I have been hit in the balls many times in my life. Every man has.

The worst experience was the time I was 12 and a team of water balloon enthusiasts launched a balloon and nailed me dead center in the seeds. My friends later told me I dropped like a sack of cement. The only thing I remember is checking myself in the bathroom later that day and seeing cuts and bruises all over my groin.

But there was always something I always wondered from the worst moment of my life: what was the science of getting hit in the nutsack?

Thankfully, now we know. A group of “scientists” recently conducted an experiment in which they launched a 2-ounce tennis ball at a man’s gonads at 50 miles per hour (the equivalent of 58 pounds of force) just to see what would happen. Their findings?

It hurts. A lot.

To prove this incredible theory, they set up a slow-motion camera, a small cannon, and a jackass named Jason, and videotaped what it feels like to get mashed in the groin. Jason stood in front of the cannon and voluntarily took a tennis ball below the belt to document what will most certainly go down as one of the greatest scientific experiments of all time.

You can see the video HERE or scroll down to the end of this post. If you’re too lazy to watch it or you don’t want to watch a man’s seedsack get pureed into a vagina, I don’t blame you. So let me take you through this experiment one screen shot at a time.

This is Jason. He’s an idiot. He is standing a few feet away from a tennis ball cannon (not against his will) to take part in an experiment he hopes will someday be remembered as readily as Einstein’s theory of relativity. He appears, for some reason, calm.

This is Jason’s balls. Sorry, this was Jason’s balls, mid-testiclotomy. (Yes, that’s a word I just made it up but it has as much validity as these scientists.) You can see that the tennis ball is beginning to enter what I like to call the “Holy Shit” zone of pain. Jason’s hands are not covering the affected area, which can only mean he is blind.

This is Jason’s face less than a second after getting struck in what used to be his balls. I’m no professional body language reader, but it looks to me like he is in pain. I don’t know, though, hard to determine without further experimentation.

This is Jason on the ground moments after the experiment’s impact. He is pounding the floor with his fist, most likely because he probably forgot to pick up his dry cleaning or something. Or he might have lost a contact lens. Or his dignity. Hard to say.

This is the sadistic prick who concocted the experiment, checking in on Jason. See his smile? He obviously enjoyed watching someone else’s balls get pounded and wants Jason to know that his own balls are just fine. This is the actual conversation between them. I am not making this part up.

Sadistic Prick: “You’ll be glad to know we got amazing footage and amazing science out of this. So you won’t have to do this again.”

Jason: “Really? That’s nice.”

We got amazing science? What the fuck? You notice that Jason’s heart rate went from 72 BPM to 182 and you call that science? Hey, I just checked my pulse. Look at me, I’m a scientist!

This is Jason several minutes after hitting the ground, now standing up and holding an ice pack to his balls. Notice the position of his hands? That’s probably where they should have been during the experiment. I guess Sadistic Prick failed to tell him.

Ultimately, this obviously worthwhile scientific experiment will probably be mentioned in the same breath as the discovery of penicillin and Newton’s Law of Gravity. For now, if this experiment proves anything, is that if you get hit in the testes there’s only one thing to do: check your pulse.

I am not from the Midwest. I don’t call soda “pop”, I have never gone cow tipping, and I have never seen people wearing overalls at a funeral.

So I certainly had never heard of “A Prairie Home Companion” until The Princess (from Missouri) and Shiftless Badger (from Kansas) told me about it last year. One year later, after many hours listening to the radio broadcast and on Saturday even attending a live show at Wolf Trap, I’m still not sure exactly what PHC is.

But I do know one thing. White people love it.

Along with The Princess, Foxymoron, and Chinese Buffet Pussy, I attended the Saturday evening show, arriving quasi-early to stake out a decent spot on the lawn. Shiftless Badger couldn’t attend because of work demands (stupid sexy responsibilities), which led me to ask him, “A midwesterner missing Prairie Home Companion? It’s like me missing the World Cup!”.

He responded with: “It is unnatural and wrong.”

It was unnatural and wrong, SB, but for different reasons. You missed what turned out to be a veritable smörgåsbord and/or orgy of white people congregating in the outdoors, drinking wine and eating cheese, laughing their asses off to jokes no normal person would understand, and paying gobs of money to “watch” a radio show they could have heard for free on NPR.

And, yes, I enjoyed every second of it.

Here are my top 5 favorite moments from PHC:

1. Spotting what kind of food other people brought.

I saw more Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods bags at PHC than at a Montgomery County recycling center. Along with the hundreds of picnic baskets, these bags carried a variety of white wines, cheeses, fruits, sushi, gazpacho, salmon steaks, guacamole dip, and other NPR-nerd-loving foods.

