From AskReddit

1.

A gorilla walks into a bar and order a banana martini. The bartender thinks this is a little peculiar and then becomes aware he is actually dreaming. He wakes up from his dream and begins to tell his wife about the ridiculous dream he had. His wife just ignores him, the man rolls over and begins to sob because he realizes his marriage is in shambles.

 

2.

A man walks in to a bar. His alcohol dependency is tearing his family apart.

Edit: Jesus Christ, people. This is awesome.

 

3.

Guy walks into a bar and half his head is an orange.

Barman: What can i get.. holy shit half your head is an orange!! How did that happen??

Guy: Magic Lamp, rubbed it, three wishes etc etc.

Barman: What in the bejesus were your three wishes, half your head is an orange.

Guy: First Wish – I wished for every woman in the world to love me.

Barman: Right, that iss ok. What was your second wish?

Guy: Second Wish – I wished that I was a billionaire.

Barman: What in the hell was your third wish half your head is a frickin orange?

Guy: It was a silly wish. I dont wanna say:

Barman: Go on tell me, I’ll give you a drink.

Guy: Ok well for my third wish I wished that half my head was an orange.

 

4.

Why does Michael J. Fox make the best milkshakes?

He uses the finest ingredients.

 

5.

A: Knock knock

B: Who’s there?

A: The police

B: The police who?

A: Ma’am, your son is dead.

 

6.

I don’t know if this is an anti-joke, but it’s a true story. I was asked, "what do you call a black pirate?" Me, being the clever racist I am, thought for a second, and then burst out: "NIGG-ARRRRRRR" …turns out the punch-line was supposed to be "A pirate, you racist" Boy was I wrong

 

7.

An owl and a squirrel are sitting in a tree, watching a farmer go by. The owl turns to the squirrel and says nothing, because owls can’t talk. The owl then eats the squirrel because it’s a bird of prey.

 

8.

As told by my roommate’s 5 year old nephew, the entirety of the joke: "A train pooped its pants"

 

9.

What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple? The Holocaust.

 

10.

Ask me if I am an orange.

"Are you an orange?"

Nope, I’m a person

I know a five year old that thinks this joke is the funniest thing ever. I hope she’s not retarded.

 

11.

I like my coffee like my women.

Without a penis.

 

12.

What do you call a black man on the moon?

An astronaut.

 

13.

How many members of an ethnicity does it take to perform a specified task?

A finite number! One member to perform the task, and the rest to behave in a manner stereotypical to the ethnicity in question.

 

14.

Why did the little girl fall off of her bike?

Because she didn’t have any arms.

 

15.

What’s green and has wheels?

Grass, I lied about the wheels.

 

16.

An irishman, a chinaman and an American all walk into a bar. This is an excellent example of integrated community.

 

17.

What’s funnier than cancer?

Most things, really.

 

18.

A midget goes up to a prostitute and asks "what’s the worst joke you ever heard?"

She replies "probably this one."

 

19.

Why was six afraid of seven?

Actually, numbers are abstract concepts, and therefore incapable of feeling fear.

 

20.

"Knock knock"

"Come in"

 

Bonus:I miss the age when…

Written by forbes

Older and Wiser: Google Turns 13

Traditionally the number 13 is frowned upon as being unlucky, but today Google has all the luck.

It’s the online search superstar’s birthday today and for a teenager, Google has been keeping it pretty mellow. Just family and friends, a couple wearing little party hats, some balloons and a few neatly wrapped presents and a cake at the center of the table. The only sign that things could get rowdy comes in the form of an exclamation point hanging out next to the fam.

This birthday party is available for every person in the world to view on the official Google homepage in the form of a Google doodle, one of the little embellishments to the Google logo that the creative team draws up on a regular basis to illustrate the otherwise sparse website. Though many countries have Google doodles that are specific to their culture, Google doodles are also available at a global scale, reaching all the far corners of the earth (and internet).

Doodle 4 Google, Google’s official history of the doodle site offers up a brief history of when the doodle was thought up. In 1998, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to let Google users know that they were out of the office (and heading to a Burning Man festival) by drawing up a quick image of a stick figure standing behind the second “o”in the Google logo. Since this drawing, Google has worked alongside chief Doodler, Dennis Hwang, to assist in creating and well, doodling some of Google’s most beloved images including the infamous Magriette’s Birthday from November 21, 2008.

