Apparently, some of you are getting into trouble due to all of the awesome on this site

So here's a link utility to download so that you can view pages on the Internet without images.  I'm going to throw this into a sidebar as well, so future readers can use this.

Note- I've not tested this utility, since I hate IE and don't use it, but once installed it should block images in IE.

http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/answers/34.html

Parting shot.

Get Your Fucking Head Right, #3- Be Positive, Or You'll Positively Suck

Being that we live in the "Information Age", we're generally buried assneck deep in a massive pile of information, of which the vast majority fucking sucks.  Unless you've got an bullshit destroying Israeli killdozer, it's hard to tell fact from fiction, especially with a variety of hacks and general fuckfaces preying upon your doubts and amplifying that shitty little voice in your ear that occasionally tells you that you suck.  Everyone has the voice, but it's what you do with and to that voice that determines your lot in life.  If you listen to that voice, you end up digging ditches for a living and taking a break from drinking Pabst in your trailer just long enough to knock one of the few remaining teeth in your morbidly obese wife's head onto the floor for mouthing off.  If you don't you end up living whatever you consider to be the good life, basically bending life over and assraping it, and then following it with a bit of ATM before you head off to another day of awesome with a predatory grin on your face.

Given the gape there, I think it's a clear-cut case that she was just ATM'd.  Good for her.

Due to the span and depth of information to which we're exposed on a daily basis, we generally use a variety of diagnostic labels to lend a bit of clarity to your personal fog of war.  Any system of classification up with 
which you come, however, is going to have its positives and negatives, based on a wide array of factors and your overall mindset.(Brafman 74-75)  Additionally, life itself, or the people therein, will likewise place labels on the things and people around them, and you'll get caught up in that system.  This is nothing so organized as the Dewey Decimal System, but is rather a nearly arbitrary system that's by and large predicated upon the astonishing amount of suck most people generate as a matter of course in a given day.  Though you know they suck, and that they're opinions are likely (at best) arbitrary, the labels they place upon you can affect you 
greatly.

Hannibal calls "Bullshit."

I'm sure you are at this point screaming "Bullshit!" in your head and vowing never to read this blog again, as I've asserted that everyone on Earth falls prey to the judgement and labels of others, no matter how mentally tough.  Even the toughest motherfucker on Earth, however, can have his own personal Alamo.  No matter how tightly you seal yourself up in a fortress and massacre the opinions of the teeming unwashed hordes of mealy-mouthed shittalkers walking the Earth, finding yourself covered in gore from stabbing those roly-poly shitbirds to death, you can end up losing.  This is because psychologists have shown across the board that even the toughest snake-eating, Carlos Hathcock motherfuckers can lose subconsciously to societal labels, and that being labelled with  harsh terms like "bipolar" can reduce formerly chipper students into weepy bitches.  Luckily, this shit works both ways, and positive labels like "high-achiever" give you a leg up in life, and generally leads to a much higher success rate on everything from physical to mental tests.  (Brafman 98-99)  Sounds ridiculous, right?  It might, but it's been proven in everything from high schools to the military to the workplace, and works mysteriously both for and against those being labelled.  The phenomenon's called the Pygmalian effect when it's positive, and the Golem effect when it's negative, but it all boils down to the same thing- when we brand or label people, they take on the characteristics of the diagnosis. (100-101) 

(For those of you who are poorly read, Pygmalion was a sculptor in Greek myth who fell in love with his own statue, and eventually wished it into a live woman (not unlike the movie Mannequin), who he fucked and gave birth to an entire city thereafter.  Golems, on the other hand, are unthinking mud-men made by Jewish wizards to do their evil bidding.)

If you wished this thing to life, you'd fuck the hell out of it as well.

In any event, it's enough to make you want to build a fucking hut in the woods and mail nailbombs to people.  There's not much you can do against this type of sway, however, as humans are social animals, and our unconscious is programmed to absorb those labels and adapt to them.  That is, of course, unless you understand the source and discount it.  I, as usual, have more than my personal experience to go on for this.  The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer stated that one "must be able to observe that other people are badly disposed towards him, ... [and] straightway ascribe them, ...to the defective knowledge of the speaker." (Pessimism)  That's certainly worked for me, and it's easy, because most people are unbelievably stupid cows with little reason and even less knowledge.  Additionally, there's really no point sitting around like a bitch and crying into your soup because a pack of lazy, insipid, fat people are trying to will you into being as lazy, fat, and insipid as they are, so you might as well put up a staunch mental defense against the teeming hordes of fuckheads and sally the fuck forth.

"JOIN USSSSSSS!"