Our group might have been the only people there who brought pupusas and domestic beer.

2. Garrison Keillor opening the show by walking on the lawn and singing.

Seriously, white people just about lost their shit when GK walked by them, snapping photos, screaming like teenage girls at a New Kids on the Block concert, and clapping loudly for a man whose attorneys once sent a cease-and-desist letter to a company producing “A Prairie Ho Companion” T-Shirts. Even this dude wrote a comment on another blog in which he said:

Wow, he actually walked by the lawn folks. He is such a great person. Did you get a chance to meet up with him. I did the time I was lucky to get seats. I was at third row, middle. I was in heaven.”

In heaven? Sorry, buddy, playing catch with your dead dad in a cornfield in Iowa is heaven. Seeing GK up close is not.

3. Watching this dude use his binoculars to stare at his wife.

There’s nothing wrong with looking at your wife. There’s nothing wrong with looking at your wife’s cleavage. But using binoculars to do both? She’s three inches from your face, do you really feel like you need side-by-side mirror-symmetrical telescopes to get a better look? He was one white lab coat shy of looking like a creepy high school Chemistry teacher.

4. Getting a great view of this man’s ass crack.

I know you can’t tell from this photo, but despite this man showing us his ass crack for half the show, he actually had a real woman lying on his lap in front of him. Which was probably a good thing because if she saw what we saw (I softened this photo to spare you what we really saw), I suspect he’d be girlfriend-less.

5. Watching kids bored out of their skulls.

Just because you might enjoy a radio variety show full of archaic references, inside jokes, and “comedic” skits, it doesn’t mean your teenage daughter, young child, or newborn baby will. The kid in this photo was so bored it’s pretty clear he got drunk and then threw up on his dad’s shoulder.

…I saved a very special and very ungrateful baby bird from certain death.

I wonder how Special Ed is doing now as a 1-year-old. The little moron probably doesn’t even remember me.

Fucking ingrate.

You know that phenomenon where you go your whole life entirely unaware that some concept or word or food even exists? And then, in the course of a single day or a week, you hear that concept/word/food a gazillion times?

Of course you do, everyone does. Some people call it “synchronicity”, which is defined as a “coincidence of events that seem to be meaningfully related, conceived in Jungian theory as an explanatory principle on the same order as causality.”

I, however, call it “bullshit”. More specifically, I think it is something people give far too much meaning to when, really, it is probably just plain, old coincidence.

Still, it was a strange act of synchronicity coincidence this week when, on Monday, I listened to two separate podcasts (Radio Lab and How Stuff Works), each of which dealt with the same morality problem I had never, until then, heard of.

It’s called the “Trolley Problem” and, though there are many variations in its details, essentially goes like this:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who can’t hear the trolley coming. Fortunately, you can flip a switch that will make the trolley veer down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person on that track. Could you flip the switch?”

I know what I would do but what would you do?

There is a variation to this thought experiment:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a footbridge under which it will pass and you can stop it from killing the five people by throwing a large man from the bridge onto the tracks in front of it, killing him to save five. Could you throw him off the bridge?”

Again, what would you do?

These seemingly opposing questions are basically the same. The math, too, is the same. But according to study after study, 90% of respondents say they would flip the switch to save the five men at the expense of one man and 90% say they would NOT throw the large man to his death even if it would save the same five men.

Why is that? Of course, it’s obvious that it has to do with the circumstances surrounding each possibility. The intent of each morality problem is different and one’s actions within that problem are significantly different. But the result is always the same — you save five people, you kill one.

The reason we think differently about these questions is where morality comes in, our sense of right and wrong. It is etched into our brains that killing someone is wrong. But it is also etched into our brains that killing someone to save more people is, while unfortunate, right. Without this ability to weigh the lives of others, we would have never evolved to this point in our civilization.

There was a third morality question asked in the Radio Lab podcast, one which was as uncomfortable to hear as it was to ponder. It is based on the famous story of what a Jewish woman did during World War II and was revisited in the final episode of M*A*S*H. It goes like this:

It’s war time, and you’re hiding in a bunker with 100 people. Enemy soldiers are approaching outside and will be drawn to any sound. If you’re found, you’ll all be killed immediately. Your baby starts to cry loudly and cannot be stopped. Smothering it to death is the only way to silence it, saving the lives of everyone in the bunker. Could you smother your own baby to save the people and yourself?”

What would you do?

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I am a fucking magician.

Among other things, I can make water appear out of a faucet in the restroom in my office simply by placing may hands directly under the spout. Also, I can accurately predict a coin toss at a rate of 50%.

