Eight Statements You Should Never Make

Want to know how to make yourself look slightly ignorant? Here are several ideas you may insert into one of many orifices you find difficult to clean in the shower.

“I really hate the taste of aspartame.”
No, you hate the thought of aspartame. Your body is wired to like sweet things, but your mind knows that you are consuming Franken-sugar. In the immortal words of Very Mary-Kate: “You know how you can’t eat meat anymore once you know where meat comes from?” That’s you, Ms. “I Won’t Eat It If It’s Not Organic, Leafy, And Hasn’t Touched An Animal With A 39½ Foot Pole.” Congrats on your mental victory; I’m slightly jealous and mostly derisive.

Special mention to anyone who says they hate chocolate without a valid excuse. You’re either lying or there’s something wrong with you.

Dawg, Mozart's "Requiem" is my jam

“If you play Mozart to babies they’ll be smarter.”
If you had done your goddamn research, you’d realize that this is actually an extreme extrapolation by the media off of a 1993 cognition study where researchers measured the effects of sound on spatio-temporal reasoning. They played music (which HAPPENED to be Mozart) to Group 1 for ten minutes, a “relaxation tape” to Group 2 for ten minutes, and complete silence to Group 3 for ten minutes, then immediately gave them some mind puzzles. The ones who’d been listening to music did better.

The finding had nothing to do with Mozart; scientists have reproduced this study with other music. The finding was because Groups 1 and 2 weren’t bored as hell listening to rainforest noises or their own borborygmi for a period of time in which they could’ve Sporcled every 90’s song ever written at least three times. It was a temporary effect on a specific type of reasoning and it wasn’t caused by Mozart. But listening to music before you start your next 2,000,000-piece puzzle may help you for ten minutes afterwards.* Now put down the Baby Mozart tapes, they’re not going to give your kid a Flowers-For-Algernon IQ boost. C’mon, we all know that most of us Bienen kids can’t count past four. But you should still check out Schubert.

“I’m so fat.”
Unlike the rest of this list, this one could be true. But regardless of the statement’s verity, rarely does the speaker believe it. No further explanation, y’all know what I mean. I have a secret fantasy of giving a silent staredown to every kumquat of every size that ever regales me with this phrase. I will watch their faces as they realize I refuse to bite on their compliment-fishing line. Unfortunately, having a guilt complex blows.

“Girls don’t fart.”
Welcome to 2012, where vaginas don’t preclude one from anal salutations. Ellie K can flatulate with the best of you bean-gobbling fools.

“I’m fuckin’ awesome.”
If I didn’t notice, you shouldn’t have to tell me.

She's not wearing anything under that... thing

“Fashion is about sex.”- Vivienne Westwood.
Thank you, Sigmund Freud.

First off, raise your hand if you possess a penis and give a flying fuck about fashion. It’s normal to ask yourself in the morning if you look like you might smell. But fashion extremists feel a level of consternation at the question of whether it’s still “in” to leave open the bottom button of your blazer. Now, if your hand is in the air, you’re either in the minority or in the process of dancing.

And now ladies (and gay men), when have you ever gotten dressed in the morning with the burning desire that an attractive manly man will seize you in a frenzied passion after noticing that you’ve matched your hat to your belt buckle? Yeah, me neither. Most men don’t give a damn if you’re wearing Lilly Pulitzer or pajama bottoms or a pillowcase with sequins if you’re their type and DTF. If fashion and sex are related, they are third cousins twice removed. Case closed.

“The Sodomites in the Bible were punished because they were gay.”
Not exactly. Summary of the story:

According to the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities known for being full of motherfuckers. Not the kind you find in New York — we’re talking rape in the name of shits n’ giggles. In Sodom, it was illegal to help strangers, which pretty much goes against everything that real, love-thy-neighbor Christians believe. So God sent some angels to walk around town, and a man named Lot, being the generous guy he was, offered them his home so they didn’t have to sleep outside in the dangerous city. The Sour Motherfuckers in the city got wind that there were strangers in town, surrounded Lot’s house, and told Lot to send them out so they could rape them.** That is agreed upon in two separate passages of the Bible. The Sodomites’ sin, according to Everything About Sodom In The Bible, wasn’t homosexuality, it was a lack of goodwill towards strangers. Does anyone see the irony in the citation of these passages by those hoping to exclude gays from everything under the sun?

“Sherman Avenue isn’t heinous.”
I will see to it that you die painfully, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction.

Because, see, I can do that.

“The heinous behind us and the heinous before us are tiny matters compared to the heinous within us” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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*Warning: You should not rely on a Mozart-induced spatio-temporal IQ burst to save you from a two million piece puzzle.
**There’s a bit where Lot’s like, “You could rape my virgin daughter or my concubine instead of these dudes I just met, because apparently it’s okay not to respect women, my family, or women in my family.” Conflicting accounts in Judges and Genesis then say that either the Sodomites raped the hell out of his poor concubine, or the angels in the house blinded the offending Sodomites before anyone got raped and warned Lot to skip town.

Interviews: A Zombie

Turns out, zombies are real. And we have one in captivity.