Hwang, who came from humble intern beginnings at Google, has since worked on multiple doodles with the idea behind the work to celebrate the lives of celebrities (be it in the world of physics, philosophy, or pop culture), athletic events, holidays, and anniversaries. Many notables over the years include Confucius, Jackson Pollack, Dr. Seuss, Houdini, and even the cast of Sesame Street.

To say that the Google doodle over the years has gotten to be sophisticated is an understatement. The doodle has over 300 versions unique to the United States and over 700 available internationally. In the last few years most notably, Google doodles have evolved from just an image to an image that one could click on and immediately interact with. For instance, when Pac-Man celebrated their 30th anniversary on May 21, 2010, the Google doodle became the site’s first interactive Doodle with 255 levels created. Many a job was neglected for employees in their cubicles and for college students, classes either skipped or attended, but with a laptop in tow as the world caught on to that sweet, sweet Pac-Man fever.

After scrolling through a list of the Google doodles throughout the years, I decided to make a list of Google’s 13 greatest hits. Google’s greatest strength has always been its ability to show off both their brand through reinvention. Imagine if Coca-Cola or McDonald’s did this to their corporate logo every other day? It simply wouldn’t work- there’s too much brand recognition that consumers have in these companies for something that radical to occur. And then there’s the issue of being unable to embrace the new image.

Google has never had this problem because while the Doodles themselves are wildly popular they only last for a day or so. The Google logo, on the other hand, is iconic itself, using a series of primary colors and simple font to read. Easy, but still innovative.

Today we focus on the innovation. Today Google may have its cake and eat it too.

*You can find all these and many more at the official Google Logospage.

Jan. 1, 2000 Happy New Year!

Iconic in the sense that it was the first official (if we don’t count the Burning Man stick figure) doodle to go live, this doodle also serves as a testament to just how far the site has come in the last 11 years. Makes you wonder where Google doodles might be in 11 more years doesn’t it?

Jan. 4, 2006 Louis Braille’s Birthday

This moment was undoubtedly the beginning of when Google would step outside of their “Google” box so to speak and begin mixing it up. Prior to this moment all designs, while cute nonetheless and very holiday and Olympic Games based, weren’t clever just yet or containing that “wow” factor. Google celebrated the inventor of Braille, Louise Braille, with a logo so intriguing you could almost feel it.

April 27, 2009 Samuel Morse’s Birthday

Morse code, anyone? Stop. Google has it for the day. Stop.

Apr. 1, 2010 “Topeka” April Fool’s

Toto, I don’t think we’re at Goog- April Fool’s!

May 21, 2010 Pac-Man’s 30^th Anniversary

Uploading a game onto this site is next to impossible so I’ve done the next best thing and provided a link for you to enjoy the game on. Definitely brings back the nostalgia from 2010- which wasn’t so long ago and when Google began to start releasing some of its more innovative work yet, much of it interactive and engaging.

Sept. 6, 2010 Google Instant- Particle Logo

Manipulations made easy with your mouse that you can indulge in here. PCWorld asked the same question we all thought over a year ago:what’s up with the bouncy balls? The answer many believed to be laid within Google’s anniversary as the company incorporated on that date in 1998.

Sept. 7, 2010 Google Instant- Keystroke Logo

It was a simple logo that upon first glance had all the potential to offer nothing. Begin typing and watch the letters of Google light up in their typical primary colors- another successful installment of the Google Instant family, released a day apart from one another.

Feb. 8, 2011 Jules Verne’s 1832rd Birthday

 

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea indeed. Had the infamous French author still been alive, he would have gotten a kick out of moving his cursor around in the underwater delight Google concocted, using a special lever on the right hand side to move the waters to and fro.

Mar. 31, 2011 Robert Bunsen’s 200^th Birthday

Bubble, bubble, toil, and no trouble, this was a tribute to the German chemist who developed the Bunsen burner, changing the chemical landscape as we knew it.

Apr. 12, 2011 50^th Anniversary of the First Man in Space

One small step for Google... one giant leap for mankind.

June 9, 2011 Les Paul’s 96^th Birthday

Google has always been respectful about the celebration of birthdays of legends and honoring the famous guitarist Les Paul with his pioneering work with electric guitars for what would have been his 96th birthday was the true definition of a guitar hero. Praise came in droves from The Atlantic, citing it as ‘the coolest Google doodle ever.”

