This week, while Ross is in the mountains of Mexico training for his new role as a Cracked columnist, we’re counting down our favorite Nooners from five to one. Coming in at number three is a stone cold classic that need only be introduced with the four oddly pronounced syllables: WIE-ner POO-pie.

Wiener Poopie

It must be hard to be a local TV reporter. You probably have to go to school for a long time, taking tons of classes on journalism and ethics and diction and all that stuff. Then you have to get an internship, hoping they’ll keep you on after the summer’s over. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get an entry-level job at some TV station in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You’ll work there for a couple of years, barely making ends meet, working late nights editing copy while your spiteful wife sits at home, stirring watered-down Kool-Aid and operating a phone sex line from your living room.

This will be your life.

Then one day you’ll get your big break. Your boss will call you into his office and hand you a script. “You won’t be on camera,” your boss will tell you, “but it’s a great human interest story. We need you to do narration.” You’ll give him a little self-satisfied nod, thinking to yourself, “No problem. I’ve got this.”

But then later on that night when you’re at home, staring at yourself in the mirror and practicing your lines, you’ll realize that nothing in your career could have prepared you for this. Most of it will be fine, the vast majority of it, really, but there will be those two words that you just can’t seem to get right.

“WIE-ner poopie,” you’ll say. “Wiener POO-pie. WIE-ner POO-pie.” You’ll inflect it differently each time, your voice rising and falling on each syllable in endless permutations. “Wie-NER poo-PIE.”

Your wife will sigh impatiently in bed. “Come to bed, honey,” she’ll say.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” you’ll say, then you’ll turn back to the mirror and furrow your brow. “WIE-ner poopie. Wiener POO-pie. WIE-ner POO-pie.”

Nobody ever said it was gonna be easy.

Ross Wolinsky is taking a personal day today. Filling in for him will be his grandfather, Pappy Wolinsky.

Hello, internet! How are you all doing? I’m doing fine, thanks!

You know, back in my day we didn’t have much scratch, but that was a different era - one where men wore hats, women wore dresses, and there was never any confusing the two!

We’d do all kinds of things for kicks back then - if we had the dough, we’d get dolled up in our best glad rags and head to town for some giggle water, but more times than not we were left flipping eggshells and spinning nuts - if you could get your hands on them! Hoo wee! We didn’t have the cable TV and Nintendro machines driving us all bugaboo back then! Heck no! All we needed was a bottle of hooch and a dame in the struggle buggy, and anything beyond that was just padding the butler’s ankles as far as we were concerned!

Things were a lot cheaper back then, boy I’ll tell you what! Back then you could get a gallon of milk for a penny, and a gallon went a lot further than it does today - we didn’t have those big fancy drinkin’ glasses you kids have today! I used to drink milk out of a rusty old tin can! There was only one tin can in the house that didn’t have any rust on it, and everyone knew that one belonged to Pa. It’d be coolies bending the trolley tracks if you drank out of Pa’s tin can - he’d box your ears but good!

Pa was a man who was hitting on all sixes for sure, and he could be tougher than a Chinaman’s mule on a hot Tuesday morning, but every once in a while he’d take us to town to see a talkie. Back then talkies only cost a nickel, and they were better than the garbage you get in the movie houses nowadays! That was when entertainment was on the level, boy! Now you’ve got your hotsy-totsy computer effects and your Iron Men and whatnot… horsefeathers! That ain’t entertainment! Nobody knows how to make a good movie anymore! Bah!

Back in my day, we didn’t need all these fancy effects and flashy cars and rap music to make a good talkie! All we needed was a good story - preferably one about a group of dogs having a party together, and if one of the dogs tried to rape one of the other dogs, all the better! If you could get a couple of dogs, some tiny evening wear, some string, and a jar of peanut butter together, why, you’d have a plum-ducky film on your hands!

