Oh, don’t get me wrong. Gay marriage totally causes hurricanes. It just doesn’t have anything to do with religion.

It’s actually very scientific, so I’ll explain it to you while wearing my professional science glasses.

Science!

Many scientists have suggested that the increase in global warming is actually causing more natural disasters such as hurricanes. And global warming, despite what those angry people on the news keep saying, is probably caused by folks like you and me. Mostly you.

The more energy we use, the more it contributes to global warming. Just think about how much energy gets used when you have a wedding: printing invitations, baking the cake, and driving to the reception where you’ve hired Gwar to play a full-length concert. Do you have any idea how much electricity a Gwar concert uses? It’s pretty ridiculous. Also Gwar seems like sort of a weird choice to play at your gay wedding reception, but I’m not here to judge.

To put it simply, gay marriage = more marriages = more energy usage = more global warming = more hurricanes.

Don’t get me wrong, gay people should totally get married! But please, gays: make your wedding eco-friendly. You are seriously driving us crazy with all these hurricanes.

Until Cobalt climbs its way out of development hell, here are a few other examples of “out” soldiers from movies and more.

1. Kevin Keller from Archie

Do people still actually read Archie? They must, because the ultra-wholesome comic book series has run for over seventy years, a fact which is evident in how dated the comic sometimes looks. Did people actually wear Jughead crowns back in the 1930s? Was that really a thing? People walking around going ‘Man, this Great Depression sucks, but I sure feel a lot less destitute when I’m wearing this crown.”

Archie has recently made some surprisingly progressive changes, particularly in the addition of an openly gay character, Kevin Keller.

Kevin is still in high school (and since this is Archie, he’s likely to remain so FOREVER), so he technically isn’t an actual soldier. But he does have aspirations of following in the footsteps of his father, a retired Army colonel. And in the future continuity of Life With Archie (okay just because I don’t read Archie doesn’t mean I can’t be a scholar of the Archie universe thank you very much), Kevin actually does become a war hero as well as a husband.

Archie doesn’t specifically acknowledge the DADT debate, but the world of Archie is so cloyingly positive and accepting that Kevin’s sexuality is a complete non-issue.

2. Colonel Frank Fitts from American Beauty

Spoiler alert if you haven’t seen American Beauty, I guess, but I honestly don’t know anyone who hasn’t seen American Beauty. It’s pretty high up on the list of “things you have probably seen,” along with Titanic, The Simpsons, and your own face in a mirror.

Not every portrayal of a gay soldier is a positive one, but in American Beauty, it’s implied that the emotionally unbalanced Colonel Frank Fitts is off his rocker not because he’s gay, but because he’s closeted. The virulent homophobe who is secretly gay himself has become something of a cliché, though the trope has been known to exist in reality (see also the ongoing train of conservative politicians embroiled in gay scandal). In Fitts’ case, the torment of the closet and the threat of being exposed is enough to drive him to murder.

3 & 4. Yossi and Jagger

One of the most overtly gay war movies ever made came not from America, but from Israel. You might be surprised to learn that Israel is arguably the most gay-friendly country in the Middle East. Gays have been allowed to openly serve in the military since 1993, and 61% of Israelis support civil marriage for same-sex couples.

Of course, the epicenter of the world’s three major religions is bound to have a bit of turmoil when it comes to gay issues, and there’s a lot of pressure on gay Israelis to stay in the closet. Yossi and Jagger tackles this subject head-on, by chronicling the tragic romance between two soldiers.

5. James Hennesey from Biloxi Blues

Based on Neil Simon’s 1985 stage play, Biloxi centers on the experiences of Eugene, a young World War II soldier in basic training. A major plot point involves Eugene suspecting fellow recruit Arnold Epstein of being gay. Arnold isn’t, but another soldier, James Hennesey, is, and gets sent to the Army prison in a dramatic and surprisingly sympathetic scene.

Players take the role of Juliet Starling, an 18-year-old cheerleader whose high school is the site of a horrific zombie outbreak. But rather than flee in terror, Juliet fights back. Accompanied by her trusty chainsaw and the disembodied head of her boyfriend Nick, Juliet decimates zombie after zombie in a frenzy of sparkly pink hearts and sugary pop music.

