3

The Wait at the DMV

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For our international readers, the Department of Motor Vehicles is where we Americans go to take our driving test when we're 16 so we can get our driver's license and then legally drive like an asshole until we die from it. It's famous for being a bit of a nightmare. Lots of bureaucracy, lots of waiting, lots of moving from one line to another. The DMV has been a cornerstone of American humor since the first comedian went to the local DMV and had the same mildly unpleasant experience as everyone else.

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"Two! I've killed two people since I got this thing!"

The problem with the comedic referencing of the DMV isn't that it's wildly incorrect -- the place can and will occasionally suck. The problem is that no one ever goes to the DMV enough for it to make a significant impact on their lives. I went to the DMV when I was 16 to take my driver's test and I've never been back. Every issue with my driver's license that's cropped up has been handled through the Internet since 2002. Unless you're a vehicular sociopath and getting your license revoked and reinstated is somehow a regular occurrence for you, the wait at the DMV should be a minor blip. It's a persistent reference point based on a place most people in America visit, at absolute most, a handful of times throughout their entire lives. And one of those happens to be one of the best days of anyone's life: the day they earn a card that legally allows them to drive a car.

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"Still pretty happy about those two people I killed!"

2

Pretty Much Anything Casting "Nerds" in a Negative Light

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Three of the top 10 highest grossing movies of 2014 as of the publishing date of this article are based on comic books (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2). Two of the 10 are based on a line of toys (Transformers: Age of Extinction and The LEGO Movie). Two are remakes/reboots of classic sci-fi films (Godzilla and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes).

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What a piece of shit this one was.

On TV, the highest rated program that isn't a live sports broadcast is The Big Bang Theory, a comedy about astrophysicists and engineers. In the top 10 list of most pirated shows, you have Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Arrow -- one fantasy series and two comic book properties.

And then there's the economic impact of traditionally nerdy pursuits, like all things tech-related. Let's look at it through the prism of a crazy billionaire in California named Tim Draper, who wants to rip California apart and split it into six separate states. If this insane idea were to somehow happen, Silicon Valley -- the part of California that companies like Apple, Google, Cisco, Oracle, Adobe, Facebook, Yahoo!, Netflix, and Pixar call home -- would instantly become the wealthiest state in the country, with an average yearly income of $63,288.

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Tim Draper, seen here wearing his most evil set of eyebrows.

1

IKEA Furniture Is Difficult to Assemble

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This is another favorite of pretty much every single late-night host. For some reason, IKEA's products have become an infinitely repeatable joke, and it's not just because the names of their products looks like demon-speak.

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"This maleficent spawn of the Dark Lord doubles as a stylish ottoman!"

Apparently their stuff is hard to put together. The process is confusing, the instructions are all, like, weird and stuff, and like ... it's just hard. So hard. No, it's not. I'm going to go ahead and say, definitively, that IKEA products are in no way difficult to assemble. At all. IKEA instruction guides are the most insultingly simplistic instructions humans have ever created, and somehow people still use IKEA as a punchline for their own failure to connect one thing to another thing to form a whole thing.