The hosts of the 2026 ESC are cartoon characters. The lady is a bony, large-lipped, giant-titted, shiny skeleton. What have we done to deserve this?

Semifinal 1

Spoiler alert: not a single one of these songs was worth listening to even once. It was even more of a train wreck than usual. Was it always this terrible or just since they all started using AI to “fine-tune”?

Moldova 🇲🇩

Joyless trash.

Sweden 🇸🇪

Utter trash. The singing ruined an occasionally reasonable electronic beat.

Croatia 🇭🇷

Trash, but at least somewhat musical.

Greece 🇬🇷

WTF. Utterly incoherent. This is not even recognizable as music.

Portugal 🇵🇹

Absolutely not my kind of my music but it was at least a song. The five guys were sympathetic. They looked like they were doing karaoke at a team-building event.

Georgia 🇬🇪

Utterly generic ESC semi-electronica song. Some decent group dance stuff.

Italy

A classic Italian disco song that was positively wholesome after the aural onslaught of the first six songs.

Finland 🇫🇮

Generic ESC trash. Not as offensive as some of the others. It doesn’t feel like Finland—more like Sweden.

Montenegro 🇲🇪

Also a generic ESC song, which means it was trash. The aesthetic was OK. It was vampire-lesbian chic, which could be problematic but they all seemed to be in into it, so off you go.

Estonia 🇪🇪

A straight-up 80s rock song. It was a song, like with a bridge, verses, and a chorus. This was fine. It might even be good if you squint hard enough.

Israel 🇮🇱

Trash. Generic. He sang in French, English, and I believe a bit of Hebrew (probably when he wanted to say some deeply racist anti-Arab slurs). Nice to see that Israel made it, though. You’d think they’d be a bit too busy, what with all the conquering and invading and stuff. It wouldn’t be the ESC without them.

Germany 🇩🇪

Just as a good a picture as any of the ESC 2026A slutty dance number but with terrible dancing. The song sucks. It is beyond generic. Germany is filling in for the Russians’ absence, because they liked to send a group of strippers too when they were still being invited.

Belgium 🇧🇪

Relied too much on the singer’s weak voice over a decent bass beat. Again, ruined by the singing and lyrics.

Lithuania 🇱🇹

Something different. Operatic ESC. E-beat. Still trash.

San Marino 🇸🇲

Generic ESC disco trash.

Poland

Gospel-style mixed with rap. Decent backup dancers. Unoffensive but not really good.

Serbia 🇷🇸

Oh hey, the goth entry. They are at least pretending to play instruments. A bit of a Hellraiser aesthetic. Not a good song. The camerawork is disturbing.

Estonia should move on. Maybe Italy. Maybe Portugal.

Semifinal 2

The second semifinal was of slightly higher quality with 4 or 5 decent acts and a handful of not utterly offensive ones.

Bulgaria 🇧🇬

This is a terrible song that’s trying to make some headway with dance moves and a lead singer with giant breasts and lips like a Zodiac boat. It will probably be enough to move on.

Azerbaijan 🇦🇿

The first slow ballad, I think. It wasn’t offensive but it was not good.

Romania 🇷🇴

The song is called “Choke Me,” so I guess that’s promising. Operatic “metal” (who are we kidding, this is hard rock at most). It’s a gimmick where two female lead singers ask to be punished. Sure, OK. This will probably also be enough to move on.

Luxembourg 🇱🇺

Another ballad. Fully generic. This one is trying to be Björk, with the same look and the same bit of a speech defect. Not offensive but not good.

Czechia 🇨🇿

A male ballad this time. He’s by himself on stage but surrounded by mirrors. His voice isn’t terrible but the song is.

France 🇫🇷

It is utterly unsurprising that the singer simply repeats the chorus “Regarde moi” the whole time. It’s an operatic ballad. Some decent dance choreography. This was probably one of the better songs so far.

Armenia 🇦🇲

This is ESC quirky with a lot of tempo changes, strobe lights—oh sweet God the strobe lights—and a lot of yelling and fast, incoherent “music”.

Switzerland 🇨🇭

A blues song? Like, what? No frenzied pace? No screaming? It’s a song? There is way too much strobing but her voice is good and the song … is good? Did I change the channel by accident? Look, before you say it, I couldn’t care less if Switzerland wins but they have, hands down, the best song so far. I would have Shazamed it if it had come on the radio. I also like Veronica’s look: big 70s glasses and big, feathered 70s hair. Not slutty, which is a welcome change of pace from pretty much all of the other female acts.

Cyprus 🇨🇾

She’s fit so that’ll be a whole bunch of votes right there. The song is generic and uninspiring. Lots of tanned skin on stage, though. The song feels really long.

Austria 🇦🇹

Singing in German. Starts off with a cool top-down camera view, cartoon-like. Generic ESC stuff but relatively well-done. Not obnoxious. Whimsical costumes. The dance moves are kind of quaint and simple. A more human music, if that’s the right way of putting it? Genuine, maybe?

Latvia 🇱🇻

Another operatic ballad. This one’s not terrible, so it should probably move on, given that all but three of the preceding songs were trash.

Denmark 🇩🇰

A goth-y generic rock-ish song with a techno beat. His voice isn’t bad but the song is. Mucho pyrotechnics.

Australia 🇦🇺

Bro, another operatic ballad. This sounds like a Disney theme song. Her voice isn’t bad, though. It’s a bit of a Celine Dion vibe. Not my kind of music but hey, it wasn’t actively painful to listen to. She’s pretending to play a golden piano that you absolutely cannot hear. Wait, you could hear it for a bit…but then it kept playing even after she picked up the mic again.

Ukraine 🇺🇦

Another operatic ballad, accompanied by a bandura (Ukrainian lute) for a hot second but you mostly can’t hear it. She has a good voice but the song is quite generic. It’s not really much worse than Australia, though. It is at this point in the evening that it becomes difficult to even tell them apart. She’s got a set of lungs on her, though.

United Kingdom 🇬🇧

Thank God, finally one that is unequivocally bad because the UK almost always sucks so hard. Christ almighty that was awful.