But I can’t do everything. For instance, I cannot make little girls happy simply by giving them a Happy Meal toy.

During lunch recently in the Ballston Mall, a father and his young daughter and son sat at the table next to me. Though I was engrossed in my book, I could not help but overhear the little girl whine and complain about how her McDonald’s Happy Meal did not come with a toy.

As my homosexual friend Foxymoron would say, “So traj.”

I finished my meal and decided to do what Haley Joel Osment died trying to pound into our skulls and pay it forward. I went to the McDonald’s counter and asked to speak to the manager. I explained that “my friend’s” daughter didn’t get a toy with her Happy Meal and that I was there to restore her faith in the human condition.

He grabbed a plastic-wrapped toy fire truck and handed it to me suspiciously.

I briefly considered taking it out and rolling it along the counter yelling “Vroom, vroom!”, just to see how he would react, but decided against it. There are enough comparisons to me acting like a child as it is.

I went back to the table and patted the dad on the shoulder.

“Excuse me, I couldn’t help overhear your daughter say she didn’t get a toy in her Happy Meal so I got her one,” I said.

You would have thought I had offered the dad a kidney. I swear I saw tears well up in his eyes. He grabbed my arm and shook my hand, effusively praising my kindness.

But his apple, unfortunately, did fall far from the tree.

He handed the toy to his daughter and said, “Thank the nice man, Tabitha.”

Tabitha grabbed the toy fire truck and looked at it. Then she threw it back at her dad.

“NO!”

Fucking Tabitha.

“Now, honey…” the dad started. But I didn’t stick around to hear him act like his 6-year-old daughter’s bitch. I walked away happy in the knowledge that Tabitha wasn’t my daughter.

And that I wouldn’t be buying Happy Meals anytime soon.

I received my $600 tax rebate yesterday which, if you have been paying attention, is part of the government’s brilliant plan to SAVE US ALL!

This is great news, considering I had to pay the comptroller of Maryland $958.39 in taxes this year. Writing that check was as fun as punching myself in the balls. Since then, aside from cursing liberal taxation policies run amok, I have been eagerly awaiting my $600 tax rebate so I could stimulate the economy as I saw fit.

Stimulating this cock-blocker of an economy isn’t as easy as you think, apparently. Journalists have been writing incessantly about what to do with your money, financial “experts” have been doling out advice like it’s going out of style (it’s not), and bloggers have been asking readers for advice on what to do with the found cash.

Why is this so fucking hard? It’s money! You’ve seen money before, you know how to use it. Do what you normally would do with money. Save it, spend it, invest it, roll around naked on it (otherwise known as Fridays for me), open a sweatshop overseas, adopt a Myanmar child, whatever.

So why is everyone freaking out about it? It’s like someone handed you a free sandwich and you turned to your friend or a stranger and asked, “What should I do with this?” Are you new to this concept?

New York Magazine even had a story recently on 18 ways to blow your newfound load. The article was slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I bet a lot of New Yorkers (anyone else read this magazine other than me?) took it to heart.

There’s even a Web site called How I Spent My Stimulus that is sort of like a Postsecret (only less scary) that allows readers to submit their photos and stories over how they spent their cash. Some of the reader-submitted content is boring (Disney World?) while others are original and funny (like buying Euros).

So what am I planning to do with my $600?

You’ll have to wait and see.

One of my favorite posts by Rothko at Nicolasix was one he wrote telling his mom about his blog. Hilarity ensued. Here is how it starts:

I recently gave my mom the address to this blog. She’s known I’ve had a blog - or as she calls it, a ‘blob’ - for some time, but she’s always figured it was something I might not want her to visit. Because, who knows, I might say something a little vulgar, perhaps. Or slip in some vaguely sexual pun. Or, you know, I might drop a few F-bombs down on this bee-atch.”

I never had the problem Rothko had since my mom knew I had a blob — er, blog — about 10 seconds after I started it. There have been moments when I have wished she, along with other family members and friends, didn’t know I had it since it would be easier to write about things I often feel I can’t share, like my inability to drink water out of a straw. So embarrassing.

I don’t mind that my mom reads my blog mainly because she gives me constant validation about my writing skills. My mom honestly doesn’t understand why I don’t have a book contract with a $100,000 first-time author advance or why my life hasn’t been optioned into a movie. All in due time, mom.

That’s the great thing about mothers: they think you’re a fucking genius even when you’re writing about how many five-year-olds you could beat up.

But what happens when someone else’s mom finds your blog?