The main way society gets over on the average lifter these days is by telling people they suck right from the outset.  The main format for the delivery of this is the myth of the "hardgainer".  A hardgainer, for those of you who are blissfully unaware, is a person who has trouble putting on size and strength.  This, of course, means EVERYONE ON EARTH.  This theory is so fucking stupid that it defies description, and really only exists to apply salve to the wounded egos of a bunch of weepy bitches who want everything right now and throw tantrums in their parents' basement because they've been training a whole 6 weeks and don't look like Ronnie Coleman yet.  It's the quintessential example of the instant-gratification craze that's swept the modern world, and it's fucking disgusting.  To back this load of Stygian stables-sized bullshit is the completely disproven and academically-mocked theory of somatotyping, which is still only clung to by mouth-breathing asshats in the bodybuilding world.  Continued adherence to the theory of somatotyping is akin to a continued belief that masturbating will give you hairy palms, or that JFK was actually shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.  In other words, you quite literally have to be a waterhead to place any credence in it whatsoever.  

 

Endomorph, or is there something far worse at issue?

If you've got doubts, consider this- pure ectomorphs and endomorphs (if they existed) would comprise 2/100  and 1/100th of a percent of the population, respectively.(Sheldon 30)  That means that in the US, there's 6140 and 3070 terminally skinny and terminally fat motherfuckers in the entire United States of America.  This fucking nonsense makes me literally want to stab anyone who utters the words endomorph and ectomorph, because even if they existed, it's almost guaranteed the person bitching was not one.  Neverthelkess, they don't exist, except in the minds of people who want to sell people a bunch of shit that doesn't work anyway, and then  turn around and blame that person's somatotype for their failure.  (If you'd like to read more about this fantastic pseudoscience, go here)  In other words, if you've classified yourself by somatotype, punch yourself in the fucking face, immediately.  Then, remember that when people feel as though they're qualified to make a diagnosis (like after reading a poorly written article about a debunked pseudoscientific theory written by a person who hasn't even read a primary source on the subject), people "become overly confident in [their] predictive abilities", and completely fuck up any progress they might make because "we often ignore all evidence that contradicts what we want to believe."  (Brafman 88)  Therefore, you'll go off half-cocked with bullshit information, and ignore anything to the contrary, which means you'll go on believing you're a bitch and can't gain any muscle and you're doomed to be fat and have a shitty squat and that you can't get laid.


FUCK THAT.


If someone else told you that you were an endo or an ectomorph, rip off their fucking face, wear it as a mask to gain entry to his girlfriend's house, and then smash the fucking granny out of her in front of her parents during their Sunday dinner.  According to the Necronomicon, that's the only way to cleanse yourself of evil magic.

Klaatu, verata, nictu, motherfucker.

To add insult to injury, you might recall that the only reason the hardgainer theory exists is to excuse failure in the weightroom.  This is fucking ridiculous- FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION.  A winner accepts responsibility for himself, rather than pawning responsibility off on others, and immediately takes charge of shit, even when he has absolutely no authority to do so.  Even if you've no idea what you're doing, a strong belief in victory will serve you far better than the mealy-mouthed defeatist bullshit coming from anyone who labels you a failure before you've even started.  Pessimism is the sole purview of losers, and belief that one's a hardgainer is nothing but pessimism.  (Van Fleet 64-66)  Though the above quoted philosopher, Schopenhauer, might believe that man lowers himself to a simple member of the animal kingdom by allowing will to triumph over reason, one will never see a lion fail to catch a gazelle because he didn't believe in himself.

  
Let nothing stand in your fucking way.  


Brafman, Ori and Rom Brafman.  Sway: The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behavior.  New York: Doubletree, 2008.
Sheldon, William. Atlas of Men: A Guide for Somatotyping the Adult Male at All Ages. New York: Gramercy Publishing Company, 1954.
Schopenhauer, Arthur.  Studies in Pessimism.  2007.  http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/pessimism/chapter5.html
Van Fleet, James K.  Hidden Power: How To Unleash the Power of Your Subconscious Mind.  Paramus:  Prentice Hall, 1987.

Apropos Of Nothing: My 2007 trip to Prague

Lest I leave you guys with nothing to read, I thought at the very least I might provide you with some amusement. I wrote this blog in March of 2007 and posted it on myspace.  Here's a repost, since I just reread it and was heartily amused.  Be forewarned- there's no training in here whatsoever, and I'd obviously been reading a shitload of Tucker Max at the time.

