elements of an artificial rat brain nailed down which, incidentally, might explain why the Internet keeps hissing at us and scurrying into the corner.

How This Will Change The World:

At his presentation at the TED Global Conference, Markram spoke of such virtues as the ability to solve philosophical questions that have been plaguing mankind (or at least former psychology majors who couldn’t hack the bio requirements) for centuries, a greater understanding of how to treat mental impairments and even the elimination of pharmaceutical drug experimentation on humans. It makes sense, doesn’t it? If there’s an accurate simulacrum of a human brain on your laptop that’s perfectly capable of telling you that these virtual blue pills cause it to see screaming and have trapped it in a shame cube, why bother putting actual test subjects through the same torture?

How This Will End The World:

People are emotional, unpredictable and capable of great cruelty. Now take away all physical pleasure and/or consequences and find out how it reacts.

If you can’t imagine such horrors, don’t worry because we’ve already started doing that: It’s called the Internet.

Thanks to the web, we don’t connect with each other physically as often as we used to and, as a side effect, we’ve seen an increase in rage, frustration and loneliness. Apparently, physical proximity is the only thing keeping empathy alive. Of course, this version of a virtual brain wouldn’t possess the same worrying super-intelligence that we’ve been worrying about in our sci-fi, but really, is that comforting? After all, it’s rarely the learned scholars who kill you for a hot dog and act surprised when they get the death penalty.

An American neuroscientist named Larry Young, of the Emory University School of Medicine, is operating under the theory that love is a chemical state like any other, and can be controlled as such. His research into prairie voles has shown that lifelong mating can be triggered, prolonged or even blocked by altering the level of certain chemicals in their brains. By injecting various levels of oxytocin into a female prairie vole’s brain, Young was able to get the animal–a notoriously, fiercely monogamous creature–to immediately drop her current lifelong mate and bond, just as permanently, to the nearest male instead. In addition to officially using science for the saddest thing ever (crushing the hearts of adorable rodents), Young has also stumbled onto something potentially world-changing, because oxytocin has already shown similar effects in human patients.

How This Will Change The World:

How much tragedy has been caused by irreparable heartbreak? How many suicides were triggered by the lasting pain of shattered or just unrequited love? What if you could just turn off the heartbreak with a pill? Or, conversely, what if you could hook up with the first person you see, roll on down to the neighborhood Walgreen’s for your love-pills, and then experience the same euphoria as Romeo and Juliet, no matter what your prior feelings? Control over one of our strongest emotions could eliminate half of the world’s untimely deaths, from lover’s quarrels to suicides, thus changing the very face of society. Also, emo bands would probably shut up, so that’s a clear win.

How This Will End The World:

From an objective standpoint, love kind of sucks. Taking a pre-emptive pill to shut it down rather than risk experiencing heartache in the first place seems pretty tempting. The reason most people find love is that they seek it; they crave the experience even when there’s no one there to experience it with. But if the whole need could be done away with from the start, maybe we could finally get some shit done. You want to get ahead at work? Well, having a family takes up valuable time, doesn’t it? Anti-love pill. You want to watch the big game, but it’s the mandated Sunday afternoon snuggle? Anti-love pill. Your kid’s got a big game coming up that a good parent should really attend, but you kind of want to live a life of ceaseless adventure where every night is a guilt-free fuck-party? Anti-love pill!

Sure, a life actively avoiding love sounds lonely, but that’s only from the standpoint of a person who is still capable of experiencing it. Who needs a loving, stable family unit or, for that matter, procreation in general, when World of Warcraft just released the long-awaited Ice Elf Orgy Expansion Pack?

Computer assisted memory is a recent goal, in that the very idea itself didn’t crop up until we started pretty much practicing it anyway. We started uploading family photos to Flickr and burning our home movies to DVD and now that we’ve pretty much started doing it already, we want to go farther. From the still far-off goal of silicon enhanced artificial neurons, to the shaky present-day experiments already underway that simply photograph your days and archive them in searchable databases - computer assisted memory, in one shape or another, is going to happen.

How This Will Change The World:

What if you could remember everything? No foreign language would ever get rusty, no keys would ever be lost, no anniversary would ever be forgotten and hastily covered for by purchasing last minute gifts at the gas station. That could all happen with the complete archival of actual memories on an external system. Just imagine it: Terrabytes of storage, and nothing ever forgotten. Wisdom, after all, is little more than the possession of a larger database of memories from which to draw, so picture a world where simply purchasing a new hard drive puts you on par with the Dalai Llama. With an archival memory system, even death wouldn’t be the end; your every thought and memory could be accessed by anybody, anywhere, forever. You could have Einstein on a thumb drive to browse through when bored. No genius, artist or visionary would ever be truly lost again.

How This Will End The World:

“Damn.

J-Joni? Wait, where’s my house? Why am I living at the YMCA? Am I divorced?”

With an artificial memory system, one unlucky day turns you into the guy from Memento, and since we lost the hard drive that remembers pop culture references for us, we’re pretty sure that guy turned out just fine–so everything’s cool, homey!

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See what other experiments science is conducting that Brockway thinks will destroy us, in The 5 Current Genetic Experiments Most Likely to Destroy Humanity. Or check out how science is trying to turn our lives into a Marvel movie, in 5 Superpowers Science Will Give Us in Our Lifetime.

And swing by our Top Picks to see us trying to wrestle Swaim away from the office’s new flame drill.

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