Mystery #142 – Emergency Shower

Joey Presents: Great Mysteries of the Universe
Mystery #142 – Emergency Shower

The other day, walking back from Spanish with my friend Amanda, we cut through the parking lot and she pointed something out to me. I knew right away that this was, without a doubt, going to be the stupidest thing I would see all day. Tell me what you think of this...

Yeah, it's an emergency shower/eyewash station... in the parking lot. The wall it's up against goes around an area where some garbage and/or heavy equipment is stored. You'd think that would be enough explanation, but I still wonder... First off, if dangerous chemical spills to the body and/or face are such a threat to warrant an emergency shower, why not put it inside the walled-in area? And even if that proved to have a reasonable justification, why on top of that would you decide to put it on the OPPOSITE side from the gate? Anyone inside the wall needing a quick rinse would have to somehow leave and run around to the back to find the shower, all while potentially blinded.

As is my way, I've opted to just make something up that's more interesting. Of the several possible answers we were able to come up with, I myself stand in favor of the "in case of acid rain" theory. How often have the students and staff at ASU been caught looking skyward during a freak acid rain storm? How many have lost eyes to what must be an all too common occurrence? Well fear no longer, friends, thanks to the brave men and women at the ASU campus planning office. In fact, I suggest we put emergency showers EVERYWHERE! Just imagine…

"Oh no, I have an eyelash in my eye…"
**EMERGENCY SHOWER!!!**
"I spilled marinara sauce on my favorite shirt, and it's our first date too…"
**EMERGENCY SHOWER!!!**
"It's been days since I've been shipwrecked on this desert island, and boy am I thirsty."
**EMERGENCY SHOWER!!!**

Mystery #143 – Morality

Joey Presents: Great Mysteries of the Universe Mystery #143 – Morality I saw a fat chick eating ice cream today and it made me smile. Does that make me a bad person?

Mystery #144 - This guy

Joey Presents: Great Mysteries of the Universe Mystery #144 - This guy MSNBC has featured this breaking news headline on their homepage this evening, ahem... "Man accused of beheading duck at hotel" Now this, this already spells out "Great Mystery" in my mind. I just stared for awhile before I could convince myself to click the link, trying to figure out what I could POSSIBLY find on the other side. Looking at the title alone, I can feel the questions popping up in my head. The most troubling thing to me is that nobody seems to know for certain if he did or did not behead said duck. How do you go about "accusing" someone of beheading a duck? Was the duck's head separated from its body? Did the action occur at his hands? Bam, there ya go. I see no real room for uncertainty. True, he could have been a closet fowl mutilator, but I find the "at hotel" tag enough to suggest that he was probably in public. Of course, I'm assuming he wasn't alone in his hotel room, which is entirely possible. However, this doesn't give me any less pleasure to imagine a cleaning lady finding a duck head among the sheets a la "The Godfather". Now there's something to ruin your day. This mystery is unique in two ways. First, it is the second to deal with duck murder, which I find I'm quite proud of for some reason. Second, it is one of the few mysteries to be answered even as it is asked. Upon clicking the link, I was able to see the second half of the headline. Man accused of beheading duck at hotel His alleged explanation? 'I'm hungry. I'm gonna eat it' My friends, our world is a wonderfully fanciful place. Good night, and I wish you all a happy Monday. (NBC article found here)

Mystery #145 – A Simple Question

Joey Presents: Great Mysteries of the Universe Mystery #145 – A Simple Question I have a very old box of cereal, a gallon of milk, a bowl, and a jones for some combination of the three. Thus I am lead to today's Great Mystery... If stale cereal is left in milk long enough to become soggy, will it become normal cereal? UPDATE, 10 MINUTES LATER: Actually yeah, kind of! Incredible...

Mystery #146 – Henry Jiang

Joey Presents: Great Mysteries of the Universe Mystery #146 – Henry Jiang There aren't even words.

Mystery #147 – Kung Fu Battles

Joey Presents: Great Mysteries of the Universe Mystery #147 – Kung Fu Battles I am a male. This means that my twenty-third chromosome pair is made up of one X and one Y chromosome. And somewhere, locked deep within that Y chromosome all of us men have, is some gene that gives me a deep appreciation for a well-scripted good kung fu battle. Honestly, there's just something instinctive that makes me break out in a cold sweat when Neo turns to face Agent Smith. "Ooh," my DNA squeals, "He knows kung fu." But herein lies a very, very important question that I have until recently ignored. While watching Rush Hour 3 (approximately 3/8 awesome, 5/8 crappy) it hit me: there cannot actually be this much kung fu in real life. I wonder how the actual ratio of real-life kung fu to movie kung fu compares. I mean think about it. Are there, as Hollywood would have me believe, no less than five dramatic life-or-death martial arts showdowns happening at this very moment? Is someone even now improvising with local objects as weapons, perhaps while carrying on a dramatic dialogue about said combatants' tumultuous past? A wonderful fantasy, but I fear it is not so. I just don't hear about enough gang members being karate-chopped to death.

Mystery #148 – Semicolons

Joey Presents: Great Mysteries of the Universe Mystery #148 – Semicolons I don't like the idea of semicolons. Well, let me rephrase that, I don't like the moniker. The fact that uncircumcised colons exist is perfectly fine by me. I lose little sleep at night to think that some colons have a little tail and other colons just have the dot thing going on. What I don't approve of, though, is that the latter have some crazy superiority complex against the former. So what if semicolons (or, as I will henceforth refer to them, "differently-abled colons") have made a different lifestyle choice? Certain bigoted period duos have no right to judge. Does that little extra flourish make DAC's less human, as it were? If I had a tail, would I be called a semi-person? No, because that's prejudice. And prejudice is wrong. So stand with me, my friends, stand against the colons and their punctuation Nazi hate regime. Plus, according to Wikipedia Shakespeare used semicolons; isn't that neat?

Mystery #149 – The Labor Day Special!!!

Joey Presents: Great Mysteries of the Universe Mystery #149 – The Labor Day Special!!! Ah, Labor Day, holiest of the "Mondays I don't have to go to school" family of holidays. Unlike Arbor Day or President's Day (note: careful sidestepping of all things MLK), Labor Day actually STANDS for something, making it the only day I can, in the name of hard work, eat cereal and watch cartoons in my underwear until noon. For whatever reason I'm going to yet again bring up Ivan Denisovich in this blog, making it the official obscure book of Joey's Great Mysteries. Anyways, I was thinking about what Labor Day must be like in an actual labor camp. I mean, it's gotta be a big deal, right? At first the idea brought to mind grand images of parades and fun Labor Day activities, perhaps some sort of county fair. But really I imagine that would be kind of against the whole idea of the labor camp in the first place, so I suppose it would be celebrated instead with just good old-fashioned labor. Pretty much just like any other day, really. Sounds like some Stalinist travel brochure: Ah, the Russian gulag! A place of magic and wonderment! Where the snow is always cold, the gruel is always lukewarm, and EVERY day is Labor Day!