Great Moments In Procrastination History

The Seventh Day: God slips into a twenty-four hour depression nap after forgetting to create unicorns. He’s never quite as productive as he was before the self-described debacle. Biblical historians refer to horses as “God’s Pinkerton.”

50,000 BC: Throg, an early homo sapien, takes frequent breaks from inventing fire to see if any of his friends have painted on his cave wall.

1700 BC: Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylon has trouble finishing “Hammurabi’s Code,” one of the world’s first codified systems of legal regulations. Ironically, his attention drifts to a public theatrical performance called “The Law and Order Marathon.”

1180 BC: Odysseus’s attempts to return home from the Trojan War are stalled by repeated pop-up quests and dangers, making his odyssey (as described by Homer) the original “epic fail.”

421 BC: Socrates gets really high and begins responding to fellow philosophers’ questions with an endless string of questions of his own. His students Plato and Xenophon refer to this as “Pulling a Socrates.” Historians kindly rename his habit “The Socratic Method.”

214 BC: Hannibal halts his trek over the Pyrenees Mountains during the Second Punic War to humorously caption sketches of his war elephants. The results were compiled in a long-lost folio rumored to be titled “LOL-ephants.”

36 AD: Jesus of Nazareth spends three days in a cave depressed over reader comments on the Old Testament. He emerges to issue the simple declaration “Haters gonna hate.”

1066 AD: William the Conqueror puts off his attack at the Battle of Hastings by ordering his soldiers to kick each other in the balls over and over for his entertainment.

1348 AD: Years of scholarship and invention postponed when the Black Death “goes viral.”

1403 AD: Production of Ming Vases slowed down an immeasurable amount by The Yongle Emperor’s tendency to stand behind the artisan and attempt to assist the pottery-making while singing “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers in an ear-splitting falsetto.

1492 AD: In search of India, Christopher Columbus accidentally leads his fleet to the Caribbean. Columbus’s only words offered in his defense are: “I could have sworn there was a Chick-Fil-A somewhere around here.”

1619 AD: In his free time, Galileo Galilei “edits” encyclopedia pages to read “Heliocentrism Rulz! Geocentrism Droolz!” Moderators from the Catholic Church arrest and imprison Galileo as a heretic.

1775 AD: For fun, Thomas “T. Paine” Paine croons long passages of his first draft of pamphlet “Common Sense” in what he refers to as a “funk-tending robotical intonation.” Many consider Paine to be the father of modern Autotune.

1776 AD: John Hancock signs his name in enormous letters to take up extra space on the Declaration of Independence after putting off ratifying it until the last minute. Rumor has it, the font Courier New is based on Hancock’s handwriting.

1897 AD: Marie Curie sidetracked during her research on new element “polonium” while reading the recent edition of popular pamphlet “Telegraphs From Last Night.”

1908 AD: Pablo Picasso, in the midst of his Rose Period, throws down a painting of a pink-clad acrobat in disgust. While attempting to masturbate to a distorted, crumpled up photograph of a former lover, he accidentally invents Cubism.

2005 AD: YouTube is invented, basically ending most productivity forever.

2011 AD: Progress on deficit reduction and universal healthcare forestalled by politicians spending the bulk of their time tweeting pictures of their genitals or criticizing one another for tweeting pictures of their genitals.