I just finished my first jigsaw puzzle in more than 2½ years.

A von Ballmoos Christmas tradition is to put together a jigsaw puzzle. The putting-together of it borders on obsession and we stay up ridiculously late, straining our eyes in the dim winter light and ignoring the telephone.

I got started a bit late this year, but still managed to strain my eyes and go to sleep very, very late.

2023: NY Public Library

This one started off relatively straightforward, but the final ¼ or so was... [More]

I was telling a friend about the article How To Be on Time in Estonia by Alex Bellos (Atlas Obscura) and its accompanying solution (PDF).

“[…] in Estonian, a “quarter past the hour” is instead described as “a quarter of an hour on the way to the next hour,” “half past the hour” is described as “half an hour on the way to the next hour,” and “three quarters past the hour” is described as “three quarters of an hour on the way to the next hour.””

Our conversation was as follows:

Me: Estonians say “one... [More]

The following are examples of alliterative sentences from What are sentences called where all the words start with the same letter?

• She Sells Sea Shells by the Sea Shore
• Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers
• The Baker Betty Botter Bought some Butter, But she said “this Butter is Bitter, Bitter Butter is Bad for Batter.”

I looked with nearly exactly the query in the link title after I’d written the following doodle in my notes:

“Which witch will win well when witches wend ways... [More]”

The video One of the most effective ads to air in TV history (Twitter) is of a child misbehaving in a grocery store, with the father looking on in horror as the child escalates a desire to get what it wants into a full-blown tantrum involving destruction of property. The boy yells “je veux les bon-bons”[1] a couple of times, then goes apeshit.

Je veux les bonbons (YouTube)

The fun police showed up almost immediately and settled in to the top of the comment thread.

Kathryn Sucks

Corey Sucks, too

JFC, shut the f#%k up, Kathryn and Corey. It’s a joke. Relax.

It’s... [More]

A friend of mine recommended a book he’d read called The Plot. I didn’t really know what it was about, but his recommendation was enough for me to add it to my list and check it out when it became available.

Pretty soon after I saw the following collection of books at the bottom of my page at the public library.

Recommendations after 'The Plot'

Reckless Hearts, Five Dares, and Love in Play looked quite a bit more overtly racy than I’d expected. I was starting to wonder what he’d recommended. Maybe he was just messing with... [More]

So, Dave Levitan tweeted,

“Someone please tell me if I’m wrong, but I have the impression that the best climate models and projections didn’t really have “all the rivers are gonna dry up, like now-ish” in there”

The Rhine, the Yangtze, the Po by aprettyp (Reddit) is a screenshot of the tweet. The top response by whoareyoutoquestion is wholly informative,

“Except they did and do. “Unprecedented droughts” and “Increased cyclic extremes of weather” are two common things in climate change caused by global warming.... [More]”

Another game that rides on the coattails of Wordle a bit is a game called Worldle. Just like Wordle, you get six guesses. Unlike Wordle, it shows you a country or a territory somewhere on the planet and then tells you how far off you are as well as the direction in which you should go to find the real territory or country. Sometimes, it throws a real curveball, like Christmas Island or French Southern Territories.

Almost all of the “hole-in-ones” are due to my partner, who’s just amazing at... [More]

The article Restaurants Now Requiring Proof Of Ukraine Support (Babylon Bee) shows a sign outside a restaurant that reads,

“Notice: Proof of Ukraine Support Required

“Patrons must show proof of Ukraine support to enter this restaurant. Please have your social media profiles open and a photo ID ready. Thank you for helping us defeat the Russian menace.”

Just be clear—because the world has largely lost its sense of humor and sense of irony—The Babylon Bee is a satirical newspaper.

I got this pretty awkwardly phrased inspirational notification from DuoLingo the other day.

DuoLingo is getting quite forward

DON’T STOP NOW IT’S SO GOOD!

Um, ok.

I use LEO quite a bit, both to learn new words and to check word genders in German. Over the years, I’ve become quite used to German having only a single word where English has several.