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Baby Bien (who I’ve written about a lot here) sent me an e-mail alerting me to the fact that Mama Bien had stumbled across my blog. She spent nearly half an hour reading all about her son stupidly losing a $300 bet, wearing what she called “a fake Hitler mustache”, and giving me his mailing address “so now you get schmutz from the internet….oy,oy,oy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” (yes, she’s Jewish, too; all Jewish moms talk like this).

Mama Bien added:

It was fun reading your demented friend’s website. [Arjewtino] should be ashamed of himself… ha,ha…

Now that I’ve had a chuckle and a panic attack, you can safely resume your life. It is no longer a “visiting” site… No parental guidelines…

Love ya, Baby Bien…”

I was on the phone a while back shortly after I posted a photo on my blog of a vagina with a fish painted on it. She said she told a friend of hers at work about my blog and that she checked it out. On the very day that photo was posted. I warned her to look into sexual harassment laws in the L.A.U.S.D.

I suppose there is a lot about us that we don’t want our moms to find out. They often know us better than anyone yet there are facets of our lives we just wish they didn’t know. Moms fed your ungrateful ass, clothed you, comforted you, put Band-Aids on you when you fell off your bike trying to impress a girl, and we thank them by growing up and having the gall to lead our own lives.

Rinse and repeat.

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Back in March, I received a Facebook friend invitation from someone I used to know in high school (in the San Fernando Valley, CA). We weren’t exactly friends back then but were acquaintances and had some mutual friends, so I accepted.

Her friend request, though, didn’t come with any kind of message or “Hey, how’s it going!” or “Can’t believe how long it’s been!” comment.

So I took the novel approach of messaging her to see how she was doing. I wanted to keep it short since catching up with people on the last decade-and-a-half of your life is as much fun as watching cooking shows.

I noticed that her “network” was in Raleigh, so I wrote the following:

“So give me your 14-year recap. What are you up to? What took you to Raleigh?”

She responded with this:

“First of all, I was born in Raleigh…I came to LA when I was 13 years old, remember?

Everything is good…I am still in LA. Having fun…working, going out, dating, etc. How are you? DC, huh? How long have you been there?

Take care.”

There was so much wrong with this message I couldn’t even begin to deconstruct it in my head. “First of all”? Where was the “second of all”? We were barely friends in high school, how could I be expected to remember she was from North Carolina let alone her family’s continental migration habits?

I e-mailed Blue who, of course, also knew this girl. I copy-and-pasted our exchange. Not exactly the online social networking expert, Blue wrote back:

“This Facebook stuff is weird. How the f–k were you supposed to remember how old she was when she moved to LA or that she was born in Raleigh. You cant even remember that you didn’t get a hit in you first at bat at Dodger camp one month ago.”

Thanks, Blue.

Catching up with friends from high school is a superfluous act of nostalgic regression. You remember certain people for certain reasons (like who you took to prom) but have little to no interest in revisiting these memories (like your prom date getting picked up by her parents at 11pm). If these high school friends were so important to you, you would have stayed in contact with them in the first place.

But using Facebook, say, as opposed to the obnoxiously ubiquitous Classmates.com, is different. You can see how your high school “friends” have aged, what they’re doing, where they’re living, and who they’re hooking up with (if at all). You see people who once fretted about carrying enough AP classes instead holding babies. Or that popular asshole who you hated now “out and proud” and actually liking assholes.

And it makes it easier to skip high school reunions altogether, like an AP reporter wrote about yesterday.

The thing is, I didn’t even want to attend my 10-year high school reunion (back in 2003) even before the advent of Facebook. I just had no desire to see anyone face-to-face again and relive a time that had long passed me by. I’d rather look at them online, from afar, with the safety of an Internet connection acting as a social buffer.

In the past few weeks, I have “friended” a few other high school classmates and even joined my high school group.

Blue, however, isn’t sold:

“I don’t like this Facebook stuff. You two reconnect but have nothing to say to each other. Why even start it?”

I wrote the classmate who “friended” me two days later, asking her how she expected me to remember such information but asking who she’s still in contact with from high school.

That was two months ago. I haven’t heard back yet.

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Everyone at some point in their lives have met someone who declared that he or she did not own a TV.

This statement was always perceived as some sort of “holier-than-thou” comment by someone “too good” to succumb to only the most important cultural invention in the past 70 years.

During my freshman year of high school, I had a crush on a girl named Paula, who was one of my sister’s friends. I liked her for three reasons: we once danced at my sister’s birthday party and she let me hold her hips; she once sat in my lap in a car (hilarity ensued); and she held my sweaty teenage hand when we watched Cry Baby in the movie theater.

