Matthew Vincent - [you] Ruined It for Everyone!

A random mother says lovingly to her child, “Hurry up, Billy, it’s your first day of sixth grade, you don’t want to be late! Now remember: walk straight to school, don’t talk to strangers, just say no to drugs, and don’t let the teacher play with Mr. Pee Pee.”

Mary, you thought your sexual acts with your child soul mate were “fate,” but everyone else called it “rape.” There is no sugarcoating it—you’re a pedophile. Now parents have to suspect the intentions of female schoolteachers around their children.

Mary Kay, because of you, I hear Wal-Mart now sells chastity belts during the back-to-school rush.

For future ski-helmet laws.

On the last day of 1997, Michael Kennedy died in a ski accident. Sonny Bono died on the slopes five days later. Both good skiers. Both hit trees. Now both dead. Even if they had been wearing helmets, neither would be alive today. Unfortunately, when famous people die, it attracts the press. Stories like these blow the danger of skiing out of proportion, and now some states are discussing unnecessary mandatory helmet laws. In fact, many resorts already have these rules enforced. Take note: There was no “crime scene investigation” for Michael’s or Sonny’s death. My malicious jumping tree theory still remains inconclusive.

Believe it or not, deadly skiing accidents are rare, with under forty per year in the U.S. Please note, more than three hundred Americans die each year falling in the bathtub. Currently, there are no available studies analyzing the difficulty of shampooing while wearing head protection.

In case you were born after 1980, Sonny Bono was a singer-songwriter most famous for performing with former wife Cher in their variety show. The high school dropout married four times before becoming the mayor of Palm Springs. He was kind of goofy but, for the most part, he was an okay guy. Unfortunately, he died while skiing without a helmet, so he made the RIFE list.

On the other hand we have Michael Kennedy. Thanks, Mikey. You died hitting a tree while playing ski football. What is ski football, you ask? It’s apparently a deadly skiing game you play when you want to avoid statutory rape charges from an alleged affair with the family’s underage babysitter.

The more recent tragedy that happened to the Thuringian minister-president and a forty-one-year-old woman only confuse matters more. The helmet-less woman died instantly during a collision with the heavily headed, helmet-wearing prime minister. Now we see that headgear can kill too.

Take note, usually people who die while skiing do it by going way too fast and hitting a tree. Here is an idea: If you want to avoid death, don’t do that! Slow the fuck down, and if you see a trunk—turn.

For promoting the Y2K fear.

Y2K stands for: [Y]ou’ve got [2] be [K]idding!

In 1996, McGraw-Hill Publishers changed the name of a 1984 nonfiction book and rereleased it as The Year 2000 Computing Crisis . The book took as its focus the number of software programs that stored years as two digits instead of four—for example, 99 instead of 1999—and discussed the potentially devastating effects this would have on our computer-run world when the clocks rolled over at midnight at the turn of the millennium and long-working computer systems broke down. As most of you well know, it was blown more than slightly out of proportion. So if you are still in your bomb shelter, you can come out now. It was all a hoax.

If FDR were alive in the late nineties, he would have revised his statement to say, “We have nothing to fear but Y2K itself!” The whole world thought we would be swallowed by a black hole and transported to some Amish farm in Ohio when the ball dropped for the new millennium. Many stocked up on food, water, and guns waiting for the apocalyptic computer meltdown. If you weren’t at least a little scared, you were lying. Some even withdrew their life savings from their banks and hid it under their ammunition crates (little did they know they were eight years too early).

The showdown between the modern world and a couple of forgotten computer code digits was quite anticlimactic. The only winners in the cyber-war were a couple of overstocked army surplus stores, a bunch of pocket-protector-wearing techies, and, of course, McGraw-Hill. About the only thing that happed was that London’s Millennium Wheel failed to operate (but for unrelated reasons). Thanks for the good times!

For being the devil’s nectar.

Alcoholism was declared an illness by the American Medical Association in 1956. E.M. Jellinek wrote a book called The Disease Concept of Alcoholism in 1960, further exploring the topic.

Even the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence believes alcoholism is a mental addiction that drives someone to drink. Alcohol has such a stronghold on humans that the U.S. government even tried to outlaw liquor during Prohibition, but it just didn’t stick. The sauce kept calling us back!

If a drunk were to explain the effects of alcohol, he’d tell you what’s what (probably while slurring and uncontrollably spitting in your face). Alcohol could force you to lose your job, your girlfriend, and your license. It may enable sexual relations with unsightly riffraff. It can give you headaches and mood swings, and it can make you puke or black out, and even poison you. It can take control of your motor skills, forcing you to stick your hand where it doesn’t belong. It makes you say things you’ll regret and causes bad breath. It also inhibits your ability to operate heavy machinery. I even had a buddy in college who was forced by alcohol to pee his pants in his sleep… (Okay, it was me. I did it. And that poor futon was never quite the same.)

Some people have the audacity to disagree with the claims that alcoholism is a disease and an addiction. Obviously, they were never left alone in a college dorm room with a full bottle of cinnamon schnapps when they were sixteen years old. Hell, you might even believe that alcohol was an airborne disease if you saw the way that firewater jumped from the bottle to my throat.

Well anyway, if you ever find yourself lying on a park bench covered with newspapers and reeking of your own vomit after being kicked out of the house, you can blame alcoholism for being a disease. But mostly, you can blame doctors for NEVER finding a cure. Cheers!

For causing unnecessary ER visits.

Okay, after extensive and exhaustive research (twenty minutes of searching on Google), the inventor of plastic packaging could not be uncovered. Apparently the creator is so ashamed of his creation, he has gone to great lengths to conceal his identity. Well, whoever you are, we still loathe you.