Sept. 5, 2011 Freddie Mercury’s 65^th Birthday

Fitting for a rock god without a single note missing. Just press play. Beautifully done, Google.

Sept. 24 Jim Henson’s 75^th Birthday

Hey, I remember this one from just a few days ago! Already iconic for allowing users to be able to pick a Muppet and let their cackles and smiles guide you to typing, even the most recent of Google doodles have already shown just how far they have come in the past 11 years.

Bonus: No Flip!

Written by alternet

Denying the very existence of an entire class of citizens? That’s waging some very real warfare against them.

There hasn’t been any organized, explicitly class-based violence in this country for generations, so what, exactly, does “class warfare” really mean? Is it just an empty political catch-phrase?

The American Right has decided that returning the tax rate paid by the wealthiest Americans from what it was during the Bush years (which, incidentally, featured the slowest job growth under any president in our history, at 0.45 percent per year) to what they forked over during the Clinton years (when job growth happened to average 1.6 percent per year) is the epitome of class warfare. Sure, it would leave top earners with a tax rate 10 percentage points below what they were paying after Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts, but that’s the conservative definition of "eating the rich" these days.

I recently offered a less Orwellian definition, arguing that real class warfare is when those who have already achieved a good deal of prosperity pull the ladder up behind them by attacking the very things that once allowed working people to move up and join the ranks of the middle class.

But there’s another way of looking at “class war”: habitually vilifying the unfortunate; claiming that their plight is a manifestation of some personal flaw or cultural deficiency. Conservatives wage this form of class warfare virtually every day, consigning millions of people who are down on their luck to some subhuman underclass.

The belief that there exists a large pool of “undeserving poor” who suck the lifeblood out of the rest of society lies at the heart of the Right’s demonstrably false “culture of poverty” narrative. It’s a narrative that runs through Ayn Rand’s works. It comes to us in bizarre spin that holds up the rich as “wealth producers” and “job creators.”

And it affects our public policies. In his classic book, Why Americans Hate Welfare, Martin Gilens found a striking disconnect: significant majorities of Americans told pollsters that they wanted public spending to fight poverty to be increased at the same time that similar majorities said they were opposed to welfare. Gilens studied a number of different opinion polls and concluded that the disconnect was driven by a widespread belief that “most welfare recipients don’t really need it,” and by racial animus – “perceptions that welfare recipients are undeserving and blacks are lazy.”

That narrative ignores two simple and indisputable truths. First, contrary to popular belief, we don’t all start out with the same opportunities. The reality is that in the U.S. today, the best predictor of a newborn baby’s economic future is how much money his or her parents make.

It also ignores the fact that living in an individualistic, capitalist society carries inherent risk. You can do everything right – study hard, work diligently, keep your nose clean – but if you fall victim to a random workplace accident, you can nevertheless end up being disabled in the blink of an eye and find yourself in need of public assistance. You can end up bankrupt under a pile of healthcare bills or you could lose your job if you’re forced to take care of an ailing parent. Children – innocents who aren’t even old enough to work for themselves – are among the largest groups receiving various forms of public assistance.

Of course, there are always people who game the system, but they represent a tiny minority of recipients; a Massachusetts study found that fully 93 percent of all cases of “welfare fraud” were committed not by the “undeserving poor,” but by vendors – hospitals, pharmacies, nursing homes, etc.

Smearing those who face real structural barriers to achievement or who will inevitably face real and random misfortunes in a “dynamic,” capitalist society – that’s some real class warfare. Here are six excellent examples of the form.

1. Registering the Poor to Vote is ‘UnAmerican’

Matthew Vadum is a very special wingnut. His current pre-occupation is attacking Zombie ACORN — an organization that sane people know to have been killed off last year by James O’Keef’s selectively-edited videos but which Vadum insists is alive and well and looking to undermine America by organizing poor communities.

Vadum recently wrote a very special column in The American Thinker, in which he railed against efforts to get poor people registered to vote. What made the column noteworthy is that Vadum skipped the usual conservative blather about “voter fraud” – a problem that’s virtually nonexistent – and offered a refreshingly honest take on the subject. The problem, according to Vadum, is that “the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.”

