All Too Flat : Serious : Ask The Fish

In an attempt to increase the frequency of updates to the site, we are adding yet another freaking blog. I don't know why we think this will increase the frequency of updates to site - we have at least three of the things anyway, and they are updated just about as often as Boston wins the World Series. But we try. Ask The Fish will now be done blog style, with new entries getting posted as soon as they are answered. Expect the same quality of advice that you have come to expect (from what is either a 800 lb halibut with a highly defined sense of irony, or one of four uber-geeks with nothing better to do on a Saturday night).

Got a question? Need advice? Ask the Fish! Use the Ask the Fish Form to submit a question!

New: Search the Ask the Fish archives!

Dear Ask the Fish,
im bored what should i do?
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Dear ,
Answer some fish questions
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
can google have a volcano named after it?
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Dear ,
I gotta tell you, I've been wanting to answer some questions for a while now - I'll swim over to the keyboard, and I'll start looking through the database for a question to answer, and this is what I get. I really do hate to bitch about it, but really - are these my fans?

I suppose that they are clearly in need of advice, but still. Dear Abby gets all the good questions.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
Dear Mr. Fish,
Can you please give me your place of residence ?
I've been looking to... ummmm... "meet you for" quite some time now.

Greatly appreciated,

Mr. Fisher
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Dear ,
143 Fuck-You-Pal Drive, NYC, NY 00100
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
Dear AtF,
I have the eternal question for you: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
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Dear ,
Eternal, but poorly posed. What kind of wood? What age of woodchuck, and of what gender? What, exactly, is the act of 'chucking,' and are woodchucks actually capable (in pure physiological terms) of performing the act?

I've made some of the necessary assumptions, and present data below. These are values averaged over a statistically significant number of middle-age male woodchucks in good health, chucking for a period of 30 minutes (where 'chuck' is defined as "To pat or squeeze fondly or playfully, especially under the chin.")

Wood-type Wood Volume

Balsa 15m3

Douglas Fir 13.6m3

Teak 10.2m3

Mahoghany 4m3

As you can see, chuckability seems to be inversely related to wood hardness. This is not much of a surprise, since we assume that if a woodchuck is going to pat a block of wood under the chin, it must first shape the wood via chewing so that it has a chin at all.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
How can i get a date
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Dear ,
I always like going for the shotgun affect. Going up to a group of ladies (who often travel in packs, especially in high school, which I assume is what you're interested in. Partially because the intelligence level of this website pretty much targets the 16 year old boy demographic, and also because all men are icky pervs) and announcing "Ladies - I am here, and available for loving. Any takers?" I've found to be a fairly effective technique.

If over 21, you can always go hunting for the last call girls. These are the girls that are closing out the bar, and have had more than a couple too many. I've never done this myself, of course (fish aren't often allowed into bars), but I understand it's an effective way to get some special time with a woman. I wouldn't call it a date per se, but it's a fair first approximation.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
what is the secret password?
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Dear ,
I'm not going to tell you what mine is, but do you have any idea how many people have told me what theirs is? There's a login box on the front page, and if you set up an account, we'll . . . do absolutely nothing for you. Not a sausage. That's not the point. The point is, there's about 300 people in the database who have given us their Yahoo! or Hotmail? email addresses, and use the SAME PASSWORD FOR ALLTOOFLAT.com as they use for their primary email. Don't ask me how I know that's true (although, Michelle - I totally think that you should dump Brad. Sounds like a douchebag.

Little security tip, guys. Don't do stuff like that. Hell, if you visit our site enough to log in, you should know that at best we're a bunch of jackasses, and at worst we are petty criminals. While we happen to be trustworthy enough not to DO anything with your email accounts, you don't know that, and definitely shouldn't trust us.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
will Michael grow wings???
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Dear ,
Man, I thought I was bad for only being in the middle of the second season of 24. But here you are, towards the end of season 4 of Highway To Heaven! I won't spoil anything for you, Samantha, but there's a good change it turns out well for the freaking angel of the lord in a prime time drama from the 80s, you know?
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
Hey, I got into a big argument with my friends about this, so maybe you can help me. Who would win in a fight (if they fought of course) the Fat Budda or the normal Budda? I say normal Budda because he is more mobile, even if he is smaller. What do you think?
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Dear ,
That's a really interesting question. Back when I was a younger fish, I studied a variation of Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do, which was called The Way Of The Intercepting Fish. My sensei taught me something that I never forgot. He told me that a large man will almost inevitably beat the living Hell out of a small man, unless the small man is incredibly well skilled, and the large man astoundingly clumsy. To apply this to the case of the fighting Buddha, I wold have to say that the Fat Buddha would probably win, since we're going to assume that they both are equally skilled in the martial arts.

