Reconciliation

If reconciliation means to coexist in harmony, it seems to be a tall order. If someone has deeply wounded you, how do you coexist with them in harmony? Well we all coexist with everyone on the opposite side of the planet technically. It seems to me that forgiveness doesn't automatically include regaining trust or credibility. I once stole $5 from my sister's sock drawer and spent it all on ice cream, she of course stole that ice cream from me and even after all my trouble I didn't even get one bite of it. That was 25 years ago, and I'm still a little bitter about the whole thing. Sure I've sense forgiven her for it, but can I trust her around ice cream again? Sometimes at birthday parties I will let my guard down a little, but not if it's ice cream cake, so we are working on rebuilding that trust, but it takes time.

Some fractured relationships can be repaired with a little bit of communication, like with Tig and Taylor Dayne. Sometimes though, communication can lead to insults or insinuations, which can even lead to punching and or wrestling, this can be fun if done with over sized boxing gloves in a bouncy castle. This is how me and my wife decide who gets to choose what's for dinner on date nights. The first time I let her win she chose vegan food, I never let her win again.

Actually this isn't us, this is just some idiot on a prom date. Good luck explaining this one to her dad. 

I do get in fights with my wife, but only when I'm driving. I have a problem with road rage, and she argues that the other drivers can't hear me yelling at them, that only she can, and it's "incredibly annoying". So one day I decided to use sign language to communicate with my fellow drivers, and she still got mad and said "you really need to expand your vocabulary", and I had to eat vegan food again. That's how we harmonize, I guess it works for now but eventually I'm going to need to learn how to coexist in harmony with other driver's as well, that or get a helicopter.

Lastly, I wanted to share this animated version of the prodigal son story. By now we all know that the moral of the story is to have a cool dad.

I don't necessarily believe this is how the real story went down. What I think really happened was, the family's cable went out and the son got bored, one thing lead to another and he ended up eating pig slop out of a trough, and the real moral of the story is, don't let your son eat pig slop out of a trough, get rid of cable and upgrade to Direct TV. And as an added bonus with satellite TV, you'll never have to spend another awkward dinner talking about your day again, thus avoiding any miss communications and de-harmonization.

aaronburrellcomedy.com
professorblastoff.com

Twins

I've always wanted my own twin, but I guess I wasn't that good at multitasking in the womb to make that happen. Also I called shotgun. Every time I see a set of twins I can't help think to about how much sleep deprivation their parents must have had. Which explains why you would you force your kids to wear matching cowboy outfits, not even on an non Halloween night? That's a double negative, and I don't mean grammatically.


Here is a clip we didn't have time to share. It deals with nature vs nurture. It's about twins Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein, who were deliberately separated at birth as part of a psychiatric study. Later in life they found each other on their own. And one of them immediately died her hair.


Luckily the mad scientists that separated them got some fascinating results! They both went to film school, were editors of their high school papers, dealt with depression, and share similar mannerisms. I'd call that experiment a smashing success! You may have to throw out the shared depression part though, I have a feeling that was maybe due to a mysterious case of separation anxiety? I must admit, it would have been much classier if the scientists would have asked them as babies first if they even wanted to be separated. They might have even agreed to it after their first Halloween together.


Now I'd like to turn my attention to the whims of knitting. Despite the comical nature in which knitting was discussed on the podcast this week, there has been an emerging problem of knitted graffiti, aka yarn bombing aka yarn storms. Look at this once beautiful tree, now destroyed by some needling freak! 

Who would do this, and why? Think of the cats! What feline could possibly resist clawing up such a tree? How many cats must we rescue before we stand up and fight this madness?! If you have any decency please stop. I don't care if you're grandma's a huge Dr. Seuss fan and you forgot her birthday, don't do this. If you have any information leading to the capture and successful intervention of the leader of this revolution, known by Wikipedia as Deadly Knitshade, please come forward. I think this is a photograph of her resting on a stool...

Thank you.

Go to AaronBurrellComedy.com pick up my new digital comedy album! Now only $5, until I print the CDs!
Also check out professorblastoff.com for more extras and clips.

Music Vol. 1

In high school, my choir director would always say, "Music begins and ends in SILENCE!" Apparently, the applause at the end of each song was just an extension of the music. When I shared that thought with her, she told me to shut up, and I said, "Why, is there a song about to start somewhere?", and she would murder me with her eyeball laser stare of death.

Despite my onset anxiety triggered by traveling high school choirs, I must admit, when used correctly, music can be very therapeutic. But when music falls into the wrong hands, in malls during the holidays, no one is safe. School choirs are the sirens of the mall, distracting you from your odyssey of holiday shopping. Clearly I need to get over my traumatic past. I need musical therapy!

