Nucular

Current Mood: mischievious

Whatever you might think of McCain's VP selection, certain things just shouldn't be taken too seriously. The Sarah Palin Facts site, for instance.

Current Mood: amused

Reality can be a mighty strange place. Or people can be mighty silly. Or the one leads to the other.

There is, or at least was, a group calling itself "Recreate '68" pushing an antiwar agenda. What amuses me is that they scheduled things around the Democrat's Convention in Denver. Luckily for Denver, the 1968 Democrat's Convention was not re-created. But don't they realize what else happened in 1968? Humphrey lost.

Current Mood: amused

I've only been to county fairs, never to any state fairs. Thus I have not been to the Minnesota State Fair. I do know that food on a stick is common, and that Minnesota takes it quite a ways (hotdish on stick?). So when there is to be an anthology of murder mysteries set at the Minnesota State Fair, there could be only one name for it: Murder on a Stick.

Current Mood: amused

Poll #2241
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Just how drunk is a skunk?

Current Mood: silly

From a comment on a post (not mine) on novelty tunes:

Recently heard someone from Fermilab sing this:

“Do your particles lose their flavor in the chamber overnight?"
"Do they enter with a left hand spin and exit with a right?"

Current Mood: amused

Sure, I've seen the foods list. It had a few drinks in it as well. But that's just two phases of matter, solid and liquid. This will help to complete the set. This is not a list of things you should try. There are some gases that are very much not recommended.

( Did you get wind of it? )

Current Mood: mischievous

Poll #2190
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

If Vakkotaur had a twin...

Current Mood: mischievous

From Fark commentary:



<Tweety>Aw, did we bweak their widdle bwains?</Tweety>

Current Mood: amused

I don't know whether to be depressed or amused. There is a group calling itself "Accountable America" targeting Republican donors with threatening letters in an attempt to limit donations to 527 type organizations. Well, not only has it been exposed for what it is, IowaHawk has given them a good sending up with the letter he supposedly received from them, This is Your FINAL WARNING.

Current Mood: uncomfortable

If you see me at Anthrocon...

DO consult your physician. I am not there.

DON'T adjust your medication yourself. You are already hallucinating.

Current Mood: mischievous

Somewhere recently I read or at least skimmed a quick book review by someone who mentioned a sex scene that was skipped over, "another threesome fantasy.. skip" or close to that. That reminded me of something that happened in college. It was just a conversation, so don't get your hopes up - or down. There was a woman in many of my classes and labs, Kelly. She was either the only one or one of very few, and so she got some attention. She handled it and herself quite well and summed it up as "Really, I'm just one of the guys."

I don't think it was her boyfriend, but more likely someone who wished to be her boyfriend who was pestering her one day about the idea of a threesome. He figured it would be a very cool thing and she was thoroughly put off by the idea. This went on for a while, and it was getting to be distracting and not in a good way. I realized I had been handed the equivalent of a good straight line and it was time for a punch line.

"Kelly," I said, "I think you're looking at it wrong. I expect you'd really like it, but you'd have to set one condition." This got the attention of both of them. The guy was still far too hopeful and Kelly was suspicious but curious. She or they asked about the condition. I replied, "Simple, you get to pick who the other guy is." Kelly lit up with a huge grin, and the guy's mood turned from eagerness to disgust. In an instant, they had traded attitudes.

I was still distracted for a while, but now I was giggling. I was not alone in that.

Current Mood: mischievous

Parts of the southeast US are going through drought conditions. Some politicians in Georgia are claiming that the Georgia-Tennessee border isn't where people think it is, and if it were set right they'd get a bit more water. Chattanooga has responded with humor as is shown in this article. Chattanooga is sending a truck of bottled water to Atlanta and a proclamation about it. The proclamation is worth reading.

( The Proclamation )

Current Mood: amused

Source.

On flurries...

Flurries? Are they the weirdos that wear snowman suits and go to snow cons pretending to be all manner of snow and ice? I hear they have sex in those suits.. "Slurpee" or something like that. XD

Current Mood: amused

A locked post I read told a version of the "Aristocrats" joke. The only thing it did for me was explain the occasional posting of just "The Aristocrats!" in some thread or other. If you are not familiar, the alleged joke involves a talent agent, some act (generally a family) that is rude, lewd, and just plain appalling (scatological, incestuous, etc.) and at the end the rather shocked talent agent gets enough composure to ask the name of the act or, "What do you call yourselves?" only to be told, "The Aristocrats!" Alternate versions might have "The Sophisticates!" or similar names. The idea, it seems, is that the humor is in the incongruity of the name with the act. Supposedly this is also "the dirtiest joke ever told" and gets worse with each telling as people try to one-up each other on the vulgarity. Note that. The vulgarity increases. The humor, if any, does not. It's the same incongruity. The shock might increase, but after a while it hardly matters. More excrement or more incestuous acts doesn't do anything for the humor.

