But I did some googling around as part of a conversation I was having with someone on YM, and came across “a transcription of the Harper’s article”:http://homes.cerias.purdue.edu/~spaf/Yucks/V4/msg00015.html that I’m fairly certain is where I first read about it.
It seems pertinent that the conversation was of the “Why are men so damn stupid?” variety.
Incidentally, I did not piss my pants re-reading it, but I came awful close.
then you would surely not understand why there would have to be “an entire web page devoted to Iron Maiden album covers with Spongebob Squarepants inserted into them?”:http://kebawe.com/wallpapers/maiden/SpongeEd.shtml
But rest assured, there must be such a thing.
Not because it’s not as funny as it used to be (’cause really, it is), but because it’s just harder to get me to laugh now–I look around and sometimes think things have truly come off the rails.
But “their bit of commentary on the attacks on Christmas”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/long-jolly-slog-i-hear-they-got.html is great. I especially liked:
bq. “On Secularmas, they do not exchange presents,” says Giblets. “They exchange identical cardboard boxes filled with rocks and mold and broken childhood dreams and nothing!”
!http://www.harmony-central.com/ProductImages/Large/000000253.jpg!
You might then think that at this time more than any other, I would be able to make a distinction between those things that I think I might want want–largely because they’re “neat”–and those things I need.
But damn, it sure does feel like I need “a nixie tube clock that looks like an H&K amp head”:http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/2005/Hughes-Kettner-Tube-Clock.html
Jim MacDonald has a non-comprehensive list of “Things I’ve learned from British folk ballads”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006448.html. It includes such gems as ??Avoid situations where the obvious rhyme-word is “maidenhead.”??
Heh.
A play that derives from Brecht and features Emacs, the RIAA, Bill Gates, Slashdot and various others as characters. I mean, “wow”:http://www.remixreading.org/node/489.
Need something to help keep the kids in line, since you don’t have access to Satan, Hell, or even the milder “making Baby Jesus cry?”.
Steve Loughran has the answer: “Cthulu for three year olds”:http://www.1060.org/blogxter/entry?publicid=7AD93D71C1D3984AE33CF63B4D41D8B4.
I especially liked the caveat, though:
bq. The hard part is striving a line between providing the minimum of lies necessary for total obedience, without reducing the child to having a deep fear of darkness, docksides, attics, cellars and the wind rattling the shutters.
SNL has sketches built around the premise. And, having lived in Germany for five years, I would tend to agree, though I would also add that they also allow nekkid people.
Anyhoo, Jerry forwarded me this “fairly absurd clip from some popular-music show”:http://cowcotland.free.fr/modules/Forums/conneries/russes.mpeg. Since Anne was home sick, and I had no idea what it might turn out to be, I viewed it without sound. I suspect it is better that way–less painful, but no less strange.
“An ‘infinitely’ zoomable image”:http://www.ebaumsworld.com/supercoolpicillusion.html
Safe for work, but you must be familiar with things that are not safe for work “for this picture to be as funny as possible”:http://profgoose.blogspot.com/2005/02/how-ironicalor-perhaps-this-belongs.html.
It’s a MIDI sequencer–really, it seems more of an interactive instrument to me–that “uses six hamsters to control three channels of pitch and rhythm”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/eceprojectsland/STUDENTPROJ/2002to2003/lil2/.
There are wav and mp3s of the output. I wonder if you could get the base MIDI files for use as a ringtone?
bq. “A good woman is like a fine cheese,” says me. “Or a large hat. Or an aggrieved sasquatch. Or an elephant made outta trees an ropes an lotsa smaller elephants.”
“What more do you need to know?”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005_02_13_fafblog_archive.html#110841400293602113
“Heh”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005_01_23_fafblog_archive.html#110669057794140997.
I’m not sure that there is any response to the state of the world that is more sane than “Fafblog!”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/
…but this one was different. I was taking a course in writing Humorous Essays, but most class discussion consisted, perhaps unsuprisingly, of one-liners. I was concerned that my work was too bitterly ironic; I wanted it to be a little more generously funny. And Tina Fey was in the class. And she had a habit of standing uncomfortably close to me.
There was more, but I couldn’t remember it by the time I actually got up.
Now, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to invest in DVDs of Tom Clancy movies, but pudge “notes Ben Affleck’s negaive value in terms of such things”:http://use.perl.org/~pudge/journal/22052.