Last weekend ranks pretty high amongst the most ridiculous experiences of my life.  
Things I learned:
-not to allow German dudes with livers like a 6 year old girls and a penchant for sleeping with their Ipods on to handle the sole room key
-Prague is not, contrary to popular belief, a cheap city for partying
-Russia must not have any strippers left, because they're all in Eastern Europe
-Eastern Europe might be cooler than Western Europe, and is definitely more like the US than Western Europe

Eastern Europe.  Good to the last drop.

The Train
Following what I originally thought to be a spectacular failure on my Financial Accounting exam (but which actually turned out to be an intellectual coup that somehow salvaged my grade and procured for me a B in the class), I bought a large bottle of Jaeger and resolved to drown my sorrows in its black licorice bliss.  Alex (the aforementioned German with the liver of a kindergartener) and Travis, two of my classmates, and I rushed to the train station, bought our tickets (for which we had to pay a $16 reservation fee despite the fact that the train was leaving in 5 min) and a lot of alcohol, and boarded in record time.  We had not yet even stowed our shit before cracking open the Jaeger and beer, and began drinking combatively before the train even began moving.  Shortly thereafter, my Jager was empty (mostly killed by me), and the other two were nursing beers, mumbling something about "pacing themselves" as I questioned their masculinity, parentage, and intestinal fortitude.  We passed the time in conversation, pointedly avoiding the topic of the exam, which was agreed to be an unmitigated disaster by all, and arrived after 4 short hours in Prague.

We Arrive
As we disembarked, we were greeted by a Czech woman with remarkably good English who invited us to stay at Hotel Express Prague, which I recommend to anyone in the area.  Alex did the majority of the negotiating, as he was least drunk, and got us a room for $60.  For the weekend.  Nice.  We followed her back to the hotel, me mentioning casually that Hostel was set in Eastern Europe, and that I'd like to live through the weekend.  Upon arriving, Travis was delighted to discover a mega porn shop across the street from the hotel, for which we left immediately upon dropping our bags in the room.  After perusing their massive selection, Alex purchased poppers and began huffing them while Travis and I sought out Absinthe (I enjoined Travis to just download all of his porn like a normal person rather than buying the armful he'd selected in 20 minutes).  Finding the Absinthe shortly thereafter, we returned to the hotel to begin drinking once more.  To spur them on into manhood, I poured doubles for every single they drank,and was soon thereafter obliterated, as were they.

Our hotel  

Partying Begins in Earnest
At some point there was a conversation between my companions to which I was not privy, over the relative merits of strippers and/or prostitutes.  Alex claimed that he hated both, though after a shot of Absinthe could talk about nothing but titty bars.  I believe I was dropping the kids off in the pool during this discussion, and emerged from the bathroom to discover them laying on their beds half asleep.  After threatening to start breaking furniture, they emerged from their state of semi-unconsciousness and proclaimed we should head for a tittybar, to which I assented, if only to get our sausagefest out into public.  We were then waylaid by one of the ubiquitous titty bar hawksters, from whom Alex haggled free drinks and entrance in return for our presence. Several more Jaegers later, Travis and I were fending off offers of everything ranging from oral sex to lap dances that exceeded the price of sex with prostitutes in the town.  I attempted to explain to the Russian spazz who apparently thought I was Donald Trump's kid that under no circumstances would I pay $30 for a lapdance, repeatedly, to no avail.  She continued her unending offers as I ignored her, even turning my back to her, and attempting to drink her out of existance.  Finally I stood and proclaimed we should leave, stopping midsentance as I watched Alex performing the weirdest dance/display of affection to a stripper I have ever seen.  Laughing hysterically at his gyrations, which would not have seemed out of place at Woodstock, I grabbed Travis and pointed out Alex, who then began drinking and laughing with me.  After Alex dropped his $30, we left the bar, constantly corralling Alex to insure he didn't wander off.  While I asked a group of Czechs where we should head next, Alex did in fact wander off, not to be seen for the rest of the night.  I called out to him, but he ignored me, so Travis and I followed the group to a bar clear on the other side of the Czech Republic.  Though I was concerned, having just seen Hostel and having watched Alex follow the ugliest Gypsie I'd ever seen down a darkened alleyway, that he might end up in a bathtub sans his kidneys, I was far too interested in the Czech chicks to worry about anyone's wellbeing.  After more Jaeger, and an inkling that the sun was about to rise, Travis and I wantered back toward the hotel, stopping briefly in the titty bar to see if Alex had returned.  He hadn't, so we abandoned our abbreviated search and headed for the hotel, only to find that Alex had the only key, and was passed out inside the room.  We banged on the door for at least 15 minutes, waking up everyone on the floor, and finally got him to open the door, and collapsed into bed.

Shithoused.