I have done a little research on musical therapy, they say that some studies date back to as early as the 1950's which means people have know about music for a long time! Research has evolved though, now we have technology to look at the brain and see how neurons are affected while people are listening to music. Here is a video that talks about some of the studies being done.

So music can bring back bad or good memories, just like smells. Just imagine mixing the two, smooth jazz playing in the background of a french pastry shop? If that doesn't jump start your positive memory synapses, you need a new childhood!

I get a lot of therapy from playing the piano, even though piano lessons always stressed me out. Playing the piano got me through some depressing times, now that I'm happily married and I love wife, I don't feel like I need to tickle the ivory as much. How many great musical careers have been nipped in the bud because of happy, healthy relationships? And one more thing, are they doing musical therapy research on lab rats as well? The answer is yes, and here comes the flute part...of that research.

ProfessorBlastoff.com        AaronBurrellComedy.com

Que Sera Sera

In the future you will be reading this, but not your future, my future. I am writing this in your past, yet you still won't know what I have written until you have read it. Does this imply some deep and unsettling truth about time and fate? Maybe! But I don't want to write about fate, so I won't, which may or may not be my fate. Therefor, my belief in free will remains intact...or did fate just now sucker punch me into sneaking in that short blurb about it? Well whatever, either way my perception of choice and free will is still solid, or it was till now, my now, not your now. Moving on...

My Dad always says to me, "Well, maybe try planing ahead next time you genius." When you deal with controlling the future, you really have to give a lot of credit to planning. What would the future be like without plans? I can safely say waffles will not enter into my mouth tomorrow while I sit comfortably on a boat in the Atlantic without a little planning. Star Trek built a franchise around crazy cool plans for our future, like food replicators, warp speed, star ships, and ugly onsie uniforms. That future would be impossible without the dreams of the likes of Gene Roddenberry. My point is, dreams are just fate's way of impregnating our minds with emotionally charged plans for our future. That is why I never write my dreams down. And that's how I maintain my free will and beat fate.

Now what do the experts predict for our future? Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, gave this hour long lecture about what to expect in the year 2030. He talks about computer chips that cost a penny, driverless cars, toilets that check our excrement for signs of health problems, the manufacturing of body parts, and how aliens will finally get to watch Leave it to Beaver. I hope we finally get to see their early prime time hits such as Get a Load of Gleeblop or What's Eating Flazgard!

Kaku hits the podium at about 5:30 into this clip.


Personally I'm excited for the future, but it seems to be crawling towards us at such a slow pace. When 2030 finally arrives I will probably be too tired of waiting and have too high of expectations to be impressed by anything short of the invention of a diet soda that actually tastes like regular soda.

I have also thought long and hard about the past and whether or not dinosaurs fought humans in 1million b.c.

 
David laughed at me for suggesting such a thing, arguing that dinosaurs had been extinct for 65million years. He said so while traveling in a time machine found in a hidden hatch beneath Kyle's home, which I found slightly ironic. The answer is simple. What I saw was a time traveling T-Rex. Why I did not think of this sooner, I do not know, but the answer seems so obvious now! Dinosaurs had millions of years to come up with a time machine... and clothing for that matter, and that's all I have to say about that.

AaronBurrellComedy.com          professorblastoff.com

Self-Esteem

Everybody knows self esteem is based solely on your successes and failures in high school. Obviously I graduated with honors and in the top 10% of my class. And yes, that was well worth cutting myself off from a fruitful social life that would have possibly lead to future business partnerships. I made up for my social starvation later though in college.

I loved college. The slate was wiped clean there, and I could re-invent myself with every new major I changed to. That reset-ability did great things for my self esteem. I was no longer tied down by an embarrassing track record, upheld by what seemed like an entire school. I know, what a narcissistic obsession. I thought I was defined by the crushes that rejected me, or the friends that forgot my birthday, but on the flip side, I thought I was completely validated and accepted by the collective when I won best actor for a play I was in my senior year.

Looking back, the biggest mistakes I made growing up were over think everything, and giving in way too much to an insatiable voice inside me that desperately had to know how other people thought of me. I tried too hard to please too many at once. I became a chameleon, or a worm...which ever metaphor pleases you best.

