we're hot!

And it's official! DC is the sixth hottest city in the nation! Duh. JUST LOOK AT ALL THESE FINE PIECES OF ASS!

Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooooooooowwwww!

"But wait. Marissa, hold up. Did you even click the link?"

What link?

"The link you embedded in the top of this blog."

Pffft, no. Why would I do that?

"Jesus.... MAYBE BECAUSE IT LINKS TO THE ARTICLE BEYOND THE HEADLINE, YOU IDIOT!"

Huh? Are you saying you want me to read something? Interesting... Well, there's a first time for everything so perhaps I will give that a whirl. Just give me a minute to get my helper llama Eugene to move the cursor and give it a little *click* and...

Ahh, OK. I get it now. We're not hot as in physically attractive, but hot as in I want to fashion a line of unfashionable clothing out of Mr. Freeze pops and commute to work in a giant hamster ball filled with dry ice, you know, so the Mr. Freeze pops don't melt. Delicious.

Incidentally, the other cities on the list, in order of fifth through first, include Medford, Ore., Wichita, Kan., Montgomery, Ala., Laredo, Texas, and Yuma, Ariz. To my surprise, Orlando, Fla., was left off the list. That motherf*cker is hot as balls, to use the schmientific term. I learned that the hard way this weekend when I decided to wear pants to the shuttle launch.

Oh, did I just say shuttle launch?! I did! I was there! And it was the most spectacular 24 or so hours seconds of my life. If you want to nerd out with me, please do so here, where I equate my relationship to the U.S. space program to an addiction to black-tar heroin. By the way, I'm in total withdrawal right now. But at least I'm in total withdrawal in the air-conditioned confines of my dry-ice filled hamster ball. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have several hundred Mr. Freeze pops to purchase and affix to my person.

lift-off!

And speaking of shooting things into the air (I'm assuming you read yesterday's schmasterpiece), this will be my last blog post this week before I jetset off to Florida tomorrow to watch a bunch of astronauts shuttleset off to space on Friday. Indeed, to borrow a term from my newly blogging brother, the bounds of my nerdery are, um, out of this world...

Sorry. That was a galactically dumb joke...

What's even more dumb, though, is not just that I followed a dumb joke with an even dumber one, but that I was somehow left off the list of this "official NASA tweetup" everyone every dork is talking about. And yeah, while unlike @nasa I can't vouch for the scientific accuracy of the 140-character missives I'll be writing during this historical event, I can certainly guarantee you that they'll be entertaining, if not solely because I'll be "waking up" at 1 a.m. to get to the launch site, which means I'll surely be relying on a magical mixture of Jolt Cola, Pop Rocks and rocket-fuel fumes to keep me awake until Friday's 11:26 a.m. lift-off. I predict I'll be going full-Cornholio by 7 a.m.... So yeah, if you like space or simply have a thing for Beavis & Butthead like my cat, you might want to jump on this Twitter train[wreck]. #choicesiwillregret #choicesyouwillnotregret.

However, the space program isn't all fun and games and tweeting ridiculously and eating nauseating amounts of sugar. As you may have been reading from the Washington Post's Joel Achenbach, it's also kinda f*cked. This saddens me because space exploration is cool and unwinnable wars are not, which means we're doing it wrong. Seriously, look at this video:



Any entity that can make an epic clip out of putting a jigsaw puzzle together deserves at least a few billion of our dollars, no?

But politics aside, I'm pumped. Hope to catch you around the Twitterverse...

bang

Congratulations, Virginia! You finally have something to be proud of. But of course I'm joking. I mean, just look at that sentence construction! It ends in a preposition! HILARIOUS! (Laugh, dammit.)

However, even if I did write, "Congratulations, Virginia! You finally have something of which to be proud," it'd still be funny. Not only because that second sentence sounds like it should be read by someone in a monocle and a top hat, but because of the joke I embedded in it -- that the only thing Virginia has to be proud of is the fact that the woman who can hold the most hotdogs in her stomach is from there.

And while, yes, that is quite an accomplishment, it is, in fact, a joke. Obviously, it's not the only thing Virginia has going for it. See, in addendum to being the breeding ground for women who can stuff their faces with five grills full of barbecued meats, Virginia is also noteworthy because it's a great place to explode things. And so, yes, I spent America's Birthday not in America's Capital, but across the river, in America's Weiner-Eaters Birthplace Capital setting off colorful explosives.

Except I nearly regurgitated my sausage when one firework I had purchased from a teenager on the side of a Pennsylvania highway shot not straight into the open air but at a diagonal directly into the power line. OOPS! Clearly, I should've purchased my explosives from Bang-Bang and Boom-Boom (and you're gonna wanna click on that link).

But this wasn't a normal, run-of-the-mill firework that just shoots up and explodes; it was a Sky Banger, which does exactly what it boasts. It sort of thrusts up and down for a bit before finally exploding in a shiny sea of ejaculating sparks. (Ew.) Under perfect conditions, the Sky Banger would do this all at about 30-to-50 feet. But here's the thing about power lines: they kind of f*ck up trajectories, meaning the whole sky-bang process ended up being more like 15-to-who-the-hell-knows-how-many-feet-because-we-were-all-flat-on-the-ground-hoping-we-weren't-'bout-to-die.

But I'm alive! The power lines remained intact and no one even sustained even minor burns. Full success. Kind of. And, hey, I see you're all alive, too, if you're able to read this blog right now, so USA! USA! USA! And most importantly, I'm happy to be back in the District where the power lines are underground.