The real question, of course, is what could possibly make Fat Buddha angry enough to get into a fight with normal Buddha? I mean, he is the very apotheosis of the happy fat man, you know? Much to my detriment, I don't know much of the history of Siddhartha; it's not completely unreasonable that there was a time in-between his gaining all the weight, and his enlightenment. I suppose it's possible that a time warp could have sent young sprightly Gautama in the future, where he saw a grumpy fat man, and made some comment.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
what is chicken pox
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Dear ,
Chicken pox is a virus, in the herpes family. So back in the day, when your mom put you in the same bed with your brother who got chicken pox from a friend at school, she was really setting it up so you contracted herpes from your sibling. And that, nerdkiller, is seriously fucked up if you ask me. Especially considering that it's transmitted mostly by coughing and sneezing, so she could have just had him breath on you a bit, then sent you into the kitchen to get the overn mitts.

Chicken pox is often used as a MacGuffin - a plot device that moves a story forward in some respect. It's useful as a device in comedies (or in productions that attempt to be comedies but instead end up casting David Schwimmer) due to the amusing rules of the pox (relatively short time span, entertaining symptoms, propensity for victims to have to wear oven mitts taped to their hands).
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
Do any girls that I know "Like me"?
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Dear ,
Like you? Yes. Like you like you? No. I'm afraid not, Fishing. You're a really nice guy, and they just wouldn't want to risk their friendship with you.

Also, the acne thing. Sorry.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
Do you like the band Green Day???
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Dear ,
Hehe. "Dear rubber."

Well, rubber, I don't really follow up with the popular music scene much any more - I'm more of a classical fan (you know, Eric B. and Rakim, KRS One, Run DMC). So I'm going to pass this one off to Kennyb, who's a little more hip and with it. Or something. He says:

"Green Day? They're alright. Quite frankly, I don't particuarly care for their most recent album, since it's a little too political for my taste. Color me conservative, but I have a fair amount of difficulty taking political advice from a band whos main fan site has banner ads for Hot Topic.

But still, Green Day will always be near and dear to my heart. When I was in high school, I drove my friends everywhere (since I was a bit older than most of them, had my license [which at least one of them has still not gotten], and had a car). For a full year, we had the bizarre experience that every single time, without fail, when we would turn on the radio either Burnout or Welcome To Paradise would come on within 10 minutes. At first, we all hated Green Day (since they were total punk sellouts, and didn't deserve us, four 16 year olds who thought that, even though we weren't quite sure what punk was all about, it almost certainly didn't involve being in heavy rotation on a top-40 music station), but the phenomenon was so uncanny that we ended up getting really psyched when it happened.

"In fact we had a little 'Yay Green Day!' shout we did when one of those songs came on. One day, we were flipping stations and had to say it every single time we changed stations. By the fourth one, the cry was half-hearted, and we were all a little uncomfortable."

Thanks Ken. I'm sure you felt then not unlike how we feel now having to read your reminisces.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
I'm bored so I thought I would Ask the Fish, so Fish... other than making your hit rate go up, what can else can I do to end this boredom?
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Dear ,
In years past, I would have suggested something nearly productive like going out and expending some of that pent-up creative energy that we all have (it's true, actually - we do all have this energy. I read it in Nature magazine a few months ago. Or possibly it was one of the books in the Illuminatus! trilogy. Either way, it turns out that even though every single person in the world has the exact same amount of this creative force inside of them, most just expend it contemplating devient sex. It's true. Turns out everyone you know that isn't doing some sort of inherently creative work is a total perv. Weird, no?). You know, like painting the street light on your corner to look like a candy cane (or arguably a scythe if it's closer to Halloween. Since it's summer time now, an appropriate costume would be. . . I got nothing. An ice cream cone would be appropriate, but that's tough to pull off, I think. Maybe just wait until October, then.