Albania 🇦🇱

An operatic male with a bit more of a rock beat. Not a ballad. He’s by himself on stage. Cool costume. Looks like Ibrahimovic. They have subtitles for his Albanian lyrics. I guess it was important to him. I didn’t hate it.

Malta 🇲🇹

This starts off as a 50s-style crooner by a guy in a sleeveless, leather outfit. He’s singing in Italian and English. It’s not really my thing but it’s well-done and it’s not demanding attention. His voice is good.

Norway 🇳🇴

A good rock song with a structure that is very much like a song. His voice isn’t bad; good stage presence. It’s a bit bland but the bass line is good. It’s a mediocre-to-good 80s rock song. Kind of a bit of a Billy Idol vibe to it.

Switzerland should definitely move on. Also Malta. OK, fine, Norway. Also probably Austria. Maybe France. Latvia if you insist.

Guess what, though? Switzerland didn’t move on. C’est la vie.

I will not be watching or even half-listening to the finals on Saturday because I am not a masochist.

I was mystified as to what the final four-letter word starting with “EN” might be, and finally landed on the four-letter combination “ENBY” and had to admit that I’d never heard of this short word before. This doesn’t happen a lot.

NY Times Spelling Bee thinks 'Enby' is a word

What the hell does it even mean? The Free Dictionary doesn’t know what it is. DuckDuckGo returns a link to Nichtbinäre Geschlechtsidentität (Wikipedia) (my settings prefer Swiss-German results), which is the Non-binary (Wikipedia) (which is much less obviously related to gender than the German title), which allowed me to finally figure out that “enby” is a phoneticization of the letters “N” and “B”.

The only reason I’m pointing this out is that the NY Times’s wokeness is still quite evident in this example, as they recognize a word that isn’t in the dictionary but is inclusive and is, apparently, well-known enough among its customers, but they ignore hundreds of other words that I—and the dictionary—consider to be more or less common. They seem to be particularly stubbornly allergic to any word that might be construed as a slur but are also fiercely allergic to science words.

Already back in 2021, I wrote the following note into the article linked above.

Where Judaic—minyan or tallit—and LGBTQ words—enby—feature prominently, science and engineering words—pion, muon, monadic, molal, decile, egyptology, enqueue, lexeme, moonlet, lidar, nacelle, fairing—regular words—midden, menage, drily, lungful, lede, monofin, nictitate, olla, phaeton, geegaw, gibbet, lamplit, immanent, headball, gnomon, gnomic, zoonotic—some of which might feel rare, but some of which are regularly used—and, finally, quasi-slurs—golliwog, chink, flatulate, gypped, ladyboy, minge, niggly, octaroon, polygyny, raping—don’t. They even allow words like “gully” but not “wadi”, which seems a bit racist. It’s unclear why they choose to recognize “tomtit” but not “woodlark”.

These are decisions made by their editor that illustrate the shape of his and the paper’s ideology.

I saw this in a YouTube comments section the other day. I consider it to be a minimally succinct summary—a microcosm, if you will—of where we are with language and technology right now.

All my motives are alterior

“All my motives are alterior.”

“Ulterior.”

“[Translate to English]”

“Translate to English” 👩‍🍳😘

Tricking a vibe coder into learning to code by Alberta Tech (YouTube)

“Alberta: This is like the next level of vibe-coding. You just type out exactly what you want. It’s really like, ‘we just put the AI in your brain.’ Here, I’ll show you how to do it.. It’s like that … and it’s done.

“Varun: This is future of vibe-coding right here. Yes! We’re gonna write the code ourselves.

“Alberta: You are the AI.

“Varun: I am the AI.

“Alberta: Human intelligence.

“Alberta: There’s this crazy website called leetcode where you can just play around and pretend to the AI. And then, if you get really good at it, somebody will give you a job, as the AI.”

It’s like trying to get a child to eat spinach because Popeye eats it.

Artificial Intelligence? Ain't nobody got time for that

Here’s a Wordle for you: I guessed my lady’s favorite first guess to eliminate four vowels. My second wild stab—with two Rs; doubled letters also being a favorite of the lady—eliminated the “O” and showed me that the “Y” was not at the end of the word.

The only vowel is Y and it's not at the end

Where the hell is the Y then?

Hint: it was December 19th.

That’s a week out from Christmas day.

Think: Three Wise Men.

Think: Gifts.

Frankincense! Obvs.

The post this poster at work (reddit) included an alphabet poster, presumably generated by an LLM.

The longer you look at it, the worse it gets. The letters H, J, P, and Y are missing. V and N appear twice. Several letters are out of order.

Imagine a kid who’s trying to learn the alphabet, though. How would they know that it’s wrong? How confused would they be?

O is penguin

1. A is for ak
2. B is for
3. C is foreah (picture of a cheetah?)
4. D is foer
5. E is elephant (got one!)
6. F is fox (got two!)
7. G is gorilla (three in a row!)
8. L is for (picture of a lion)
9. I is iguana (there’s I!)
10. K is kangooo
11. N is awal
12. O is penguin (picture of basic bird; not a penguin)
13. M is monkey (there’s M!)
14. N is narwhal (picture of a blue whale)
15. S is snake (picture of a bird)
16. T is tiger
17. Q is quail (nestled between T and R
18. R is rhinocros (picture of a snake)
19. V is vulture (bird with no head)
20. X is xerus (picture of a dog)
21. U is urchin
22. V is vulture (again, but this time with a picture of a vulture)
23. W is volf
24. Z is zebra

Eurovision Song Contest 2025It is that time of year again and this time the whole shebang is happening in Switzerland, right up the road in Basel.

I wrote these notes for fun, so don’t expect me to write about each group, and don’t expect any sort of fair evaluation of each group’s talent. I started writing somewhere after a couple of groups into the first semifinals. I filled those in during the finals. My partner insists on watching this thing, so let’s get right to it. I wanted to watch it in Italian for fun and practice but that too was verboten. We’re watching in Swiss-German. Well, the presenters speak mostly English with a bit of obligatory French where it absolutely can’t be avoided but there’s a guy live-translating to Swiss-German chattering over them.

