Sage Advice

Sound Advice Presents: The Adventures of Mr. Super Captain Man (Mr. Super Captain Man Versus Badfish Act I)

Sound Advice is back with an all new episode. This week, we’re proud to present our new radio podcast show, The Adventures of Mr. Super Captain Man! Follow the link below to listen to Act I of Mr. Super Captain Man Versus Badfish.

Mr. Super Captain Man Versus Badfish Act I

Remember to check us out on iTunes, too. And while you’re at it, you can like Sage Advice on Facebook. We’ve also got an archive where you can browse every episode of Sound Advice.

Synopsis for The Adventures of Mr. Super Captain Man:

Listen and follow the adventures of Mr. Super Captain Man and his trusty sidekick, Leopard the homeless leper, as they protest the crime-infested street of New York City and protect a local sushi restaurant owner from the likes of Badfish. Is it the notorious Sublime cover band? A foul fish? Or an anthropomorphic fish who is a member of the Sublime cover band? Will our heroes be able to overcome Badfish’s evil henchman, Mind Monkey? None of these  These questions and more will be answered during Mr. Super Captain Versus Badfish Act I.

Written by:

Matthew Fugere

Michael Fugere

Voices:

Mr. Super Captain Man, Trash-man:

Michael Fugere

Leopard the homeless leper, Narrator, Mind Monkey:

Matthew Fugere

Edited by:

Matthew Fugere

It’s Raining Outside, So Here Are Some Jokes

I was sick today. It’s also been raining. So I wrote some jokes for you guys. I hope you enjoy them. If you don’t, that’s okay. But you should. 

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The inventor of the television remote control has died at the age of 96. He was found stuck between two couch cushions.

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DC comics has announced that one of its most established characters will soon be revealed to be gay. DC does not want to perpetuate any gay stereotype by picking a character that dresses in tight flashy clothing, so the only option the company has is the Penguin.

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Recent research has indicated that many members of congress write and speak at a high school sophomore level. This statistic explains the recent surge of sexts found amongst congress.

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A vial said to contain a sample of Ronald Reagan’s blood is up for auction. The current highest bidder is the Republican Party who plans to use the vial as a more human and electable candidate than Romney for the 2012 presidential race.

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Many right wing bloggers and columnists have recently connected President Obama’s support for gay marriage to recent U.S. Department of Justice guidelines issued to reduce rape in prison. In other news, all gay marriage is prison rape according to Republicans, so stopping gay marriage is stopping prison rape.

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A recent study indicates that Facebook can negatively affect a marriage with more than a third of divorce filings in the UK citing the popular social networking site. In response, Facebook is now developing a “Don’t bother coming home, you son of a bitch” button to replace the “like” button.

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The land used to film the hit film The Hunger Games is being sold after the 83-year-old owner has become stressed by the number of fans of the series that have visited the attraction. The move to sell the property comes after his first plan to deal with the rabid fans, forcing them to kill one another for sport, fell through for legal reasons.

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Many libraries around the country have been hesitant to keep the hit book “Fifty Shades of Grey” on their shelves because of its erotic story. However, nearly all librarians agree it’s great to see people masturbating to books again.

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-Matthew Fugere

Lions And Sloths And Linguistic Associations! Oh My!

We human folk often try to find our understanding of attributes and traits in nature. If we have the concept of strength in our word-bank, we look into the natural world to find a example of it (for quite some time I believe the ox has been associated to strength, a branding that certainly begs for a modern update).

People do this with just about every descriptor available. It’s not just enough to have an understanding of an adjective in the human world; a certain kind of validation is felt when the word is connected to an aspect of nature.

You can see it all over our culture and language. We’re drawn to how we can connect ideas to nature, making the understanding of humanity outside of the human experience. The problem with this word-association tendency is how often people can get it so dreadfully wrong.

We’ve already mentioned the Ox. However, this is not a great example as the Ox is quite a strong animal—though certainly not the strongest. The intention is correct, but the degree is off by a smidge.

Let’s consider the lion instead.