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

Rarely has so much wrongness been packed into so few words. Less than half of those receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) – the most significant anti-poverty program remaining in our welfare system after the Clinton-era “reforms” – are unemployed. About a quarter work jobs that earn poverty wages, and the rest aren’t in the workforce because they’re disabled, caring for a relative or they’re children. In fact, almost half (48.1 percent) of all TANF families receive benefits only for the kids, not the adults. It’s true that children are, in strictly economic terms, “nonproductive,” but they will be productive someday, and more so if they receive adequate nutrition, housing, health care and the like.

The other problem with this argument is the idea that the poor vote for “redistributionist politicians.” First, because all politicians are ”redistributionist” – it’s what government does – and second, because, as Martin Gilens discovered, while Americans hate the word “welfare,” large majorities – 71 percent of Americans; not just the poor – believe that spending on anti-poverty programs should be increased (as long as you don’t call it welfare).

Contrary to Vadum’s beliefs, there is only a small number of true reactionaries who desire to live in a society that doesn’t care for the poor and disabled, and it is in fact they who are “profoundly antisocial.”

2. Unemployment Benefits Have Created a ‘Nation of Slackers’

Media Matters says, “It’s taken three years, but America has finally graduated from being ‘a nation of whiners’ in 2008 to ‘a nation of slackers’ in 2011 — at least, that’s what Rep. Steve King (R-IA) believes we’ve accomplished.” King, a right-winger’s right-winger, took to the floor of the House to deliver this word-salad:

The former speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, has consistently said that unemployment checks are one of those reliable and immediate forms of economy recovery, that you get a lot of bang for your buck when you pay people not to work, and they will go out and spend that money immediately, therefore we should pass out unemployment checks and stimulate the economy. That statement is ridiculous where I come from, Mr. Speaker. To pay people not to work, and somehow in that formula it stimulates the economy.…

The 80 million Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce need to be put to work. We can’t have a nation of slackers… We’ve gotta get this country back to work and get those people out of the slacker rolls and onto the employed rolls.

Here, too, we have a shining gem of wrongness. And a common one – the belief that unemployment benefits discourage people from working is widespread on the Right.

Here’s a simple reality-check: there are no jobs! According to the Economic Policy Institute, “there are 6.9 million fewer jobs today than there were in December 2007.” Of course, the working-age population has grown by over 4 million in that same time. Do the math. As Mike Thornton noted on AlterNet, when you add people who are working a part-time gig but want a full-time job to the unemployed, you get 25.4 million workers vying for 3.2 million full-time job openings, “or 8 unemployed or underemployed workers per job.”

This is more of the same: King’s painting a picture of the undeserving poor living the good life on the tab of hard-working Americans. So it’s worth noting that among developed countries, the US offers some of the stingiest unemployment benefits around – only two countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) replaced a smaller share of a worker’s earnings than the U.S. in 2004, and only the Czech Republic offered unemployment coverage for a shorter time.

In 2008, those unemployed Americans who qualified for benefits got $293 per week, or about 35 percent of their lost income, and that’s why conservative spin that the jobless are living it up on their unemployment checks instead of trying to find work is so ludicrous. (There is, however, some evidence that this is actually true in places like Scandinavia, where people who lose their jobs still take in 70 percent or more of their income, and in some cases can do so for an unlimited amount of time.)

King drives his point home using a classic tactic: take big numbers out of context to distort reality. There are in fact 85 million “Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce,” and he would have you believe they’re all “slackers.” But that figure includes stay-at-home spouses, people who live off of investment income rather than a job, entrepenuers, and of course the disabled and ill – people who can’t work. Back in January 2001, when the unemployment rate was just 4.2 percent, there were 69 million working-age adults who weren’t in the labor force. And the working-age population has grown by about 22 million since then.

And, of course, Nancy Pelosi was right that unemployment benefits have a huge amount of stimulus bang-for-the-buck — King is not only a brazen class warrior, he’s also economically illiterate.

3. You Can’t Really Be Poor if You Have a Color TV!

Is it not the height of class war to make a conscious effort to erase the poor from the public’s view? That has been a longterm project on the Right, and one of the classic, if shopworn arguments goes like this: back in the 1930s (or 1950s, or 1970s, depending on the speaker), most poor people didn’t own color TVs, but now 97 percent of them do! So the poor really should stop bitching – they’re living the high life!

