The Cynic Gazette

I’m pleased to offer the newest product from Snyder Heavy Industries, Snyder’s Homeopathic Birth Control Tonic, and I’m offering it at zero cost to the consumer. Because here at Snyder Heavy Indurstries, we care, and are hoping to get a Wholefoods distribution deal since they’re a leading retailer of homeopathic pills.

How does it work? I thought you might ask. Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy, bases everything on what he calls the law of similars (basically that like treats like). So, something that causes a problem becomes a solution when introduced in super dilluted quantities, since the medium (water usually, sometimes pure alcohol) remembers the “vibration” of the ingredient.

Being that sperm is the leading cause of pregnancy, homeopathic says that a super dillution will cure AND prevent it! That’s right, if I bolt in a cup and mix it with enough water, it’ll double as birth control AND a morning-after solution!

Most homeopathic remidies on the shelf at Wholefoods are available in dillutions of 30C, since Hahnemann says this as a good general dillution for most ailments, that’s what I’m going with. What’s that mean? Glad you asked.

Homeopathic ingredients, in this case, my freshly squozen sack chowder, all get dilluted on the X scale or the C scale with either distilled water or pure alcohol. A dillution of 1X means one part per 10, and a dillution of 1C means 1 part per 100. So, our dillution ratio of 30C means the dillution will be 1:100^30 or 1:1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Every few dillutions, you have to “actuate” or shake the mixture. Videos of professional homeopaths show actuating as banging a bottle on a leather book, or just shaking it (not unlike a polaroid picture) the way you’d shake a ketchup (NOT catsup) bottle. I’ll be using the “book” method to make sure my gentleman’s leavings are properly actuated.

So come one, come all (I know I will) and get your bottle of Snyder’s Homeopathic Birth Control tonic!

*ahem*

Sound stupid to you too? Well, that’s homeopathy in a nutshell. One other thing worth mentioning–at dillutions over 12C, you’re guaranteed that you won’t get a single molecule of the original ingredient (the math behind this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant).

And the chance you’d get one of my 2 million (ish) swimmy little buddies out of my liquid boy sauce? 1 in 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Joisey Mike Geek, Skepticism alternative medicine, homeopathy, sarcasm, Skepticism, sperm, wholefoods

I love the Craigslist. For serious.

It started back when I developed a sick fascination with the Missed Connections section, and to this day I’m still sitting with my foam 1 fan finger waiting for that Missed Connection that says my favorite thing an anonymous classified could say: “I saw you at Safeway and thought you were cute. Write me back if you get this.” Awesome. They’re really THAT vague.

And of course, I loved finding a girl who was looking for one friend of mine on there, and finding a guy who was ranting about someone a friend of mine took home from a bar. I still giggle when I think about that 

The lovelorn stopped being enough for my Craigslist high – so I decided my life needed a daily injection of bike pics, so I started hitting the motorcycles for sale, and since it was right next to them, eventually music instruments and photo/video equipment. Of course, electronics and computer stuff had to make the list too, because, well, I wear my geek pride like a Miss Teen USA sash — which I could totally buy on Craigslist, since anyone winning Miss Teen USA will need money for rehab once they realize they can’t really do anything about world peace. See how I brought that full circle?

I’ve been the king of commerce, selling 2 TVs, 2 digital SLR cameras, a motorcycle, Social Distortion tickets and a PS3 in the past year, and with more stuff up for sale now, I get a TON of replies. However, a lot of people, and when I say “a lot” I actually just mean a few here and there, are Craigslist evildoers. They’re different from the Craigslist ne’er-do-wells and the Craigslist nogoodnicks. They want your money, or your stuff, but here’s the rub, they don’t want to trade you their stuff or money for it.

I know, right?

A few want me to ship their item to a cousin in Nigeria, and they’ll pay me an extra $100 in a UScertified bond checks. Or, they want me to use their escrow service, Royal Mail, which involves me calling a premium toll number in Belize (like $50/minute) since I don’t have to pay for the item until I’ve inspected it, but I still have to send them money to “release” the item for inspection.

Snopes.com has been my buddy, as well as the helpful Craigslist scam pages, because while I don’t be a part of anything that doesn’t involve a cash deal in-person, I like to know how all of this stuff works so I can explain it to the great unwashed who don’t like to do research as much as I do. Now thanks to me, these bad people won’t be making the baby Jesus cry. We’ll let “2 Girls 1 Cup” do that.

I’d like to think people will heed this warning and learn from my experience, but let’s face it – most people roaming the web spend too much time wiping the drool off their keyboards to check into a dubious offer. If you don’t like to look up the weird emails you get from buyers, hey, no problem. I’ll just send you a cashier’s check for your DVD player for $8000 signed over to you, if you could just cash it and send me the balance minus $200 for your troubles, well that’d be just swell.

No?

Oh come on… even though our eyes met at Safeway last week?

Joisey Mike The Internets craigslist, sarcasm

Dear People of the MySpace dot com,

I’m out of here for the week, so happy thanksgiving (unless you’re American Indian), enjoy your turkey (unless you’re vegan), tell your family I said hi (unless you’re not seeing them), take a big gulp of wine (unless you don’t drink) and have a great weekend (unless you have to work)!

America, Jesus and I love you and are thankful the Germans haven’t killed my people yet,

Joisey Vegas Mike

p.s. Thanks for emailing — I’m aware I spelled it like that. Now I know two of you don’t get my sense of humor. I’m so telling Baal on you.

Joisey Mike 4th Wall sarcasm