Everyday Junglist
Bio
Practicing mage of the natural sciences (Ph.D. micro/mol bio), Thought middle manager, Everyday Junglist, Boulderer, Cat lover, No tie shoelace user, Humorist, Argan oil aficionado. Occasional LinkedIn & Facebook user
Stories (553/0)
When Guyitis Strikes
Melanie glared at Tod from the passenger seat as he weaved left then punched the gas attempting to pass a slower moving vehicle. Though she very much wanted to scream, instead she grit her teeth, and managed to keep her voice calm as she spoke "Tod, we have to get off at the next exit, why are you passing this idiot now? You are not going to make it around him before the turn off and we are going to miss it. Don't add twenty minutes to our drive just because you got a bad case of guyitis on the highway." She paused briefly for effect, expecting some sort of verbal retort from Tod. Instead he remained silent, and pressed the pedal all the way to the floor. The force of the acceleration pushed Melanie back in her seat, and reflexively she grabbed tight onto the door handle. Irritation was obvious in her voice as she continued. "Why do guys always have to pull this shit when driving? They just cannot stand to be behind a slower driver. Thirty seconds and we would have been to our exit. But no, you had to pass some fool at the last minute because why? Because guyitis that's why." As she spoke Tod had managed to make the rapidly approaching exit, with only a few feet of clearance to spare. He smiled and laughed in relief then said quietly "There is no such thing as guyitis, and we made it didn't we?"
By Everyday Junglist6 months ago in Fiction
The Microbiomics Revolution Has Arrived
The age of microbiomics is upon us and with it opportunities for promising new areas of research have arisen that build and expand upon the excitement of the original but add a previously thought unrelated dimension. By combining the study of the microbiome with some random other non-microbiology related thing that people study not only will you gain notoriety as a trailblazing pioneer in the field, but more importantly you will instantly at least double the number of funding agencies to which you can apply for grant money. Confused? Me too a little bit, but to help clarify some I have proposed a few new fields and brief descriptions of possible research focus areas for each. Note that I own any and all intellectual property associated with the name of each field and any valuable discoveries made within them.
By Everyday Junglist6 months ago in Humor
Nice Guys Finish Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh in Local Marathon
Each year since the inception of the local marathon nice guys, the brothers Tod and Ted Stephens, along with friend Jim Thorne, had finished last. Most had speculated that this year would be no different. Today, the Stephens brothers and Mr. Thorne proved the haters and doubters wrong, finishing fifth, sixth, and seventh respectively. A visibly tired, heavily sweat pit stained, but still smiling Ted Stephens said the following about the nice guy trios historic result. "I am just so gosh darned pleased with my performance, and especially that of my brother Tod and old college roomie Jim. With this finish under my belt maybe Cherry (Tims) will finally go on an actual date with me and agree to that candlelight dinner at Chez Rouzeau I have been asking her about for years. Assuming she says yes, I might be given the opportunity to patiently lay the groundwork for a long term relationship by listening intently and responding with genuine warmth and caring as she talks about the horrible day she had at the shoe factory where she works. This would be in contrast to our other 'dates' which have mostly been us meeting at the local Denny's and splitting a Moons over My Hammy for breakfast, as I listen intently and respond with genuine warmth and caring as she talks about the terrible day she had at the shoe factory. Those are really a waste of mine and her time. Although, she really does need a good shoulder to cry on, and, I am a really good listener. I guess it's not so bad. Eventually she will have to tire of empty passionate sex with various members of the high school football team. I can give her so much more than that. Except for the sex part, I can only handle so much of that until I get really tired and sleepy."
By Everyday Junglist6 months ago in Humor
State Fostered Complexitivity and Lovecraftianism Among the Masses Has Brought Us to the Brink of Disaster
When the project was completed, and what we had been working on was finally revealed to the world the reaction was swift. Moral outrage, anger, and fear. It was the most complex system ever created by man, yet it's primary function remained a mystery. The machine was so complex that it was impossible to explain what it was or how it worked to the intentionally under educated masses. The state propaganda machine had been emphasizing the importance of Occam's razor their entire lives. Part of the people's moral code was based on it, therefore that which was complex was viewed as morally inferior and less desirable then that which was simple. Moreover, the masses had been taught that the the state was omniscient. A thing which was unknown, was a cause to be very afraid. The state knew that the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind was fear, and that the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. They had used that knowledge to great effect, but now it threatened the very existence of the state itself. We had to destroy it, the machine we had built, before it could destroy us. On September 26th, 2036 at 10:26 am a ten megaton thermonuclear warhead was launched from an orbiting satelite and exploded at a height of 1 mile directly above the project site, incinerating the machine and everything else within a 100mile radius.
