Thanks, Rick Moranis
I read this article the other day, which is an interview with an anthropologist named Helen Fisher, who designed the personality questionnaire at Chemistry.com, which is a dating site. I took the personality questionnaire, and I must admit it was interesting--among other things, for some reason I had to select which drawing of a hand best represented mine (it was the one where the ring finger was longer than the index finger)(but I must admit that it wasn't overly accurate, as it didn't have any calluses on it from repeatedly playing a broom like a guitar), and I also had to select which type of doodles I do during meetings (abstract shapes)(again, not entirely accurate, but that was the option that most closely resembled my normal doodle, which is a monkey riding a unicorn and shooting a machine gun at Ike Turner). I didn't proceed any further than the questionnaire portion of the personality profile because I'm not interested in writing a 200-word essay about myself unless the essay is about the time that I met Fabio, but I must admit that I'm curious about what kind of matches such a weird questionnaire would produce for me. Regardless of how interesting the site sounds, however, the fact still remains that a lot of people will never use some of the more prominent dating sites because they cost money. In other words, people are worried about paying money for a service that might not yield any results. This is why I think that all dating sites should have some sort of retroactive payment plan, meaning that what you pay for the service is based on what you get out of the service. If you use the site for like a year, and nothing much happens with your love life, you never have to pay a dime. If you go on a few dates and have a good time or two, you pay like $20. If you go out on lots of dates and get lots of handjobs, you pay $100. If you get a BJ, that's $150, and if you get laid, that costs $200. And then, if you end up marrying a person that you met on the site, all of your money is refunded, for obvious reasons. I think this retroactive payment plan makes a lot of sense, although really I'm just trying to legalize prostitution through the back door (pun intended--HELLO!). Maybe I'll send it to that creepy old dude who's always on TV trying to get people to sign up for eHarmony. I've never really understood that--aren't the commercials supposed to get people in the mood for love? Who thought that the best way to do that was to show people a withered old man in an ugly suit talking about getting married? WHAT THE SHIT? But, I digress. Wait, where was I? I forgot what I was talking about. Oh yeah, the price of BJs these days: they're too high. When did they start costing so much?
Speaking of financial stuff, there's a lot of news out there today concerning the faltering stock market and the crumbling mortgage industry. If you're like me, you're probably confused by all of this talk (because, if you're like me, you don't know much about money, as your areas of expertise center around Robotech trivia and hangover remedies). However, this morning, after listening to a story on NPR about the mortgage industry, I think I hit on the best way to explain to everyone what's happening: Spaceballs. The "expert" in the NPR story was saying that 3 weeks ago some mortgage company (I forget which one, but it was emblematic of the entire industry) was writing tons and tons of mortgages, and now they're literally writing 0 mortgages, and that has had a ripple effect on the economy. It hit me: the mortgage industry is like Spaceball 1--it was going at ludicrous speed, and it overshot its target. As Colonel Sanders taught us all, you can't just stop when you're going at ludicrous speed--you have to slow down first. However, the mortgage industry didn't do that: they just came to a complete stop, and so of course the industry is now like Dark Helmet after he similarly stopped Spaceball 1 when going at ludicrous speed, i.e. it smashed its head and is a little woozy, and it's going to take a while for it to recover (i.e., it needs to take a five minute break and smoke if it's got 'em). Makes sense, right? Right! There, I get it: I understand economics now. Awesome!