There were a few experiences that broke me of this cycle of trying to make everybody happy. One experience happened while I was about a year into stand-up comedy. I considered myself a failure unless I made 100% of the crowd laugh at every joke I told. If everyone didn't laugh, that meant a joke wasn't funny. But after about a year of telling the same jokes to different types of audiences it dawned on me that most jokes just didn't hit home with everyone, and in fact the more a joke was dialed into a specific demographic, those people seemed to appreciate it. I was happier making 5 people in the back of the room laugh than winning over the whole room. It meant so much more to me that those 5 people got my unique brand of comedy, and that's when I broke free and started writing the types of jokes that really defined me.

Now I stretch myself to relate to as many people as possible, but starting from my own point of view, I am allowed to be myself up there, not some conglomeration, or multifaceted entertainment machine. I do want people to understand and appreciate my comedy, and it's really amazing when that happens but it doesn't shatter my identity now when they don't. Coincidentally, my new comedy album, Calculated is out and available on my website AaronBurrellComedy.com. You can digitally download it, you don't have to wait for me to ship it to you, thus adding to the your carbon footprint. It is guilt free comedy!

Also I mentioned this NBA clip during the podcast about how veteran players treat their rookie teammates.

 

I found this to be mostly good humored, and I understand the need to humble cocky newbies. In fact, I think this ritual should reach farther, I'm thinking we really need to start the humbling process at birth. There is nothing more unnerving than a smug baby staring you down as you throw away their diaper. 

Also don't forget to check out professorblastoff.com for more extras.

Genes

When I was thirteen I must have gone with my older sister to see Jurassic Park 20 times when it was in theaters. It amazed me that they could use frog genes to patch up the missing dinosaur genes. I thought this was going to inflate the market on frogs so that summer I became frog hunter. At our local golf course, I caught at least 40 frogs but my mom rejected my business model I had to liquidate my assets... I mean I returned them to their pond. My dreams of making a Dino Frog were crushed.

In the movie they made the dinosaurs sterile. They gave them the "Terminator gene", which is probably what made the movie so awesome. I understand why geneticists make their living Lego's sterile. You wouldn't want a scientist creating an out of control creature that totally dominated the rest of the animal kingdom without some fail safe, thus giving a rogue species the ability to multiply, generation after generation, until it filled the entire planet. God didn't make us sterile, so his fail safe was a global flood and a floating zoo. And that's how we got rainbows! Do I believe in such miracles? Yes, how else would you explain the existence of chocolate chip pumpkin bread?!

This clip is cool. It explains how our genes tell our cells what to be and what to do.

What I would like to know is do the cells have a say in it? Say you are told to become a skin cell in the armpit region, but you feel morally opposed to it. Can you say, "suck it genes, I'm going all the way to the top!", then make your way to the head and become ear skin? That would be a much more noble existence. Perhaps on the cellular level you wouldn't be so self aware. I certainly don't know what my cells are thinking, with the exception of my brain cells, they won't shut up! Sometimes I'd really like to know what the other cells are thinking. I imagine the older toe cells giving advice to the younger ones, "Well, I'm going to become a toenail soon, it's a great sacrifice some of you might have to make one day, if your tough enough. We gotta keep you softer cells safe! Remember, mutating may look fun in the movies, but it isn't. The antibodies will come after you and they'll banish you, like your uncle Bob. Don't forget your protein shakes, and I love you!" Well, I think I need to do more research on this topic.

AaronBurrellComedy.com    Professorblastoff.com

Gravity

Gravity, it's what makes the world go round I think. The most important thing to remember about gravity is that when you go to smaller planet you will weigh much less. I call this the intergalactic planetary diet and I believe the Beastie Boys will spearhead an ad campaign for it. Well maybe holograms of them will anyway.

We ran short on time on this episode and one of the clips I wanted to share was about how stars are born. They start out as large amounts of gas particles that slowly gravitate towards each other and eventually heat up to, I don't know 10 million degrees or so and then they become nuclear as Hydrogen fuses into Helium, which makes balloons that float. These balloons then spit in the face of gravity as they fly off into space. They then fuse together into a large enough ball of balloons to carry an old mans house, say 10 million. And that is how gravity is responsible for the movie Up. And movies are where stars are born. Today's clip will explain.




OK so the clip left out the balloons, but you get the point.

Now to the wobbling star thing I was trying to explain during the podcast. Astronomers use the Doppler Shift to tell if light is moving towards you or away from you. So if a stars light keeps shifting from redder to bluer that means it is wobbling and therefore intoxicated, it could also mean that a small unseen planet it pulling on it. Much like when you spin around holding a ball on a rope, you are probably drunk.

Here is a picture illustrating my point, but the scale of the telescope is a bit off.

Professorblastoff.com    AaronBurrellComedy.com   @airburple