First semifinals

Hazel’s costume hurts my eyes even more than Sandra’s costume does but both of them should be burned. These two are f@&king embarrassing so far. I hope they get better (they do by the second night).

🇮🇸 Iceland

A rap with a fiddle bridge spoken by what look like children (maximum 15 years old). They’re rapping in Icelandic. Their song sounds like something that would come from a ski-hut after 15:00, like the Hühnerstall just above Zermatt. It is not a good song. I don’t know how they made it out of the semifinals. People like kids, I guess.

🇵🇱 Poland

This is in the genre of vaguely lascivious with male and female dancers in quasi-post-apocalyptic costumes while the lead singer—a woman in a holey leotard—holds one note after another and a generic ESC-electronica beat plays in the background. There are dragons on the video and the dancers all look like they’re in Mad Max or maybe Drogo’s tribe in Game of Thrones. She sang in what I assume to be Polish.

🇺🇦 Ukraine

Ukraine’s lead singer is wearing what I can confidently call the most flamboyant Star Trek uniform I’ve ever seen. I can’t even remember what their song sounds like because I kept worrying that he would collapse from malnutrition.

🇪🇸 Spain

The camera work is absolutely insane. And terrible. And insane. The Spanish lady – who was awful – was shot from the bottom of the ribcage up half the time, which I don’t even know what the hell camera angle that even is. The camera swings around wildly the rest of the time. There are senseless effects on everything. I guess they’re trying to distract us from this nothingburger of a song.

🇪🇪 Estonia / 🇸🇪 Sweden

Estonia sang about an espresso macchiato. Sweden is singing about a sauna. Pretty much all of the acts so far have at least sung in their native languages. Both Estonia and Sweden were gimmick acts with no legs.

🇵🇹 Portugal

Portugal is terrible. They’re singing in Portogese. At least they’re playing instruments. That’s something, I guess.

🇳🇴 Norway

Norway is even worse. They sang in English.

🇧🇪 Belgium

Belgium is somehow even worse than Norway. We’re spiraling here. The dude (I’m guessing) is wearing a red, plastic suit and now he’s kneeling on a mirror and looks like he’s having sex with himself. He does have a hell of a falsetto, though, gotta give him that. OK, I take it back. This is better than Norway. It’s not good but it’s winning me over a bit. It’s got a good driving beat. It reminds me enough of Lords of Acid that I end up thinking of much better music without getting mad that I’m not listening to it. Guy in red with red lights and Switzerland’s patented blurry camera was OK.

🇮🇹 Italy

Italy is a goth skeleton singing a pretty song in Italian and playing the world’s largest grand piano. His costume is straight from the seventies. Everyone got the message from Nemo and Conchita Wurst that it’s best to be gender-ambiguous if you want to move on. Update: this song has a four-second guitar solo and a much longer harmonica solo. I still don’t hate it.

🇦🇿 Azerbaijan

I refuse to believe that Azerbaijan isn’t taking the piss. They are singing in English. Why is everyone wearing variations of giant, pleather hazmat suits? I guess I really don’t have my finger on the pulse of fashion these days. The lead singer is now carrying around a balalaika and dead-ass expects us to believe that he is playing it. NO. STOP IT.

I continue to be mystified by the production choices. The camera angles are all squeezed and cropped, putting people into weird corners. FFS, just because it worked for Mr. Robot doesn’t mean that’s how you should film a concert.

OMG the song ended completely unexpectedly. The crowd obviously had no idea the end was coming. I thought someone had mercifully cut the power.

🇸🇲 San Marino

San Marino has the world’s most generic electro-beat. It’s so generic that no-one would even know who to sue for copyright infringement. They’re singing in Italian. it’s a Ballerman-style song called “Tutta L’Italia”. I know this because they said it 200 times. Is there a rap interlude? You betcha.

🇦🇱 Albania

There is a lot of red this year. It’s Albania so sure, of course. Throw that awesome eagle up while you’re at it. This duo has a lady who sings and a guy who plays the marimba. Oh wait, he “sings” too. They both sing in what I can only assume is Albanian. Good for them. There are a ton of pace changes, making this feel more like a medley than a song. It’s not terrible

And the god-blessed Swiss camera is swinging and swooping like a child with ADHD who’s had about ten slices of cake and two liter-bottles of soda.

🇳🇱 Netherlands

If Claude from the Netherlands has real friends, they are going to mercilessly mock him for the rest of his life about this dumb song. Like, every time something goes wrong for him, at least one of his friends should sing “C’est la la la la vie.” and then his other friends should chime in until Claude starts to cry. Lucky for Claude, his friends probably don’t watch the ESC and he’s almost certainly going home tonight.

🇭🇷 Croatia

Like Albania, Croatia has a lot of tempo and genre changes. The strobe lights are crazy. The shaky camera is even more disturbing. The male singer and his dancers are all very pretty, though. That’s something.

The camera is now moving so quickly that I’ve seen the image actual tear a couple of times. He’s singing about a “serpent snake”, as a CGI snake wraps the stage (which I’m sure only the home audience can see).

🇨🇭 Switzerland

Switzerland is also pretty and singing from what looks like the location where she’s being held hostage. She also has a pretty voice and little to no makeup. She’s singing in French. It’s not my style of music but it’s not bad. The fucking cameraman insists on shaking it a bit though because he seems to think that a camera that doesn’t do something all the time is a sin against the old Gods. The camera is shaking so much now that I feel like the person who took her hostage is getting tired. OK. The camera has completely cut out now. It just froze. Wait, she’s back. It just stopped. For like ten seconds. At least the audio didn’t cut out. That’s something.

🇨🇾 Cyprus

Cyprus is singing in English. These lyrics are fucking embarrassingly bad. We know who wrote them. It starts with a Chat and ends with a GPT. Again with the strobing lights. Like, my whole living room is flashing. I can’t even tell if anyone’s pretty because they’re either in blurry red lights or they’re too far away or I’m too busy having an epileptic seizure.

The closing Swiss presentation wasn’t bad.