Mr. Nibbles struggles with a brain addiction and chronic back pain

This is an interview with an actual zombie, who was born, raised, died, and raised in Haiti. On Sherman Avenue’s latest manatee-hunting excursion, we found a zombie, named him Mr. Nibbles, and took him home to be our new pet. This interview was conducted through the bars of his cage (in the bedroom of Sir Edward Twattingworth III), as we fed him centipede brains from Plex and Cheerios from Hinman.

Sherman Ave: Tell us, Mr. Nibbles, how did you become a zombie?

Nibbles: Well, it started out when I went to the Bokor to get some pot.

SA: What’s a Bokor?

Nibbles: Our resident witch doctor. You know how whenever American thugs want to cut a bitch, they cut the bitch? Haitians just go see the Bokor and he curses the bitch. He also deals things.

SA: So what was different when you went to buy from him this time?

Nibbles: Well, I told him that my last trip had been more painful than teaching wildcats to play sports. So he gave me something new to try. Said it came from pufferfish.

SA: What did the pufferfish stuff do?

Nibbles: It knocked me out. I apparently looked pretty dead.

SA: How long did this go on?

Nibbles: Long enough to be buried alive. Can I have some more Cheerios?

SA: Not until you’re done with the interview. What was being dead like?

Nibbles: I wasn’t dead, I was just unresponsive.* When I eventually came to, I felt worse than freshmen sorostitutes on a post-Keg Tuesday morning, and I had a mad case of the munchies. Basically, the Bokor had knocked me out and then given me a dose of datura, which is just your run-of-the-mill potentially toxic hallucinogen.

SA: Can you describe the effects of datura?

Nibbles: Well, it walks a foggy, fucked-up line somewhere between hallucinogen and near-death experience. I’d done it before I was zombified on it. You kinda mumble around tripping massive crusty balls. Side effects are extreme suggestibility, amnesia, diaphragm paralysis, and sometimes aggression. There are Youtube videos of state school Motherfuckers immortalizing each other’s bad decisions on datura. But essentially, you’ve just been roofied by the Bokor.

SA: So in a stereotypical zombie, the drooling, moaning, slurring, limping, and aggression is probably because of the datura.

Nibbles: Exactly. And because zombies are pretty complacent most of the time, they usually get put to work in the field. But I’m sure there are Bokors who get more creative with their zombie slaves.**

SA: Do you identify with the common stereotype of a zombie?

Nibbles: I mean, in some ways. I definitely lost a lot of brains due to asphyxiation while I was buried alive, as a lot of zombies do. I think that oftentimes that disappointment that you’ve just died a little on the inside manifests itself in the aggression caused by the datura. You just want your brains back in whatever way you can, and you end up trying to nom on anyone normal in the area.

A huge part of zombification is the mental adjustment. When you’ve been buried alive and you wake up feeling more fucked up than the lovechild of Tom Cruise and Charlie Sheen, a common question to ask is, “What’s wrong with me?” But the question never comes out right. You end up with something like, “Hn wclch trchk blm nnnnng?” And when the answer from your friends and family is “HOLY FLYING FUCK, I THOUGHT YOU DIED,” at some point you do start believing you’re a zombie. It’s like your crotchety black uncle who’s convinced he’s a Democrat because he’s a minority, despite his right-wing stance on every fucking issue on the platform. It’s like having anorexia and participating in the Stanford prison experiment. There’s this impossibly perfect standard of what a zombie should be, and you have zombies becoming someone else to try to fit into those roles.

SA: So what you’re saying is that you felt pressured by the cultural expectations of zombies.

Nibbles: Yeah. I started hanging around graveyards, I lumbered around slower than the frustrating Motherfucker in the dining hall who’s obliviously in your way when you’re hauling ass to the cookie bar line, I didn’t say anything but “NNNNNGGG” for a year or two. I mean, what kind of a word is “Ng”? The stereotyping and idealization of zombies in the media is a dangerous cultural phenomenon, and it goes unquestioned and unreported. Every time you watch a George Romero film, I beg you to please remember that not every zombie can tear the limbs off of a pair of dumbass lovers trying to make a kamikaze run for their lives. And not every zombie wants to.

SA: Are there any portrayals of zombies in movies that you’d like our readers to watch?

Nibbles: Yeah. There’s a Spanish foreign film*** called Rec, off of which the American piece of shit Quarantine was based. If you’re going to watch a zombie movie, Rec is significantly more heinous. Please honor Latin America with the concession that this movie might be the one thing we don’t do as well. Also, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. Hanna-Barbera gets enough zombie facts right to be legit.

SA: Thank you. Nibbles, I think this concludes our interview. We really appreciate your input on the subject. It’s been a heinous time.

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*Like the side door of Annenberg.
**Interactive question for readers: What would YOU do with a zombie slave?
***There are subtitles. Get over it, you’re reading things right now. But apparently they mistranslate the foul language, so whenever you hear the word “mierda” you’ll have to either get off your lazy ass and onto Spanishdictionary.com, or rely on whatever AP Spanish remains accessible behind the stacks of quotable South Park episodes in your brain. See? You knew being bilingual was good for something. You can power trip over your ability to point out inconsistencies in the translation of profanity.