In any case, since it's not a few years ago (are you keeping up with this answer? I admit, I'm trailing a bit, but I'm somewhat out of practice. Go back and read it again without reading the parenthetical statements and it should parse fairly well), you don't have to leave your room to eradicate your boredom. Think of bizarre keywords to type into youtube, and see where that takes you. If you are unsatisfied with the hits, try google video. And if that doesn't work out for you, get your web cam and make a video relating to that keyword. This way, we'll eventally get full coverage.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
were can i get pictures of fractals

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Dear ,
Here.

And now i've got a question for you. How much more effort, in terms of time and clicks, was it to enter this question into the ask the fish interface rather than go to google? Do you have a firefox extension that allows you to enter questions directly to us?

Actually, that's brilliant. Someone out there should get right on that.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
is the fish a stoner?
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Dear ,
Dude, it's a bubble pipe, not a bong.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
"Obsolete" is a transitive verb, right? Does that mean it is okay to say that my wife was obsoleted by my girlfriend?

On a somewhat related note, the adjective form of the word is "obsoletely." that's a funny word in and of itself. especially since it can easily be confused with "absolutely." Please use it in a funny sentence for me.

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Dear ,
In your case, since you're getting married in a few short weeks, no it is not okay to say that your wife was obsoleted by your girlfriend. Since (a) she is not yet your wife, (b) It will be your girlfriend who is obsoleted by your wife, and (c) Do you really need another door into the doghouse?
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
Yo. just wanted to remind you that I love you.
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Dear ,
Huh. Thanks, Biz! You know, going over the last few answers that I've given, I've realized that I might have a couple of anger issues today. I appreciate you taking the time to provide a little support.

Huge!
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
could u tell me the best ways to have an organsm whilst having sex and the best positions.
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Dear ,
Again with the spelling. I assume you mean the best way to have an organism whilst having sex. For this, I understand that any position which allows for deep penetration is effective. So pretty much, the answer is to dump Kennyb.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
i need help!i like this lad but he wont go out wif me cos he fancies me best m8.shud i keep asking him or shud i just leave it and turn my attentions to someone else?
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Dear ,
I think it's so funny when people ask me for love advice. I mean - it makes perfect sense, seeing as how I'm such a ladies fish, but still you guys don't know that. For all you know, I reak of brine and spend my nights alone except for the deep sea diver (who, by the way, I don't think will ever find out what's in that treasure chest. Certainly not if he doesn't dig his feet out of the sand. Big dummy.

Also - what's up with the spelling shortcuts here? Is this what all the kids are doing, or are you an Mechanical Engineering student?

In any case, this all sounds to me like a teen drama in the making. If you're being filmed, than I suggest waiting until this lad starts shagging your mate, and then corner him in the kitchen at a party and spill out your deepest feelings whilst wearing a low cut shirt. If I've learned anything from years of Melrose, Gilmore Girls, and. . . what is the current load of crap you kids watch these days? The OC? Yeah - if I've learned anything from interpersonal relationships from watching the OC, it's that not only is this a sure fire way to both hook up and get caught by your friend, but you'll also suddenly be backed by the latest teen pop band which is just about to break out and make it big (thanks mostly to the placement in your drama).
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Dear Ask the Fish,
What is 2+2???

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Dear ,
I know your teachers and parents would tell you things like "Rufio, there's no such thing as a dumb question." But they were lying, and often when you asked them things like this, they would hang their heads in shame that they raised a child as ignorant as you. I'm sorry to be so brusque, but that's just the case.

Not a total loss, though. This question does remind me of a joke that we used to think was SO funny back in school:

Joke Teller: What's 120?
Joke Tellee: I dunno . . . What?
Joke Teller: 5!

Never gets old, that joke.
-ATF

31 Dec 1969

Got a question? Need advice? Ask the Fish!