Second Semifinal

The two hosts are back on stage and I am impressed. I didn’t think that Hazel’s costume could be any stupider but I stand absolutely mightily corrected. I am actually at a complete loss for words to describe the dress. It screams “I lost a bet with an absolute asshole.” It’s a ton of transparent plastic discs glued to a greenish-rainbow glitter body suit. She looks like she’s in the Tron movie. Her shoes are stupidly big and clumpy. Kudos to her for acting as if absolutely nothing is wrong.

The two joked about how people were watching because the woman got the remote away from her husband, who’d rather be watching football. At least the Swiss-German moderator corrected them in translation to point out that the men would most likely be watching ice hockey—especially since Switzerland is absolutely kicking ass so far, having wiped the floor with both the U.S. and Germany and having almost beaten Czechia. Do better, Hazel.

🇦🇺 Australia

Thank God Australia’s here. The dude is somehow singing in English as if he is not a native speaker of Enlgish. The chorus is “I can tell you want a taste of the milkshake man”. I do not believe that they practiced this even once. There is no dancing. I think that they’re taking the piss. The dude is now shirtless and his package is absolutely just prominent in a way that cannot be accidental. His shoes are stupidly big and clumpy.

🇲🇪 Montenegro

Montenegro is a lady wearing a life-sized duvet cover around her neck. She looks like she’s in a play that explains to children where babies come from. She’s singing in what I can only assume is her native language. Her singing and music are a pretty generic ballad, absolutely bog-standard ESC slop. I think someone else complained about the frenetic camera? Oh, never mind. I spoke too soon: the wild camera pans, cuts, angles, and bizarre composition are 100% still here.

🇮🇪 Ireland

There is literally nothing the Irish singer can do to make me care about Ireland this year because I still miss the absolutely psycho from last year (Bambie Thug). This year’s entrant has some attractive and talented dancers but the song is so generically ESC that there is no chance that they will proceed. Her voice is pretty weak.

🇱🇻 Latvia

I kind of liked Latvia. Six women singing and chanting with really cool production values and a song that I might actually listen to again. This is a pretty and artistic performance. Falsetto solos are nice. The song had structure. As Rick Beato says, “It was a song”.

🇦🇲 Armenia

Dude’s name is “Parg”. He’s out of the gate without a shirt. The camera, blown-out HDR camerawork, and slow-motion blur the whole time means that I don’t really know what he looks like. This a Ballerman-style song, striving so hard to be the summer hit, with a bit of a metal tinge to the chorus (“Survivor”) but rap-style stanzas. It’s better than the first two songs. He’s singing mostly in English and some Armenian. Right at the very end, we get to see that he is quite handsome. That’ll work.

🇦🇹 Austria

I don’t even know what to say. Why do they even bother coming back? Is it because it was just a quick train ride this year? Good thing for them (I’m guessing) that they can probably even still catch the train back home tonight. Yes, they can sing really high notes. Good for them, I suppose.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

As an experienced ESC viewer, my hopes are not high. They just have the consistently worst taste. This year, they seem to be trying to copy the Abba sound but it is not working. .Three young ladies with quite weak voices. The chorus is “What the hell just happened?” which is what I’m asking myself after this terrible song. Guess what, though? Since their country provides so much of the budget for the ESC, they are automatically qualified for the final. So, we get to hear this gem of a song again on Saturday. Null points.

🇬🇷 Greece

Clavdia is singing a song called the awesome name of “Basteromata” in Greek. She’s alone on stage, singing a classic ballad, weaing what look for the all the world like reading glasses. Wait, somebody else showed up. She’s a “dancer”. This is utterly generic. The computer graphics are doing a lot of work. As is the crazy Swiss camera. She is by far not the worst but it’s not really my bag.

🇱🇹 Lithuania

This is what might have, in a better world, been a metal band. Instead, it’s an emo-looking lead singer trying to stay on-camera. They’re all wearing gray sacs. Kudos for going in a metal direction but it’s an aimless song that never seems to drive to a conclusion. It’s not got much structure (as usual). It’s not terrible but there are a lot of other songs just like it that are much better—and I can’t help but think of those instead.

🇲🇹 Malta

This is about as hyper-sexualized as ESC is allowed to get. They changed the name of the song to “Serving” from, I believe, “F@&king” (the moderator said it was a “Kraftausdruck” that you’re not allowed to say on television). It’s not a good song. Malta’s hoping that people vote for skimpily clad female dancers dry-humping each other, which is—NGL—not a bad bet to make with ESC voters.

🇬🇪 Georgia

She’s singing operatically in Georgian and English. She has a good voice but the song isn’t great. She has good stage presence though; she’s quite striking. I wish the camera would knock off its bullshit. I’m just going to note here that she also does a costume-change, which, like, nearly everyone has done now. They keep calling it a “quick change” but that’s not what it is: she just took off a giant coat and left it on the stage.

🇫🇷 France

Completely unsurpisingly, France has a blonde woman singing a ballad. Am I happy that my French lessons are paying off and I can understand most of the lyrics? Well, yes and no. It’s always difficult to continue liking a song once you understand the dumb lyrics. The chorus is just her scatting the word “Maman” again and again and again. Next.

Interlude

If I’m honest, the two hosts are kind of growing on me. They’re goofy but in a decent way. They’re vacuuming the stage after the French lady spilled sand all over it.

🇩🇰 Denmark

Another female ballad dropping a giant coat on stage. She’s singing in English. Oh, no, wait, now we’ve transitioned to a completely generic ESC-style electronica beat. Her voice isn’t as strong as others. She’s barely moving on stage. She has no stage presence but benefits from the frenetic camerawork in that it doesn’t … linger. Denmark stunk up the joint last year too. She’s taking the train home with Austria.

🇨🇿 Czechia

Adonxs is singing in English. He is shooting for Freddie Mercury. He’s a good showman and has a decent voice with a lot of range but the song is not good. Guess what? He also dropped his coat. It’s a thing this year.

🇱🇺 Luxembourg

She’s singing in French. Generic beat, generic melody, and generic singing but good dancers, costumes, and set design. She started off as a doll in a quasi-futuristic house but dropped that conceit quickly. OK, so she did a quick change. What is happening this year? Did they all get a memo that they should bring two outfits?