Now, as of this writing, Craigslist offers the following items for free in the San Francisco Bay area: several TVs, multiple armchairs, a set of swivel bar stools, a stainless steel refrigerator, a Nordictrak elliptical trainer, a bunch of sofas and bed-sets – including a “like new” leather couch – a countertop grill, a ”beautiful pine armoir” and some “Hydro Massage Soaking Tub and Sinks.” Those are just the listings posted in one morning. We create a lot of goods and people want the shiniest, newest things, so there are a ton of obsolete but still functional items like TVs and washer-dryers out there that one can get for nothing or next to nothing.

Perhaps my favorite example of the genre is the claim, accurate but divorced from context, that our poor have it good because they don’t necessarily live in shoe-boxes. As the Wall Street Journal was happy to point out, “The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.” Case closed! American-style capitalism for the win!

Well, not really. This is a simple matter of population density: in the EU-15, there are 120 people per square kilometer; in the United States, we only have 29 people per kilometer. And that average obviously includes people living in sparsely populated rural expanses. I live in a tightly packed U.S. city, and given that most middle-class people here can’t even dream of affording 1,200 square feet, I don’t think our poor folks can either.

4. Food-Stamps: ‘A Fossil That Repeats All the Errors of the War on Poverty’

Sometimes what passes for an “argument” is just stating a simple reality in an ominous tone. Consider this string of English words, offered by the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector:

"Some people like to camouflage this by calling it a nutrition program, but it’s really not different from cash welfare," said Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, whose views have a following among conservatives on Capitol Hill. "Food stamps is quasi money."

There are strict limits on what can be purchased with food stamps, which isn’t true of money, but, yes, they do contribute to a household’s financial health in the same way that cash does. That doesn’t negate the fact that it is, indeed, a nutrition program. But Rector wasn’t done – it gets better:

Arguing that aid discourages work and marriage, Mr. Rector said food stamps should contain work requirements as strict as those placed on cash assistance. "The food stamp program is a fossil that repeats all the errors of the war on poverty," he said.

Perhaps this works in the same magical way that gay marriage “discourages marriage” – I don’t know. But what is clear is that, in the words of one anti-hunger activist, "Without food stamps, we’d have starvation." According to the USDA, “14.5 percent of households were food insecure at least some time during” the past year, and “5.4 percent of households experienced food insecurity in the more severe range, described as very low food security.” It’s also the case that about a third of those who are eligible to receive nutritional assistance don’t, in part because of the stigma that people like Robert Rector has worked so hard to encourage.

These are real people experiencing very real problems making ends meet, yet Rector and his ilk would make it more difficult to get assistance because they’ve embraced the fact-free idea that the poor are plagued with a “culture of dependency.” That’s some serious class warfare.

5. ‘The Main Causes of Child Poverty Are Low Levels of Parental Work and the Absence of Fathers.’

On Wednesday, the New York Yankees clinched the American League East title. On Thursday, it rained in New York. There is a correlation here, but only a fool would suggest that the Yanks’ victory caused it to rain the following day.

Yet, the Heritage Foundation (it happens to be Robert Rector again) sees a lot of poor, single-parent households, and would have you believe that “the main causes of child poverty are low levels of parental work and the absence of fathers.”

This gets the causal relationship wrong. The number of single-parent households exploded between the 1970s and the 1990s – more than doubling — yet the poverty rate remained relatively constant. In fact, before the crash of 2008, the poverty rate was lower than it had been in the 1970s. So, as the rate of single-parent households skyrocketed, poverty declined a little bit. Saying single-parent homes create poverty is therefore like claiming that the Yankees victory caused the sun to shine the next day.

As I noted recently, this is an essential piece of the “culture of poverty” narrative, and it is nonsense. Jean Hardisty, the author of Marriage as a Cure for Poverty: A Bogus Formula for Women, cited a number of studies showing that poor women have the same dreams as everyone else: they “often aspire to a romantic notion of marriage and family that features a white picket fence in the suburbs.” But low economic status leads to fewer marriages, not the other way around.

In 1998, the Fragile Families Study looked at 3,700 low-income unmarried couples in 20 U.S. cities. The authors found that 90 percent of the couples living together wanted to tie the knot, but only 15 percent had actually done so by the end of the one-year study period. And here’s the key finding: for every dollar that a man’s hourly wages increased, the odds that he’d get hitched by the end of the year rose by 5 percent. Men earning more than $25,000 during the year had twice the marriage rates of those making less than $25,000.

