Tag: humor

Signs of Humor

Seth Anderson0 comment

Why not name your village something memorable? Too many places have generic names. Language is one of the best inventions humans ever came up with – why not celebrate it?

In the scale of embarrassing place names, Crapstone ranks pretty high. But Britain is full of them. Some are mostly amusing, like Ugley, Essex; East Breast, in western Scotland; North Piddle, in Worcestershire; and Spanker Lane, in Derbyshire.

Others evoke images that may conflict with residents’ efforts to appear dignified when, for example, applying for jobs.

These include Crotch Crescent, Oxford; Titty Ho, Northamptonshire; Wetwang, East Yorkshire; Slutshole Lane, Norfolk; and Thong, Kent. And, in a country that delights in lavatory humor, particularly if the word “bottom” is involved, there is Pratts Bottom, in Kent, doubly cursed because “prat” is slang for buffoon.

As for Penistone, a thriving South Yorkshire town, just stop that sophomoric snickering.

“It’s pronounced ‘PENNIS-tun,’ ” Fiona Moran, manager of the Old Vicarage Hotel in Penistone, said over the telephone, rather sharply. When forced to spell her address for outsiders, she uses misdirection, separating the tricky section into two blameless parts: “p-e-n” — pause — “i-s-t-o-n-e.”

Several months ago, Lewes District Council in East Sussex tried to address the problem of inadvertent place-name titillation by saying that “street names which could give offense” would no longer be allowed on new roads.

“Avoid aesthetically unsuitable names,” like Gaswork Road, the council decreed. Also, avoid “names capable of deliberate misinterpretation,” like Hoare Road, Typple Avenue, Quare Street and Corfe Close.

[Click to continue reading No Snickering – That Road Sign Means Something Else – NYTimes.com]

Corfe Close is a stretch – you have to live at 4 Corfe Close, and even then say the first two words quickly. The NYT is of course too afraid of language to say “Fuck Off“, perhaps the New York Times style guide should be updated to include the substitution of fracking, as appropriate?

[via Chuck Shepherd]


“Rude Britain: The 100 Rudest Place Names in Britain” (Ed Hurst, Rob Bailey)

“Sniggering at double entendres is a loved and time-honored tradition in this country,” Carol Midgley wrote in The Times of London. Ed Hurst, a co-author, with Rob Bailey, of “Rude Britain” and “Rude UK,” which list arguably offensive place names — some so arguably offensive that, unfortunately, they cannot be printed here — said that many such communities were established hundreds of years ago and that their names were not rude at the time.

“Place names and street names are full of history and culture, and it’s only because language has evolved over the centuries that they’ve wound up sounding rude,” Mr. Hurst said in an interview.

Mr. Bailey, who grew up on Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire, and Mr. Hurst got the idea for the books when they read about a couple who bought a house on Butt Hole Road, in South Yorkshire.

The name most likely has to do with the spot’s historic function as a source of water, a water butt being a container for collecting water. But it proved to be prohibitively hilarious.

“If they ordered a pizza, the pizza company wouldn’t deliver it, because they thought it was a made-up name,” Mr. Hurst said. “People would stand in front of the sign, pull down their trousers and take pictures of each other’s naked buttocks.”

The couple moved away.

Reading Around on January 30th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading January 30th from 08:30 to 08:30:

Straight Outta Glasgow

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Straight Outta Compton” (N.W.A)

This amuses me, probably for the mental image (rappers in kilts, haggis studded with bling, yadda yadda)

A professor has theorized that rap music, by way of the dozens, originated in medieval Scottish pubs…

Professor Ferenc Szasz argued that so-called rap battles, where two or more performers trade elaborate insults, derive from the ancient Caledonian art of “flyting“.

According to the theory, Scottish slave owners took the tradition with them to the United States, where it was adopted and developed by slaves, emerging many years later as rap.

Professor Szasz is convinced there is a clear link between this tradition for settling scores in Scotland and rap battles, which were famously portrayed in Eminem’s 2002 movie 8 Mile.

He said: “The Scots have a lengthy tradition of flyting – intense verbal jousting, often laced with vulgarity, that is similar to the dozens that one finds among contemporary inner-city African-American youth.

“Both cultures accord high marks to satire. The skilled use of satire takes this verbal jousting to its ultimate level – one step short of a fist fight.”

