The last few days I've seen the term "gun culture" thrown around and it bugged me. I've figured out why it bugs me. The term "gun culture" is equivalent to the term "gay agenda." Really. Both are used by the ignorant and fearful to demonize that which they seem unable to comprehend. Both signal to me that the person using the term doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

And if the title of this post made your head explode, perhaps you shouldn't look here or it's likely to happen all over again.

Current Mood: annoyed

Animals such as dogs, cats, and horses, that look like the they're walking on their toes, because they are, are digitigrade and can be said to have digitigrade feet. Getting that look is sometimes desired when building a fursuit, and I don't have any real problem with that. There are at least a couple ways of getting the look.

What bugs me is all the folks who either ask for help and advice or show their versions in fursuit communities who don't manage to spell the word. Very often I see "digigrade" or even worse variations and it grates. At least some are likely just typos, but when the misspelling occurs repeatedly, I wonder if that person shouldn't do any work on the design until they can get the spelling right.

Current Mood: irritated

Most Sundays jmaynard and I go out for breakfast and one fellow who works at the restaurant takes his family to Disney World every year This morning I just happened to ask him, "What's up, Doc?" and he pointed out that was a Warner Bros. thing and he was more a Disney type. Thinking the incident over a bit, a question came to me: Is there any popular phrase that makes Disney or a Disney character immediately come to mind?

For Warner Brothers there are a few phrases: "What's up, Doc?" "Th-th-that's all, folks!" "Of course you know, this means war." and even "I tawt I taw a puddy-tat. I did. I did taw a puddy-tat!"

But all I can think of for Disney are musical items such as, "When You Wish Upon A Star" or the derogatory usage of Mickey Mouse to describe a (I am trying not to say 'goofy') screwy system.

Am I overlooking something? Is there some character quotation that is fairly common that instantly brings a Disney character to mind?

Current Mood: curious

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 had a few related experiences, or one repeated experience, recently that showed that Jay and the Hercules project have been an influence. I've heard of the IBM 360 and OS/360 and 370 and 390 and other IBM mainframe things. I am also not a gamer, and that is also significant.

In last couple weeks I've seen a few people say they have a 360 or are using a 360. And for a bit I was wondering about these people using old IBM mainframes or such. Until a little more context made it plain they weren't talking about a real 360, nor even emulated one, nor OS/360, just an xbox. Had they said xbox, there would not have been any confusion.

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Current Mood: calm

I just made (and quickly corrected) a typo that might be useful as a word. When someone attempts to make a joke and while it's not complete crud, it's still only semi-amusing and not really laugh-worthy and they might even feel a need to ask if you got it because you didn't react? That's a subjest.

"Didn't you catch that?"
"Yes, I did."
"And?"
"And it was only a subjest."

Current Mood: okay

Snippet of actual lyrics:

When Katharine Hepburn speaks her part,
And gives out high dramatic art,

The lyrics are sung just fast enough that words can seem to run together. But I just can't picture Hepburn giving out "hydramatic art."

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Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Popcorn Sack - Spike Jones and His City Slickers

"The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways.
The following sentence contains them all: A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."

But I must be missing something or not speaking in the required dialect. I only count eight different pronunciations:

1. rough - uff
2. dough - oh
3. thought - aw
4. plough - ow
5. through - oo
6. Scarborough -ah/uh
7. slough - oo (uff?)
8. cough - off
9. hiccough - up

So, what am I missing, or is the quoted text wrong? For the record my dialect would be either (Northern) Midwest or maybe Great Lakes if that is at all helpful in this.

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Current Mood: curious

One peeve some have is about color descriptions. "It was orange in color." is redundant since orange is clearly the color and "It was orange" conveys the same information. I just noticed a situation where the "..in color" line makes sense. While for most colors it is redundant there are some where it conveys necessary information. "The brick was gold in color." has a different meaning than "The brick was gold." The same applies to silver. Color names that are also material names need to be distinguished between mere color and actual material - at least in some cases. If the item described is clearly not the material ("The sunbather's skin was bronze."), then the argument against redundancy returns.

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Current Mood: relaxed

I saw The Potion Maker in a post of gothkat's. After tossing in my LJ username and not thinking much of the result, I decided to play with it. Since it adds -ium to everything fed it, I fed it: uran-, rad-, and zircon- and got some rather silly results. When this was mentioned on IRC, kinkyturtle fed it prem- and stad-. More fun can be had with the silly reactions by mixing something with itself.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Uranium - The Commodores

Preface: I don't expect everyone to agree with the Vice President, but I would at least hope they'd disagree with him in an informed manner.

Saturday morning, listening to NPR, I heard the full quotation of something Vice President Cheney said, rather than the partial quotation I'd seen cited for a few days.

What AP reported, and has been widely repeated:

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.

What Vice President Cheney said:

Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us.

The official transcript is here.

Whether or not you agree with Cheney, the reported and then re-told statement is not the one he made. The statement is just vague enough, due to the nature of the English language, to be easily misinterpreted twisted. I'm looking at this from a programming point of view, and it's a bug. It's a bad IF-THEN, really.

What was said didn't have an explicit THEN, and people put one where it was politically or emotionally convenient for them:

IF Kerry is elected THEN there will be a terrorist attack...
Here the THEN is placed by those who would accuse Cheney of saying terrible things, no matter how terrible.

Changing the position of the THEN, and adding a needed conjunction, yields a different result:

IF Kerry is elected AND there is another terrorist attack THEN it will be handled as criminal investigation.
There's quite a difference.

The first version has Cheney make a silly claim, that a Kerry win will lead directly to an attack. The second version only makes a claim that Kerry will treat an attack in a different manner. Since the AND and the THEN were implicit, the statement could too easily be taken (or given!) as something other than intended.