Think about a lion. Specifically a male lion. Mane and all. Do you have that image in your head? What does it bring to mind? How would you describe it? There’s a good chance that you’re thinking about courage, pride, or honor—traits of an ideal king. Here’s the problem with that association: male lions are lazy, incompetent child-eating rapists. That’s not a statement of hyperbole. Male lions really do eat their cubs. It’s called infanticide and it proves that male lions are completely shitty in every way.

How does your childhood feel right now?

As if eating babies wasn’t enough, male lions continue to show how antithetical they are to the human attributes tied to them by being the laziest members of their pride. The female picks up the heavy lifting when it comes to hunting and surviving. Lionesses hunt, give birth, and provide for their insane, child-devouring husbands all the time. How does the male lion return the favor? By raping the shit out of the lioness whenever he feels like it.

A human who eats babies, rapes, and refuses to get a productive job or hobby isn’t considered a shining example of pride, courage, and honor. In fact, that human is usually confined in a padded room until society figures out a humane way to dispose of something truly inhumane. There is one positive note to the male lion getting these human words: they are words falsely connected to kingship. Turns out real lions have a lot in common with real kings; they both love to do nothing all day until it’s time to rape and eat babies.

History tends to forget about all the babies Henry VIII ate

Occasionally people get the whole word-animal-association game wrong in the opposite manner, giving a perfectly delightful animal a terrible reputation. The sloth is a shining example of such a farce. Sloths have had the misfortune of having an absolutely terrible and undeserved word attached to their existence.

For those of you who have never seen Se7en, allow me to explain what it means for something to be slothful. You know when you wake up in the morning and all you want to do is eat and then sleep some more and maybe eat a little bit more and not think about anything but the blissful pleasure-train you just created with a mountain of food and decadence? Imagine being that all the time and you get an idea as to what it means to be slothful.

Sloths, the animal not the lazy and shitty humans from which they are named, receive this name because of their incredibly slow pace. Sloths don’t move much, if at all, through their day-to-day. They spend most of their time hanging from trees, surely contemplating the sloth life-experience.

That may seem slothful, but really consider what they’re doing: hanging upside-down from a tree all day long. All day. And many sloths carry their offspring along with them. Essentially, baby sloths use their parents as branches as their parents hang from actual branches. What’s slothful about that?

Absolutely nothing

Go to your Facebook page. Go find the first person on your feed who is sharing tragically boring photos of their ugly children. How long do you think those over-sharing cunts can hang from a tree while their bastard babies grip their ribcages all day? I’d give the egg-headed jerks two minutes—tops—before they fall to the ground and get raped and eaten by a male lion.

Sloths aren’t slothful. There’s nothing slothful about being able to cling to a tree for survival day in and day out. Lions aren’t courageous.  There’s nothing courageous about eating children. We’re always going to channel our experiences through a medium that doesn’t experience or understand our experiences, but I think it’s about time we start putting a little more thought into our future—and past—cultural synapses. 

-Matthew Fugere

Who Or That

My understanding of the difference between who and that has always been wrapped around the idea as to whether something is human. So Matt is a who while table is a that. It’s an easy way to make your everyday speech sound credible, but I think there’s a strange sense of entitlement that comes with people and who.

Sure, we can say all things that are people get to be whos, but at what point can we say that we lose our rights to whodom? When we’re dead, our lifeless bodies resting in the earth or in other people or in ashes, are we still whos? Perhaps people consider the conscious who and the body that. That’s strange to me. If that’s the case, you can’t be a who without a that, thus who is completely dependent on the idea of that. If anything, who is created out of that, maybe even constructed by leftover pieces of all the thats.  

Some whos may not even deserve their whoness. After all, if you’re a who and Hitler was a who and so was that kid who called you that kindergarten insult equivalent of that, then does it really matter if you get to be a who? If whos are so readily handed out to any one thing that got lucky enough to exist as a human, does being a who really even matter?

And when you really break down what we’re all made of, it’s basically all the same stuff, so can’t we all be whos? There isn’t a significant difference between the who you are and the that a table is when you consider the scale and quantity of things that make your whoness and the table’s thatness. You and a table, despite having the grammatical conflict of who and that against your relationship, have a vast amount in common when you consider the rest of every other that and who in the universe. The fact that your who and its that even get to exist side-by-side should indicate that.

