Written by Lars Hancock

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I have seen the future, and I am afraid.

Last week we took a trip to the “happiest place on earth” – Disneyland. My kids are all little, and all have been sufficiently brainwashed by the Walt Disney Company, so this was less a family vacation and more of a pilgrimage to the Mecca of the Mouse so we could pay our respects. And “pay” is the operative word.

You know those people that love Disney everything? Adults that wear Disney logo t-shirts and drink out of Disney-logo mugs and crap on a toilet with mouse ears on it? I am not one of those people. I hate those people. When I see Disney, I see a ruthless and efficient marketing machine that programs children to adore them like Christian Scientists do at their reeducation camps, and then demands as much of your money as they can extract, like Christian Scientists. Hearts, minds, and wallets all pay homage to the mouse.

Unfortunately due to numerous parental failings on my part, my children have fallen prey to their ruthless clasps, and therefore we had to visit Disneyland on vacation. The shakedown starts right away when I’m forced to pay $15 to park my car. Mind you, there is nowhere else I can go but into the park after I park my car, but nonetheless, here’s an extra $15 they can charge me, and they do. My car is then directed through a huge labyrinth of a garage to a precise spot with chilling efficiency. And it hits me – Disney has mastered mind control, and they also have mastered crowd control. This thought takes root in my head.

Sidebar: my favorite genre of reading is what I like to call “conspiracy fiction.” The effort people put into concocting and supporting conspiracy theories is downright fascinating, and it makes for a phenomenal read of fiction based on real facts held together with the duct tape of bizarre conjecture and conspiracy. [It is to be noted here that I love to mess with people who are a little “off”, and as such this genre of work fits right into my hobby.] My clear favorite conspiracy theory is the New World Order, where the masons are banding together in a global conspiracy to kill 80% of the people in the world and establish a new rule of law among all people. Google “Denver airport murals” for a good starting point in this flight of fancy if you’re not already familiar.

Back to Disney, and we get shaken down for more money entering the park, and between snacks, novelties, necessities, water, and other expenditures, soon enough my credit card is glowing red from being swiped so often. I begin to wonder if there is a plan to suck out all the oxygen in the park so they can sell you oxygen packs for $20 each per hour. Wait, no, Disney, I didn’t really suggest that. It’s not feasible. Please don’t do it. Please. At some point I just wish they would have forced me at gunpoint to empty my savings account at an ATM when I entered the park, and then let me just enjoy myself without being screwed at every corner.

We wait in line to go on numerous rides which tell the story of movies 50 years old, and which my kids don’t fully appreciate, and then find that It’s A Small World is wide open. Oh, joy. We go in and I become frightened. As those of you who have been there know, our boat goes through racist generalizations of about 50 cultures, and then passes through an ominous arch to where all the cultures are suddenly homogenized into one English speaking people.

This is the exact vision of the New World Order, and the scene in It’s a Small World is precisely that depicted in the murals in the Denver Airport. And it hits me. Crowd control, mind control, It’s a Small world… it all adds up to one thing: world domination. Walt Disney is the New World Order, and they will eventually try to kill 80% of us.

Note this theory completely explains why ESPN, owned by Disney, is such a manipulative and evil force in the world of sports. Control sports, control the minds of America. That’s why they want us to root for the evil Heat. It all makes way too much sense. Be afraid people, be very afraid.

Speaking of world domination, there may be reason for optimism in Cleveland sports these days. The Cavs are supposedly maybe kind of not really but definitely close to landing Andrew Bynum, which would make them an instant force to be reckoned with in the East. The Tribe is 2-3 players away from making a serious run this year, if the pitching could hold it all together, and the Browns finally have playmakers at all offensive positions, and a few key defensive ones as well. Could the rise of Cleveland sport be nigh? Is there hope that the greatest era of Cleveland sports may indeed be finally upon us, after years of prophesying such?

Or could it all just be an illusion of perspective, and a bias of attitude, like any good conspiracy theory?

Anyway, off to the questions.

What do I do with an office mate who is incapable of not talking?  She is one of these people who verbalizes internal monologues.  No topic is too mundane to not talk about.  I have begun completely ignoring these "conversations," but they continue.  She has now begun narrating what she is working on to me even though we work for different companies.  I am literally barraged all day long with external monologues about nothing.  My life has become Seinfeld minus the humor.  Help. –Not Master of His Domain

One of the toughest things about being a human being is that we have a natural instinct to care for each and every one of our fellow men, even those we hate. I have a neighbor that just returned from Afghanistan as a military doctor. He told me that they will care for any and all wounded personnel, regardless of who they are: U.S. forces, civilians, or enemy forces. So we actually send troops out to shoot the bad guys, and then will patch them together because we are good human beings.

