Már Másson Maack 5/28/19 Már Másson Maack 5/28/19

Garbage, at your disposal

An issue of TNW’s newsletter, Big Spam

Hey spammin’ fam, Már is back.

Here’s a disgusting pic of my sink:

When I was a kid I was fascinated by a mysterious fictional piece of tech: garbage disposals.

There was a particularly terrifying Treehouse of Horrors episode of The Simpsons I used to obsess over. A pushy sales robot sells Marge an ‘Ultrahouse 3000’ to smartify their home.

The upgraded house had tons of amazing features, like a fully-automated kitchen where the dining room table would clean itself. It did so by raising each half, so the leftover food would slide down into a hole in the middle of the table, where it was received by whirling blades that chopped it up and disposed of it.

Eventually the home’s HAL 9000-like persona, voiced by Pierce Brosnan (that’s freaking James Bond!), tries to kill Homer by dumping him into the garbage disposal — awesome.

As a kid I kept thinking how rad The Simpsons were and how no other show could come close to its brilliance. Not only was it HILARIOUS, but also came up with awesome sci-fi stuff on top of that.

But then something weird happened. I started to notice these sci-fi ‘garbage disposal’ things cropping up in other TV shows.

It ranged from casual scenes where a character would flip a switch near the sink, but instead of a light being turned on, there was a soft grinding noise — to more serious horror like in NBC’s Heroes (remember that? HIRO! amirite?) where the indestructible cheerleader shoves her hand down a garbage disposal.

The thing is, growing up outside the US while fanatically watching American television, there were tons of things I had to piece together on my own. What’s the difference between East Coast and West Coast? So a ‘harvard’ is stuff for smart people? How long is a ‘block’ and which one is Jenny from?

So in the end, I came to the conclusion that ‘garbage disposals’ must be real in America, although I had never seen it in any country I had ever visited and no matter how weird they seemed. (BTW according to the fascinating Wikipedia page on garbage disposals, they basically only exist in the US, with the only other adoption being 6% of homes in the UK and mere 3% in Canada — so young Már wasn't that stupid).

Now... in the time it took me to write up this Big Spam, could I theoretically have cleaned my sink? Well, let me tell you what. Shut your stupid face.

Despite not having seen a real-life garbage disposal to this day, I’m still clinging to the vague hope that somehow one will magically show up in my sink — cuz I ain’t cleaning it.

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🎁 A gift for you.

Tweet of the day

Pretty ugly poll

Yesterday we asked you to choose between W λ R-1Ø and W λLΨ 1-61. 53.8% you chose W λLΨ 1-61.

Today, garbage disposals?

● YAY!

● NAY!

● Mommy my fingers are gone

We'll leave you with this...

Love you, mean it,

TNW Editorial

Már Másson Maack 5/28/19 Már Másson Maack 5/28/19

hot cousins near you

An issue of TNW’s newsletter, Big Spam

Sup spammin’ fam, Már is back to brighten your day. Today’s topic: incest.

Now, like most of you, I haven’t been able to go to parties in the last few months. Of course that sucks, but I’ve found there's a fortunate by-product of not being able to meet new people over drinks. I no longer get the question “isn’t it true that you have an app to stop you from fucking your cousin?”

Wait, what?

Lemme explain. I’m from Iceland and whenever I tell people that, I get the usual fawning "OMG I’ve always wanted to go" or "I visited last year AND IT WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE ON EARTH AND I WANNA POKE MY EYES OUT BECAUSE THEY'LL NEVER WITNESS SUCH BEAUTY AGAIN" — you know, the usual.

But there’s also one myth that almost every single person I’ve met seems to believe:

“You guys, have like, a dating app that checks whether you’re too related to date, right? You know, cuz all the incest.”

False.

Back in 2013 (seven years ago!), some jokesters at the Icelandic ‘Sad Engineer Studios’ created a feature to test out smartphones’ ‘bump’ function for a genealogy app. They jokingly named it Sifjaspellsspillirinn (gotta love the Icelandic language), or the ‘Incest Desistor/Disruptor’ where you’d ‘bump phones, before you bump uglies.’

The world media absolutely LOVED this story — LOL these sheep farmers on the edge of the world have an app to keep them from fucking their cousins — and threw out headlines such as “Some Icelanders Are Accidentally Dating a Relative and Now There’s an App for That,” “Kissing cousins? Icelandic app warns if your date is a relative,” and the BBC even doing a special video segment titled “Icelandic phone app stops you dating close relatives.”

But let me be clear, I’ve never met an Icelandic person using a ‘cousin dating app’ or the ‘bump uglies’ feature, ever. You hear that, BBC?!

*These are the nerds responsible for me having to answers questions about incest at every single party.*

...but if I’m being completely honest, the reason why this myth is still being brought up in random parties, seven years after its inception, is because it’s also kinda true.

In Iceland, we have incredibly detailed genealogy records going back to basically the first settlers in 874. Those records have also been digitized and *sigh* it’s also now an app called Íslendingabók, a.k.a. ‘The Book of Icelanders.’

You can look up any other Icelander in the app, and get a detailed outline of how exactly you’re related — and most of us Icelanders are.

We aren’t that related though, and it's a small country so we know who's supposed to be on our no-no list for dating (although we only draw the line at 3rd cousins, rest is our sexual playground).

So when Icelanders throw big festivals, odds might only be 1/1000 that you might hook up with your cousin. But as Hafsteinn Einarsson with the University of Iceland’s Social Science Research Institute put it: “Although the odds are small for an individual, the odds 1/1000 mean that such incidents can occur regularly in society. People simply have sex that often.”

In conclusion, technically you could use the genealogy app to check if you’re dating your cousin (my girlfriend and I are 7th/8th cousins), but it’s not made for that. However, that’s a much more boring story for the outside world.

Anyways, at least you’ve now got a fresh and boring new anecdote on Icelandic incest tech which you can whip out at your next party (which I guess will be in 2021?). You’re welcome.