Going the opposite direction, what if some humans really don’t deserve whodom? Babies, for example, are barely people. They don’t talk or move or think or care about anything. Babies and tables have about the same degree of humanity. However, every time I use that when I’m talking about that baby that is right there, its parents get offended, informing me that it isn’t a that or an it.

But why not? What’s so bad about thatism? Is being a that rather than a who really such a horrible thing? Is all measurable humanity stricken when you’re placed in column “that”? I don’t think it really matters. Being a who is nice, sure, but being a that can’t have that much of a negative impact on your identity or daily life. If anything, you should appreciate the possibility of being a that. Plenty of amazing things are labeled with that rather than who: rockets ships, the moon, Conan O’Brien’s hair, a half dozen package of eggs, nineteen, door knobs, toenails (unless they’re attached to your whole whoness), and computers just to name a few. Being that or who shouldn’t matter. All that matters is that you get to be a that or a who. Simply being.

-Matthew Fugere

What Day Is It? I’m Not Sure, But Here Are Some Jokes I Wrote For You guys

You guys know I like to jokes sometimes. Well, here are some more. I also put the other jokes I wrote all onto one page that you can read at your leisure. Please enjoy these: 

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A man from Ohio recently broke the record for longest time continually fist-bumping. He was also awarded the record for biggest douche bag.

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A cemetery in Alabama where the remains of slaves are buried is causing complications for the construction of a new Wal-Mart. To solve its problem, Wal-Mart has decided to build an aisle around the graves, expanding their already vast stock to headstones and dead slaves.

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A well known Catholic priest has publically acknowledged that he has fathered a child and will be stepping down from his position. In his public address, he mentioned that the saddest part about leaving his priesthood is how difficult it will become to get away with molesting the child who forced him out.

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One of the top Italian universities announced recently it will begin teaching most of its classes in English as of 2014 to attract more international students. Academic officials have decided not use American English, however, as forcing words like Baconnaise into Italian culture is just pushing it.

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Austin, Texas was recently named one of America’s healthiest cities. Because it goes against their motto, “everything’s bigger in Texas,” Austin was charged with treason by the rest of Texas and was put to death by the rest of the state eating it.

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Because of the expansion of private enterprises, many classic cars 50 years of age on the streets of Cuba are likely to be phased out. Jay Leno has offered to buy all of them. However, trading with Cuba is illegal in the US, so Leno faces the same punishment as Austin from the last joke.

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A report from the journal Nature featured a quadriplegic woman using just her thoughts to control a robotic arm. The report did not specify when she plans to control the rest of the robot to take over the world.

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Google announced that it will soon release a new function to its search engine called the Knowledge Graph. The tool will reportedly make the popular website “more human.” An example was demonstrated when a tester Googled the word Google and the search engine only came up with the result “Stop being an asshole.”

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Yankee Candle is introducing scents aimed at men. The aromas include “riding lawnmower” and “2X4.” When all of the scents are combined, men everywhere will finally be able to use candles for romantic occasions by getting their bedrooms to smell like wood and gasoline.

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Guinness has created an upscale bar out of a submarine. Patrons are urged to not drink and dive. 

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-Matthew Fugere

Smelly Smells

Though I certainly adore each of my media to the physical world, my sense of smell is one with which I have a complimented relationship. I like whiff things that I know for fact are foul to smell. I can’t help it; I like smelly smells. And I really do enjoy these smells. I pursue them, searching the perfect places to find these smelly smells all around my world.

I stick my head in between couch cushions often. Breathe deep. Smile. I love that smell. Its source is from a combination of dirt, dead skin cells, dog and person sweat, and lost coins (so copper, I guess). Each smell on its own has no character or would sting the nostrils. All together, however, and you get smelling-magic. I like to think it’s the smell of dying air. Not dead air. Air that is on its way out the door. Air that is about to kick the bucket. Air that is writing its last will and testimony. Dying air.

