How much goddamn free time do you people have

Source: NBC News

In which an Australian who has never had a hangover tells you how to deal with hangovers

Shonagh Walker would like to share some of her hangover cures.  I'd love to tell you that they work, but that would be the height of mendacity, so I won't do that.  That said, if you're interested in solving your hangover with just 7 complicated steps and approximately $185 in cash, maybe these will work for you!  I found reason to pause very early on--the headline made sense, but the subheadline was...perplexing.

Sunscreen!  I never thought of that, because even really drunk me does not think sunscreen would ever possibly help with a hangover.  Points for creativity, if nothing else.

WE'VE all been there, and I defy anyone to say they haven't. Well, I've got some just-for-the-guys

Because hangovers are gender-dependent.

tips, to make it easier for you to front up and look fresh, all day long.

1. Water

1. The most obvious hangover cure ever that everyone already knows.  Thanks for that.

Drink the largest glass of water that you can find, the second you get out of bed. Make sure it’s at room temperature, or warmer, and add the juice of half a small lemon to it (that helps to remove the toxins you ingested last night).

I don't think that's how science or lemons work.

2. Eat a green breakfast
Slice up half an avocado and sprinkle it with lemon juice.

Always with the lemons!  How much citrus fruit do you use in a typical day, Shonagh?

Steam a few mushrooms and then blanche a handful baby spinach by pouring boiling water over it. 
Add a couple of certified free range, cage-free eggs – boiled or poached. If you want toast, ensure it’s wholemeal and go easy on the butter. Serve the lot with a side of organic baked beans, and you’ve got yourself a pretty healthy, and delicious, hangover breakfast.

Given that one of the key parts of a hungover breakfast be that you should be able to get the food down, this is not promising. It does sound healthy, sure, but it's really lacking in the all-important grease department.  

It will make you feel better, give you energy to last until lunch time and contribute to a healthy pH of your body.

I think that last bit about pH might be pseudo-scientific bullshit, though per Wikipedia, "Outside the acceptable range of pH, proteins are denatured and digested, enzymes lose their ability to function, and death may occur."  I kinda doubt that you would die from a pH imbalance created by drinking, but what do I know?  (Hint: nothing).

3. Take a warm-to-cold shower
Take a warm shower and do all you need to do in your daily shower … shave, exfoliate, whatever.

• Stumble upstairs to shower
• Turn it on blindly, hope it's some variation of "warm"
• Get in without remembering to test the temperature
• Scald face
• Half step, half fall out of shower, causing injury to knee
• Adjust knob to "warm"
• Get back in, stand under showerhead with head down and eyes closed
• Ponder how much everything sucks

5. Moisture plus Radiance
Combine your regular moisturiser

Sure, that's a thing I have.

with a boost of vitality. Pick a product with energising ingredients like, Biotherm High Recharge Energy Shot, $65, www.biotherm.com.au, which uses ginseng, vitamin B5, vitamin E, magnesium, copper and zinc, to bring life back into your skin.

Pick a product like this one, that I'm definitely not being paid to advertise!  Here, I'll just give you the price and the website, in case you want to, you know, buy some.  Just buy some!  Look at all these ingredients!  Ginseng!

6. Bright Eyes
Ok you’re on the home stretch and can almost safely head out the door. Just make sure your eyes get treated. You may wish to douse them with Visine, depending on the level of red veins apparent, but what you sure want to do is apply a soothing, de-puffing eye cream. I love Clinique Skin Supplies for Men Anti-Fatigue Cooling Eye Gel, $52, www.clinique.com.au. Its medical grade stainless steel roller ball offers a draining massage, which will move away all the fluid that’s causing your eyes to bloat up like that. At the same time, it deposits a liquid gel-serum, which cools the skin on contact, and absorbs quickly to address dark circles.

Whenever I'm hungover, my first thought is always "I could really use a metal ball to roll around on my face right now, especially if it puts me out $52."

7. Take the red out
Finally, before you step out the door, tone down the red in your skin with a high SPF sunscreen that has a slight tint, like Ultraceuticals Ultra Protective Daily Moisturiser SPF30+ Sheer Tint, $65, www.ultraceuticals.com. Don’t worry it’s not make-up. It simply adds a sheer tint to your skin that knocks out any redness and uneven tone, so you turn up to work looking fresh faced.

