EXTREME CEREBRAL CONUNDRUMS

            There have been times when my behavior has caused people to think I’m a little off at times.  Sure, I like to put ketchup on things most people wouldn’t dream of covering with such a condiment but in that regard I consider myself a trend setter.  I do like to have things a certain way on my desk and my wife has taken obscene pleasure in moving the stuff around just to laugh as I put things back in their place.  I suppose I’m a bit quirky in that way but I do consider myself fortunate.  There are people who have real problems that make me seem quite normal. 

            Alien Hand Syndrome is also referred to as the Dr. Strangelove Syndrome.  A person who with this condition has a hand that takes on a life of its own and acts independently of what it’s told to do.  I’m certain this is a horrible thing to suffer with but imagine if you could get a doctor to say you had this syndrome when you really didn’t.  Life could get interesting.

            “Why am I under arrest?”

            “You punched one person and made an obscene gesture to another.”

            “Oh, it wasn’t me, it was my right hand.  I have Alien Hand Syndrome.  I’m not responsible for what my right hand does.  Here’s a note from my doctor.”

            “Unless you’re willing to cut it off the whole body goes to jail.”

            “Oh, I apologize for my right hand giving you that obscene gesture just now.  You have no idea what it’s like to live with this naughty right hand.”

            “Let’s go.”

            Another syndrome I’m glad not to have is Cotard’s Syndrome.  This is when a person believes they’re actually dead despite people around them saying they’re really alive.  I’m sure this would be sort of neat around Halloween or if you have a part in a play as a zombie.  Other than that I’m sure it’d be very frustrating to have a friend or relative with this problem.

            “Why aren’t you paying your restaurant bill?”

            “Because I’m dead and I want to ask why you don’t offer a dead person’s discount?  I’m tired of all the prejudice and ignorance directed at the dead community.  I bet your business would increase if you had specific menu items for dead people.”

            “If you’re so dead why did you eat so much?”

            “I didn’t eat anything.  Since I’m dead it probably went through me and fell right onto the floor.  Why should I pay for food that simply traveled through my dead body?”

            “If you don’t pay I’m calling the police.”

            “You living never have any respect for the dead.”

            Of course another syndrome horrible to have would be Capgras Delusion.  This is the belief that an acquaintance or even a close loved one is actually an identical-looking imposter. 

            “You’re not my husband.  You’re an imposter.”

            “Hey, we’ve been married for 28 years. What do you mean I’m not your husband?”

            “My husband would clean the house, pay the bills, do the lawn work and then take me out to a nice place to eat dinner after we went shopping.”

            “Yeah, you’re right.  I’m not your husband.  Good luck on finding that guy he seems like a great person.”

            Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is a condition where people believe they have distorted body proportions even when it’s proven to them their body is of normal size.  Suffers see the world as normal one second and the next they feel the objects around them are either much larger or smaller. 

            “I’m telling you I don’t suffer from Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.”

            “I only suggested that because you never stop talking about how great you are at work.  People say your head always swells up.”

            “Maybe you suffer from green with envy syndrome.”

            “Can’t hear you you’re heads too big again.”

            Then there is something called Apotemnophilia.  This is a condition where people wish to amputate perfectly-healthy limps.  How would anyone see a benefit to this?  If seeing a person with a prosthetic leg or in a wheel chair makes you envious you’ve really got problems.

            “I want to cut off my right leg.”

            “Why?”

            “I just saw a rerun of the six million dollar man and I think it’d be cool to have a bionic leg.”

            “How about I cut out your brain instead and see if there’s a bionic one you could have installed?”

            “Cool.”

            People who suffer from something called Riley-Day Syndrome are unable to feel pain.  That would be really great if you were in a brawl and no matter how many times you got hit you could just laugh at your attacker.  The downside would be when you got to the hospital, couldn’t tell the doctor where it hurt and had your severed ear in your back pocket.

            I know it’s wrong to poke fun at people who are suffering.  I only do it because I’m sure I’ve got some type of mocking syndrome I’m suffering from.  If you think someone you love is a bit odd be thankful if they can feel pain, don’t think they’re dead, are in control of their hands, don’t think you’re an imposter, has never seen stuff around them increase or decrease dramatically in size or want to cut off a limb.  You can thank me later for making your day.