[Click to read more Rap music originated in medieval Scottish pubs, claims American professor – Telegraph]

and to fulfill any lingering grad student impulses:

The most famous surviving example of flyting comes from a 16th-century piece in which two rival poets hurl increasingly obscene rhyming insults at one another before the Court of King James IV.

Titled the Flyting Of Dunbar And Kennedy, it has been described by academics as “just over 500 lines of filth”.

Right? So just imagine lines like these being recited over a phat beat of knives clanging on a bottle of single malt whisky:


Into the Katryne thou maid a foule cahute,
For thow bedrate hir doune fra starn to stere;
Apon hir sydis was sene thou coud schute,
Thy dirt clevis till hir towis this twenty yere:
The firmament na firth was nevir cler,
Quhill thou, Deulbere, devillis birth, was on the see,
The saulis had sonkin throu the syn of the,
War not the peple maid sa grete prayere.



Quhen that the schip was saynit, and undir saile,
Foul brow in holl thow preposit for to pas,
Thou schot, and was not sekir of thy tayle,
Beschate the stere, the compas, and the glas;
The skippar bad ger land the at the Bas:
Thow spewit, and kest out mony a lathly lomp,
Fastar than all the marynaris coud pomp;
And now thy wame is wers than evir it was.

Hmmm. Maybe not.

Or Else What

swanksalot0 comment
It’s the Future

It’s the Future

Received an amusing email, spam presumedly, from a Hong Kong company re my domain name. Here it is in its entirety:

We are Hong Kong Network Service Company, Limited. which is the domain name register center in Asia. We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “b12partners” as their domain name and Internet keyword on Dec 25, 2008.Since after our investigation we found that this word has been in use by your company, and this may involve your company name or trade mark, so we inform you in no time. If you consider these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first, contact us soon. Thanks for your co-operation and support.

In order to avoid the law problems invovled,we need to confirm with you first.If you consider these domain names are not important,please don’t reply this email,we will cooperate with the third company Kind Regards, Andy.liu

Tel: +852-31757930(ext.8023)

Fax: +852-31757932

Email: Andy.liu@hknetwork.hk.cn

Hong Kong Network Service Company, Limited. Website: www.hknsc.hk

Yes, indeed, I’ll get right on that.

Especially since they are so serious about their claims

Toujours Tingo

swanksalot2 Comments


“Toujours Tingo” (Adam Jacot de Boinod)

Oooh, sounds fun. Nothing like working in bizarre phrases into conversation

Toujours Tingo, a book by Adam Jacot de Boinod, lists weird words and bizarre phrases from around the world. The “tingo” of its title is an Easter Island word, meaning to borrow objects from a friend’s house one by one until there are none left.

some faves:

Layogenic: Filipino for someone good-looking from afar but ugly up close.

Mouton enragé : French for someone calm who loses their temper – literally, “an enraged sheep”.

Fensterln: German for climbing through a window to avoid someone’s parents so you can have sex without them knowing.

Stroitel: Russian for a man who likes to have sex with two women at the same time.

Okuri-okami: Japanese for a man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to try to molest her once he gets in the door – literally, a “see-you-home wolf

Les avoir a zero: French for “to have one’s testicles down to zero”, or be frightened.

Du kannst mir gern den buckel runterrutschen und mit der zunge bremsen: Austrian for “go to hell” – literally “You can slide down my hunchback using your tongue as a brake”.

[Continue reading Toujours Tingo: Weird words and bizarre phrases – Telegraph]

Perfect for the language maven on your Xmas list…

Synecdoche

Seth Anderson0 comment

Other than the ridiculousness of citing the Washinton Times on any subject, William Safire’s overview of the Key Vocab1 word, synecdoche is amusing.

They must have forgotten my column of only 16 years ago, which explained that metonymy, pronounced muh-TAHN-uh mee, identifies a person or thing by something closely associated with it — like “the brass” for high military officers, “the crown” for royalty and “the suits” for executives, usually male, and other stiffs in traditional business garb. “Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche,” I wrote in a display of trope-a-dope, “which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole” like “wheels” for automobiles and “head” for cattle.