The easy answer is a scorched earth policy, and really there is no downside to this. I’m sure you’ve visualized this in your head a thousand times – she’s yammering on about sweet potato pie recipes and you kick over your chair, get about a nanometer from her nose, and with a full array of spit yell at her “WOULD. YOU. SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP!” That would be the last word she ever said to you, and your pain would end. She works for a different company as you stated, so no HR would be needed, and your life goes on clean and untarnished by her drivel.

But no, you have a soul, don’t you? You could never do that, and I’d never recommend such a horrible thing, even if it would be a mercy killing for her own good.

No, this situation requires some finesse. Something that makes her feel good about not talking to you. I recommend two possible tactics for you.

1)Noise cancelling headphones. To work properly, these have to be the large, gaudy over the ear headphones, like beats or Bose. When I travel, I wear my beats as soon as I get to the airport because when people see them on me, they think I’m listening to something and won’t talk to me. Last thing I want is for some psychopath to be chewing my ear like Mike Tyson for three hours as I pray the plane slams into a mountain. I don’t even have music playing half the time, but nobody knows otherwise, and I’m allowed to live peacefully inside my own little cone of silence.

You can say your wife/girlfriend got you new headphones for your birthday because she knew you had a lot of continuing education to do for work. Every job has continuing education, I’m sure yours does too, and you download it to iTunes and get it done during your break times. And so you walk around all the time “doing your continuing education”, meaning you listen to the latest Offspring album, or just have them off. Heck, don’t even explain the headphones - she doesn’t have to know WHY you can’t talk to her, she just needs to know THAT you can’t talk to her.

2)The big promotion. Congratulations, you just got a big promotion! Now the bossman expects you at his beck and call 24/7 which means you just can’t get your nose out of your iPhone. And it just so happens that whenever she’s in the break room, you’ve got a “fire to put out” or a “hot item to take care of”, meaning you need to rush back to your computer and take care of it RIGHT NOW. This ruse works particularly well in conjunction with the headphones because you can pretend the phone rings and only you can hear it. “Excuse me, I have to take this”. And then you go off and talk to yourself for a while, or play some Words with Friends in peace.

Eventually, she’ll determine you’re not fun anymore, and find a new host organism to attach to.

This is a HUGE week for the Tribe. Win more than lose and the Indians will be in position for a run.  Even though the cupboard is a little bare down on the farm, are you OK with our 12 year old GM rolling the die and making a serious run at a RH bat?  Opportunities for postseason baseball can be few and far between.  What say you? –Brady

You always want to be on the giving end of any trade where prospects are involved, and get the established player to make a playoff run. Always. Prospects are always a crap shoot, and often you get Alex Escobar, Andy Marte or Matt Laporta. But then again, sometimes you get the player and get Ubaldo Jiminez. I guess the only thing we know for certain is this stuff works out badly for Cleveland most of the time. Hey, we did get Santana for Casey Blake once, and the Bartolo Colon trade was awesome! Wait, that works against my argument…

But seriously, the Indians are within a game of the Wild Card and have a fighting chance. Their pitching staff could be good, although it often isn’t, but who’s to say everyone couldn’t keep their respective heads out of their respective asses for a five game series, or a seven game set? Granted, we’d need a first baseman, a left fielder, and a right handed hitter on the bench who’s name doesn’t rhyme with “Smelly Pumpkin”. Cunningham, cut, Damon, cut, Duncan, cut, replace with three capable bodies and who knows what we can do. The Tribe is contending with only four to five viable professional hitters in the lineup – imagine what they could do with eight or, gasp, nine!

Okay, so there isn’t much to trade. Well, they have that guy tearing up AAA… oh, wait, that’s Laporta… Ignore that, there’s ALWAYS someone to trade. A couple of AA guys, low rounders from the past year or so… to get a Cole Hamels to solidify the rotation, for example, you trade just about anyone in the organization. Give the Phillies all the crap they gave us back for Hamels. That would be fair, no? A veteran righty bat like Michael Cuddyer would cost far less.

But please, Shapiro, DO SOMETHING. When you've shown you can contend after half a season, don't waste it, capitalize on it. Show us you care.

My friend owns a water bottling company. He laughs all day. Why? –pod

When I was in Haiti, you could die from drinking the tap water. As a result, all we drank was bottled water, which was a necessity of life and thus worth every penny of the dollar plus a bottle it cost. Bottled water is free of cholera and feces, which create both a notable unpleasant taste and unpleasant effects afterward. If you could afford to drink bottled water, you had to, and unfortunately most people had to drink whatever was available just to survive, taking their chances with disease.

Americans are all under the misguided impression that the tap water in Cleveland is of the same quality as that in Haiti. We are water snobs, and want to have the image of drinking out of a particular brand’s bottle as part of our fashion accessories and general life of excess. We adorn our hands with water and Starbucks cups because we are bored as a society, and need to find ways to show off our wealth like little peacocks. Turns out, however, that your little bottle of water only serves to make you look like a fool.