The person who posted this joke was a bit surprised by the negative reaction it got. It wasn't seen as funny, but just as crude. I suspect this falls into the "So crude it's funny" trap. There are funny jokes that happen to be crude. Much like there are funny jokes that happen to be stupid. The mistake is in thinking the the crudeness or the stupidity are what makes things funny. Those are just along for the ride.

I've often heard the line that something is "so stupid it's funny" and found the result was not funny, merely very stupid. Here I have a similar reaction. The idea might be "so crude it's funny" but all I get is that it's very crude. Many jokes depend on having some less than perfect aspect aspect to them. This is why self-deprecating humor works so well: you don't have to concern yourself about who is the butt of the joke. Rodney Dangerfield had this down. For that matter, so did Jack Benny though it might not have seemed obvious at the time.

While censorship is an ugly thing, some restraint can be a good thing. Some limits require a person to think about how to get a point across or do a joke without using cusswords and crudity as a comedic crutch. When my sister and I were much younger and living our folks, there was some show on the history of comedy. It had tantalizing clips of folks like Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and Burns and Allen. And also, I expect, Rodney Dangerfield and up through the folks who were in or had just had been in Saturday Night Live. After the show, Pa remarked on something. My sister and I had been lying on the floor as we watched and he was also watching us. We laughed almost uncontrollable at the early comedians, and didn't laugh much if at all for the more recent ones. It's not that we didn't get the jokes. It was that the jokes just weren't very funny. They were, as I have dubbed such things, subjests. They live in the comedic state of Almost. And Almost Funny... isn't funny.

Yes, shock can work. But not if you're desensitized to it from nearly continual exposure. Shock only works when it actually is shocking. "Not worth a tinker's damn" comes to mind. It's nothing unusual for the tinker to cuss. He's always cussing anyway. No shock. But if something happens and someone not known for cussing, the Pope perhaps, cuts loose with an expletive...that's shock that would work - once. It works by the sheer rarity and unexpectedness of it. Repeating it lowers the value, and fast. And even then the shock, by itself, is not necessarily funny.

I don't know how old this joke is, but the lesson in it holds true.

There was a flood. A man managed to make it to his roof which was above the floodwaters - for now. Someone came by in a small motorboat that had somehow managed not to be swept away and offered the man a ride to a safer place. The man refused, saying "The Lord will save me."

The rising waters were starting to reach the eves of the house when a fellow in a larger motorboat arrived and offered a ride to a safer place. Again the man refused, saying "The Lord will save me."

The water was well up the roofline when a helicopter appeared and a rescue offered. Once again the man refused, saying that "The Lord will save me." It was only minutes later that the raging flood carried the house off its foundation and crumpled it into debris, drowning the man.

At the pearly gates, the man inquired as to what had happened since surely God would have provided. "He sent two motorboats, and a helicopter. What were you waiting for?!"

My take: Divine intervention may seem appealing, but technology is far more reliable.

Dan Rowan always introduced Dick Martin on "Laugh-In Looks at the News" with the line "Here's the man to whom the news wouldn't be the news without the news-- he-e-e-ere's Dicky!"

From Jack Kelly: The mainstream, out of it:

When the Web logger Laer ("Cheat Seeking Missiles") called to cancel his 25- year subscription to the Los Angeles Times last Monday, he was made an extraordinary offer. The circulation service rep, detecting that he was fed up with the paper's liberal bias, offered to sell him the newspaper without the news sections. Laer was thunderstruck.

"How often must the beleaguered circulation department ... be dealing with calls like mine, for them to come up with a special like this?" he wrote. (On Wednesday, an LA Times exec wrote back, denying that the Times sells partial copies of the paper, but thanking Laer "for bringing this to our attention.")

I haven't settled on anything to take up for Borrowed.

Current Mood: mischievous

These are transformers.
These are also transformers.
And these are transformers, too.
So are these.
This, however, is just a toy.

Someone suggested writing a program to be readily transportable across various Windows platforms, from desktop stuff to CE. Someone else quipped, "Write once, crash anywhere."

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Blue Screens (to the tune of Blue Skies)