Writing up the findings for the Nation, Sharon Lerner noted that poverty itself “seems to make people feel less entitled to marry.” As one father in the survey put it, marriage means “not living from check to check.”

6. Taxing Working People Less Than the Rich Is ‘Perverse’

That half of Americans “pay no taxes” is a simple lie that will never die, regardless of how frequently it is debunked. It’s pure class-war, feeding into the narrative of the parasitic poor feeding off the blood of the industrious. And it is totally divorced from reality – in the real world, the working poor and the wealthy have virtually the same tax rates.

Yet the belief that only a minority pay taxes is ubiquitous among conservatives. Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said last month, "I don’t want to tax the truly poor, those who would help themselves if they could, but you can’t tell me that 51 percent of all households are the truly poor.” And here’s where the lie was created: “No matter what these Democrats tell you,” he said, “the wealthy and middle class are already shouldering around 100 percent of the nation’s tax burden and 51 percent pay absolutely nothing in income taxes."

Note the sleight-of-hand. Federal income taxes make up only 18 percent of the taxes collected in this country. It also happens to be among the more progressive taxes, and with median wages stagnating for years, many people today don’t earn enough to have to pay them.

Hatch takes this fact, which again pertains to less than a fifth of the country’s total tax burden, and transforms it into “the wealthy and middle class are already shouldering around 100 percent of the nation’s tax burden” – completely and totally untrue. If we looked only at the regressive payroll tax, and dishonestly pretended that no other taxes exist, we could make a similarly twisted argument that the wealthy pay virtually nothing in taxes – billionaire investor Warren Buffett doesn’t pay a penny in payroll taxes.

When you include all taxes – not just those that erase working people’s contributions – you see that we really have something close to a flat tax. That’s the conclusion of a 2007 study by Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson, who found that when you add it all up — state and local taxes, federal taxes and excise fees – “The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.”

Class War

All of these narratives are designed to protect a status quo that’s serving the interests of a rarified elite, but is obviously not working well for the working majority in this country. All are intended to distract from the structural causes of poverty and inequality, or to ignore the fact that some people will always experience genuine misfortune – the myriad surprises in life that can happen to anyone – because they’d choose low taxes over caring for them.

But it’s also a narrative that denies the very existence of class differences in this country. As noted earlier, the United States is anything but a true meritocracy. What millions of white working-class Americans understand – intuitively, even if they can’t articulate it – is that class still matters. And by erasing the very idea of class, of structural barriers to getting ahead in this economy, they are left with a nagging sense of grievance against those they perceive to be bringing them down: foreign powers, immigrants, people of color and liberals, with their “job-killing” regulations and the like.

Ultimately, to deny the very existence of an entire class of citizens is to wage some very real warfare against them.

Bonus?Bro-tip #25

Written by lifehacker

We spend a lot of time talking about how to improve our own lives, but how about the lives of our pets? Today we’re looking at ten great ways to improve the life of your cat—which has its benefits for you, too.

Note to dog lovers: We’re concentrating on cats this weekend, but we’ll be back again sometime next month with a full set of tips, tricks, and projectds for dogs. So stay tuned, we haven’t forgotten about you!

10. Teach Your Cat to Shake Hands

Isn’t it cute when animals do human things? According to wikiHow, if you want to teach your cat to shake hands you just need to spend a few hours over the course of a couple of days. Ready some treats, let your kitty smell them, open up your treat-less hand, and issue a command (like shake). If your cat paws your hand, provide him/her with a treat. If not, keeping trying and life his/her paw if necessary.

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9. Create a Place for Your Cats to Climb and Perch

Here are two DIY projects that’ll save you some money and provide your cats with some activity. First, you can turn an old bookcase into a cat tree where they can climb and play. Unsurprisingly, IKEA furniture is a great starting point. If you just need a perch for your kitty, a wine crate will do the trick. Just attach it to the wall and you’ll be good to go.