🇮🇱 Israel

We had to of course hear about how this dingbat was dancing outside of a concentration camp at the Nova music festival from our Swiss moderator, like she’s some kind of hero. She’s alone on stage, singing in English and a bit in Hebrew. It’s a standard ballad. The lyrics are a bit on the nose, no? “But we will stay even if you say goodbye” and “Everyone cries. Cry alone.” “A new day will rise.” Like where will that new day rise? Over her daddy’s new seaside condo in Gaza? Yikes.

🇩🇪 Germany

This is a generic dance tune but it’s got a decent beat and it’s also the best act that Germany has sent since Lena. Spock playing the light-cello was a nice touch. I think the name of the song is “Baller”, which is kind of funny if you know German. She’s quite attractive, which is absolutely going to help.

🇷🇸 Serbia

“Princ” is singing in Serbian. He’s in red; his dancers in black. It’s a ballad with a bit of piano accompaniment. Yawn. This is not going anywhere. He can hitch a ride with Austria.

🇫🇮 Finland

A blond lady with a sizable bosom and lips to match sings a pretty generic party song. She’s wearing a lot of leather and the moderator promises “lasciviousness” but it’s not really evident. The strobe lights and frenetic camerawork are absolutely maddening. She didn’t drop a coat because she didn’t start with one.

The closing Swiss presentation wasn’t bad.

Finals

Hazel’s wearing a rainbow sweater that doesn’t fit but it’s better than the thing she wore on Thursday. She’s joined by Michelle Hunziker, who’s not looking 48 years old at all. Today I learned that she was born in Lugano and went to school in Bern before moving to Milano. I had no idea.

As usual, all of the musical acts were exactly the same as the ones from the semifinals. I’m pleased to see that every single one of the acts that I said would move on because they were “hot” (male or female or indeterminate) moved on, as expected.

I have no idea who won nor does it really matter since the jury voting has, in the last couple of years, been overwhelmed by pretty obvious astroturfing and manipulation in the televoting portion. Last year, an absolutely terrible Israeli act rode a completely inexplicable wave of adoration from most of old Europe. I expect the same boring hasbara to dominate this year as well.

Stewart LeeI very much appreciate Stewart Lee and have listened to everything I can of his. I don’t really know any other comedian like him. It’s impossible for me to detail the levels of meta-analysis he brings to his sets. I can barely find a joke that I can quote of his because everything is so rambling and intricate and self-referencing that you’d end up citing half the show. You can see full transcripts of very similar shows for Tornado and Snowflake.

Stewart Lee: Tornado/Snowflake − 17th March 2022 − Harrogate by John Hodgson (YouTube)

Perhaps he sums it up best in the second hour—Snowflake—with this bit at 01:41:00 or so.

“It’s […] all right […] but it took him 45 minutes to tell a barely adequate anecdote about an author I’d never heard of.”

Which is also not correct, because it’s more than all right. I think it’s brilliant.

This was the punchline to a joke he’d started 30 minutes earlier, with:

“So I found myself reading an article in GQ by the 1970s punk-era polemicist
and popular 21st century novelist Tony Parsons.

“Do people know who Tony…?

“[murmurs of agreement] A lot of you, not everyone, which is a shame, because I’m now going to talk about Tony Parsons for 45 minutes.”

Earlier, there was a segment about a relatively stuffy Times reporter named Alan Bennet, who’d given Stewart a great review, but couched it in terms that seemed somewhat backhanded as compliments, as they would almost guarantee to consign him to high-brow, think-piece-style comedy venues.

“He’s fearless, undeterred by an audience’s failure to respond.
Erving Goffman (Wikipedia) would have liked Stewart Lee. Who’s that? Who’s Erving Goffman? Erving Goffman would have liked Stewart Lee? That’s a quote for the poster isn’t it? That’ll pack ‘em in at the Bradford Alhambra!

“It’s austere stuff. Stewart Lee is the J.L. Austin of comedy. What does it mean? J.L. Austin? Erving Goffman would have liked Stewart Lee?

“I googled Erving Goffman. Erving Goffman is the most influential American sociologist of the 20th century. His major areas of study include the sociology of everyday life, social construction of self, social organization of experience, and particular elements of social life such as institutions and stigmas—and he would have loved me, wouldn’t he? He’d’ve been flailing around in a tsunami of his own urine by now!

“Stewart Lee is the J.L Austin of comedy. Right. J.L Austin was a British philosopher of language, perhaps best-known—if at all, Alan—for the theory of speech acts. Austin’s work ultimately suggests that all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging on metaphysics of language that would posit propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning. And I’m the him of this! I’m the him of this!

“If you’ve come along here tonight, hoping to see two-and-a-half hours of the kind of J.L. Austin-influenced comedy that Erving Goffman would have loved, then you can fuck off, cos it’s not going to be that, is it? […] This is the kiss of death, this Alan Bennett review. […] I hate Alan Bennett.”

At 02:08:00,

“I actually wrote that bit to be like that, to show you who I would be if I was
who they say I am.

“LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

“Right? Yeah.
That’s right. Listen to that.

“And that − that’s how good I am. I can write jokes that fail in exactly the way I want them to, which is much harder than writing the kind of shit funny jokes that you like.”

He has a more recent show from 2024, called Stewart Lee, Basic Lee: Live at the Lowry.

Want Laughter Therapy? Watch Stewart Lee's 2024 Live Show Now Full | Full HD by Abdullah Media (YouTube)

This copy of the video probably won’t last because it’s not an official channel but I just wanted to remember I’d seen it. Stewart Lee is one of my favorite comedians. Whenever I listen to one of his shows, I almost always start off by wondering “what is he even doing,” and I always end up thinking that it was one of the most brilliant, funny, deeply philosophical things I’ve ever seen in my life. There is no other comedian like him.

“Don’t come and see me if you don’t know what anything is.”

At about 13:00,

“Right. That’s the end of the fun, topical bit at the top of the show. It’s not really of interest to me, that sort of stuff. I just do it because I’m sick of reading people going, ‘the reason you don’t see Lee on Have I Got News for You is because he can’t write economic, topical jokes. Well, I can write them. As we’ve seen, I can write them very easily. But, um, it’s beneath me. Uh, it’s beneath you. And it’s time now to move on into the punishing experimental standup that has kept me out of the arenas for 35 years.”

