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Category Archives Funny Learning Series

 

Funny Learning is creative series of humorous essays (with an admittedly non-creative series name) that aims to bring a few laughs to the world of science and history, while at times shamelessly leveraging the events of my own life to bring a sense of narrative to the experience.

Think comedian Mike Birbiglia meets science writer Mary Roach meets verbose poop humor. Learn about the origins of the vasectomy (as well as helpful tips I learned via my own vasectomy), the discovery of sperm (spoiler: it involves penises), and much more.

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My anti-confrontational nature began at birth. Most kids cry when ripped from the womb. I shrugged. So when, during my first post-college agency job, I was prepping for a face-to-face meeting with a client that, for lack of a more tactful way of stating this, hated my company’s fucking face, I was nervous. My palms were sweaty, my heart was pounding, and I remember feeling as though the entire universe had suddenly snapped back like it had exceeded the limit of its cosmic elasticity and it was now pulling back in on itself with me at the very center, suffering the pressure of billions of years of macrocosmic expansion...you know, normal nerves stuff. But the impending client firing squad paled in comparison to the sudden realization, just before stepping out of my office door, that I had no idea how to tie a tie. And worse, I was in no position to ask for instructions. At that time—a new job, bosses to impress, living on my own—I had committed to a facade of manliness that I had never attempted before. This was new, unnerving territory for me. Failing to tie my own tie would not only chip away at the delicate sports-loving, car-jargon-speaking veneer that I had created, but would likely send me relapsing into a life once again governed by sports-indifference and car-jargon illiteracy. I had worked too hard to risk that.

Discovery of Sperm

[su_note]UPDATE: After reading about the discovery of sperm, why not check out my other work? My main focus now is YouTube videos about video games. Check out my channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/calebjross[/su_note] We take for granted the simplicity of procreation. Sperm + egg = baby. Sure there are superfluous operations often wedged within the greater formula, generally including + alcohol, - inhibition, or / legs (and in my case so many nights spent as the remainder), but there are three sex laws we have always been certain of, right? 1) Spermatozoon hunts for ovum, 2) ovum receives spermatozoon, and 3) sex leans toward brevity, both in the bedroom and in the dictionary (before shortening further to “sperm,” “spermatozoon” had seven additional syllables and drove a NYC taxi). But math isn’t so simple. Consider this: the number zero wasn’t always a thing. Think about that. There was a time when an adolescent me, charged with the question “so how many girls have you kissed?” would have been morally justified to simply shrug my shoulders and let implication lie for me. But those damn Babylonians had to invent the zero, making it impossible to ethically skirt not only pre-teen sex surveys (the unwritten entrance exam to so many cliques) but also slightly more important questions like “so how many sperms do you see?” “Zero” would no longer be an acceptable answer after Dutch amateur lensmaker and lonely guy Antonie van Leeuwenhoek combined his microscope-making hobby with his other hobby in 1677 to magnify some human ejaculate. Microscope + semen + zero = sperm!

You probably don’t know this, because I rarely talk about it here on this blog, but my novella As a Machine and Parts has been re-released.  You probably also don’t know that bitches be crazy. Case in point: Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer loves the Berlin wall. And I don’t mean loves as in respects it because it represents Cold War oppression (which would be a weird thing to respect, I agree). I mean loves as in wants to fuck it because it represents Cold War oppression. To be fair, I don’t know if that’s why she loves the wall. Maybe she’s a WWII era East Germany sympathizer. Maybe she’s a synesthete who associates the rough texture of concrete with her father’s hug. But again, of course, let’s not rule out that she’s possibly an aforementioned bitch who be aforedescribed crazy. No matter what issues she has, the relationship between a person and…

I wrote this book, a short novella called As a Machine and Parts, about a man who finds himself slowly changing into a machine, a la Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis but with fewer traveling salesmen and cockroaches. The As a Machine and Parts titular machine is concerned that as he becomes more metal and less human, he will eventually lose his ability to love his girlfriend (“awwwww” is the correct response to that plot). At some point before the start of my story the Machine, before he went full toaster, was 100% human, and therefore entered into mutual relationship with his human girlfriend. However, with real-life inter-thing relationships, mutual consent isn't always a priority.  A lifestyle called object sexuality forces literally 10s of buildings, rollercoasters, and concrete walls into unhealthy relationships with crazy people every day. Object sexuality is a real thing, apparently, and is defined as “a pronounced emotional…

Man dies while having sex with a vacuum cleaner

Ever since man discovered his penis he’s dreamed of sticking it into things. It seems unfair for a single extremity to have so much power over a person, but the way I see it, if it weren’t the penis it’d be something worse, like the brain. And you don’t want that; a man’s brain can be dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that it’s been known to drive men to stick their penises into strange things. I know, that’s circular logic, but I’m not thinking so well right now. All this talk of penis-sticking is starving my brain of blood. And is it just me, or is the term “circular logic” just begging for a good pounding? The inciting incident of my newest novella, As a Machine and Parts, involves a woman’s unfortunate hospitalization after unwittingly having sex with a machine. I promise you, the situation is nothing like you’re imagining…unless…

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