If you’ve never had the privilege of having a dog that birthed a litter of puppies, then you’ve probably missed out on what I consider one of the greatest smelly smells in the known universe: puppy breath. Puppies yawn a lot due to the huge amount of energy they exert while being cute enough to make the coldest of hearts melt into a childlike manner of being. When they yawn, they shoot out tiny particles of that cute that fill your nostrils with the most adorably addictive aroma. I don’t know what makes up a puppies’ breath as all they put in their mouth is dog milk and air, but something amazing happens when those little buckets of cute open their mouths.

Maybe this has more to do with temperature and touch than smell, but the inside of any kind of freezer is absolutely amazing. Walking freezers are nice, but there’s something about sticking your head in your home-freezer and taking a giant whiff that is blissful. It reminds me of popsicles. Old popsicles. Maybe dead popsicles. Freezers smell like dead popsicles, yet it also smells like fresh air—a spring breeze. Freezers smell like dead popsicles being carried by a spring breeze through a grassy meadow.

The weirdest smelly smell I like is me. Not fresh out of the shower, all spiffed up for the day me. Smelly me. Sweat and dirt covered me. I know for a fact that this version of me in absolutely unbearable to the nose. I know because people other than me who have witnessed it let me know how unbearable it can be. There’s something about it though. It’s not delightful per se. It’s not pleasant either, but I like it. It’s comforting in a disgusting kind of way.  

I’m always looking for new smells to smell. Even terrible ones. Each smell is a new experience—a new smelly story to tell. I’ll keep sticking my head in places it shouldn’t be and breathing deep, sucking in all the molecules that combine to create that particular stench, looking for a new fragrant to wrap around my nose. 

-Matthew Fugere

How Do You Guys Feel About Your Bodies This Time?

Because they’re actually quite brilliant. Some people are going to convince you that your body is a disgusting, smelly chunk of decaying flesh and your job as a human is to deal with it until your inevitable death. It’s a lovely incentive for existing, but it isn’t quite true when you really consider what your body does.

Sure, on a large enough time-scale, it’s a decaying chunk of blood and flesh. While it’s hurdling for that final moment of decay though, it spends an enormous amount of time growing and creating. Your body is an amazing little machine, running off only what surrounds it and you put in it. It makes a vast number of tiny calculations over which you have no conscious control. Those little calculations are brilliant in terms of their independence and effectiveness.

Your mind is rarely completely distracted by your body. Sure, you get the occasional ache and pain, but all the little beating and wurring sounds that perpetually keep your everything operating go largely ignored during your day-to-day.

People are afraid of the body, though. We’ve been trained to understand it as the vilest part of our existence. Everyone has been taught that even mentioning the functional use of the body in regular conversation is off-beat and off-putting; such talk should be reserved for bathrooms, bedrooms, medical procedures, and alcohol influenced conversations.

Really concentrate on your body for a minute. It just did a thousand different things to keep you living and you didn’t even have to ask it. That kind of competency should be admired, not shunned. If you actually had to control your body, how quickly do you think you would mess up? If your conscious was suddenly transferred to every splitting cell, beating heart, and churning organ, do you really think you’d make it past a few seconds? Most people can’t walk and text without getting hit by a car, so control down to a cellular level would be catastrophic.

For all the pain and misery that seems to be attributed to it, the body is certainly capable of creating equal measures of pleasure and not being dead. That’s the most important part, you know, the not being dead part. Love it or hate it, that body you think is so terrible and disgusting and smelly keeps you from not being dead—the entire point of existence.

-Matthew Fugere  

And remember to go read me contradicting myself

How Are You? Here Are Some More Jokes I Wrote For You!

You might remember a few days ago that I wrote some jokes for you guys. If you don’t remember, that’s fine… Though I am a bit disappointed in you and our friendship might be permanently scarred. We’ll get over that roadblock. Eventually. Here are some jokes for now. 

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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s return to office was met with heavy protests from citizens on Monday. The protestors that weren’t arrested by police were given the honor of being beaten and detained by President Putin himself.

