MEET THE NIERATKOS - I KNOW WHAT YOU LEARNED LAST YESTERDAY

Friends, please read the following list, slowly and carefully. I need you to pay very close attention to each and every detail of what I'm telling you. I'll explain afterwards.

—Gold is a precious metal.

—Bob learned to drive in a blue Pontiac.

—Why do mechanics carry rags when they have perfectly good seat covers to wipe their hands on?

—Mashed potatoes should not have lumps.

—A camel without a hump is like a peach with no fuzz.

—Small heads look better shaved than big heads.

—Baseball is boring in April and exciting in October.

—The hearing impaired enjoy music because they can feel the beat.

—Human beings start life wearing diapers and sometimes end life wearing diapers.

—Your funny bone is called your "humerus."

—I am addicted to Tootsie Rolls.

—What does "abra-adabra" mean?

—In Australia, water spirals down the drain in the opposite direction.

—The Chinese invented pasta.

—The Italians did not invent egg rolls.

—There should be a restaurant in New Delhi called "New Deli"

—Bubble gum is pink because that was the only food coloring the inventor had in his lab at the time.

—The letter "W" should be called "double-V."

—A triple is the most exciting play in baseball.

—Puns are their own "rewords."

—A white lie is "aversion of the truth."

—Grandfather clocks should be wound every day.

—Second cousins are the children of first cousins.

—If you never cut your fingernails your typing speed will slow down.

—A waist is a terrible thing to mind.

—My favorite fern is my best frond.

—Never swallow your chewing gum!

—The hardest part of making a movie is making all those little sprocket holes.

—If you change your first name to "Senator," you will always be able to get last-minute reservations at fancy restaurants.

—"Radar" backwards is "radar."

—"A Toyota" backwards is "a Toyota."

—The LA Lakers were originally from Minnesota.

—Wilt Chamberlain inspired the "three-second rule" in basketball.

—Rick Barry was the last NBA player to shoot free throws underhanded.

—Albert Einstein was dyslexic.

—In the game of chess, it is against the rules to "castle out of check."

—Brownies are better without nuts.

—Jacques Cousteau's fingertips were always "pruney."

—Ancient Egyptians shaved off their eyebrows to mourn the deaths of their cats.

—There are no clocks in Las Vegas casinos.

—A good little boy will always keep his phalange out of his proboscis.

—A dragonfly has a lifespan of about 24 hours.

—Salt is painful on an open wound.

—An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

—Typing will never become an Olympic sport.

—Get your "bloated nothingness" out of the way.  Did that feel like a complete waste of time? It was. 
And now you know how I felt after taking a nine-hour online driving school class.

To make things exciting and help the time pass along, the site designer inserted these zany photos you see and some oh-so-funny jokes throughout. They also inserted the above useless information to make sure you were actually reading. The above anecdotes and Jeopardy fodder were then referenced in the chapter ending quizzes and final exam. Every sentence was brutally painful and the 30-minute timer on each page (that took five minutes to read) prevented me from jumping ahead.

And yous guys thought my writing sucked…

I figured since Vice rented me the rental car that I got the ticket in that you all deserved to share in my suffering. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Remember back in April when I went to Cuba? Me neither. Regardless, check out this interview I did with Argentinean filmmaker Tomas Crowder. He's the one that made the entire trip possible.
Look for more Cuba stories appearing in an upcoming issue of The Skateboard Mag and Vice and also a piece on VBS. And maybe here too. Who knows?

MY DOG, BENNY THE COMEDIAN, IS ON VACATION THIS WEEK.  Luckily, my driving school also inserted jokes amongst the random useless information. Here are just a few I copied… —I have one of those new subcompacts. It has an extra powerful gear for getting off gum! 
—I know a fellow who put a beard on his Ford and told everybody it was a Lincoln! 
—The used car salesman swore by the car. I bought it. The next day I swore too! 
—A drunk is staggering down the street with one foot in the gutter and one foot on the curb. A cop stops him and says, "You're drunk!" The drunk replies, "Thank God! I thought I was crippled."

CHRIS NIERATKO