Short Takes

At some time during the course of every man's life, he is asked a profound question. One which he can spend decades pondering and considering the ramifications of, swimming in the sea of possibilities that arise from such a profound query. Other times, a man is asked a whole bunch of stupid questions that take about four seconds to answer. Guess which kind of week I'm having?


Are dogs colorblind or what?

This is a very common misconception. It's actually cats that are colorblind, and penguins. While this fact is of little consequence to black and white birds living in the blank white expanse of Antarctica, it does, however, make housecats truly terrible players of Candyland and gives most an annoying preference for old B&W movies. Researchers in Minnesota actually discovered the colorblindness of cats in the 1960's when teaching the cats to drive, which ended tragically since the cats were worthless at reading traffic lights and proved too oddly-shaped to be properly restrained by seat belts in the resultant hair-raising collisions.

Dogs, on the other hand, are actually totally blind from birth. Nature has helped make up for this appalling oversight by giving dogs a happy-go-lucky nature that makes them seem like affable, clumsy simpletons rather than the utterly sightless creatures that they are. Dogs do, however, make up for their lack of sight with a highly directional sense of smell, and a radar-like sense emitting from specially-evolved testicles known as sonards.


Dude, what's up with those Easter Island heads?

Numerous theories over the years have sprouted up to explain the mysterious monolithic stone heads found on Easter Island, all of them utterly false. In actuality, the heads were part of an Easter Island homeland defense initiative in prehistoric times, aimed at creating a series of threatening stone heads that would ultimately form together into one giant robot, which would stomp the island's attackers into goo.

The project ultimately failed, however, due to the fact that actual robot technology was thousands of years away, and the stone heads were only good for pushing down hills at advancing armies. In the end, though, this hardly mattered since no outsiders even discovered Easter Island until long after its inhabitants had starved to death from offering up all their food to the stone heads, in hopes of encouraging them to "robot up" and kick some ass.


Is the Tooth Fairy totally made up, or was there ever a real one and the bitch just died at some point?

By the "Tooth Fairy," I'm assuming you don't mean the fictional serial killer or the famous gay dentist from Toledo, but rather the magical little flying woman who eats your children's teeth and bribes them with hush money tucked under their pillows. This Tooth Fairy, you'll be surprised to learn, never actually existed. You moron. In truth, she was invented by parents tired of keeping track of the literally hundreds of tooth-disposal superstitions that existed up until the 1920's, including but not limited to feeding teeth to mice, throwing them over the house, baking them in pancakes, burying them in hopes of growing a profitable tooth tree, smoking teeth in a pipe, carving them into funny tooth action figures, leaving them on a teacher's chair like a thumbtack, or sticking them up your nose.

The invention of the Tooth Fairy left parents with only one implausible story to remember and justify, and left some irresponsible parents with the option of terrifying their children into obedience by telling them that if they misbehaved, the Tooth Fairy would come while they were sleeping and eat their fucking eyeballs out.

The Longest Word in the World (Part Two)
By 1550, the Spanish, British and French were engaged in a linguistic arms race to secure for their countries the truly longest word in the world. Over the next several decades the crown of word longness was passed back and forth between the three... (4/25/05)

The Longest Word in the World (Part One)
If anybody tells you that the longest word in the English language is Antidisestablishmentarianism, you know right away that they're full of the brown stuff. Though that's certainly a pretty long word, anyone in the know knows that this famous... (4/11/05)

Beware Fnord the Illuminati
Reader questions come to yours truly in all manner and variety of ways, but some of my favorites are screamed from passing automobiles. This week's question is no exception, as a passing motorist recently broached an intriguing subject while laying... (3/28/05)

The History of History
While most people question from time to time the history of this or the history of that, few ever dislodge their heads from the collective bunghole long enough to ponder the history of history itself. How did we remember the past in the past, and... (3/14/05)