You Died On Purpose



How will you die? The mystery lingers over all of us, with a panoply of ailments and accidents we dare not speak for fear it would curse us to the same fate. But for those who buy this backpack attached to a gas engine and giant propeller, the answer is clear: You will hit a cliff, you will fall, the blades will lacerate you. You will drown in the ocean. You will become trapped in a tree. The details are up for debate, but at the end of it all, you will die as a result of hooking a parachute and propeller to yourself.

What is “The Weather Stick”?


“Weather sticks will tell you what the weather is doing,” brags the manufacturer of the Davis Hill Weather Stick. It’s not that they’re necessarily wrong – it’s made of a balsam fir branch and part of the trunk. The fibers in the wood on one side of the branch contract or expand as the relative humidity in the air changes, causing the stick to bend up or down. It’s just that you can get a digital hygrometer for about the same price without nailing a stick to the side of your house.

As reviews of a competing weather stick show (this one with “extra” “quotation” “marks” has the best title) the Weather Stick engages the same anti-intellectual reflex that some have toward scientific progress. “Love watching the weather stick,” says one. “Better than weather man who is never right,” adds another. If you think I’m exaggerating, this guy (in a review of a third brand of Weather stick) claims that the stick itself improved the weather.

The idea that that world has passed you by is frightening to everyone. The first time a child buzzed by me on an electric scooter, wearing a shirt covered in emojis, and called me a “fuckboy,” I was taken aback. But I didn’t nail a stick to my house and start calling climate-change scientists “warmies.”

Jerk Tissues For Men


“All your childhood dreams come true,” brags the box of Spankrags. No, I wanted to be a fireman, a pianist, a scientist, a master of my craft, the bonds of mortality slipping away for just a moment every day as I labor elegantly in my chosen field. I didn’t dream of shamefully cranking one onto a pre-printed Porn Napkin.

I can’t decide whether this is better or worse than Dude Wipes, which is awful, for a slightly different reason.

Galileo Was Wrong: The Book


Geocentrism, the belief that the Earth floats at a fixed point in the universe while the cosmos rotates around it, is still alive in 2016. Based on quotes from the Bible, and backed up with a PhD in religious studies from an unaccredited university, Robert Sungenis presents a “scientific” argument for geocentrism. If you think about it, though, a “Multimedia CD-ROM” is the perfect venue for this argument, being a format that went out of vogue eons ago.

If you want to wade further into this dude’s orbit of lunacy, I suggest reading his breathless third-person description of his own book Geocentrism 101, where he compares it to Reader’s Digest and describes it as “hot off the presses.”

Should you want a second opinion, Jack A. Mooreman presents “The Biblical And Observational Case for Geocentricity,” an equally-scientific book from more or less the same point of view.


Contact drew at drew@toothpastefordinner.com or tweet him @TWTFSale.