American tap water is as good as anything that goes into a bottle, using equally rigorous of filtration and purification processes. The sources are the same – groundwater – and there isn’t a human being alive that would be able to tell the difference between Evian, Fiji, Poland Springs, and New Jersey Municipal tap water (you can tell Dasani, because they add crap to it which makes it taste bad). So why do you pay $1 a bottle for water? Pride and ego, and the fact that you may actually be stupid enough to believe quintuple charcoal filtering makes a crap of a difference in what you taste. Sucker.

Coffee is the same way, which is why everyone and their brother wants to open a coffee shop (I bet pod’s friend dabbles in coffee too). You take a dime worth of grounds, run some tap water through it, and charge $4. If you make your coffee right at home, you can make a cup of coffee for that dime, and have it taste significantly better than Starbucks. Starbucks burns their coffee, and tens of millions of Americans have been duped into thinking that horrible burnt taste is “gourmet coffee”. It isn’t – it’s bad coffee, and you’re being ripped off because you want that white cup and brown sleeve fashion accessory.

As W.C Fields said, and Walt Disney later made their corporate mantra, “there’s a sucker born every minute”. And those suckers are padding their egos with their bottles of water and Starbucks cups.

Why is it that everytime Point Break is on cable, regardless of what I'm doing, I have to watch it til the end? –Larvell

Point Break is like the Reeses Cups in the checkout line at the grocery store. They are candy, void of anything even remotely nutritious, and just empty calories that make you less healthy. But they satisfy your carnal desires for peanut buttery chocolately sugary goodness, and when eating them all the unpleasantries of life seem to disappear. You see them, you know you shouldn’t have them, but you buy them anyway, and you hate yourself afterward.

Point Break is the same way. As a cinematic achievement, it’s a movie. The acting isn’t good, the plot is ridiculous, and the cinematography is… well, it’s fucking Point Break, do we really have to talk about the cinematography? It stars Patrick Swayze, Keanu Reeves, and the always ridiculous Gary Busey, hardly Shakesperian thespians, but guys that know how to make a movie fun.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? We’re not watching Citizen Kane here. We’re not analyzing the symbolism and social commentaries throughout the movie, there are no metaphors or subtexts. Its guys with guns skydiving and playing football and surfing and robbing banks and surfing some more and then big glorious death. Wooooo. There’s the f word said approximately 105 times, and some nudity too, just to ensure every cell of the male brain is fully engaged in the movie.

As a man, how can you resist Point Break? If you’re a guy ad you don’t like the movie, you need to get off your high horse, grab a Busch Light, take off your shirt, and relax a bit. You just may learn that life is fun if you let it be.

Regardless of the fact that they would never meet in their real life environments, who would come out on top in a one on one battle between a large cat(tiger, lion) a large bear (kodiak, griz or polar) and a gorilla? –Tarzan

Well, we have three animals here, so we’re going to have to round robin this in order to determine a winner. Also, we’re going to have to make them super aggressive by taking one of their babies and locking it in a cage behind the other animal, just to ensure they fight. I’ll ask Mike Vick for other advice in this tournament when he comes to Cleveland for the season opener, but for now, let’s assume they’re in the octagon and ready to rumble.

Match 1: Large Cat v. Bear: The cat has the advantages of quickness, raw speed, and biting power, where the bear has the advantage of power and durability. The cat’s best course of action would be to knock the bear over and try to kill it while the bear is prone and has its power neutralized, or get it from behind and kill it before the bear has a chance to use its power. The bear, on the other hand, wants the fight to come to him. He can take a scratch or two, maybe even a bite, because once he lands a paw to the necessarily light ribcage of the cat, the fight ends. The cat will be smarter, but won’t be able to overcome the bear’s power or take a hit. Let’s go to the video and see… yep, bear by KO in the first.

Match 2: Large Cat vs. Gorilla: This is a similar matchup to the first, with the exception being that the gorilla is much smarter and more agile than a bear, albeit less powerful and able to take a hit. Sadly for the cat, these slight reductions in strength and stamina really do nothing to change the outcome, and the intelligence and agility of the gorilla make this even more of a rout. Like a blitzing safety being picked up clean by Joe Thomas, this is a non-starter. The tape confirms it, gorilla all the way.

Championship: Gorilla vs. Bear. Let’s go right to the magnificent tape on this one, because it is just so awesome. As you can see, the gorilla will use its speed and agility to try to get an advantage. If the two become intertwined, the stronger bear has a significant advantage in strength, not withstanding his ability to bite will prove to be an advantage. But the gorilla can use tools – look how he throws that rock! He could take a steel chair from ringside and hit the bear with it, or come off the top rope and smash the grizzly with the championship belt, or even throw some mysterious dust into the bear’s eyes. All of which get him disqualified. Gorillas… they always cheat. Bear wins by DQ.

 

Please email questions to  lars.hancock@yahoo.com, tweet them to @ReasonsImADrunk, or DM them to me in the forae to LarsHancock.