Noone is a somebody who correctly notes the re-emergence of the synecdoche (sih-NECK-doe-key) in the punning title of a new movie directed by the Oscar-winning surrealist screenwriter Charlie Kaufman: “Synecdoche, New York.” Though panned in The Washington Times as “art-house pomposity,” Kaufman’s new work — whose hero is described as a narcissist haunted by the thought of death — is hailed as one of the best films of the decade by Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post. That reviewer notes that “my death is your death is her death is our death — possibly accounting for the title, which isn’t just a phonetic play on Schenectady but a speech form in which a part of something can stand for the whole.” Headline of his review: “Synecdoche: A Part of Life That Makes Us Whole.”

Other headline writers are beginning to catch synecdochal fever. A recent article in The New York Times, datelined Rutshuru in eastern Congo, reported on “white-collar rebels” known as guerrilla warriors who are now trying as civilians to administer the territory they control. The rhyming headline, bordering on today’s figure of speech: “Rebels Used to Boots, Not Suits, Seek to Govern Congo.”

[From On Language – Synecdoche – NYTimes.com]

We really should use synecdoches more frequently on these pages.

Oh, and Safire’s article from April 26, 1992, begins:

Wearing his usual Western attire — a plaid shirt, jeans and a quilted down waistcoat — a former rodeo rider named Cy Baumgartner paid a visit to the St. Louis Art Museum and made an interesting discovery: the horseman in “The Bronco Buster,” a bronze by Frederic Remington, was wearing his spurs upside down.

When the real broncobuster (now one word, on the analogy of gangbuster ) pointed out this gaffe to the curator, his embarrassing revelation was received with a disdain bordering on condescension. Mr. Baumgartner, who now drives an 18-wheel truck but retains his interest in the Wild West, cheerfully waved off the frigid attitude of the museum official with “I’ve been lied to by suits all my life.”

This episode was recounted to me by Eliot Porter of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch with the suggestion that I explore “the metonymical use of suit .” He enclosed an early citation in print of a 1984 A.P. Laserphoto (formerly wirephoto) of a bunch of executives marching with briefcases, beneath the title ” Suits in Step.”

First, he is right about metonymy, pronounced muh-TAHN-uh-mee, which is the figure of speech that identifies a person or thing by referring to something closely associated with it. Older examples include the brass for high military officers and the crown for the only royalty not headed for the divorce courts.

Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche, which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole. (“I’m using the wheels , Pops, to go get a new tube ” means your high-definition son is borrowing the car to obtain a new television set.) A suit is associated with, but is not part of, a person, and suit as the figure of speech is therefore metonymic.

Footnotes:
  1. from Mrs. Hettenhausen’s 10th grade Advanced Placement English class, of course [↩]

23 Randomizations

Seth Anderson0 comment

I’ve always1 loved this particular math factoid/game/mind-boggler:

Wired News: My IPod for a Random Playlist [sic – iPod is the preferred spelling]
To illustrate his point, [mathematician Jeff] Lait referred to a phenomenon statisticians call the birthday paradox. Roughly stated, it holds that if there are 23 randomly selected people in a room, there is a better than 50-50 chance that at least two of them will have the same birthday. The point: Mathematical randomness often contradicts our intuitive expectations of randomness.

If the group expands to 57 or more people, the probability approaches certainty.

On the larger point, randomization: I’m significantly better now, but when I was younger, I made many decisions after applying some ‘randomization‘ protocols (such as I always carried around several Chinese coins – and gave different values to heads or tails, flipped them and added up the numbers; or used dice; or other tools like the added-up page numbers of a randomly opened book). Yes, I had problems making decisions sometimes. Some folk resort to tarot cards, or media pundits – I used my own home-grown methods. Did I mention that I used to ingest plenty of inebriates?

SoundJam‘s randomization algorithms (and hence iTunes too) always seemed a little to prone to repeats, so I’ve worked many, many an hour creating playlists that eluded the need for ‘true‘ randomization. I still use the artfully created playlist instead of using Smart Playlists, even though that particular tool has improved, a bit. My playlists still give better results.

On this score, Apple’s iTunes takes the lead with a feature called Smart Playlists. It allows you to set all kinds of conditions as to what songs do and don’t get played. For instance, you can tell it to select songs at random but to select only tunes that haven’t been played in the last two days, or week.

