The Official Uppity Handbook — A Man-Up Manual for Smart Alecks

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Oneupmanship—The Money Game.

By Timothy Cataldo

It's easy to talk, innit? Doesn't cost anything either. And the amount of work you don't have to do is a beautiful thing! Seriously, have you wasted your life?

Prompted by the innocent-enough text (above) from our good buddy JP, we've decided to challenge ourselves this year to stop squawking about how intrinsically unredemptive and mind-numbing video games are, for just one example, and actually do something worthy of our own imagination and admiration to, um... stem the tide of decline in the west.

Comments | I want to read all about it... >

Brain surgery is not...rocket science.

By Dr. David Oliver-Smith

(To start off parenthetically with an aside, brain surgery is not rocket science. That doesn't mean it's a piece of cake, but it's not like you're trying to send someone to the dark side of the moon and back or anything.)

First thing you're going to need is a patient. Preferably one with a brain tumor. If you can't find one with an actual tumor, find someone you don't like, or who's dumb anyway in case something goes wrong. As an aikido teacher I read about once very succinctly put it: sometimes you have to waste a guy to restore harmony to the situation.

Comments | Read on... >

Call me Mr. Halligan.

By Johnny Mustard

It's a recurring dream: I'm enjoying breakfast in the sky, with a 360 degree panorama of the earth below me. I think I can even see it rotating slightly, slowly. The blue is azure, the sun's blinging. It's quiet while I shovel a couple of delicious croissants in. The stewardess asks me if I'd like more coffee. I say yes, and then she proceeds to pour it into my lap. By accident — the plane has been hit by a missile it feels like. Or maybe a bomb blew up on board. I can't tell, because there's shattered glass flying all over the place and I can't hear anything. Then I wake up.

Comments | I'd like to read the rest, please... >

Pardon my French.

By Monsieur Write

If you really think about it, there are only three words you need to know in French: bonjour, croissant, and... surrender. Just kidding. I was having dinner with a friend recently and his father, the caricature crazy Frenchman from Woonsocket (RI) happened to be in town for dinner. The "Colonel" told me, once he found out I had lived in Paris, that a man couldn't consider himself civilized unless he spoke French, which sounded a bit ironic in that accent of his. Or maybe he said "sophisticated", which would make it even ironicer.

Even though the conversation was mostly a hilarious, hyphentated-adjective-filled diatribe against a mutual acquaintance, it got me thinking about what you need to know, if you don't actually speak the language, to sound like you do at the next croquet/cocktail party you're invited to. And I'm not going to waste my time with the simple stuff like soupcon, decolletage or je ne sais quoi— if you don't know those already then don't bother reading any further.

Comments | Encore, s'il vous plait... >

Well-Versed.

By Mr. Write

There's a lot of "recalcitrance" in poetry, but try to find something that rhymes with it! Seriously, we feel like we're trying to live poetically in a certain sense over here, and we're surrounded by it everyday, but most of the time we're just 'getting and spending' and miss it.

Comments | These three poems shouldn't be missed... >

Tie one on.

By Mr. Write

Sure, we know it's historically anti-establishment to not wear a tie, and we are a t-shirt company for crying out loud, but we think it's kind of smartsy and cool to sport one every once in a while. For effect, of course.

Comments | Here's how to tie a couple of cravats correctly... >

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Our Most Popular Articles.

Brain surgery... it's not rocket science.

Call me Mr. Halligan.

Pardon my French.

Well-Versed — 3 "Uppity" Poems.

How to tie your tie right.

Seven Bullet Points of Highly-Effective People.

Hollywood Called.

Out of the blue a young hotshot player from Harvard rang us up and said he wanted to produce our feature-film script Absinthe Man, and you'd think we'd be jumping for joy. But we're not, not yet anyhow.

Find out why.

Top This Toponym.

We believe that words can still startle and sparkle, and have created a couple of fun brain brush-ups for you to show us how much you love them too.

The first challenge is to come up with a contemporary word derived from a place, such as Shanghai (abduct by force, from Shanghai, China), Paisley (design, from Paisley, Scotland) or Timbuktu (metaphor for a distant land, from Timbuktu, city on the Niger River in Mali), along with a definition. We're looking for originality and humor.

Our attempt:

Chicago — to railroad (someone) INTO office.

Read all the excellent entries...

State (your name).

While we're thinking about it, this contest is kind of topical too. We're trying to rebrand our state "Connetiquette" — with success, of sorts. If you were to give yours a new name, what would you come up with?

Check out the best of the cleverest here.

Brain Up!

Why don't you test your mental mettle on some of the other clever trivia(l) games we have at Brain Up! — including the perennial favorite hair-puller "Einstein's Fish"?

Quick. Fun. Canny.

The ONE UP! CUP 2012 is a yearlong contest (with prizes every month) we invented to see who has the most cerebellum soup in the bowl, so-to-speak. Check out the challenge for February.

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