It would be easy to write off Lollipop Chainsaw as exploitative eye candy. The image of a scantily clad cheerleader brutally slicing through hordes of gory, blood-soaked zombies isn’t exactly a progressive one at first glance. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from games like Bayonetta (where you play a voluptuous witch who slaughters angels in frenetic bursts of nudity), it’s that butt-kicking females do not always equal feminism.

But as ridiculously hypersexual as Lollipop appears, there might be more to it than meets the eye. Creators Suda51 and James Gunn are well known for blending over-the-top style with genuinely interesting substance. Suda’s first major game success Killer7 was a relative simple first-person shooter where you battled exploding zombies, but under its slick surface was an incredibly complex and esoteric psychological and political thriller. Similarly, James Gunn is responsible for horror films such as Slither and the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake which are unexpectedly deep despite their campy premises. Story-wise, Lollipop could very well have more in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer than with Bayonetta.

In terms of gameplay, Lollipop is a lot of fun. The controls are graceful and effortless, and dispatched zombies dissipate with a satisfying “pop.” Battles make use of a combination of button-mashing, strategy, and quick time events, all saturated with a sly sense of goofy humor.

Though its visuals might scare away discerning gamers, Lollipop definitely seems like a game to look forward to. Expect it to slash its way on to the PS3 and Xbox 360 sometime next year.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to fix things! Like one time, my TV broke, so I messed with the wiring a little bit, and now it’s a fully functional microwave oven! So I’m sure that with these three simple methods, we can get the economy up and running again in no time at all!

1. Bake Sale

We owe a lot of people a lot of money, you guys! I don’t know why all the other countries even still hang out with us, we owe them so much money. And at this point it sort of looks like we’re not ever going to have enough money to pay them back. Not in a million billion years.

So I think the only reasonable solution is to pay them with something else. And everyone likes lemon squares! I bet that if we all get together and work really hard, we can make enough lemon squares to completely eliminate our debt.

The only problem with this plan is that we’re going to need a lot of vegetable oil to bake the amount of lemon squares we need. So we’re definitely going to have to drill a lot of oil.

The only qualification you'll ever need.

From vegetables! Because that’s where vegetable oil come from!

Also Alaska.

2. Puppies

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Chicken, we can’t pay off our debt to China by giving them puppies!” You’re right, and I’m not going to make that joke because it’s kind of racist. Shame on you for thinking of it.

No, I think that we should give puppies to people here, in America. I bet that if people brought puppies with them to job interviews, they’d be way more likely to get hired. Who’s going to turn down someone holding an adorable puppy? You might even want to attach your resume to a puppy. That’s what I call job creation!

3. Magic

Let’s face it, guys. If we’re ever going to eliminate all of our economic woes, we’ll definitely need to elect a wizard president at some point.

Our current political climate would turn completely upside-down if a wizard ever ran for president. The other candidates would be like, “We should raise taxes,” or “We should lower taxes,” or whatever. And then the wizard would be like, “I have magic. I will fix our problems using magic.” Boom. Landslide victory.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that magic would be incredibly useful for our economy right now. I’m not talking about turning lead into gold. That would both drive down the value of gold and deplete our vital lead resources. No, I’m talking about putting on a magic show! That would probably make us even more money than the bake sale!

I actually don’t mind Rebecca Black! I thought her video was funny, and her song was really catchy, and she’s actually not even that bad at singing when she doesn’t have a metric ton of autotune filters applied to her voice.

I don’t even get the whole “death threats” thing. Not that it makes any sort of sense to threaten to murder a 14-year-old girl because she appeared in an annoying Youtube video that you voluntarily watched, but like, really? Who even has that kind of time?

And it’s not like she’s the first celebrity to become famous simply for being terrible. Paris Hilton and the Kardashians practically have the monopoly on terrible-famousness, and they didn’t even need any sort of viral video to… oh. Wait. Okay, bad examples.

Courtney Stodden! That’s a better example. She’s that 16-year-old who married 51-year-old Lost actor Doug Hutchison. They became famous simply for being probably a terrible idea, and now they’re getting their own dang reality show!