And boy, those dogs were disciplined back then! We didn’t need some Spanish poolboy “whispering” at them to get them in line, no sir! But like I said, it was a different era back then: one where men wore hats, women wore dresses, and dogs knew their place. These films nowadays… applesauce, I say! Applesauce!

Robotic Dogs Are Coming To Kill You

Remember when everyone was freaking out about killer bees? Back in the 90s they were the imminent threat du jour, pressing northward in a buzzing swarm of honey, stingers and death. We were completely terrified knowing that these insanely aggressive bees were coming to destroy us all…

And then nothing happened. The killer bees never really showed up (other than in a few parts of the southwest), America turned its attention to other, more pressing matters (like, oh, I don’t know… TERRORISM?), and the vast majority of our great nation avoided the stinging wrath that was supposed to have been the killer bees.

That being said, allow me to introduce you to our latest national crisis. Fuck a bunch of bees¹ - we’ve got robot dogs² to worry about.

Why would the scientific community do this to us? Don’t we already have enough to worry about in the world without robot dogs running around our forests, adding knowledge to their AI databases until they’re ready to come kill us all with ruthless efficiency? What possible reason did scientists have to create such a thing? I can only come up with a few possibilities:

All perfectly valid, but none of them really do anything for me. The only benefit I get from this development is that I now get to live with the knowledge that there’s a robot dog out there somewhere; one that can almost certainly outrun me on pretty much any type of terrain. Thanks, scientists.

¹ Warning: Do NOT actually attempt to fuck a bunch of bees.

² I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there’s a “Robot Dog” wikipedia entry.

Awesome Video Of The Day

Terrifying Police Dogs

I’m not totally sure where this video is from, so I’m going to be sure not to commit any crimes ANYWHERE for the rest of my life. It seems like it was probably shot somewhere in Eastern Europe in France, but I’m not risking it - the mere idea that these dogs exist somewhere on this Earth is enough to keep me on the straight and narrow.

Did you hear that guy screaming?! Did you see the dog running straight at the guy shooting at it? I can’t think of a single crime that would be worth attempting to pull off if I knew that I might have to deal with one of those things. The only way these dogs could be any more terrifying would be if scientists were able to modify their genes to make them poisonous, and I’m pretty sure that’s just around the corner, too. My prediction: global crime rates will fall dramatically over the next few years. Y’know… because of all the poisonous dogs.

(more…)

Since most CRACKED readers are obsessive-compulsive basement dwellers with an unhealthy fixation on arcane Soviet-era space programs, I’ll assume that most of you already know that the 50th anniversary of the first Sputnik launch is right around the corner. The Sputnik program paved the way for manned missions at a time when people (even scientists) were scared to send human beings into outer space. It’s easy to laugh at such naiveté today, but remember that hindsight is 20/20. Even though everybody now knows that space travel is simple, affordable and not even that big of a deal (kind of boring, really), back then the cosmos seemed a whole lot scarier. What happens when you go into space? Does your head blow up? Are there monsters up there, and if so, what do they eat? Is there food around, or should I bring a sack lunch? They had no idea! To find out, mankind had to do a few practice runs. Unfortunately, there were no astronauts yet back then, so the USA and Soviet Union were forced to use the two next best things: monkeys and dogs.

We may have completely mastered space travel a long time ago, but that’s no reason not to pay homage to those brave monkeys and dogs who risked (or lost) their lives in pursuit of the greater good, those furry fellows who wanted nothing more than to see their captors colonize the moon, or possibly Mars. Maybe that would mean no more pulling levers when the light bulb turned on. Maybe the electric shocks would stop, and they could finally sleep. Yes, sleep… Precious, precious sleep…

But I digress. In homage to those great monkeys and dogs, I’d like to take a moment to remember them in a way befitting their greatness: in a no-holds-barred cage match. Monkeys vs. Dogs, winner takes the much-coveted title of “Better Astronaut.” The games begin after the jump!

(more…)