At about 18:00

“I’m not going to write any more jokes. I’m going to come out here with a blackboard, with a list of topics on it. I’m going to point at one of them and you can have a good laugh imagining what I might have said about it.”

At about 01:11:30

“[…] what’s this? What’s going on? He’s doing some kind of lecture. Of course I’m not. That’s what I do. That’s my comedy. It’s not a mistake. That’s kind of routine. That’s why the broad sheets call me the world’s greatest living standup—which they do, in case you—why have we not heard of him? I don’t know! There’s been an administrative error.

“It’s because of stuff like that. That’s what they like. It flatters their intelligence, the broad-sheet newspaper critics, because what I do is as close to being not funny at all as it’s possible to be. And then, just at the last minute, when you want to blow your own head off, you go—it turns around—you go, oh it’s brilliant.”

After a long, brilliant bit in which he ties together about a dozen threads into a repetitive, mesmerizing, and coherent jumble, all played as people endlessly visiting an office, day after day after day, he says, at about 01:27:30,

“This is my life. Pure. Simple. Classic. But listen to that. There’s no laughs, are there? There’s just a strange tense atmosphere of hopeless despair. A bit like the kind of atmosphere you might get at the end of an award-winning piece of theater.”

“I’ve only ever written one decent closing joke. I wrote it in September 1989. […] I’m going to finish with it now, without changing any of the now-irrelevant personal details and then I’m going to go. See you in a couple years.

“So, I was talking to my granddad the other day. He’s 94 years—he’s dead now obviously, but he was alive when I wrote this. I’m not sick, you know—so I was talking to my granddad the other day—he’s 94 years old—I said to him, ‘Grandad, you are 94 years old. What, in your experience, has been the worst thing about growing so old?’

“And he said to me, ‘Stu, in my experience, the worst thing about growing so old has been watching all of the friends that I grew up with slowly dying off one by one.’

“And I said to him, well, Granddad, ‘you fed them those berries.’”

Ricky JayThere has never been and will never be anyone like Ricky Jay. He was a polymath. He was erudite. He spoke in clipped tones, with words like “disapprobation”. He cited 15th-century poetry from memory, as part of his show. He cites George Bernard Shaw, “Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.”

He was the most brilliant playing-card prestidigitator the world has ever seen. He knew more about tricks and magicians and the history thereof than anyone else before or since.

Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants − Magic show (YouTube)

A large part of this show is explaining how to cheat, how to prestidigitate, all the while doing tricks that cannot be explained. He keeps up a non-stop, relevant, and sophisticated patter while pulling aces from the deck without looking at his hands or the deck. He demonstrates the kind of “card control” that you can only get when you’ve done it a million times. Probably literally.

It’s a friendly reminder that you should never, ever play cards with anyone you don’t know, or whose skills you don’t know.

I have written about him before,

• In 2018, I mentioned a long-form essay about him, Secrets of the Magus in 1993 (New Yorker)
• He was a favorite of David Mamet, so he appeared in his movies Redbelt in 2008, House of Games in 1987, and Heist.

The article Study finds AI-generated meme captions funnier than human ones on average by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica) describes what it says on the tin. As several others confirmed in the comments, the memes all suck, whether generated by an AI, a human, or a combination.

Here is a sheet of the “winners.”

Top memes from study

They are uniformly terrible, at best confusing. Not one is funny.

For example, this is apparently a meme written by an actual human being.

“Threw something into the trash can.. Hit it first try.”

WTF. That is not even cringe-worthy.

Here’s a robot one, with the same fist-pumping baby.

“Fridge was empty…found ice cream hidden in the back!”

That makes no sense. It’s f@&king terrible.

The rest are just as bad. They would be terrible T-shirts, terrible postcards, … they are objectively terrible and unfunny memes. This entire study is garbage.

People will read the headline and tell all of their co-workers that AIs are funnier than humans now—all without having looked at a single meme to see if any of them are actually funny.

I started my recent journey of Bill Burr videos with an interview on none other than NPR. Below the video are stream-of-consciousness notes in which I waver on Terry Gross but eventually admit that Burr badgered a decent interview out of her. I wouldn’t make a habit of listening to her interviews, though. It’s a testament to anti-intellectualism that she’s considered a leading light of liberal thought.

Bill Burr on NPR

Bill Burr (extended interview) by Fresh Air / Terry Gross (YouTube)

I love how Bill Burr runs the interview, in that he doesn’t let her “move on” from talking about cancel culture and the complete bastardization of the “MeToo” movement into something that just rounded up so many people with unwelcome opinions to the same thing as Harvey Weinstein.

At 13;57, Burr talks about people’s capitulation to Musk,

“This is why I hate liberals. It’s like liberals have no teeth whatsoever. They just go, ‘oh my God. Can you believe? I’m getting out of the country.‘ I’m just like, ‘you’re going to leave the country cuz of one guy with dyed hair plugs and a laminated face? Who runs a bad car company and has an obsolete social-media platform? You’re going to leave this country? Why doesn’t he leave? Why isn’t he stopped? What are we so afraid of? This guy who can’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag?”

Gross is so f@&king condescending, saying that the discussion would be worthwhile if it were “nuanced,” implying that Burr is not capable of having the discussion the right way. Burr says, “nuanced conversation is not my strong suit,” which is utterly belied by the relatively nuanced argument that he’d just delivered. But Gross happily agrees—because she’s a classic liberal and is only interested in having conversations involving ideas and coming to conclusions that she already held before they start. It’s safer that way.

Burr is so very in-control of this conversation, even revisiting his tirade and relating it to his character in Glengarry Glen Ross, a play that he’s currently starring in, who also tends to express himself as he intends but in a manner that is more offputting than he wanted. Nice plug, Billy Boy! [1]

He is not only one of the funniest people to have ever graced this planet, he is also quite insightful and empathetic and disarmingly intelligent, in the sense that he’s able to root out hypocrisy like a truffle-hunting pig.