– Wired

Funny, I still try to incorporate random behavior into my life, whenever feasible. Our 21st Century culture is so computer driven, so regimented by Manichaean choices, that there is a real danger of losing the spontaneous juxtaposition of every day occurrence. Or something.2

Footnotes:
  1. a repost from 2005! for some reason [↩]
  2. I do believe clarity is being sacrificed in this paragraph because I only had about 3 hours of sleep last night [↩]

Who Says Breast Related Math Can’t be Fun

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Well, a certain kind of fun, for a certain type of person, namely those obsessed with tits…

More important equation news from the Sun this week, with the exciting headline “How to tell if the boobline is too low … use this equation 0=NP(20C+B)/75“. Alongside a photograph of poor old Britney Spears with her boobs falling out.

“Following her wardrobe malfunction – where she was snapped nearly popping out of a very low-cut dress at her 27th birthday bash – scientists, undies experts and mathematicians have been trying to figure out where the decency perimeter lies. And here we can exclusively reveal the formula to work it out.”

I will talk you through this important work. “To figure out the naughtiness rating (O), you times the number of nipples exposed, from zero to two or expressed as fractions of nipple shown (N) with the percentage of exposed frontal surface area (P).” We’ll stop there.

This is, of course, part of a crap effort to sell a presumably crap book by an apparently crap mathematician who I shall not name1, partly in protest at the crass way he makes a big fuss about doing maths at Cambridge (congratulations), and partly because it seems to me that he can’t do basic arithmetic.

“Britney’s tight fitting Roberto Cavalli dress showed off around 70% of her breasts,” said the Sun: “and experts at Wonderbra think she is a 32D. Without any nipple exposure, Britney’s formula works out as 0x70x(20×5+32)/75 = 123.2.”

No. Without nipple exposure Britney’s score is zero, because zero multiplied by anything is zero. In fact, even if that error wasn’t made by our genius mathematician (did you know he did maths at Cambridge?) the formula is still rubbish, because if all women walked around wearing absolutely nothing but tassles on their nipples they would still have a naughtiness rating of zero.

[Click to continue reading Bad Science: How the Sun boobed over Britney Spears equation – The Guardian ]

I suppose I should link to the boobage in question – of such luminaries as Beyonce, Courtney Love, Nigella Lawson, Anne Hathaway, Salma Hayek, Rihanna, et al.

Ok, I confess, am just trying to juice up my site traffic with some plump melons.

Footnotes:
  1. but I will: Mathematician William Hartston, who holds an MA in Maths from Cambridge University [↩]

Traditional marriage, Bible-style

Seth Anderson0 comment


For your Bible-related laugh of the day. Me? Happily unmarried1. I added a few links to the Brick Testament for further illustration of these concepts of traditional marriage, so celebrated by pricks such as Mike Huckabee. Click them, they’re Lego fun!

Seriously, wtf!

From gladkov at the Orange Satan:

A. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

B. Marriage shall not impede a man’s right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30)

E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother’s widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

G. In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with him (even if he had previously offered you up as a sex toy to men young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)

[From Traditional marriage, Bible-style]

5,000 years, what?

What a tradition! Oy.

Footnotes:
  1. though in a committed relationship [↩]

Could I survive on nothing but potatoes and milk?

swanksalot0 comment

Could one live, like so many of my ancestors allegedly did, on a diet consisting of mostly potatoes? Cecil Adams says, well, nearly.

No Dumping Potatoes

The good news: A spuds and milk diet definitely has possibilities — the Irish, to cite the best-known example, got by mainly on potatoes until the infamous blight of 1845 wiped out their main course. The bad news: (1) Considering the quantities you’re going to have to eat, you’d better really like potatoes. (2) If you’re literally going to eat nothing but potatoes and milk, you risk — brace yourself — serious molybdenum deficiency.

Years ago I tackled the question of whether you could live by bread alone. (See The Straight Dope: Can man live by bread alone?) Answer: Yeah, for about six months, but then you’d die of scurvy. Things won’t be anywhere near that bad on milk and potatoes. Before the Great Famine, the traditional Irish peasant meal consisted mainly of potatoes, milk, oats, beans, barley, and bread. Potatoes were the mainstay. As the years grew leaner, dairy products largely disappeared from the Irish diet, since poverty forced many farmers to sell their milk to pay rent. By the time the famine hit, the peasants were eating pretty much just potatoes, supplemented with some salt fish and oatmeal. I’ve seen it said that a third of the population lived on potatoes and nothing else, although that seems doubtful, as we’ll see. Edward Wakefield, an English land agent and amateur social scientist who traveled Ireland from 1809 to 1811, calculated each Irish peasant family member consumed 5.5 pounds of potatoes per day. An 1846 source claims a working man needed at least 8 pounds of potatoes a day to survive if nothing else were available; a typical family of six would need 26 pounds.

