by Garth Sundem
• If a doctor specifically recommends exercise, you can write off your gym membership and/or any other “weight loss expenses.”
• While your dog doesn't quite count as a dependent, don't forget to write off pet moving expenses and expenses incurred for guard dogs (you can deduct the percentage of dog expenses that matches the percentage of time your Chihuahua spends guarding the house).
• To protect a one-year windfall, in addition to buying a (big) first home, consider blinding yourself, which will allow you to check the coveted box 39A.
• If you are planning to be busted in possession of a large quantity of illicit drugs or moonshine, be sure you visit your state's department of revenue beforehand to pay your illicit drug tax. Affix the needed stamps to your “product.”
• Consider holding business meetings in Caribbean countries where you can write off expenses: Honduras, Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic, Barbados, Costa Rica, etc. It's much harder to write off meetings in Europe.
Note: Employing family members and/or deducting pet expenses is effectively volunteering for an audit.
OCARINA SONGS FROM THE LEGEND OF ZELDA
Courtesy of www.clayz.com, where you can also find audio examples.
TOILET TRAIN YOUR CAT
Woe be unto ye who messes with the world of the cat. In terms of specific woe, you can expect everything from shredded furniture to endless sulking to sneaky deposits of urine, discoverable only once they have thoroughly wrecked the carpet and/or floorboards behind the couch, should ye artlessly attempt feline potty training. But oh, the rewards of training done right! No more stench of ammonia filtering from the litter box in the corner of the laundry room! No more scouring of late-night infomercials for the perfect hands-free disposal system! No more subtly plotting ways in which your wife's cat could “accidentally” encounter your neighbor's Rottweiler! Just follow the steps below and when in doubt, take it slow!
• First, explain to your cat that you are not trying to kill him/her. Nor are you in any way impinging upon his/her right to urinate and/or defecate wherever and whenever he/she sees fit. Nor are you implying that you would appreciate it if he/she urinated/ defecated in the toilet. You are only implying that said cat might prefer urinating/defecating in the toilet, and as his/her servant, you are willing to offer help as wanted. Repeat the following mantra: “It is I who is being trained, not the cat. Ohmmmm.”
• Slowly and in stages likely totaling the life expectancy of your cat, move the litter box toward the bathroom. If your cat pees on the rug, move the litter box back to the last successful spot and wait.
• Once the litter box is in the bathroom (oh joy!), slowly build a platform under said box, raising it glacially closer to the height of your toilet. If your cat is pliable (as if …), you might add a phone book per week; if your cat is a cat, consider the weekly addition of the Sunday sheet of newspaper containing the Gar-field comic strip.
• Throughout and forevermore, be sure to leave the toilet seat down and the lid up.
• Now slowly scoot the litter box onto the toilet itself (at the pace of continental drift).
• Once the litter box is firmly atop the commode, start shearing away bits of the box. Start with a small hole in the box's center and cut away the box until nothing remains. The crux is leaving enough box to allow the system's continued stability—a mistake here can result in a wet, pissed-off cat, whose twin outlets for angst are your home and your person. During this stage, encourage cat to place feet on toilet seat, rather than in litter box. Herein lies the art.
you have mastered the Zelda basics you can, in fact, use your ocarina skills to play other songs, including the following:
• Eventually you will have cut away the litter box entirely and your cat will be hanging it over the rim. Congratulations: you have entered a very elite club. However, from this point forward you may have to forgo hosting dinner parties with non-cat-owning guests.
Note: An alternate strategy employs a metal bowl as a transition between litter box and toilet bowl—find a bowl that fits snugly in your commode. Start with it in the litter box and then transfer it to the pot.
TURTLE ART
FORWARD 25
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 25
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 25
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 25
Does this ring a bell? In the programming language Logo, these simple commands draw a square. The idea behind Logo is that of a trained turtle with a pen strapped to its tail walking on blank paper. In fact, this is exactly what “Irving” did—MIT'S robot turtle, constructed in 1969 to test an early version of the language. If you are a geek of certain age, you spent many grade-school evenings writing lengthy Logo programs on graph paper, which, if you were lucky, your math teacher would let you test during recess. Today, you can write and test your Logo programs online at www.sonic. net/˜nbs/webturtle/.
THE JOYS OF FANGRAPHS.COM
It's game five of the 2005 World Series. The Cardinals are down 4–2 in the top of the ninth, two outs, two men on. Albert Pujols steps to the plate. Unfortunately for Pujols, there's a 92.4 percent chance the Cardinals will lose the game (though the chances were 96.3 percent against before Jim Edmonds walked and 98.9 percent against before Eckstein's single). This, according to www.fangraphs.com, which (generally) measures game situations against past situations of the same type to determine probable outcomes. Unfortunately for the Astros, Pujols knocked it out of the park, making the score 5–4 and giving the Cardinals an 81.1 percent chance of winning, which they did after two Astros grounders and a fly ball.