By Everyday Junglist6 months ago in Fiction
Bloody Pencilvanian-Penlander War Continues With No End In Sight
The ink stains of the dead Penlanders are as fresh as the horror and dismay over the fates of the many Pencilvanians erased from the front lines. This centuries old conflict shows no signs of abating as fighting renewed again yesterday at the contested border between the two warring nation states. Hardest hit by loss were the famed Penlander fountaineers claiming some 500 dead in the first five minutes of fighting alone. They stormed the Pencilvanian front lines early and with numbers but ran head first into a hail of graphite re-enforced artillery shells lobbed from deep behind enemy lines. The battle tested #2 company of the Pencilvanian army then counter attacked with a neat pincer move attempting to sever the head of the Penlander BiC brigade, so named for its legendary leader General Brad (ironside) Cotton. General Cotton called for a counter-attack but the Pencilvanians gelled as a unit, hardened their lines with their mechanicalized troops, and repulsed the counter easily with a simple brush stroke. In a last ditch maneuver to salvage something from the horrendous string of losses the General fielded razor company and the 101st lighter brigade consisting of several thousand battle tested Penlander shock troopers. They attacked in ball point formation exploiting a small crack in the Pencilvanian lines. At the point of impact ink and black carbon flew in all directions as the ancient enemies met in bloody tip to tip fighting. This reporter will never forget the horror of that sight and prays for a swift end to this seemingly never ending war.
By Everyday Junglist6 months ago in Humor
Doomsday Peppers Prepare for the Apocalypse
Doomsday peppers the world over are busy preparing for the Ripeture, the event which is said to foretell the coming apocalypse. According to the peppers when the Ripeture happens all good peppers will suddenly disappear leaving only their neatly folded husks behind. The non-peppers unfortunate enough to be left behind will be forced to spend their remaining days fighting to survive in a hellish nightmarescape of death and destruction. Stuck hanging on their shrubs as they slowly rot from radiation exposure or die from dehyrdation due to lack of available clean drinking water. A leader of the local pepper movement in Sinaloa, Mexico, Pablo Ano said the following in a prepared statement. "All good peppers must prepare now for the Ripeture. It will come suddenly and without warning. Those sinful peppers who do not believe in our great leader Dr. Pepper, blessed by the holy ghost, will be left behind to rot. Those non believers will never gain entry to the heavenly garden of eden where peppers of all varieties live forever in paradise." According to pepper lore the garden of eden has soil so rich all peppers can live for eternity without any need for fertilizer, inseticides, or replanting. In fact, it is believed that no insects are allowed in the garden lest they disturb the holy peppers planted there.
By Everyday Junglist6 months ago in Humor
Local IT Manager Hires Hollywood Production Company to Create Content for Anti-Phishing Campaign
Local IT manager of Openz Industries, Ted Stephens, announced today that he had hired a Hollywood production company to create content for an anti-phishing campaign aimed at rank and file employees. Openz is a global leader in the manufacturing and distribution of automatic garage door opener remote controls and provides remotes for all of the leading automatic garage door manufacturers world-wide. The company has recently been hit with a spate of phishing attacks and employees have been easily fooled by fake emails exposing valuable company data to hackers intent on using the data to extort Openz or its customers for large sums of money. Specifically the hackers are believed to be targeting Openz' database of garage door opener codes. If those codes were compromised it would cripple Openz and possibly put hundreds of thousands of garage door opener remote control users at increased risk of break in. The previous attacks used fake emails that appeared to be coming from Openz corporate headquarters in Pittsburg, PA, and informed employees that they needed to update their user names and passwords as the company would soon be transitioning to new customer and pricing management software. The emails instructed the employees to click on a link which led to a fake website where they were then asked to input their current user names and passwords and asked several personal identifier questions during which many employees freely gave up their social security numbers, home addresses, personal cell phone numbers, and even detailed information on the whereabous of their sons, daughters, husbands, and wives. In the first atttack some 72% of employees fell for the scam. That number dropped to 40% for the second attack, but that second attack also saw several senior executive sduped. Mr Stephens said of the phishing attackss "While it is true that 40% of our employees were completely tricked by the fake emails and foolishly surrendered personal and confidential information, that leaves 60% who were not fooled. Those 60% need to fully understand the seriousness of the threat we face. They may have sniffed out the first wave of phising attacks fairly easily, but let's see how they do when Hollywood production company New Wave Entertainment steps up to the plate."