He gets angry because he’s so frustrated with how people like Terry Gross seem to be so smugly satisfied with living in a giant stew of hypocrisy, holding views that just happen to not only make them feel terrific about what wonderful people they are, they also coincidentally lead to themselves never feeling any financial or emotional discomfort.

They never ask “why me and not all of these other people?” They don’t really think about the answer, but if they would, they would say it’s because they deserve it for being so smart and amazing and useful. Bill knows that the answer is “luck” or “I don’t”.

At 50:30,

“It’s funny to me, because I just thought it was hilarious that when that me-too thing came out, right? All of these guys, all of a sudden, were walking around and they had on these male-feminist buttons, right? And that was absolutely hysterical to me. And it was hysterical to me that women didn’t call out the BS of that.

“Because it’s like where was that button before this happened? You had your whole life to wear that button and you didn’t wear it until guys were getting thrown off the bridge…then all of a sudden, I’m a male-feminist—females first—and you fell for it!

“I … that’s a red flag. Let’s just take it out of men and women. I remember when I first got a manager, and an agent, and I thought oh boy oh boy now I don’t have to make the calls! Someone’s going to be making calls for me. It’s like no-one’s going to care about what you want more than you, so you got to empower yourself to do this.”

Conan on Hot One

Conan O'Brien Needs a Doctor While Eating Spicy Wings by First We Feast / Hot Ones (YouTube)

He controls the show from start to finish. He invited his own fake doctor and set up fake bits to do throughout. He was obviously suffering and he did not stop, nor miss a step. He improved through the pain, to the point where I thought he might be faking it—but the show doesn’t let guests fake it.

At 15:00,

“I’d have […] said there’s no way there’s ever going to be a Charlie Rose show where you eat hot wings but I’ve […] I would have been wrong.”

At 23:30,

“Read. Read widely and read well. There’s comedy in the Old Testament. There’s comedy in the New Testament. You can read all kinds of stuff; just don’t lock yourself in to ‘it’s got to be some comedy from the last 10 years.‘ No. There’s great comedy out there, that was written a long time ago. What’s funnier than Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza, you know? This is good stuff. The classics are funny, you know? You can read Chaucer’s Tales. They’re funny. There’s funny everywhere. Don’t be a snob. Look high and look low. A Mad Magazine is funny. There’s funny stuff online all the time. There’s no reason for us to try and exclude one category over another.

“These aren’t the rantings of someone who’s had some bad chemicals and overdid it to be funny and relevant to people who were at least 50 years younger than him.”

Bill Burr on Conan

Bill Burr Can't Help But Laugh When He Watches The News | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend by Team Coco (YouTube)

This is a fantastic 12-minute video. Bill Burr is on fire, as usual. He brings together a few stories I’ve heard before, but juxtaposes them to expose new meaning.

After he tells several stories in which he ended up laughing at stories in which others suffered, he says,

“I don’t even know what the fuckin’ news is. It’s like, here’s a bunch of shit you can’t fix, that happened, that was horrible.”

Bill’s point isn’t a new one but it’s an important one to remember: sometimes you’ve just to laugh at the dark humor of reality. Just say, ‘good one, God. You got me.’

You can’t cry all the time and those who pretend that they can are posing for an imaginary audience.

Commentator Bombadil-ez9ns writes,

“I love how good Bill is at saying the WORST THING EVER, then walking you through it so that you understand where he’s coming from, and part of you even agrees.”

That’s called “philosophy.”

Another eloquent summary is from TheOtherMrEd,

“The thing I love about Bill Burr when he goes on these rants is he says all the things we think or feel… but know we shouldn’t. He’s right. Sometimes the level of “tragedy” reaches a point where it becomes absurd. And laughing about things you can’t change is a healthy survival strategy. Processing everyone else’s tragedy as though it was your own leads to burnout and compassion fatigue.”

Bill Burr and Conan O'BrienEven this, though, isn’t exactly why Bill Burr laughs at The Biggest Loser. He said it himself, “most of the world is starving”. That’s why. He’s laughing at the utter darkness of a country having come up with a hit series about people who have eaten so much that they can barely move, filming them crying about their inability to control themselves—which is real and which is devastisting but only to them—when the rest of the world has real problems.

Even a lot of their fellow citizens have real problems that don’t involve having so much disposable incomes that you literally can’t stop yourself from eating Oreos. You laugh at the genius of a culture that airs this kind of stuff to distract everyone else from noticing that they are part of the oppression that causes starvation in the rest of the world, at a system that encourages—nay, enforces—people to focus solipsistically on their own problems, despite having relatively no problems compared to most.

He laughs because he’s really woke, not posturing. He is awake to the structure of the system and he’s laughing at how it’s trying to manipulate him into going back to sleep.

At least, that’s how I read it. I like to think that he would share my frustration that people only care about how their country is tearing the world a new asshole, day after day after day, when their country’s behavior starts to impinge their own lifestyles.

I hear it in Switzerland too: the latest tariffs are going to put companies out of business. Yeah, well, that sucks. But those companies were in bed with an empire that was also cheerily slaughtering people that they never cared enough about because it never affected their bottom line. That’s not a principle. That’s just self-interest.

As long as you pension fund earns 7-8% per year, you honestly don’t give even a single shit about what else is going on. As soon as your personal flourishing might be affected, all of a sudden, what’s going on must be stopped, even if it’s just to shore up the crooked system that stole nearly everything but allowed a few crumbs to drop onto your plate. All of a sudden, people are fighting like crazy to put things back they way they were.

This is how change happens. Your middle-class pain is not the biggest pain in the world. It is, at best, discomfort. You will definitely muddle through. There are still 95% of the people on this planet who didn’t even notice that the stock market went down or that tariffs have been levied because their lives were already shitty.

You never cared about them—not enough to take even a little bit less for yourself—even though making a better world for them would automatically mean that you’d also be living in a world whose continued economic well-being wasn’t contingent on the behavior of a handful of lunatics.