Imagine this: In the top of the ninth, you bet $10 on the Cardinals with a bookie who was tracking the odds in real time and thus offered you 89.9-to-1 odds (.989/.011). When the Cardinals won, you pocketed $899. Nice.
SIX STEPS TO COLLEGE ACCEPTANCE
According to U.S. News and World Report, in 2008 the country's most selective university was the Julliard School of Music, with a scant 7 percent acceptance rate. Yale and Harvard both weighed in at 9 percent. This, of course, is measured against the pool of applicants who had the gall to apply to these schools in the first place (and back up this gall with an application fee). Follow the steps below to avoid being on the losing end of these massively discouraging statistics.
1. Apply early. Many colleges accept a much higher percentage of early-decision applicants than they do from their standard applicant pool. Pick your dream school and submit before November 1.
2. Volunteer. Every applicant to the country's top schools has a 4.0 GPA, racked up enormous SAT and ACT scores, was concert-master in the state orchestra, ran cross-country, and won the science fair. Not all candidates volunteered at their local at-risk after-school program. It doesn't hurt to highlight this volunteer involvement in your essay, in a way that demonstrates how your interest in this specific cause evolved organically from your background.
3. Excel. Have a 4.0, enormous SAT and ACT scores, be concert-master in the state orchestra, run cross-country, and win the science fair. Be sure your GPA includes your school's hardest classes. Don't trade GPA and test scores for increased extracurricular involvement.
4. Befriend and impress specific teachers. Starting early in your high-school career, groom the teachers whom you will eventually ask for references.
5. Top choice! If a school is your top choice, let them know. If the school knows you will attend if accepted, they may be slightly more likely to offer admission.
6. Contribute. Demonstrate specific skills that will contribute to the college environment. If possible, make professors at your school of choice aware of these skills, so that said professors can advocate for your acceptance. For example, get recruited by a school's engineering competition team.
FOLDING INSTRUCTIONS FOR A MASSIVELY COMPLEX PAPER AIRPLANE
ARE YOU HOT? YOUR COMPUTER KNOWS
Interestingly, the method used by Australian scientists Massimo Pic-cardi a
nd Hatice Gunes to calculate facial beauty is similar to the method used by fangraphs.com determine probable baseball outcomes: Their software compares features of a new situation (in this case, any given face) to features of a known situation (in this case, 215 faces of models and actresses), to make inferences about the present situation (if the ratios of the face being measured match those of actresses and models, the face is attractive). According to Australian news source the Age, the good doctors’ software predicts facial beauty to within 1.5 points (on a scale of 1–10) of a human panel voting on the same face.
Lest ye think the good doctors have undertaken frivolous research, they point to their software's application in determining outcomes of plastic surgery, both in quantifying gains and in avoiding possibly unnecessary procedures.
Enterprising hackers are exploring the possibility of remotely accessing computers’ built-in web-cams to automatically determine users’ attractiveness and then posting these ratings on social networking sites.
A SAM LOYD LOGIC PUZZLE
In this version of the game Dots and Boxes, the players take turns drawing a segment that connects two of the letters in the grid (as shown). The goal is to complete boxes. If a player completes a box, they may draw another segment. It is the sitting girl's turn. What is her best play?
THE TURING MACHINE
The Turing machine is quite simple: It is a tape divided into cells, a head that reads and writes 1's or 0's in these cells, and a set of instructions telling the machine four things—based on the state of the machine (1), and the symbol it reads (2), it should assume another state (3) and either write or erase the cell or move left or right one cell. (This can be represented by a “program”:
A SAMPLING OF YIDDISH WORDS ADOPTED INTO THE COMMON LEXICON
THE PROBLEM WITH SEMAPHORE
The primary problem with semaphore is that not only are you acting geeky, but by the activity's nature (waving flags to attract attention) you are doing so in a very visible way. Thus it is commonly understood that every semaphore communication starts with the unsignaled phrase Look at me! I'm a geek! which is then followed by the message itself (as in “Look at me! I'm a geek! It seems as if your scoutmaster is being eaten by a bear!”). Provided here is the semaphore alphabet as well as depiction of the proper semaphore-signaling outfit.