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A while ago I posted a bit on how there are different perceptions of some words than what there really ought to be. Now rillifane has pointed out this article which sums up the differing attitude about the name cowboy far more effectively than I did. The bit about the perception of frontier is also worth noting. Of course, the really important message isn't about a couple words. It's about an attitude.

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Current Mood: positive

Someone had a list of questions phrased to make somewhat common things seem rather silly. But the it's just the phrasing that does it. A little thought about how things probably actually happened defuses the phrases. It spoils the joke, but sometimes a right answer is more useful than a moment of alleged humor. So from time to time I'll post something in this series. I'll start off with a common one:

Q: Why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?

A: This is a case of definitions mixing. While people do park on driveways, they do have to drive on to and off of them. The driveway is what is driven on to the garage, if a person has one and keeps their car there.

A parkway, as originally meant, is a way through a park. Parking a vehicle was not part of the original definition. As an example there is Theodore Wirth Parkway in the Twin Cities. It winds through Theodore Wirth Park.

While I'm at it, I may as well take care of another one before it starts bugging me too much:

Q: Why do toasters always have a setting that burns the toast to a horrible crisp, which no decent human being would eat?

A: The existence of indecent human beings. Well, maybe not quite. How about unreasonable people?

The char setting of the range is for the same reason that toasters have a setting lighter than almost anyone would really want to use. It's a classic user interface problem, really. If you were in the business of building toasters you wouldn't know what setting every person wants and if you decide for people, you will almost always be wrong. So instead of having no settings, or even a few settings, a range is provided.

So far so good. But the question is, "Why such a large range that includes those silly choices?" A narrow range would probably not be enough for some people and they'd be complaining about how they want their toast "just a little lighter" or "just a little darker" and how the manufacturer is being unreasonable for not allowing that. So instead, the range is made excessive. This quietly demonstrates that the manufacturer isn't limiting your choices. Want dark toast? Well, you can set it all the way to "carbonized bread" if you really want to.

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The ispell spell check utility, at least the version I have, doesn't recognize "bimbo" as a word. The very first thing it suggests instead is, "Bilbo." The only other suggestion is "limbo."

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Current Mood: not *that* nerdy

Yesterday's post asked which did not belong:

                    _______
                   |   |   |
                   | 1 | 2 |
                   |___|___|
                   |   |   |
                   | 3 | 4 |
                   |___|___|

And I admitted that there was likely more than one answer.

First, it's not the box, boxes, a line, or lines. Those are simply the closest I could easily manage with text to show the divided-into-fourths picture.

I had not thought of the number of pen-strokes needed to write the characters, which would result in 4 being the oddball. But as the comments show, that is not a sure thing.

I had thought of the factorability argument: Only 4 can be factored into primes that do not include itself. That may seem a bit weaselly, but it does avoid the argument over if 1 is considered or defined to be prime.

Strangely, I hadn't thought of the sequence 1, 2, 4 with each being double the previous digit, thus making 3 the oddball.

I have to admit to a bit of obfuscation, as I listed the numbers as 1, 2, 3, and 4 rather than as one, two, three, and four. Granted, the same arguments for distinction would apply. But perhaps a linguistic idea rather than a mathematical idea would be a bit more likely.

As I had originally thought of this, the unique number was three. Why? Because the names of other numbers have homonyms, at least in english. One has won. Two has to and too. Four has for and fore. But three is just three. Not that this answer is any more valid than the others.

Current Mood: okay

http://www.chuckchamblee.com/dom/fun/yankee_dixie_quiz.htm (javascript required, bah) uses the Harvard Computer Society Dialect Survey to rate how Northern or Southern you are, or at least how your speech is. I got "34% (Yankee). A definitive Yankee" where the percentage is a rating of southernness.

My individual results tended to either be common throughout the U.S. or more common in the (western) Great Lakes region, which is no surprise.

Current Mood: satisfied

Whenever Wisconsin is in the news I notice that some people, who are generally well spoken and seem not to have some odd accent, are hard to take seriously. There is no 'e' in Wisconsin, so hearing someone say "Wesconsin" is a bit jarring to someone used to hearing the name pronounced properly.

One of the items I received for Christmas is daily desk calendar with stupid or at least curious quotations for each day. Today's item is actually three. Three menu items from Asian restaurants, supposedly.

Non-agricultural chemical Rice & Brown Rice

Seems to be a bit too much detail in the translation. Seems like it should be "Organic rice."

Shrimps in Spit

This one is a puzzle.

Bacon and Germs

Well, germ can mean something other than bacteria. Like the germ of an idea, a beginning. Say, the beginning of a bird perhaps. Thus, "Bacon and Eggs"

Probably all fine dishes, but I'm not sure I could bring myself to order the shrimp.

Via bronxelf:

( Words for things. )

There's a cartoon where two mice, Hubie and Bertie, have eaten so much cheese they can't stand any more and decide that there's nothing more to live for and so go find a cat to end their lives. But the cat is suspicious of mice that want to be eaten and so refuses to eat them. The dog sees the result and tries to figure things out. The mice hate cheese. The mice want to be eaten. The cat refuse to eat the mice. And the cat, I think I recall, even wants the dog to attack. As the dog puts it, "It just don't add up!"

There are a couple interesting things. One is that I said the dog tries to figure things out. The other is the dog's comment. Both treat a situation as being something that can be analyzed numerically. Listening to the radio on the drive back to work this noon I heard someone use the line "It doesn't compute." without being at all a reference to actual, or even fictional, computing. This is seems an updated version of "It doesn't add up." I wonder, how common is the compute version now that computers are ubiquitous and is the add up version fading as people no longer do much addition themselves?

Current Mood: contemplative