Bookcase Cat Tree / Wine Crate Cat Perch

8. Get Your Cat Comfortable with a New Place with the Help of Butter

Humans have a hard time adjusting to new places, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that cats do too. New surroundings are always a little daunting, but it helps if your cat is forced to stay put and survey the area. The trick? Butter up their paws. When they head outside, they’ll slip around and have to lick it off. This will give them a chance to get used to their surroundings as they won’t be able to go anywhere right away. It also comes with the added bonus of making their coat a little shinier.

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7. Turn an Extra Storage Bin into a Mess-Free Litterbox

If you’ve run out of files to shove in your storage bins, file away your cat’s waste instead. Top-entry litter boxes can be pricey, so you can save a bit of money by simply repurposing your leftover office supply. Just fill it with kitty litter like you normally would. Your can’t probably won’t know the difference, but your wallet will.

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6. Make Pet Travel Easier

Traveling with your cat can be as stressful for you as it is for them, especially when on an airplane. The best thing you can do is be prepared and know your options ahead of time so there are no unexpected problems along the way. This means knowing whether or not you can take your cat on the plane with you, if your airline allows pet travel at all, if you can check your pets (and how much that costs), getting your cat used to the travel crate before leaving, and providing it with adequate playtime prior to the flight. You also won’t be able to feed it six hours prior to the flight. It’s not exactly a pleasant process, but it’ll be a lot worse if you’re not prepared. Alternatively, find a good pet sitter.

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5. Save Your Furniture from Your Cat’s Claws

Cats love to scratch, which isn’t great for our furniture, but there are ways to keep that behavior at bay. Offering up appropriate scratching surfaces is a good start, but you need to combine that with making the places you don’t want them to scratch unpleasant. Give them scratching posts they can use as they please and spraying them with water when they scratch the couch are both good ways to teach them what’s okay and what isn’t. And, of course, regular claw trimming can be a big help as it’s a bit harder to scratch something when you don’t have the proper tools.

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4. Make a Cat Litter Box Ventilation System

Ah, the wafting smell of cat turds. If you’ve never taken to the smell, here’s a DIY project that’ll sit well with you: a litter box ventilation system. DIYer Alan Graham came up with a way to use a bathroom fan to vent the poopy air out of the garage and into the world for everyone to enjoy. He even hooked up his Mac mini to automate the process so the fan wasn’t running 24/7. If into home automation and not smelling stale cat butt, this project is for you.

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3. Get Your Cat to Take His/Her Pills Without Incurring Bodily Harm

You love your cat about as much as s/he doesn’t love taking pills. You can trick dogs with peanut butter, but cats just need a little help from our friend gravity. And your forceful fingers, of course. Just open up your cats mouth, toss the pill inside, and tip his/her head back to let gravity do the rest. You want to do this quickly or it’ll be an unpleasant experience for both of you.

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2. Eliminate Cat Hair with Your Hand and Water

Chances are pet hair isn’t part of your apartment’s desire aesthetic, and it’s definitely a problem when you’ve got company who might be allergic. Cleaning up pet hair is a major pain, but wikiHow has a few handy suggestions—literally. The first is wetting your palm with some water and scooping up the dander bare-handed. The water will make it stick and easy to move from couch, floor, or wherever to the trash. You can also get the same effect with a lightly dampened kitchen sponge or regular latex gloves. A more fun approach is using an inflated balloon. Create some static electricity by rubbing it on your hair, then touch the balloon to hairy areas. It’ll attract the hair until you can dispose of it. Finally, try a fabric softener sheet. If it doesn’t work on its own, mist it with a little water for some extra cling.

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1. Make the Smartest Cat Door Ever

For the tech-obsessed cats of the future—or at least their owners—comes this DIY automatic cat door with facial recognition technology. Why would you want something like this? You probably don’t have strange cats wandering in your house so it’s not meant for that as much as it’s designed to keep your cat outside if it decides to bring back a dead mouse. Basically, it compares you cat’s face with a few cat profile pictures and it won’t match if there’s something dead in its mouth. It also won’t match if it’s a raccoon or some other animal, which is an added bonus. It’s a pretty crazy project, but definitely very cool.

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Title illustration by I Can Has Cheezburger

 

Bonus:My niece

We surveyed over 50,000 people about their sex and hygiene habits, then we turned our most interesting findings into sexy, sexy graphs. Among our findings: A shower is your most effective wing man, urinating in the shower and masturbating to anime usually go hand in hand (pun intended), and math majors? Well, you’ve got some explaining to do.