BODY TRICKS WE LEARNED IN MIDDLE SCHOOL THAT INDUCE ZOMBIFIC POSSESSION AND/ OR ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND PERCEPTION
1. The Completed Church Steeple. Clasp your hands, intertwining your fingers. Hold them clasped tightly together for at least thirty seconds—the longer the better. Then, raise your index fingers as if imitating a church steeple with an open top. Watch the tips of your fingers close inexorably together.
2. Harmonic Rotation. Stand or sit while rotating your right leg in a clockwise circle. Draw a six in the air with your right hand. What direction is your leg rotating now?
3. Women Are from Venus, Men from Mars. Stand with your derriere and heels touching a wall. Reach down to retrieve something small from between your toes. (Men will likely fall forward, while a naturally lower center of gravity may allow some women to touch the floor without toppling.) Similarly, stand three foot-lengths from a wall and use your hands to lower yourself until your forehead touches the wall. Stand up without help from your hands (or from momentum). Again, many women can, while almost all men can't.
4. The Doorway Trick. This is an old standby. Stand in a door frame and push outward/upward with your hands for at least thirty seconds. When you move out from the door frame, your arms will rise above your head as if possessed by zombific force.
5. Feet Through the Floor. Lie on your back and close your eyes. Have a friend hold your feet up at an angle. Relax. Go to your happy place. After a minute or two, have your friend slowly lower your feet. It will feel as if they are falling through the floor.
SLIGHTLY COMBATIVE AND/OR VIOLENT TWO-PERSONGAMES
The obvious evolution of these games is boxing, wrestling, or gladiatorial combat with accompanying mass spillage of blood (and can quickly revert to such, should participants fail to set ground rules for decency and good-natured combat). They are also best performed by the very stupid. As such, their inclusion in this book requires justification: While each is physical, winning requires skill and cunning—unlike dodgeball, if pitted against meathead competitors, geeks will win these games. If still in doubt as to these games’ geek pedigree, a quick visit to www.fingerjoust. com will put your mind at ease. Beware: participation in any of the following can act as a gateway between violence experienced in video games and movies and the expression of violence in real-world settings.
• Finger Jousting. Clasp hands with your opponent as if arm wrestling in the air. Each person should raise his or her index finger to point at the other person. Now, try to poke your opponent in the chest.
• Hand Slap. The classic game in which one player hovers his or her hands face down over an opponent's hands (face up), who tries to slap the top of the first person's hands before he or she can remove them. Be quick, grasshopper.
• Flamingo Death Match. Players face each other in positions of maximal body twistage—one leg twisted around the other and arms twisted in front. The players then crash into each other with the intention of toppling the other. The loser is whoever first touches to the ground any body part other than the one foot used for hopping.
• Shin Kicking. Participation in this game without the acknowledged purpose being intentionally ironic stupidity requires an IQ of less than 80. Simply, combatants face each other with their arms on each other's shoulders and then try to kick each other in the shins.
• The Rope Game. Stand facing your opponent, about two paces apart. Hold between you a length of rope (some versions recommend passing this rope around your back and then holding it in the opposite hand). Now pull and loosen the rope with the intent of throwing your opponent off balance. The first to move a foot or drop the rope loses.
BECOME A BILLIONAIRE TODAY THROUGH THE POWER OF NO-LOSE BIDDING!
With a group of friends, classmates, or coworkers, offer to auction a $20 bill. One more rule: both of the top two bidders must pay their final bid. Imagine that person A and person B are foolish enough to join your auction, with person A bidding 25¢ and person B overbidding to the tune of 30¢. Obviously this should escalate—who wouldn't bid $7 to earn $20, especially if this could keep you from losing money you previously bid? As bidding passes $10, you—the auctioneer—earn money. However, the auction is far from over. As the two bidders reach $20, it becomes obvious they will not earn money on this transaction—but how much are they willing to lose? For example, if person A has bid $19 and person B bids $20, wouldn't person A be smart to bid $21 in order to win the auction and thus lose only $1 as opposed to paying $19 for a second-place bid? According to game theory (and with players of infinite resources), without collusion, there is no logical end to this bidding war, and you will soon be a billionaire, minus $20.
However, if your bidders recognize their peril at the auction's outset and are not prevented from colluding, they can quickly agree to let one or
the other win the auction at a low price and split your $20.
THE QUOTABLE KUNG FU
It is the Tao Te Ching? Is it Buddha? Confucius? Mencius? The course materials from a Chinese anger management seminar? No! It's the 70s TV series Kung Fu!
• Avoid rather than check; check rather than hurt; hurt rather than maim; maim rather than kill. For all life is precious, nor can any be replaced.