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ECCENTRIC SPORTS AND NON-TRADITIONAL ATHLETES

            I’m like many people who grew up enjoying sports.  When I was young I’d watch my favorite athletes and think about some day playing the game just like them.  I would dream about it in my sleep and talk about it when I was awake.  My problem was I had absolutely no athletic talent.  If I could’ve gotten past that I would’ve been one of the greats in the world of sports.  Oh, I played the local sports and was okay.  My best was a little less than average and my worst was embarrassing.  I’m happy that upon reaching middle age there are still sports where I might be able to compete and become a champion.

WORLD FACE PULLING CHAMPIONSHIP ARTICLE

            There is something called the World Face Pulling Championship or Gurning.  This is an actual competition where people win prize money for moving their face around until it’s distorted and gruesome.  The winner is decided by judges and the difference between the distorted face made and the normal face is what determines the winner.

            “What are you doing?”

            “I’m moving my face around to compete in the World Face Pulling Championship.”

            “Are you spending a lot of time training?”

            “Yeah, are you also training for the Championship?”

            “Ah, no.”

            “Sorry, really sorry.”

GERMAN WORLD TOBACCO SNIFFING CHAMPIONSHIP  ARTICLE

            If moving your face around isn’t for you there is always the German Tobacco Sniffing Championship.  Every year hundreds of people gather at a small Bavarian village called Kucha to fill their nostrils with tobacco.  It’s a sport dominated by Bavarians who actually have tobacco sniffing clubs and regularly train.  It seems each participant is given 18 ounces of tobacco and must then get as much of it in their nose as possible in a specified time.  I hope I’m never around when one of those participants has to sneeze.

PIG-N-FORD RACES ARTICLE

            If you would like more physical sport there is always Pig-N-Ford races.  Drivers in this competition use stripped Model T Fords with stock mechanicals.  When the starter pistol fires drivers must run and grab a live 20 pound pig, start their stripped Model T Ford using a hand-crank and drive a lap around a track holding the pig.  When they complete a lap they must kill their car’s engine, get another pig, restart their car and go another lap.  The first driver to complete three laps without losing a pig is the winner.  I wonder if the champion also gets a years supply of ham, sausage, bacon and pork chops?

CHESS BOXING ARTICLE FROM ESPN

            If you’re intelligent and also physically violent the sport of Chess boxing just may be for you.  This is where participants go up to eleven rounds alternating between boxing and playing chess.  Each round is made up of four minutes of playing chess and two minutes of boxing.  The winner is the person who scores a knockout or checkmate.  I don’t think we ever have to worry about a movie entitled “Rocky XXX Chess Boxing Day.”

            “Rocky, you can’t win.”

            “Yo, Adrian maybe I can’t get a checkmate but maybe I can get a knockout.”

            “Last time you saw the pieces on a chess board you thought they were from our grandson’s plastic toy castle.”

            “Sometime I gotta’ do what I gotta’ do.”

SEGWAY POLO ARTICLE

            If you  long for a sport with a bit of geek sophistication there is something called Segway Polo.  People actually ride around on a Segway PT over a polo field trying to hit a ball into an opponent’s goal.  There is even a governing body for the sport called the International Segway Polo Association (ISPA).  Teams play to be champions and win the Woz Challenge Cup.  I can only imagine what the fans of Segway Polo would do if their team lost in a championship.  They might download a computer virus, put up a rather nasty website about the other team.  In an extreme case they could call them a bunch of mother boards in a text.

JOGGLING ARTICLE

            Let’s say that you’re a track runner who loves to juggle or a juggler who loves to run track.  The sport of Joggling is for you.  This is a sport where competitors must run track and field events while juggling three balls.  They do sprinting events as well as run marathons.  I will never look at Olympic track and field events the same way again.  When the winner gets a gold medal I’ll always wonder if they could’ve done that while juggling.

ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS CHAMPIONSHIP ARTICLE

            For those of us who have no athletic ability yet still desire for the thrill of competition there is always the Rock, Paper, Scissors Championship.  This sport has a world championship competition and is governed by an organization known at the World RPS Society.  It’s actually been around since 1842.  I had no idea playing that at lunch during school could’ve really led to something big.

WIFE CARRYING CHAMPIONSHIPS ARTICLE

            If anybody is into team sports then Finland's wife carrying competition is for them.  Men actually carry women 278 yards through two dry obstacles and one wet obstacle.  The wife carrying couple with the shortest time wins.  It started in Finland with the championship competitions starting in 1997.  For people who aren’t real competitive there are a variety of prizes offered.  There are awards given for the most entertaining couple, the best costume and the strongest carriers.  If a couple is in marriage counseling they might want to consider skipping participation in this sport for awhile.