For example, “die Schande” in German translates to “obloquy”, “opprobrium”, “infamy”, “scandal”, “dishonor”, “disgrace”, and the most common one, “shame”.

Translations for schande in English

The other day, though, I found a good example in the other direction. The word “joist” in English translates to “Balken”, “Träger”, “Dachträger”,... [More]

I suppose it should come as no surprise that I’ve been playing this with Kath. As long-time Crossword (even occasionally cryptic crosswords) and Spelling Bee fans, Wordle fits right in. And it takes only a couple of minutes per day.

In Wordle, you have to guess a 5-letter word. All guesses must be real words. The puzzle indicates letters that are in the right position with a green background and letters that are in the solution, but in the wrong position with a yellow background. It’s kind of... [More]

With enough time having passed since it aired, I would have believed you had you said that this real commercial was an SNL spoof from the 70s.

Shlitz Malt Liquor with Wilson Pickett (YouTube)

It was great enough before before the bull showed up and Pickett elevated his egg-shaped lounger up out of reach.

I dunno, Dilbert has always been dark, but I thought these three recent cartoons were even more cynical than usual.

Dilbert: Burrow Into A Team (14.12.2021)

Dilbert: Guy With No Talents (15.12.2021)

Dilbert: Lower The Quality (17.12.2021)

I feel like they come at it from opposite angles, but Dilbert and Existential Comics have a lot of overlap in critiquing the existing system.

A recent one about anarchism was great.

Existential Comics: Anarchy on the Street

I think Austin Bragg and Andrew Heaton (of Reason Magazine) make pretty funny videos.[1] Their latest is about the recent the congressional cryptocurrency hearings. These are a good idea—you can’t just hand your economy over to a world of unregulated scamming without asking a few questions[2]—but some of the people seemed…unprepared, to be charitable.

What Should Have Happened at the Cryptocurrency Hearings by ReasonTV (YouTube)

I think this was actually quite well done and is quite funny. “I was literally a different person then.”

Libertarian James Bond
by Reason (YouTube)
 

At Encodo, we recently turned off comments on our web site because we hadn’t gotten anything useful in years. Instead, we’d gotten a ton of spam comments that had gotten past the captcha included with Umbraco.

Several years ago, we switched from earthli WebCore, which has a home-grown captcha with math that seems to stymie the robots and spammers much more effectively. Now we’re kind of stuck with Umbraco and its patchwork CMS.

At any rate, there are comments to delete now, because some are... [More]

Jonathan Pie nails it, with nary a superfluous word.

Acting Gay! by Jonathan Pie (YouTube)

Partial transcription of the 4.5-minute video.

“If this is about authenticity and not about wokeness—which I don’t believe for a second, by the way—if it is about authenticity…would Russell T. Davis cast a gay person in a straight role?

“I’m not being contrarian. I’m not. An actor’s job is to imagine being in the shoes of someone who has a different lived experience to their own. Suggesting that an actor can’t authentically pretend... [More]”

This is a real thing. That is the Mario Lopez of “Saved by the Bell” fame. This is not even tongue-in-cheek. This seems entirely irony-free.

A Recipe for Seduction | Premieres December 13th | Presented by Kentucky Fried Chicken | Lifetime (YouTube)

Queen Bee

Since COVID-19 has put me into 100% home office for a while[1], I’ve been doing the Spelling Bee at lunch with Kath instead of shooting the shit with work colleagues at Encodo.

As the link outlines, the Spelling Bee has an achievement called Queen Bee—where you have to guess every single one of the words that the author thinks are words (and bite back curses at his utterly mysterious omissions)—which we’ve only achieved twice.

