How to Convince Someone to Do the Right Thing

Just this week I had a dental hygienist explain to me that modern dental insurance is, for the most part, a discount plan. I pay a company a monthly fee, and in return I get the discount they negotiated with the dentist when I pay for my dental care.

I forget who told me this, but someone once said, “There’s very little you can learn that isn’t bad news.” The older I get, the more I see the wisdom in that.

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How to Send a Clear Message

It’s been years since I lived in Seattle, long enough that when I’ve gone back to visit the city is substantially changed. One of my chief memories of the time I spent there is that driving in the downtown area instilled a powerful hatred of pedestrians. It’s like they believed that rain gave them the legal right to jaywalk, and the fact that rain also decreased visibility and made it harder to stop on a dime was the driver’s problem. The rain would start and people would dart out into the road, running hunched over, the way characters in movies do when they’re trying to keep from getting spotted.

I can’t tell you how many times some jaywalker gave me a dirty look and the finger right after I had saved their life.

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How to Be a Considerate Spouse

It’s true, she still trounces me at Scrabble on a regular basis.

It is also true that we have only ever played Monopoly against each other once, back when we were engaged, and I beat her in less than thirty minutes. I don’t suggest playing Monopoly with your fiancée or spouse. The game requires a certain disregard for your opponent’s feelings and self-esteem that makes it uniquely suited for playing with your siblings.

When I was a kid, we had a variation on the game where one or both of my brothers would agree to play Monopoly, but only if I set up the board and counted out the money. I’d spend five minutes setting the whole thing up (when you’re a kid that’s an eternity) and then when I’d tell them we were ready to start they’d say, “Nah.” Watching me unhappily pack the game up while they laughed constituted “winning” in “Meyer Rules Monopoly.”

Note from Missy: To be fair, though, I disliked Monopoly long before I ever met Scott. So it’s not like that one trouncing made me hate it; it just confirmed that my pre-existing hatred was accurate.

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How to Spot the Various Types of Human Stupidity

I know that we watched season 2 of The Next Food Network Star. I know that I cared enough about it at the time to write this comic. But, I swear, sitting here, I have no memory whatsoever of that season or anything that happened in it.

I remember that the show lost me when the Food Network brought in three of their most successful cooking show hosts to act as team captains and had them constantly antagonize each other. Not only did that make me like the show less, it made me like those three hosts less. It was a show so bad it damaged four or five other shows. The show had an actual measurable blast radius.

Note from Missy: I had to look back through the Wiki for The Next Food Network Star to confirm that it’s where the world was given Guy Fieri for the first time.  Turns out he was on season 2 (if memory serves, we voted for Reggie), and this comic must have been written about season 9, which aired in 2013 and had a contestant named Nikki and a guy who made pie.

Also, holy crap, it was season eight when they changed to the Alton/Giada/Bobby smack-talking team system.  So we watched nine or ten seasons of a show, and all I can really remember of that 100+ hours of television is 3 celebrity chefs being total dicks to each other, and a vague memory of greatly disliking Guy Fieri before disliking Guy Fieri became cool.

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How to Explain Why You Like Something

Wolverine is haunted by things in his past he can’t remember. I never thought about that before. How does that work?

“I’m haunted by horrible things I can’t remember.”

“How do you know they happened, or that they were horrible?”

“That’s just the thing. I don’t!”

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How to Live on the Edge

I was all set to write a paragraph about how I should try to start a TV career setting myself up as someone who explores the extreme edge of quiet, mellow, grown-up activities, sort of like the Bear Grylls of safety and complacency. Then I realized James May has beat me to it.

I offer the following videos as evidence.

James May reassembling a toy train.

James May making a sandwich.

James May replacing his car’s tire valve stem caps.

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How to Watch Mistakes Compound

The movie theater I go to (or at least the one I used to go to, back when going to a movie was an option) has pumpers of butter flavored oil out in the lobby where anyone can get as much of it as they want, and do whatever they chose with it. That is a freedom that cannot last. Someone, somewhere, is going to do something that will ruin it for everyone. I don’t know what kind of accident, tragedy, or act of public depravity will occur, but I do suspect that whatever it is it will smell delicious.

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How to Develop a Successful Product

This is only tangentially related, but since Halloween is coming up, I thought I’d share a video of the best costume I’ve ever seen.

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How to Evaluate Another Person's Artistic Expression

Memory is a strange thing.

For years . . . YEARS, I would quote a specific Kids in the Hall sketch where Bruce McCulloch called the rest of the guys “a bunch of human load-holders.” I loved it because it was nonsense, meant absolutely nothing, but was so clearly a terrible insult.

I am now convinced that I imagined it somehow. I believe I’ve watched every episode of the Kids in the Hall, and their one movie, Brain Candy, and if McCulloch or anybody else ever said “human load-holder,” I can’t find it. The closest thing I can find is a sketch where he calls someone a “human loser.”

That said, my second favorite Kids in the Hall insult, when Kevin MacDonald called the rest of them “Crap-burgers,” definitely happened.

Note from Missy: Rick’s “guitar solo” just makes me want to go play one of the Borderlands games. Though Rick is definitely no Mister Torgue Flexington.

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How to Enjoy Something for What It Is

People look down their noses at me for being a morning person, and give me grief for liking my steak well done, but I get my revenge when coffee time comes. I take my coffee black. As such I get to judge my friends for trying to MacGyver together a crude latte using a cup of coffee and several little tubs of half and half.

They’re weak, I tell you! As weak as the “coffee” they’re drinking!

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