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The 138^th Kentucky Derby was unfortunately cancelled this past weekend as every racing horse available was killed on the set of the HBO television series “Luck.”

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A recently published scientific paper suggests that earth could have been up to 18 degrees warmer during the Mesozoic era because of the amount of methane produced by massive animals like dinosaurs. The research has also contributed to the belief that Taco Bell food is the leading cause of global warming.

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The newly elected French President, François Hollande, used the hit Kanye West and Jay-Z song “Niggas in Paris” to accompany one of his political ads. Upon his first official speech as President of France, Hollande was interrupted by Kanye West who claimed, “Ayo Hollande, I’m gonna let you finish and I’m real happy for you, but François Mitterrand is the greatest left-wing president of the fifth republic ever!”

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Meow, a 39-pound cat who made national news after meeting Anderson Cooper, passed away Saturday from suffocation caused by trying on one of Cooper’s signature black t-shirts.  

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The Pentagon reportedly refused to cooperate with filmmakers as military advisors for the blockbuster hit The Avengers. The Pentagon found they were unable to “reconcile the unreality of this international organization [S.H.I.E.L.D] and our place in it.” Pentagon military advisors were also unable to believe Bruce Banner being able to keep his pants on after transforming into the Hulk.

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Musicians Chris Martin and Plan B are backing an earplug campaign raising awareness about hearing damage from performing or listening to loud music. The campaign will show fans of music how to avoid hearing damage, tie their shoes, use the potty without making a mess, and breathe on their own among many other tips and tricks they should have learned before and during preschool.

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Inspired by a self-writing diary in a Harry Potter book, a group of researchers have created a type of paper that can write by responding to a person’s blood. The paper will be used to determine a person’s blood type faster and cheaper than normal means. This innovation has turned out much more positively than the research team’s other Harry Potter inspired medical procedure: using wooden wands as rectal probes.

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A massive rise in young people with eye damage has become evident throughout many major Asian cities. Experts say that the causes are most likely from a lack of sunlight and a commitment to education that forces young people to stay indoors and study. American youth has responded by using their good eyesight to continue getting one another pregnant early and not knowing where Asia is on a map.

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A Canadian woman recently broke the world record for fastest motorized toilet. Canadian government officials are calling it the most powerful demonstration of Canadian military strength to date.

-Matthew Fugere

I Wrote Some Jokes For You Guys

Conan was running reruns this week, so I didn’t get my fill of monologue-like setup-to-punchline jokes based off current events (I could have easily just watched one of the many other late-night shows, but then I don’t get to see my favorite lanky ginger dance around on television). As such, I decided just to write a few of my own. I’m no professional, so don’t expect anything too grand, but please enjoy!

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A University of California, San Diego student is suing the DEA for $20 million after being wrongfully detained in a holding cell for almost five days. The student’s lawyers claim that amount of money should at least be enough to pay off his student loans.

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Recently released documents belonging to Osama Bin Laden gathered from last year’s raid on his compound have revealed that Bin Laden urged militants to seek opportunities to assassinate President Obama but to leave Vice President Biden alone as, according to Bin Laden, Biden would be unprepared to the lead the country as president, sending the US into a crisis. Vice President Biden responded by falling asleep while being debriefed about Bin Laden’s totally boring work documents.

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Famous expressionist painting The Scream sold at an auction for $119 million recently. The record breaking price has brought about a new understanding of the piece with many art critics claiming that the man portrayed in the painting is actually screaming because he is worth less than what Tyler Perry makes in a year.

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After the groom’s brothers were cut-off from the bar at a Massachusetts wedding this past weekend, a massive brawl ensued that led to several arrests. Or, as the Irish would put it, a perfectly reasonable response ensued.

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In Tianjin, China, developments on the world’s biggest eco-city have begun. Some experts believe that it could sustain hundreds of thousands of people by the year 2020. The city’s energy will reportedly not use traditional natural resources as fuel, instead relying on burning residents’ own waste, which in China would be every second born or female baby.

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A recent study showed that the United States is on par with developing nations when it comes to percentage of babies born premature, or, as America puts it, we’re number one at premature babies!