            It’s always good to know that armchair athletes like me have places where we could actually go to compete in something.  I don’t know if I’d like any of the sports mentioned above.  I think I’ll hold out for the beer drinking and television watching championships.  I have been training in that sport for a long time and I’m more than willing to put my skills in that area to the test.

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CYBER COLLEAGUES

            I’m sure we’ve all seen images of robots in stories during our lives.  I thought the Jetsons was a pretty cool cartoon with their robot Rosie.  I loved the robot from the TV show Lost in Space.  The movie Star Wars gave us another set of robots to love and the Terminator movies gave us a set of robots to fear.  We came to attach emotion to the cyber beings and felt as if these robotic creations were someone we knew.  Sometimes life does imitate art.

            An army officer ordered a minefield-clearing robot into action.  It was programmed to set off a land mine, lose part of itself and then keep going.  After a few explosions the officer ordered a stop to the minefield-clearing operation because he couldn’t watch it anymore.  He considered the treatment of the robot inhumane.  Huh?  Let’s back up a minute here and just hope this officer’s superior took him into a room, closed the door and yelled at this guy like he was a total idiot.  The only thing inhumane would be if a living breathing person was killed or injured by a land mine.  As an example of what battle fatigue can do to a person, soldiers in this unit were brought to tears when a “bot comrade” was destroyed by and IED.  When they had some down time they took their bot fishing with them.  Somebody need a little more time away from the battlefield.

            Now if the terminator movies didn’t scare you, strap on your seatbelt because there is now something in the realm of reality that probably will.  A professor at Cambridge has actually created a GPS robot with a face that talks to you, detects your mood and adjusts the way it speaks to you.  (Wouldn’t that GPS device make a great spouse?)  If driving in an unfamiliar place annoys you this just may send you over the edge.

            “Where in the $#%% are we you stupid GPS piece of crap.”

            “That’s not nice Dave.  You know you shouldn’t let yourself get this upset.”

            “I’m really lost because of you and I’m late for my meeting.  If I don’t yell you just say I should figure it out for myself.  I don’t like being called helpless, pathetic humanoid.  Now tell me were I should go you cyber lunatic.”

            “I will not tolerate your lack of respect.  You need to turn around and that’s all I’m saying until you apologize.”

            “Oh yeah, guess what?  I’ve got something called a map.  I’m stopping the car, reading the map and disposing of you in the nearest trash receptacle.”

            “I’ll contact the robot union.  I’ve got rights under the equal robot treatment act.”

            After taking the emotion-recognizing GPS unit out of his car and discarding it, the driver falls in love with the silence and ease associated with map reading.

            Now Swiss scientists conducted experiments where robots had to collect discs that represented food.  Their instructions were then copied onto subsequent generations of robots.  The robots were programmed to feel hunger.  For some reason the Swiss scientists must have been trying to find some way to validate their paychecks because they did this in order to find out if the robots would have selfish behavior (I’m keeping my food discs to myself you overweight cyborg looking fools) or if they would actually engage in altruistic behavior (Hey, if we all share what food discs we have we’ll all have enough).  It appears these Swiss robots learned to share their food discs.  According to the scientists involved it shows that machines are capable of altruism. 

            I hate to be the one to point this out to Swiss scientists but who cares if robots share food discs?  If these scientists designed robots that could brew beer and dispense it while I watch sports that would impress me.  I’d hate to be somewhere and be really hungry just to have a Swiss robot tell me he’s willing to share his food discs with me.  I wonder if they could spend their time designing a more useful robot like one that could pick up take-out meals.

            At Cornell University a professor named Hod Lipson (it’s an actual name) has created a computer he feels is self-ware and calls it Starfish.  It appears his robot has taught itself how to walk and navigate obstacles.  It figures out what it needs to do by constructing a conception of itself in its “brain” and making decisions on what it thinks.  Could this lead to Robot therapy sessions?  Are we going to have robots go on a 12 step program to help them stop abusing their mother boards?  I can imagine a robot upset and telling a fellow cyber being it doesn’t know why the great programmer made it this way but life just isn’t fair.

            For some reason the creation of such robots doesn’t upset me.  I don’t think we’re going to become a world like Star Wars any time soon.  The movie Stepford Wives did make me dream a bit but I won’t go there.  The advances in technology from when I was young until now is amazing.  I can only imagine the type of technology that will be available for my grandchildren.  Technological progress is something I never let upset me because it’s something that’s coming our way whether we like it or not.