I was really hoping the sunscreen would be for an even more ridiculous purpose, such as applying before bed to supplement melatonin or some bullshit.  As far as I'm concerned, there are precisely three things you need when hungover, and not one of them costs more than a couple bucks.  They are:

• Water
• Coffee
• Sleep more, you dumbass

Google Drive's autofill feature is both useful and bizarre

 Autofill is a common feature on spreadsheets where you can enter a few items (typically, numbers) like so:

Then, if you click that little blue square and drag down, it'll know that you want to just keep counting up:

Useful!  However, as this story over at TechCrunch today notes, Google Drive has an enhanced version of this, where you can ctrl-click instead of just clicking before you drag and Google will attempt to guess what you want to autofill with pretty much any data you want.  As TechCrunch writer Drew Olanoff notes, you can do this with beer types to produce a comprehensive list of beer varieties (albeit with some noise thrown in):

Obviously, I wanted to try for myself, so I put in a few beer types, autofilled the column, and ta-da!

So that list was populated using three entries ahead of time--as a certified lazy person, I wanted to see if I could use just two for the same result, which did in fact produce basically the same list:

Using just one, however, yielded more unusual results.  If I started with "ale", I think Google assumes I'm looking for country abbreviations:

Using "ipa" yields what appear to be names of college majors in Indonesian:

Starting with "lager" gives us some words I had to translate, but they appear to be basic German (and some Dutch) words that have to do with either A) business transactions or B) automobile repair.  The word "lager" just means "stock", so I guess that's the common thread.  I am not sure where the Dutch words came from.

If we use "porter", we at first just get a list of other jobs, including some oddly specific ones.  The Japanese characters below translate to "Yoshida bag", which seems random at first--however, apparently Yoshida makes a line of porter bags, so that explains that.  Zozotown also seems wholly ridiculous, but it's apparently a Japanese retail site that sells items such as porter bags, so there you go.

I thought typing out the full name of a beer style might help, so I tried "india pale ale", but that just gave a series of "________ pale ale" results, which is boring.  "Imperial pale ale" was more interesting--we got off to a good start, but then it just started naming German months (from 2011, for some reason) as well as the German word for "pages".  No clue.

"Pilsner" was the only single beer type that really worked--it yields a similar list to using several beer types:

Having confirmed that this feature works (mostly), I decided to try a couple other things.  Obviously, I was curious what using my name might yield:

Not much of use there, though I noticed that Google appears to be subtly hinting that others, as opposed to myself, arouse.  Daily dose of damage to self esteem: ☑

Lastly, I wondered if Google's smart autofill could count.  Obviously, the basic version can, since it can only use basic mathematical progressions, but can the more advanced version figure out how to count?  

 Ah.  Well, it did get to eleven, I guess.  It's probably kinda unfair to use the spelled-out versions of numbers--what happens with just the digits?

 No idea what happened there.  Anyway, if you're interested in seeing the results on a spreadsheet, all the images come from here--feel free to add your own if you find some interesting results. 

It's time for science with Jose Canseco

Yesterday, Jose Canseco tweeted the following:

This of course led to great excitement among those of us who wonder what the concept of Science looks like in Jose Canseco's head (just me? yeah, probably just me).  Luckily for us, he did in fact follow through on his promise, and it is fantastic.  Observe:

This is actually something that scientists do debate, since the total mass of the Earth does change a bit over time, thus affecting its gravitational force.  Jose, however, has other reasons for believing this:

Probably something to do with evolution?  You're the expert, Jose, you tell me.

After sharing this intriguing theory about gravity, Jose went on to discuss the planetary physics that caused this gravitational change:

Basically, the Triassic was the Earth's steroid era.

It's thought-provoking, that's for sure.  This concludes today's edition of Thoughts about Gravity, featuring Jose Canseco.

It's almost time for the Super Bowl! Do you know how to watch a football?

Do you meet the following criteria?

• Live in the United States
• Work in a place where other people work also
• Have $50
• Don't know how football works

If so, there is now an allegedly useful class you can take to rectify the last two items!

The course is taught by a Diane Darling, so I decided to research (read: google) what else she does when she's not teaching people how to watch football.  Unfortunately, obstacles!

Fucking robots!

Going to the site itself yielded similar results:

Reading this aloud with the ellipses causes you to sound like Christopher Walken.