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McDonald’s has been the subject of some controversy due to a restaurant the company will open for the 2012 Summer Olympics taking place in London. The McDonald’s restaurant—which will be the world’s largest, seating 1500 people—will be serving the only brand-named food available at the event. Olympic officials defended the company’s sponsorship of the games by claiming the track-and-field events should be far more interesting if the athletes have diarrhea running down their legs.  

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A group of Palestinian prisoners placed under incarceration without formal charges have started a hunger strike in effort to get better prison conditions. Americans respond by asking who Palestine is and what hunger means.

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Facebook announced it would be giving users the ability to share their organ donor statuses. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims that enabling such a service will create broader awareness of potential organ donors, perhaps increasing the chance of people receiving life-saving treatments. However, no one has addressed how awkward it will be to ignore your friends’ organ requests.

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A recent study commissioned by the President to determine the US’s readiness for potential terrorist attacks and natural disasters suggests the nation would not be properly prepared in the event of a cryberattack. Since the only way to completely avoid a cyberattack is to get off the computer and go outside, the Obama administration has declared it the number one threat against the US currently. 

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-Matthew Fugere

Early Adopter

Sometimes when you buy a new piece of technology, you get the opportunity to be an early adopter. Like when people were first playing with iPhones and iPads, they were probably super psyched to show off their new chunk of metal and plastic, demonstrating all the amazing wurring sounds it could make that their friends were too poor to understand. It can backfire though, being an early adopter. Like when my little brother bought a Zune at the height of the iPod. “Look at my amazing piece of technology,” I remember saying for him in my brain when I try to remember an exact but nonexistent moment. “Is it not amazing? Is it not a look into the future?”

It wasn’t either of things because Zunes turned out to be the technological equivalent of diarrhea—a disgusting, runny mess trying to replace something solid. Being an early adopter of the Zune turned out to be dumb and wasteful, financially and socially.

It makes me wonder what other kinds of things people have adopted early that turned out poorly. The obvious lies in modern technology, but there had to have been instances of early adopters looking dumb before electronic devices.

Maybe before people decided cows and chickens were the way to go when it came to eating another species en masse, someone tried something a little different in hopes of it catching on. Like maybe some nomadic guy was travelling around, carrying chunks of lizard meat around. “Gamey, sure,” he or she might have said, “but there’s no way capturing and eating live reptiles is a fad.”

I get a feeling that chopsticks are just a stubborn early adoption going on. Let’s face it: the fork is far superior to chopsticks. With very few exceptions, the fork makes more sense aesthetically and practically. It’s like all of Eastern culture bought their Zunes and kept telling themselves it was just as good as the iPod. C’mon, guys. Forks.

I get a similar idea when I think about guitars. The guitar is a very highly regarded instrument, taking center stage for much of western music for roughly the past century. The bass guitar, however, is useless. The bass guitar makes a sound you can easily mimic by cupping your hand around your mouth and saying, in a really low voice, dumdumdumdumdum. I bet someone made the bass guitar right around the same time as the regular guitar thinking they were going to spark the same kind of energy. They didn’t. It just sounds like the noises your body makes when something is going wrong. Or a car horn. Or an energetic bird.

Anyone who rides a horse is taking their early adoption way too seriously. Sure, horses were great when the only alternative was walking until you died by getting eaten by an animal or captured by an invading people. Let’s face it: horses are incredibly useless now. We can’t eat them. They aren’t fast. They’re expensive to maintain. If cars are iPods, horses are vinyl records people with huge glasses and beards hold onto with a false sense of nostalgia and authenticity.  

The biggest letdown about your early adoption not standing the test of time or social judgment is that, usually, it does the exact same thing as whatever casts a giant, popular shadow over it. Zunes do the exact same things as iPods, they just didn’t catch on. Horses do the exact same things as cars, they’re just more edible. Lizard meat probably tastes the same as cow meat. I’m not sure about that one, but I would give it a try. Essentially, not buying into the technological zeitgeist won’t destroy your life by any practical means, but you’ll look a nerd and we’ll all make fun you and your dumb haircut.

-Matthew Fugere