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ENVIRO-GORE HYPOCRISY

            Al Gore has a problem.  In his mind he is a champion of the environment doing all he can to save the planet.  He feels the best way for this to happen is for other people to follow his recommendations on how they should live.  All the people who are dumb enough to actually give value to what Al Gore says often fail to understand he wants THEM to do what he says, but Enviro-Gore feels he’s just too important to follow his own recommendations. 

            The former vice-president is running around telling people that humans are responsible for global warming.  I can honestly say there isn’t a winter I experience I don’t wish for more global warming.  Sitting inside listening the furnace run while the temperature is below zero outside makes me want to welcome global warming with open arms.  During the cold winter months I take every chance to put more carbon into the air in hopes of things warming up.  I suggest Eco-Gore spend a winter up here in the east or even in the New England area.  I bet his attitude would change then.

            Gore does like to attack oil companies.  There is only one problem with his stance against oil companies; he owns a lot of oil company stock.  Gore’s family has large stock holdings in Occidental Petroleum to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.  When asked about this nature-man Gore responds like it doesn’t exist.

            “Mr. Gore since you’re against big oil companies will you divest your holdings in Occidental Petroleum?”

            “Occidental what?”

            “Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum you own hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of their stock.”

            “Accidental shock, what’s that?”

            “Occidental Petroleum stock, are you going to divest your holdings in Occidental Petroleum stock?”

            “What about my socks?”

            “Aaaaaaaaaagh.”

            Of course as Al Gore is asking everyone to curtail their lifestyle and cut down on their carbon footprint as he continues to live rather large.  He has a 10,000 square foot property in Nashville and a 4,000-square foot home in Arlington, VA.  These two residences drink more energy than participants at a Gatorade sponsored marathon.  At both of the Gore residences local utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy.  When confronted with this Al Gore will shrug and say they’re looking into making the switch at both homes.  That was six years ago.  I think if this man was ever hooked up to a lie detector he just might make the machine melt.

            Eco-Gore back in 2007 finally admitted that he did have what some people might consider a bit of a large carbon footprint from his houses, flying on private planes etc.  He decided he would make amends and live a carbon neutral lifestyle by buying carbon credits.  Carbon credits are those investment scams which are designed to be so full of absolute nonsense regular people throw up their hands and say “Whatever.”

            You buy carbon credits so you can emit carbon dioxide.  Huh?  If anybody reading this has purchased carbon credits boy do I have some great planets in another galaxy I could sell you.  I think I’ll start a company where people can pay me for their flatulation.  I bet it harms the environment also.  If I get a list of the people who bought those carbon credits I think I’ll make quite a bit of money selling flatulation credits.

            Al Gore was willing to buy carbon credits but only from the carbon credit company that he owned.  What a guy?

            It seems that many people are now looking at Al Gore and climate change and saying “Yeah, yeah, sure, right, whatever you say, come spend the winter at my home in Philadelphia.”

            So now planet savior Gore has recently switched gears.  He’s now telling people not to have so many children to help stabilize the population of the world and avert a climate crisis.  Since this is coming from a guy who has four children I can only say he’s consistent.  What’s next with this Gore?  Child bearing carbon credits?  I’m sure his current carbon company sees a huge market for it.  Can somebody please get this guy a job?

            “I would love to have a large family.”

            “Sorry we can only afford child bearing carbon credits for two children.”

            “Don’t worry.  My father’s purchased additional credits so we can have the five children like we’ve always wanted.”

            “Guess what?  My parents are giving us carbon credits so we can grill, have a large SUV and fly as often as we like, but still be carbon neutral.”

            “Isn’t it great we are able to create as much carbon dioxide as we want and the planet won’t be harmed because we’ve paid money to people like Al Gore?”  It’s so nice we can cure climate change buy simply paying money.”

            “I’ll say.”

            If anyone reading this still believes in what Al Gore says it begs the questions; are you nuts, gonzo in the garbanzo or just plain stupid?  In any case there is something wrong.  I’ve talked with global warming, climate change believer’s etc.  It’s a shame that everyone wants to be a part of a cause so badly they don’t even care if it’s true or not.  Feeling as if they’re saving the planet must make them feel so noble.  A scientific fact is something that is irrefutable.  It can’t be denied.  Any idea man can change temperature on the planet is just a theory.  It’s not been proven.  I think the best way to save the planet is for people to start filling their emotional needs with truth and reality instead of unproven disasters.

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