This exhausted my patience for research, so I gave up at this time.  Returning to our original topic (how to watch football games), here's what Diane has to say about her class.

DISCLOSURE - This event was filmed in front of a live audience at the British Consulate in Boston, MA on January 8, 2013 at the chapter meeting of the Greater Boston ASTD .

With Super Bowl  is around the corner, I decided to upload the class so you can enjoy right away rather than spend hours perfecting the video.

Diane, while we're on the topic of oddly specific how-to classes, would you be interested in my course on "How to use grammatically correct sentences in articles describing courses on how to watch American football games"?  [editor's note: that sentence might be grammatically incorrect.  If so, it's supposed to be ironic or something.]

Welcome to Water Cooler Football - where football and networking meet to have fun!
"To have fun" is a bizarre addendum to that particular sentence, because subjects, objects and verbs are things that matter.

You’re at a party with a football game on, people cheer and you have no idea what happened – do you feel left out? 

Here's a free tip from me--if people are cheering, you can do one of two things to fit in.  Either just cheer whenever they do, or remain silent and if anyone asks just say you're a Cleveland fan.  They'll nod their head in a knowing and sympathetic manner and be none the wiser as to your football ignorance.

At a meeting someone says, “let’s do an end run” – do you feel lost?  

Not as lost as mayor Rob Ford of Toronto feels when he tries to actually do an end run!

This is a pretty good approximation of how  pretty much everything Rob Ford does in public goes.

When you hear “football” do you think people mean soccer?

That is an extremely odd question.  If the answer to the question is yes, the question will make no sense.  If the answer is no, it's such a mind-numbingly silly question that it still makes no sense.  It's like a zen koan, if the word koan means what I currently believe it means, which I'd say is about a 50/50 proposition.

If you don't know how to watch a football, you maybe left out.

This is pretty much my favorite sentence of ever.  Am I doing it right?

Fuck!  So close.

This can have a negative impact on your career and perhaps social life.

Forgetting to watch a football has certainly had a negative impact on Jermichael Finley's career!  ZING

You'll also learn some best practices for networking. How to pick your events (aka "whether report")

Frankly, I have no idea what a "whether report" is, so I'm not even sure we're talking about football anymore.

how to get into a conversation, and .... how to get out of one.

That is the most ominous way possible to write that sentence.  It suggests that any beginner can get into a conversation about football, but only the experts will be able to extricate themselves later.  I can't tell you how many times I've seen a group of football novices start chatting, only to realize that they are stuck in the conversation forever.

Learn how to be a part of the game with tips and from Gene and Diane. (And wait until you hear how they met!)

Do I care how they met?  No.  No, I do not.

Regarding Gary Busey and my newfound phobia of inner tubes

Ever wondered if it's possible to fuck an inner tube?  Gary Busey has the answer.  I've always felt that "flabbergasted" is a word that people should only be able to use once in their lives, because that would make it special and it seems like a word that shouldn't be used lightly.  I'm thoroughly flabbergasted by this whole video, and by Gary Busey, and I do not want to go tubing ever again.  Video involves some NSFW language, if that was not apparent already.

The Internet does not always solve all of my problems

So, I just spent about thirty minutes trying to figure out if there is any way to set an animated gif to play a sound along with it, because these are the things that I do with my time, I guess.  .gifs are an image file format, so obviously they can't contain any audio data, but I really would have thought that someone would have made a website where you can upload a gif, upload an audio track, and have it spit out a video combining the two.  The closest I was able to come was gifsound.com, which as far as I can tell shows you a gif next to a Youtube video while hiding the video so you hear the sound and watch the gif.  Anyway, if anyone knows how to take my results here and make a single file from it, let me know.  In the meantime, hit play on this:

And watch this:

It's time for music learning

How to Keyboard:

One time when I was 11 I played in a "keyboard group" where seven of us played keyboards set to sound like various types of synthesizers.  The song we played was kinda similar to the Star Wars theme but not quite the same, although it was called the Intergalactic March or something like that.  That moment was literally the pinnacle of my musical contributions to society thus far, although with the knowledge I've gained since then I can't help but think that seven sixth-graders playing synthesizers must have sounded roughly like a roll of duct tape going through a garbage disposal.

How to Organ: 

 

How to Xylophone:

  Source: Cracked