Atom Feed
January 3, 2008
With the Iowa caucuses, the countdown to the countdown of George Bush’s days left in office ends, and the countdown of Bush’s days left in office begins. Hooray! It’s about time!
If you don’t see the countdown timer above, it’s probably because you don’t have Flash installed. Don’t worry. The timer isn’t worth installing Flash for.
December 25, 2007
December 20, 2007
Baseline is running is list of favorite, funny tech spoof videos. Some are funny. Some just blow stuff up. And at least one does both.
December 18, 2007
This month’s limerick competition held by the Annals of Improbabl Research asks us to write a limerick illustrating the nature of the following report:
Discrimination in Vitro Between the Acoustic Emissions fromBjork-Shiley Convexo-Concave Valves With and Without a Broken Minor Strut,” Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing,D. K. Walker and L. N. Scotten, vol. 29, no. 5, September 1991, pp. 457-64. <http://tinyurl.com/2cyoqk>
I don’t have the slightest idea what that’s about, but it hasn’t stopped me from composing a limerick to explain it:
When Bjork blew her valves in a huff,
Shiley had absorbed surely enough.
He emitted a wave:
“I’m convexo-concave,
“So kindly stop strutting your stuff.”
Any sense it makes is purely coincidental — Holy crap! It sounds smutty! Totally unintentional! (Yeah, sure, Dr. Freud) — but you have to admit that it rhymes. [Tags: limericks humor bjork_shiley]
December 13, 2007
The striking writers guild (or some faction of it) has an AMPTP spoof site. I thought the logo page was especially amusing. The original is here.
(One lesson: if you’re a dot org, consider getting the dot com version of your domain as well.)
December 10, 2007
Check out the hilarious photo of a 5mb hard drive as of 1956, at Snopes….
December 6, 2007
Emma Clarke was the voice of the oddly iconic “Mind the gap” announcements in the Londone Tube. On her blog, she has spoof announcements, some of which are very funny. This may have gotten her fired; the Tube says they fired her because she said using the Tube is “dreadful,” while she claims that she said it’b be dreadful for her because she would find it creepy to hear her own voice making the announcements.
Anyway, the spoofs are funny. (Thanks to Corinna di Gennaro for the link.)
December 3, 2007
Here‘s an hilarious Amazon product listing.
(Link via Michael O’Connor Clarke.) [Tags: uranium238 humor ]
November 24, 2007
There are times when you don’t want to do something ,and you know it’s ok not to but you can’t think of an excuse.
That’s when we could really use a crowd-sourced excuse. Or an online excuse exchange. Oh, where are the Internets when you need them?!
(This arose in a conversation with Paul Hartzog.)
November 15, 2007
Yesterday, my ISP required me to choose two “security questions” from a drop-down list of dumb choices: the name of my first pet or my favorite book, movie, food, or place to visit.
Why dumb? First, these questions assume I don’t have an Evil Sibling who knows these things; the same is true, of course, of common questions such as where you were born and your mother’s maiden name.
Second, they are guessable. Type in The Bible” and “Harry Potter” as favorite book and you’ve probably covered 95% of Americans.
Third, I don’t have a favorite book, movie, food or place to visit. I don’t even have a favorite non-fiction book, sf novel or funny book. As for favorite places to visit, I had a really good time in Italy, but I also had a really good time in Leiden before that, and I don’t really know how to rank my sister’s house on Thanksgiving versus that place fifteen feet in front of the Monet water lilies in the basement of the Musée de l’Orangerie versus Heaven if the Lord is willing to overlook certain transgressions (which, by the way, are also some of my favorite places to visit).
So, here is a list of similarly dumb security questions, although they are dumb in a variety of ways:
If asked to list US states, which would you remember last?
Who is your sixth-favorite novelist?
What word does the final scene in “Madame Butterfly” bring to mind?
Where exactly did you get the most lost?
Name the teacher who had the least influence on you.
What is your preferred way of organizing items? (Note: Do not choose “alphabetically.”)
Who is your favorite child?
Guess a number from 1 to 1,000.
Elf is to wipes as happenstance is to ______.
if your house were on fire, what is the last thing you would remove from it?
What would be the trade-in value of your new car, you know, if you cleaned it up real good, got the empties out of the trunk, etc.?
Who is the next of your high school friends you are going to forget?
What is the answer to this question?
Joho the Blog uses WordPress blogging software.
Thank you, WordPress!