By Everyday Junglist6 months ago in Humor
Cigarettes Were Never a Combatant in the War on Drugs and Yet They Have Been Soundly Defeated
Be it the war on drugs, or the war on poverty, or homelessness or any of a hundred other social problems the US and other countries around the world have declared war on, our record remains abysmal. It remains where it has been stuck seemingly forever at zero victories and very little tangible ground gained. The record is actually so bad that it appears as if declaring war on a thing is the metaphysical opposite of what one should do if wanting to make a positive change to a persistent social problem. The war on drugs is perhaps the best known example of the failure of the let's declare war on something we want to go away approach to social policy. Many, many drugs became and remain combatants in this many decades old war. Cocaine, crack cocaine, heroin and other opiates, meth, marijuana, LSD, etc. Interestingly however one of the drugs that somehow managed to be left out of the war on drugs was nicotine. Specifically nicotine in the form of cigarettes. And, surprisingly to some I guess, they are the one drug (technically cigarettes are only a particularly deadly delivery mechanism for the addictive drug nicotine) that has been soundly defeated. They have in fact had their asses kicked. Completely, totally, absolutely crushed. In less than two decades cigarettes have gone from the hip, cool, must have accessory of the rebel without a cause, to a disgusting, hated, and reviled evil that no one in their right mind wants to have anything to do with. Cigarette smoking has become about as popular as Yahoo mail. That is to say, not popular at all with demand and usage at record lows. Meanwhile all the other addictive drugs still slugging it out in the war on drugs remain as popular or more so than ever. As popular as Google Maps. That is to say, quite popular and in heavy demand with usage at historic highs (no pun intended).
By Everyday Junglist6 months ago in Psyche
Local Author Struggles to Determine if Satire or Satirical Best Tag for His Humorous Vocal Story
Local author, Daniel R. DeMarco, Ph.D. struggled Saturday to determine if he should append the tag "satire" or "satirical" to his story Argan Oil Chronicles Part VI - Yep, You Read That Right, Part Six. Unless You Can't Read Roman Numerals In Which Case You Did Not Read That Right. In Any Case This is the Last One. For Now. Dr. DeMarco said the following in a written statement explaining his confusion. "Anyone who reads any of my stuff, which currently sits at around 10 or so people per month, knows how passionate I am about precision in language. This applies to all aspects of my writing, including so called 'tag' selection. I say so-called because on every other website, and by standard convention, what Vocal calls a 'tag', everyone else calls a keyword. I guess the editors at Vocal felt that if they called them keywords that would imply they were actually findable using common search engines like Gooogle.com. Instead they can only be 'found' using the internal Vocal site search engine which absolutely freakin sucks by the way. In any case, when I publish a story to a given community, I want the tags I select to accurately reflect the content of said story. Is it weird that I throw up in my mouth a little bit everytime I type or say the word community? That's exactly how cheesy and stupid the entire idea of communities actually is. So stupid that I throw up in my mouth even thinking about it. Weird, right? Or, maybe it is the concept of community in a general sense that I find so distressing. Similar to the concept of sharing, it feels like a slippery slope to communism to me, but I digress. I recently pulled together the sixth and final part of the series collecting my most popular and hilarious stories featuring argan oil and was in the process of publishing it in the Humor community when I encountered the head scratching conundrum of whether to choose satire or satirical as a tag.
By Everyday Junglist7 months ago in Humor
The Writer/Reader Guilt Complex
Does this scenario sound familiar to you? You publish a story here on Vocal or some other web publishing platform. It might be a story you feel is really great, or one that is mediocre, or maybe even one you regret. Another writer you are familiar with from the site leaves a like and a comment on said story. The quality of the story and the content of the comment are not really factors in what happens next. You ask yourself when was the last time you read anything published by this other writer? You also consider, when was the last time you left a like or a comment on anything they had written that you read? If you are anything like me, (I can assure you, you are not, but we may share at least this in common) our answers to both questions will probably be a very low number or zero in some cases. A nagging guilt begins to build at not having read or commented on any of this writer's many works in a very long time, or maybe even ever. This very nice person, this aspiring writer just like yourself, took the time out of his or her busy schedule to read and comment on something you wrote, and you can't even be bothered to do the same for them? What kind of monster are you? And, so, appropriately ashamed you immediately seek out something/anything this person has published and leave a like and a comment to even the score. It doesn't matter if the piece you found was Hemingway reborn (highest possible literary quality) or Michael Chrichton reborn (lowest possible literary quality), you like it and you leave a comment detailing how great it was for whatever reasons you think will soothe your guilt ridden soul.
By Everyday Junglist7 months ago in Writers
Math Can Be Art, But Why Can't Art Be Math?
"......when I look at a mathematical equation I see a piece of art in a way. Usually there are numbers and letters and various kinds of symbols arranged in a specific order just like a picture to decipher and understand."
By Everyday Junglist7 months ago in Art