Steak and Jaeger
Upon rising and discovering that I was hungrier than I've ever been in my life, I grabbed a book, called my companions pussies for sleeping through Prague, and went in search of steak.  Soon thereafter I found some,  devoured it heartily, and enjoyed sitting in a sports-themed brewpub that would not be out of place in the US.  That's not to say it was some chain, but rather that it had the same air of unbridled masculinity that you'll find in some better US sportbars, a feature sorely lacking in much of Continental Europe.  Returning to the room, I exhorted the guys to get the fuck up, and they grundgingly obliged.  We then left the room to get more food, and after poking our heads into a number of resteraunts, settled on a pizza place.  The pizza was pretty damn good, if a little bland, and we sat for a while and chatted while planning our day.  They both wanted to watch soccer, which did not appeal to me at all, so we reached a compromise in which we'd walk around a bit and stop at a sports bar if we found one.  We headed for a giant clock in the center of town that's a famous landmark, and happened upon a sex toy museum.  


Fuck an a right, a sex toy museum.  Gods bless the Czechs.

Best. Museum. Ever.

After telling them it would be the coolest fucking thing they've ever seen (which it was), they grudgingly entered, beers in hand.  The museum began with various historical, woman-powered vibrators and other female stimulators, and led into a movie house showing the oldest threesome in porn, which might be the single funniest thing I've ever seen.  Alex and Travis, already in their cups from having been drinking as we walked the streets, were treated to my commentary and added dialogue to the movie, as were the rest of the people in the theater, who were apparently overawed by my hilarity.  I drew quite a crowd, providing MS3k-style quips throughout what might be the greatest display of hideous physiues and sexual ineptitude ever caught on celluloid.  Upon the end of this rare cinematic gem, we toured the rest of the museum, and proceeded along to the giant clock in the center of prague, capturing a comical picture of several thousand people staring with rapt attention at a giant Glockenspiel.  Don't get me wrong, it was cool, and 700 some odd years old, but these people looked as though they were watching the guy with the biggest dick in porn bang porn's smallest midget or something (which, incidentally, is amazing- a dude with an 18" dick fucks some dwarf who's something along the lines of 30" tall).  

The only soccer I'd watch of my own volition.

Thereafter, we wandered the streets looking for a sports bar, as Alex demanded that we watch grown men playing a child's game.  We were then fleeced by some shitbox Slav cabbie, who demanded something along the lines of 40E for what should have cost us 3E, and sat down to watch Man U battle it out with some other soccer team.  As we were sitting with some Man U hooligans, I had a good time with them, chugging Coke Light (for which they mocked me mercilessly, but fuck it, I like my liver right where it is) and heckling the other team and their fans.  I also ordered some wings, which were apparently cooked by a man who has never, in fact, eaten wings.  They were 1) boiled, and 2) covered in some disgusting and wholly bland salsa.  My heckling then began to include the phrase, "Your team sucks worse than these fucking wings!", which was met with no small amount of anger- apparently everyone shared my opinion of the wings

.
Upon leaving that bar, and having vowed never again to pay for a cab ride, anywhere, we began our walk back to the hotel, which turned out to take about four minutes.  Irritation then turned to murderous rage, and we vowed to kill the cabbie if we ever saw him again.  To cap this point, Alex and Travis began on a path of liver destruction to which the previous night paled in comparison.  I, being unused to drinking with either that frequency, or intensity, chose to relax a bit on the chugging of liquor, and I was the voice of sobriety for the bulk of the evening, which was another whirlwind tour of titty bars (Alex found that he was in love with one of strippers, I believe) and bars.  We again misplaced Alex while talking to some chicks, and departed on the bus for points unknown in search of what might be the weirdest club I have ever seen.  Picture, if you will,  a bar from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, populated with European metrosexuals, metalheads, and ravers.  Quite a mix.  While Travis tried to work his magic with the locals, I grabbed another Coke Light and headed into the dance club, where I found a live band playing techno.  If that were not odd enough, I came to the realization that the band was in fact a jazz band, playing techno on jazz instruments.  I wandered back to the bar to alert Travis to the uniqueness of this band, and found him engrossed in a conversation with two Nordic chicks.  He was, apparently, awaiting my return, completely unaware of the fact that I have the same effect on European chicks that German panzers have on the French-  I inspire  mass, and usually very disorderly retreat.  Before I could do too much damage, I rolled back to the techno room, where I remained until  Travis gathered me up. 

Overhung and tired of waiting for those lazy motherfuckers to drag ass out of bed.

There you have it- my weekend adventure in the Czech Republic.  Lest you worry, the next blog installment will be back to business as usual.