Study Shows Test Subjects Real Pricks About Studies

recent scientific study released Wednesday surprised the research world with the evidence that test subjects as a group are frequently unapologetic dicks about being involved in scientific studies.

Conclusions were drawn based on the results of observations of 200 various test subjects at the University of Macon at Macon Georgia. The test pool was narrowed down into groups of 20, with further separation to divide the 20 into two groups of ten, control and actual test subjects. Then varieties of tests in the vein of usual scientific studies conducted at large, well-funded universities were conducted on the test groups while the control groups were allowed to go home and do whatever they wanted. At the end of a three-month long test period interviews and surveys were taken with all participants and conclusions drawn from the results.

The dominant results among those who participated in test groups were frequent findings of "irritable" or "highly irritable," with occasional high occurrences of "extremely angry" and one or two cases of "violent". Researchers, all of whom had engaged in voluminous tests with subjects on other matters, say findings fit their expectations.

A variety of tests common in scientific research were used. In one test, for instance, participants were subjected to hours of violent television for hours at a time to see if it caused violent feelings in the subjects—it did. In another test, viewers were exposed to looping trailers of Jennifer Lopez theatrical films. This also caused violent feelings among test subjects.

In other tests conducted for the study, subjects were left in rooms with two-way mirrors for ten hours to be observed, to see if this caused irritability. In other tests, the mirror was turned the other way and test subjects allowed to observe the researchers talking about them in the safety of their observation room. This likewise caused irritability. In fact, as results show, there were virtually no conducted tests which did not cause irritability in subjects. The conclusion was vital in proving the case of the University of Macon research team that test subjects are real assholes.

"Before the findings were made public," said research team leader Cal Edwards, "we would talk amongst ourselves about how our day with the participants went. It was easy to postulate hypotheses about whether the test subject was a dick or just being a dick because of the particular test we were running on him. Now we know once and for all they're all just dicks, no matter what test you're running."

Edwards' proof lies heavily in the fact those in the control groups were perfectly friendly when the researchers showed up at their door and asked them their moods. In 80% of all control group cases, subjects described their day as "fine." Of the remaining 20%, subjects frequently described their day as "Enh" or "Could be better," or asked what the researcher was doing at their home.

"Of course," continued Edwards, "knowing they're pricks is only the beginning. It's important to find out why they're pricks when you experiment on them, too. What is it about being removed from normal society, trapped in sterile laboratory facilities, and observed by people who don't tell you anything that makes them pricks? That will require years of further research. Though after the results of this one, I can tell you I'm thinking about getting out of the game altogether. Who needs this kind of bullshit?"

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Few things in life are more annoying than sports fans who think they're cursed. That is unless they think they're individually cursed, which can be hilarious. If all their breakfast cereal turns into locusts or they gain weight no matter what they eat, I can listen to that stuff all day. But nobody can stand listening to some sorry loser complaining that the Curse of Cheops kept his sad-sack team from winning the big one, and how the gimpy harem of mama's boys deserved better. In ancient times, men were killed for less, usually by fans of more-successful teams.

Baseball fans in Chicago and Boston have gone to great lengths to lament and preserve their teams' curses, and the commune staff has not been spared their pain. This very column is an effort to try and end the "Curse of the commune," which involves having to hear commune reporter and former Cubs pitcher Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown explain the Curse of the Cubs every time somebody makes a comment about baseball, goats, mummies, bears or Chicago-style deep dish pizza.

The Curse of the Cubs, also known at "The Billy Goat Curse" and "Loser's Excuse #42" dates back to the World Series of 1945. Local Chicago tavern owner William "Billy Goat" Sianis wanted to take his goat to see World Series game four, ostensibly because he couldn't find a babysitter. His real reasons were thankfully kept private.

Sianas had been the owner of the Lincoln Tavern for years, and one day a goat fell off the back of a passing truck and wandered into his bar, looking for a place to drop off a batch of road apples. Sianas had the annoying habit of taking nearly everything that happened to him as a sign from God, and in keeping with this quirk he promptly grew a goatee, renamed his bar the Billy Goat Tavern, and began taking the goat along with him wherever he went, to promote his now disagreeably-themed establishment.

Sianas managed to get through the turnstiles at Wrigley Field that day in 1945, after telling the ticket-taker that the goat was his adopted Malaysian son. Thanks to Chicago's admittedly small Malaysian population at the time, the ruse was successful. The goat probably would have been left to enjoy the game in peace if not for the fact that it had just eaten twenty-seven caramel apples during the half-hour immediately preceding the game, and the panicked look in the goat's eyes made all the fans seated nearby extremely nervous. Sianas and his goat were soon ejected, after which the goat promptly ruined a convertible parked outside the stadium.

While he was searching around for a fire hose to clean up after his goat, Sianas cursed the Cubs to eternal postseason futility by announcing "Never again will World Series be played in Wrigley Field!" His pronouncement was met with raucous laughter from Cubs fans, who noticed that the goat had eaten Sianas's pants while he was cursing. Upon discovering his pantsless state, Sianas began to curse in doubletime, most of which was not suitable for historical documentation. It was noted, however, that during his tirade Sianas did pronounce that a goat would never win the Kentucky Derby, a curse that has remained eerily true to this day.

The Cubs went on to lose that World Series, and have never been back because they suck. They did make it back to the playoffs in 1984, 1989, 1998 and 2003, but each year Lady Luck stepped on the Cubs' balls in the most humiliating way possible. Baseballs were dropped, pooches were screwed and somebody ate a cat. Cubs fans love to blame the goat curse for their team's lack of success, but this holds little water for fans in other cities also cursed with teams that suck but are short on rank barnyard animals to blame.