Queen Bee 2020-11-21

Queen Bee Answers 2020-11-21

We’ve gotten within a word or two several times,... [More]

I recently wrote that Kath and I have a one-year streak going in the NYT Crossword Puzzle. While that is still ongoing, we’ve also recently discovered a little gem called Spelling Bee (New York Times). The concept is elegant and simple:

• You get seven letters arranged in a honeycomb.
• You have to combine these letters to come up with as many words with four letters or more as you can.
• The middle letter is required.
• You can repeat letters as much as you like.
• Answers can overlap one another. (E.g. “glad” and... [More]

Kath and I passed a milestone today: we’ve been on a NYT Crossword-puzzle streak for one year.

NYT 365-day Streak

You have to complete the puzzle on the day without asking for help. There is no time limit other than by the end of the day (so 24h maximum?) As you can see from the graph of average times I’ve also included, that issue doesn’t come up for us.

Maintaining a streak used to be more difficult before they improved the software for rebuses. A rebus is where you have to put more than one letter in a box... [More]

On the evening of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Joe Rogan held his podcast with a dozen of his friends to discuss the incoming results for four hours. I’d listened to the podcast at the time, but found the following video, which includes only highlights, mostly of Bill Burr working his unique magic.

Bill Burr on Election Day − ALL best moments by Joe Rogan Podcast (YouTube)

My favorite part is at the 7:00 mark, where Bill Burr described the magnitude of Trump’s accomplishments relative to other sporting victories:

“I gotta tell you something. Dude, if Trump... [More]”

The Photo of Fox Scaring Marmot Wins Wildlife Photographer [sic] of the Year 2019 is really wonderful and must have taken so much time and preparation. I can’t help but think, though, every time I see it, that it should be captioned “Allen!”, as shown below.

Allen!

Why (You might perhaps be asking yourself)?

Because of this video:

The 'Alan Alan Alan' Marmot on the BBC! (YouTube)

The NYT Saturday Crossword today looks very similar to the Encodo logo.

We did the puzzle justice by filling it out from the middle outwards—perfectly balanced.

We made it another few clues before things drifted apart.

I just read through a list of offensive jokes (Reddit). Here are, in no particular order, the ones I thought you would enjoy; your mileage may vary and don’t judge me.

Q. What do 50,000 battered women have in common?
A. They don’t fucking listen.

Adolf Hitler and Josef Mengele are sitting in a bar when Hitler turns towards a stranger and says: “I planning to deport and kill 16 million jews and 1 clown”. The stranger then replies: “why deport and kill the clown?”. Hitler turns to Josef and says... [More]

Mark Zuckerberg was worried that Congress wouldn’t understand his message, so he had his team whip up a helpful, instructional video to take things down to Congress’s technical level.

“It’s like a petri dish filled with friendship germs.”

Friendface | The IT Crowd S03E05 (YouTube)

I read through The web’s funniest stories by Tim Carmody (Kottke) the other day. My favorites from that list are:

Quick reads

So You’ve Decided To Drink More Water by Mallory Ortburg (The Hairpin)

A nicely written fantasy about starting a new diet/lifestyle.

“[…] Grown men sink to their knees as you pass, their faces crumpling into shameless sobs. Mothers lift their children up to you in mute and expectant appeal. You bless them all. […]”

TOTO’S “AFRICA” BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY by Anthony Sams (McSweeney's)

You’re welcome in advance for putting this into your head for the... [More]

A friend on Facebook published a giant list of political-news links, one more stress-inducing and hyperbolic than the next. His friends commented about their existential angst and hair-pulling in response to the worst onslaught that the worst has had to offer to any group of people ever. To soothe the souls of these benighted individuals, I offer some distraction.

During dinner last night, we entertained ourselves instead with the following rabbit-hole of YouTube videos, starring Robin... [More]

Bill Burr does an extemporaneous podcast every Monday and Thursday. He is one of the English language’s best living comedians, with a tremendous feel for timing and a much cleverer take on things than he’ll admit (but that’s part of his schtick).

On a recent show, Monday Morning Podcast 22.12.2016, his wife Nia joined him. She is pregnant, several months along. Once you’ve heard the podcast, you’ll wonder at the amount of patience that she brings to the marriage, all the more when very... [More]