“Know what we should make?” someone said. “A reality show about terrifying monsters. Another one.”

But back to Rebecca Black. She is still really famous, you guys. And it’s not like she’s the first celebrity to become famous via the Internet (lest we forget that Justin Bieber started out as just another person singing into a camera on Youtube). But Rebecca Black became an incredibly successful pop star and even guest starred in a Katy Perry video, all simply because she did something slightly embarrassing.

She’s even almost sort of made the transition from lame to not-lame. Her newest music video is actually fairly bland and normal. And it has less than 600,000 dislikes? So that’s something?

Black’s reputation precedes her. Even though she totally seems like a perfectly pleasant girl, her career is one that thrives on hate. Or more specifically, “haters.” Or “haterz,” if you’re one of those preteens who sends all of those “text messages” that I hear so much about. She’s famous because people dislike her. Personally, I’m just not even going to try to wrap my head around that concept and what it says about us as a culture. I’m just gonna enjoy it while it lasts.

Last night, Moose and I watched Johnny Mnemonic. I said that it was a clumsily executed but ultimately prophetic portrait of the future of technology, and Moose said that Keanu Reeves isn’t a very good actor. I think that we’re both right!

Shouldn’t that woman already know what the Internet is? How come she looks so confused by Keanyu’s cyberhelmet? That is the only logical flaw I can find in that scene.

From what I’ve been able to gather, the Internet lives in something called “cyberspace.” Cyberspace is a virtual place full of wolf plushies who ride hoverboards (although technically the correct terms are “cyberboards” and “cyberplushies”). This is something I learned from the TV show CSI, which I think stands for “Cyber Squad Internet.”

When you’re exploring cyberspace, it’s really important to be careful of hackers. Hackers can infect your computer with a virus! Fortunately, it’s easy to tell when your computer has a virus, because your screen gets replaced with a picture of a skull.

Always remember, skull = virus. The crossbones are optional.

The best way to avoid a hacker is to fly away on your cyberboard (preferably through some sort of 3-D maze). You have to be very fast, though, because all hackers wear rollerblades all of the time.

The tropes and conventions of horror movies have changed, a concept that the recently released Scream 4 beat us over the head with ever so subtly. Virgins can die! The expected is the new reversal, or something! What it all adds up to is that if you only stick to the “rules” in Scream 1, you’re gonna die pretty fast.

As a lover of all things that go bump in the night (Where did this expression even come from? It sounds sort of dirty.), I’m a qualified expert on surviving horror movies. So if you do find yourself being chased by a crazed slasher or some sort of aquatic animal hybrid, here are just a few tips to make sure you stay alive.

1. Be a Child

I really can’t stress this one enough. With only a few rare exceptions (mostly zombie movies and the like), children in horror movies have a positively massive survival rate. It’s the whole innocence thing, naturally. Children are the new virgins. Goodness, I regretted that sentence before I even started typing it.

Your chances are even better if, in addition to being a child, you’re also the one doing the killing. This is mostly because you’re probably already a ghost.

This is the face of a killer (assuming that he is also a ghost).

2. Stay Away from Bathroom Mirrors

It happens in just about every horror movie you’ve seen. Someone closes their medicine cabinet, when suddenly oh man scary monster standing behind you. At best, the monster/killer/ghost/Sharktopus won’t be there when you turn around. At worst, you get horribly murdered.

Wait, scratch that. The absolute worst case scenario is that it’s actually just your spouse accompanied with a scary noise. Because fake scares are the worst, and your spouse needs to stop sneaking up on you when there are Sharktopi in the area.

3. Don’t Be In the Sequel

Unless you’re a big name, your survivability will dwindle the longer you stick around in your particular horror franchise. Even then, there’s no guarantee that you’re safe. The Grudge, Hostel, and Saw movies all killed off main characters, some within a single sequel.

It’s a sad truth that as actors get older, they tend to become more… “disposable.” It’s usually a good idea to make your exit before you wear out your welcome. So as a general rule, don’t move back to your hometown where all your friends got killed. It never ends well.

Anyone else have some good survival tips?