How did the Irish do on this diet? We can’t be certain — nobody was conducting nutrition studies in those days. But there’s reason to believe they were healthier than you might guess. In the century before the famine, Ireland had the highest birthrate in western Europe. Some credit potatoes, saying the availability of easy-to-grow, easy-to-cook spuds made it practical to raise large families. Telling evidence on this score, one historian writes, “is that the Irish in general and Irish women in particular were widely described as healthy and good-looking.” I don’t know about you, Josh, but any diet that gets results like that is good enough for me.

[Click to continue reading The Straight Dope: Could I survive on nothing but potatoes and milk?]

I knew I loved potatoes…

and if one supplemented one’s diet with the occasional bowl of oatmeal, and even some salad, you’d be well enough to down pints of Guinness Stout.

Pippen gets Famous

Seth Anderson0 comment

Omnivore's Dilemma

Michael Pollan and my cat1, featured in an LA Times blog…

There are legions of people who love books, and who love cats, and have a habit of photographing them together. You may like books and not like cats; I know it’s possible. But this post, my friends, is not for you. This post is for people who think that Pippen, above, is awfully cute when confronting the “Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

[From Books and cats: a love affair in photos | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times]

Of course, Pippen prefers the taste of rabbit to corn…

Footnotes:
  1. when he was but a kitten [↩]

Viral Email Spreading False Claims About Barcodes

Seth Anderson0 comment

Hadn’t heard this particular claim, but am amused by it nonetheless…

016-2048 that's my number

A viral email sent across the United States is creating consumer confusion about the content of barcodes and potentially harming American businesses, according to GS1 US, the standards organization based here

The email incorrectly states “the first three digits” of a product’s barcode always indicate the product’s country of origin, and encourages consumers to make their buying decisions based on these numbers. GS1 US, as the administrator and sole source of Universal Product Code barcode prefixes in the United States, warns that consumers heeding this faulty advice are being misled and could unintentionally “boycott” businesses or products they would otherwise choose to support. “Although the first few digits of a barcode — what we call a company prefix — can indicate the country in which a barcode was issued, it tells you nothing about where the product was made,” said Bob Noe, chief customer officer for GS1 US, in a statement. “The claim is somewhat grounded in reality, but just enough to be dangerous, even if you’re reading it correctly, which is not a safe assumption.”

[From Viral Email Spreading False Claims About Barcodes]

At least it has nothing to do with the Number of the Beast aka Grand Rapids

Swayze worries about invasions from Mexico

Seth Anderson0 comment

What a strange thought to have when giving a fluff-ball interview about a television series being filmed in Chicago! Patrick Swayze worries that the Soviet1 hordes are going to invade the US, and Chicago would be their target. Or something.

Danger! Sound Horn

I felt that Chicago added so much, just in terms of the energy. If you read any Tom Clancy novel, Chicago is much more a dangerous point in this country than people realize. Tom Clancy says, if you want to invade the U.S., come through Mexico and come through Chicago, and split the country in half. Chicago has much deeper-reaching fingers, from a national security point of view, than most people realize.

[From Swayze feels at home in Chicago — chicagotribune.com]

Ok. Will make sure to stockpile weapons and canned goods, thanks Mr. Swayze.

Footnotes:
  1. sic, of course, but maybe he thinks the Venezuelans are coming? Unclear who this invading army might be as I’ve managed to avoid reading any Tom Clancy novels [↩]

The God Simulator

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Being God for three minutes is fun, better than Queen for a Day anyway1. The God Simulator forces a deity to make several consciously faulty decisions to end up where we are today. Otherwise, you are just relaxing in boring bliss, as are we all. Wouldn’t want that.

Immaculate Conception

J’raxis·Com • The God Simulator
You are eternal, omnipotent God. For the past boring eternity, You have been sitting around in darkness twiddling Your thumbs wondering what the hell You are supposed to be doing and pondering where You came from and what Your purpose is and why You look like an angry old white man. Suddenly, You are hit with the desire to do something.

(via PZ)

Footnotes:
  1. a repost from my old blog, but the God Simulator still works, and still cracks me up. [↩]