“Just go read it for yourself”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001750.html.
“via Matthew”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/11/bestblog_postev.html.
(can one imagine having any other sort with her, and then being derided mercilessly for at least 18 hours on the site?), I imagine I’ll have to restrict myself to being amused by her use of such amusing phrases as
bq. …”but that’s why the baby Jesus invented mixers, buddy.”:http://www.wonkette.com/archives/tiny-jon-stewart-and-his-crushed-self-esteem-023725.php
When you know people who work at, or have worked at, some large company, like, say, eBay, or Amazon, they always seem to get hooked into the “wierd shit” list for whatever the purveyor is.
Thus, Alex Yan brings to my attention both “weaponry”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/search.html/sr=3-5/qid=1098124101/ref=sr_3_5/002-6239427-1189612?%5Fencoding=UTF8&node=3415301&rh=a%3A3415011%2Ca%3A3415301 and “mascot costumes”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=sc_fe_c_4_0/002-6239427-1189612?%5Fencoding=UTF8&node=3402211&no=3402161&me=ATVPDKIKX0DER.
Furries, anyone?
The inimitable “Fafblog”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/ succeeds in making “a pointed commentary”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_10_10_fafblog_archive.html#109770844064284783 about an ideology that focuses on 3500 fetuses and yet pointedly ignores the suffering of millions.
“What did Philip K. Dick know?”:http://www.geocities.com/pkdlw/MIHC.html
Will Shetterly “rebuts Patrick Neilsen-Hayden’s alternate-world scenario in which Bush won the 2000 election”:http://shetterly.blogspot.com/2004/10/what-if-george-w-bush-had-been-elected.html.
By way of “Michael Froomkin”:http://discourse.net/, a “Guardian report on new thoughts on T.Rex’s growth patterns”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1281369,00.html reports the following:
bq. The T. rex in the Steven Spielberg movie Jurassic Park famously snatched and devoured a lawyer cowering in a lavatory. Palaeontologists have since heartlessly adopted the lawyer as a standard unit of dinosaur diet.
No, we’re not talking about sharks, or Osama Bin Laden, we’re talking about “the tendencies of your coworkers”:http://www.serversunderthesun.com/tin/.
I’m guessing that this is why there are people with enough time to do “wild and silly things with Bento”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~msittig/bento/.
I wish I could read what I presume to be the ingredients used for each of the pieces.
The scary part? Two words: Bento porn.
After a moment’s disorientation–what, we’re in Italy now?–we decided that Virginia’s Po river had to be a teletubby reference.
We became suspicious, tough, when we noticed the Ni river a couple of miles later. I mean, could they be that obvious? A ??Holy Grail?? reference?
Then we put it together.
I would hope it would come as a suprise to no one that one of our local bakery/restaurants would have a sense of humor about some of its wares.
“The presidents dog has his own domain name”:http://barney.gov/. Yeah, sure, it’s just a redirector to a spot on the White House website, but still.
There’s also, I feel obliged to mention, the “Presidential Pet Museum”:http://www.presidentialpetmuseum.com/whitehousepets-1.htm.
In fact, I’m always somewhat amused at the verbing of Photoshop. Regardless, though, “the faux Google News feeds of Rumsfeld”:http://www.musicforamerica.org/node/view/21365 are pretty amusing.
“Rumsfeld denies eating Iraqi prison” indeed.
Where, you might ask, are you going to find a guide to swearing in Esperanto? Easy! “Swearsaurus”:http://www.insultmonger.com/swearing/index.htm
I don’t know what to say. As much as I enjoy watching the Durham Bulls, I was spectactularly ignorant of baseball’s history, other than having some notion that it was a 19th-century thing.
“Rivka fixes this”:http://respectfulofotters.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_respectfulofotters_archive.html#10843352196650749, with a discussion of it’s late-18th-century appearance in Jane Austen novels, and further references–ones that also mention “Morris-dancing”:http://www.geocities.com/tokyo/subway/4346/pages/morris.html, natch–from the earliest parts of that century.
And the Steven Jay Gould quote on the page uses the word _tendentious_. So there.
“Crooked Timber”:http://crookedtimber.org/ has “an amusing post wondering exactly why “Trojan” gets used as a name by various organizations”:religion/.