But there was something odd about Paula and her family and I finally found out after weeks of pining for her. She didn’t own a TV.

When she told me this startling fact I looked at her like she was a Martian. A really hot Martian who liked to sit in my lap.

“So, what do you do?” I asked her.

I don’t remember what she said, but it had something to do with “reading books” or “talking with her family” or some other crazy behavior.

I never understood people who didn’t watch TV. They usually added to this fact by declaring that they didn’t even own a TV set. Television was the first widely available machine to which humans became addicted, bringing diverse people together, and allowing us to avoid eye contact with our friends and family.

But maybe Paula, and all the other aliens who pride themselves on not owning a TV, was onto something. Because on Tuesday night, after enjoying decades of staring at the socially relevant telecommunication system, I did something I am not proud of:

I voted on “American Idol”.

Specifically, I picked up my cell phone and texted the word “VOTE” to (866) IDOLS-02, just like the funny-looking Seacrest man told me to do.

A TV show I had once reviled for being a retarded popularity contest featuring karaoke singers got me this season to watch. And care. And vote. But, I believe, I had a good excuse.

For those of you who watched on Tuesday, you may remember that the phone number I mentioned above was the voting designation for Syesha Mercado (who survived this week’s vote in no small part thanks to me). Though she wept crocodile tears and compared her efforts on “American Idol” this year to those of the civil rights movement, Syesha was so amazing singing “Proud Mary” and, more importantly, looked so friggin’ hot, I was overcome by a desire to text a vote for her.

Turn away, I’m hideous.

Overcome by shame, I then texted my friend MJ about what I did.

Arjewtino: “I’m voting 4 syesha.”
MJ: “We might not be friends.”

MJ didn’t mean we wouldn’t be friends because I had succumbed to voting for some hot chick on a TV show (as opposed to being unable to vote in this year’s Presidential primary). She meant we wouldn’t be friends because she disagreed with my choice. (FYI, she voted for David Cook.)

Sure, my man card should be taken away. Sure, this makes me a hypocrite (big surprise).

But at least I own a TV.

FIRST PHOTO CREDIT

For years, The Princess has talked about taking a drive to Pennsylvania to visit Amish country. For years, I have refused.

Maybe it was my reluctance to feel like an outsider to what I would consider xenophobic people. Maybe it was the prospect of having a really boring weekend sniffing horseshit.

Or maybe it was because watching Witness when I was a child traumatized the living crap out of me. Seriously, watching Danny Glover slash a man’s throat in a train station bathroom and watching another man get buried alive under a silo-sized mountain of corn feed is liable to emotionally scar just about anyone.

In any case, I finally agreed this past weekend to take the 2-hour drive to Amish country. We traveled through towns called Cockeysville and Blue Ball before arriving in Intercourse.

FYI: At no point did these jokes get old.

We spent more than 24 hours among these misunderstood Anabaptist Christians, riding their horse-and-buggies, walking among their farms, and doing our best not to offend any of them. Knowing me, I’m surprised I succeeded. I even snickered when I heard some frat boy ask an Amish lady selling homemade root beer to take a photo of her only to have her respond, “I’d rather you didn’t.”

Here are three things I learned about the Amish this weekend:

1. Horseshit stinks.
2. Horses shit a lot.
3. There are a lot of horses in Amish country.

We got to Intercourse, PA, on Saturday afternoon after a meandering drive through northern Maryland and Lancaster County, PA. The Princess, who is nothing if not a well-prepared traveler, read her literature about what we could do in Pennsylvania and soon learned we had made a huge mistake.

Apparently, there is nothing to do on Sundays.

I knew the Amish were a religious bunch but I didn’t realize that meant that everything shut down on the Sabbath. When the Lord wants you to rest, he really wants you to rest. So we tried to cram as much as possible on Saturday.

We took a horse-and-buggy ride:

We visited Amish farms:

We found signs about Intercourse:

We haggled with Amish boys over the price of horseshoes:

We saved a group of kittens from religious persecution:

We drag-raced wild and reckless teenage Amish boys:

We read the Bible (something called the New Testament?) page left open in our hotel room:

And, of course, on Saturday evening, we revisited my traumatic childhood experience by watching Witness, which played in every room in the Best Western at 9pm. More than 20 years later, the movie had lost some of its power over me, I suppose because I no longer empathized with a young Lucas Haas witnessing a brutal murder. And Harrison Ford going ape shit against the local townies for spreading ice cream on the face of that immortal dude from Die Hard was pretty funny.

But man, Kelly McGillis as an Amish woman? Hot.