A-Z: Mix Some Onion in with The Oatmeal - Yummy!

If you believe humor should be sedate and respectful and always Politically Correct, Bob Hope style, you probably won't like The Onion or The Oatmeal.

Luckily for me, I either have a great sense of humor, or am totally sick and twisted, because these two sites are among:

My 26 Favorite Ways to Piss Away Time Do Valuable Research on the Interwebs.

from The Onion's Study: Dolphins Not So Intelligent On Land:

GAINESVILLE, FL—Although dolphins have long been celebrated for their high intelligence and for appearing to have a complex language, a team of researchers at the University of Florida reported Monday that these traits are markedly less evident on dry land.

According to study researchers, a group of 25 bottlenose dolphins removed from their holding tanks failed 11 exercises designed to test their basic cognitive abilities and reasoning skills. 

A dolphin performs poorly in a University of Florida land-based locomotion test from The Onion

The Onion also now runs video clips, like this one.

Boy Loses Leg In Totally Awesome Shark Attack

And there's an Op-Ed Section:
Let's Just Go Ahead And Assume We've Learned The Lessons Of The Gabrielle Giffords Shooting

On Jan. 8, 2011, we as a society were shocked and dismayed when 19 people, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic congresswoman from Arizona's 8th District, were shot during a public meeting outside a local supermarket. Six people were killed and Rep. Giffords suffered a near-fatal head wound. In the wake of this national tragedy, there seemed to be a clarion call to have an open dialogue about gun control, a thoughtful conversation about the way this country treats its mentally ill, and a long overdue discussion about the consequences of overly inflammatory political rhetoric.

Well, seeing as I haven't heard so much as a word about any of those topics in the past three months, I'm going to go ahead and assume that at some point we thoroughly explored those complex issues, resolved them, and are now living our lives based on the lessons we learned from the in-depth conversations I assume we had.

After all, if the crucial, imperative questions raised by this shooting—and there were many—hadn't been satisfactorily answered, we'd still be discussing them, right? The violence was far too brutal and the loss of life far too tragic for the American people to treat the Arizona shooting like any other news event that consumes the country for a brief moment and is then virtually forgotten. So let's just say that we handled the tragedy with the sophistication it deserved... (click here for the rest)

The one annoying thing about The Onion is there are a lot of pop-up ads.  Make me want to demand all my money back... *looks down* never mind.

The Oatmeal does not have pop-up ads (at least, not yet) but there are totally reasonable spots from time to time requesting that you support this artist by actually paying money for one of his posters or books. (Which I have done, and I plan to buy his next book, too. At least, if I can work out the math.)

from What we should have been taught in our senior year of high school

I also love How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you, How to use a semicolon, and quizzes, like How many baboons could you take in a fight - Armed only with a giant dildo? (My answer was 25. Just so's you know.)

From Why I love and hate having a Smartphone:

The Oatmeal offers hilarious grammar posters from some of the best cartoons that totally rule, IMO.  So that, in and of itself, makes a visit to The Oatmeal qualify as research for any writer.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

My A-Z theme is My 26 Favorite Ways to Piss Away Time Do Valuable Research on the Interwebs.

Truly, sometimes an idea from a "pointless" fun site or post or photograph does result in pages and pages of writing. Or at least a blog post or two.

What's your Onion or Oatmeal story?

Got other fun sites beginning with the letter "O"?