The Boston Red Sox have their own curse, "The Curse of the Bambino," which is just as famous as Chicago's curse but told in a different funny accent. It has also been known as "The Curse of the Big Fat Hot Dog Eating Machine," but is usually shortened to "The Curse of the Bambino." In 1920, Red Sox accountants discovered that team profits were down for the third straight year because star outfielder Babe Ruth was eating the team out of house and hot dogs. The accountants took their plight to tight-fisted owner Harry Frazee, who promptly traded Ruth to the Yankees for a case of beer and a St. Bernard named Lucky. The Yankees went on to win 26 World Championships, while for the Red Sox the trade was a wash because Lucky loved hot dogs almost as much as Ruth.

What lesson is there to be learned from these two infamous baseball curses? In a nutshell, the universal lesson here is this: Don't hire the long-dead pitcher from a team that hasn't won the World Series since he played for it in 1908 to be a reporter for your Internet news site, unless you want to hear a lot of long, boring baseball stories. Amen.

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One night several weeks ago, I got home after a grueling day of communing to find a strange-assed envelope in my mail box, wedged between the usual offer for Sea Monkeys and a Carmen Electra poster catalog. At first I thought I might have won a Harley or maybe my report card from the third grade had finally shown up. No such luck. When I studied the return-address more closely, I realized it was from the Jury Commissioner's Office, and that could only mean one thing.

The game was on.

Ever since the I was in shortpants, watching my dad do battle with unseenfoes over the telephone line, I'd waited for this day. The time had come to do what any honest, red-blooded American would do when they got the call: to match wits with the American justice system and try like hell to get out of jury duty. This is what our fathers have fought and died for time and time again, compadres: the right to outsmart The Man and avoid having to find parking downtown.

I decided to warm up by trying my old stand-by dodge. I called the number listed on the back of the summons and, in a bone-chilling facsimile of my mother's voice, told the jury duty operator that Omar would be unable to make it, because he had the measles or some shit. Looking back now, it was probably throwing that "or some shit" on the end that sunk my subterfuge, because the operator said I'd have to reschedule for another date. I thought fast and tried adding on that I had whiskey-dick as well, but she seemed pretty unimpressed by that improvisation.

I knew then that the old stand-by wasn't going to cut it this time, not by a long-shot. It was like trying to carve a jack-o-lantern with a piece of cooked spaghetti: damn useless. I was pretty surprised, too, because the exact same ploy worked wonders that time when I had to get out of a date with the ugly-assed daughter of one of my uncle's business partners. Shit, by the time I got to the whiskey-dick part I don't even think she wanted to go on the date any more, but these jury duty mugs had far tougher nuts to crack.

Several subsequent calls to the jury duty line proved equally unsuccessful: it turns out that swearing like a motherfucker, being a Communist or having a thick Mexican accent are all honky-dory if you want to be a juror these days. Go figure.

I went to the drawing board and read the pamphlet that came with my summons, figuring I had to beat these hard-asses at their own game. According to the pamphlet, there were only three excuses that would get you out of jury duty: you don't speak word uno of English, you're so damned old you scare little kids, or you've already been on a jury in the last two years. Now I know what you're thinking, and believe me I thought of it first: between that wet pajama contest I judged locally and being in the audience for that taping of Divorce Court last year, I should be good for another four years at least. Not so, claim the Jury Nazis.

Since they had to be such assholes about the whole two-year thing, I decided to play a little hardball and spent the next two weeks answering the phone in a made-up nonsense language that was like some kind of cross between German and the ingredients of a Snapple. Once again, those clever motherfuckers got the drop on your friend Omar by calling at eight in the morning when I was dead asleep and had momentarily forgotten about the whole "No English" ruse. So much for project "Nein Sorbate Verboten."

I briefly considered making some kind of old-man suit out of croissant mix and talcum powder, but after a particularly nasty talcum mishap I got pissed off and just called those uptight pigfuckers and told them that it's my constitutional whoozumwhatzit to have them kiss my pale white ass, with whipped topping if you please, and that in the mean time I hoped they all choked on a turd. It was a bold shift in strategy, I admit, but for a while I thought it might have worked and that I'd scared them off.

Then one day I received a notice in the mail saying that if I didn't show up for jury duty, I'd be held in contempt of court and fined $121. Woah. Now, I don't know how they arrived at that figure, I suspect they were peeking into the old Bricks Checking Account again, but suffice it to say they were now officially speaking my language. These were some stone-cold bastards.

After a rousing rental of "A Few Good Men", I decided that jury duty probably wouldn't be that bad, and that maybe I'd luck out and get some kind of case that involved a dude being smothered by fake boobs or something. Really, any case that involved topless testimony would've been cool by me, I'm flexible.

And to tell you the truth, in the end, I actually had a good time. And man was I glad that I'd thought to wear my judge costume from last Halloween, because they treat those regular jurors like assholes. I got a much better seat and even got to give some dude the chair for eating his neighbor's horse in some kind of funny-assed cultural misunderstanding. The rest of the day probably would have been a blast too if the real judge hadn't shown up and had me re-assigned to some boring damned murder trial. Since when does it take a whole friggin' week to figure out that the dude with the chain-saw did it? I'd planned on two hours tops, with maybe a break for a romantic interlude in the middle. Some fussy sacks of juror-scat might argue that it would have been over sooner if I hadn't been playing the "Do you have a verdict?/Your honor, we have a dickfour" game with the judge, but that only added twenty minutes, tops.

And the memories, as they say, will last a lifetime. I think the taser scars probably will too.

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