The prison riot might feel really bad right now but, instead of complaining that we want the doors put back on our cells, maybe we should be figuring out how to build a more just system, one that’s more resilient against the whims of mad oligarchs. We should build a world without oligarchs, so that this kind of insanity can’t happen, instead of begging the oligarchs to give us our steady stream of crumbs back.

I like to think that Bill Burr would agree with that.

For its 50th anniversary, Saturday Night Live released its first episode, in full. It was initially aired in 1975. It was quite interesting to contrast the form and style with the SNL that we know today and that has been established for a couple of decades.

The biggest difference is that SNL started out with much shorter skits. They got to the point, delivered the punchline and…basta. They had a lot more skits; the host delivered several monologues; there were two musical guests and they both played twice. I prefer the shorter skits to the drawn-out “beating a dead horse” length they tend to use now.

SNL’s First Episode with Host George Carlin and Musical Guest Billy Preston and Janis Ian by SNL (YouTube)

After watching it, I took the following notes,

• The cold opening was about a minute long. It was a language lesson involving wolverines and is quite famous. The feel of the skit felt much more like Monty Python than modern-day Saturday Night Live—or any SNL from the last 30 years.
• The entire show was just under 68 minutes long.
• Each of the two musical guests played twice. Janis’s songs were each about 4–5 minutes long. She was interesting, singing songs that were almost like poetry that she wrote for herself—we just got to listen along. The second song sounded kind of like the beginning of Gutter Ballet by Savatage; at other times, she sounded a bit like Billy Joel.
• The skits in general were much, much shorter, so there were more of them.
• Original SNL cast (partial)Dan Akroyd was very good, not reading from his cards at all.
• There was a long segment involving muppets, which was absolutely amazing.
• George Carlin hosted and did about 15 minutes of material, distributed over about five different segments throughout the show. He did not clean up his act for the show, shooting straight at religion pretty heard, as is his wont.
• Albert Brooks presented a film that was quite odd, and quite risqué, with a quick segment about Oregon having lowered its age of consent to seven years old—and then showing a date with a man and a seven-year-old girl eating a sundae. Avant-garde as hell.
• Chevy Chase did a Weekend Update.
• Andy Kaufman lip-synced part of the Mighty Mouse theme, illustrating his more-than-offbeat brand of comedy and amply showing why he was funny. He was funny because we couldn’t figure out why he made us laugh, so we laughed more. So, he was a comedian.
• Al Franken in the credits as a writer.
• There was some on-the-street stuff featuring a blind cab driver.
• Garrett Morris was there but didn’t get a lot of airtime yet.
• Gilda Radner was still getting her wheels under her; her oddball comedy kind of shone through but she seemed somewhat reserved (kind of inebriated?)
• There was a short skit about the population of the state of Georgia switching places with the people of Israel.
• There was an odd two-minute stand-up by a comedienne I’d never heard of, and whose name I already cannot remember.
• There was a fake commercial mocking the razor-blade companies for ever thinking that anyone could need more than two blades on a razor, presenting what they clearly deemed a laughable number of blades: three.

I was recently bragging to a friend about how I’d finally just about conquered a difficult jigsaw puzzle with methodology and techniques, My friend of course asked [1] to which methodologies and techniques I might be referring.

Background

I was raised on jigsaw puzzles. We always had a Christmas puzzle at my house. When I was much younger, we did them throughout the year. As I got older, we only had the Christmas puzzle, but we always had that one. [2] Everyone in my nuclear family did it: mom, dad, twin sister. Even though, we all had different backgrounds and predilections, we all got pretty good at them. Like, I might have been the only one occasionally and semi-robotically machine-gunning pieces in at a frightening pace, but everyone was getting pieces in at a pretty good clip. We were all rewarded enough to keep going. More on that later.

Perhaps jigsaw puzzles are how I learned to analyze a problem into smaller problems. Perhaps they’re how I learned patience and perseverance to tackle longer problems. Perhaps they’re how I learned to put in the work before reaping the fun.

Why I enjoy them

I’m not sure if it’s always been this way but, for as long as I can remember, jigsaw-puzzle pieces just kind of jump out at me. Like, someone will say “I need this piece here,” and point to a gap. It has happened to me often enough that I can scan the table and say “I see it,” and, most of the time, it’s the right piece.

This is also perhaps a good part of the reason that I’m left to do them alone now. [3]

It is very much the reason why I like to do them, because I get a little frisson. [4]

Methodologies and techniques

So, now that I’m thinking about it, here are a few things that I tend to do and not to do.

I never start by willy-nilly slapping pieces together. Someone’s got to flip all of the pieces over. It might as well be me. [5]

OK. Pieces are all flipped over and, most importantly, visible.

While I’m doing that, I sort out the edge pieces, as many as I can. I don’t obsess with getting them all (I’m 80% finished with a tough puzzle right now and am still missing one).

After that, there are different approaches for different types of puzzles.

How do you put pieces together? You get the pieces that fit together near each other. Then, you’re more likely to be able to fit them together. If they’re on different sides of the table, or in different boxes, then you’ve got no chance.

Oh, the boxes. I forgot about those.

The boxes and engineering

It’s a trick my Dad taught me. [6] Instead of laying all of the pieces out on the table, you lay them out in other puzzle boxes from other puzzles. That way, you can stack them and put it away so the cat doesn’t f@&k everything up. Also, it takes less space. Also, if you build something together that then needs to go inside the already-built border, you can flap down one of the sides of the box [7], and easily slide it into place.

I guess I like puzzles because they’re basically an engineering problem.

Sorting

But, at heart, and, before I digressed into discussing boxes, jigsaw puzzles are a sorting problem. [8]

So, how do you sort pieces? Sorting by color or shape are your go-to piles to start making. Usually, as you’re sorting, you’re already kind of fitting pieces together.

If it’s not color, it’s significant features, like any edge between two different colors or patterns. Any significant patterns or grains are somewhere to start, as well.

The boxes help keep your different groups separate from each other. “Gimme the red box,” was not uncommon at Christmas. “I need noses,” was perhaps another.

The important thing is to be able to see all the pieces at once or be able to quickly scan a grouping of likely candidates. Hence: flip ‘em over and make ‘em accessible.

A jigsaw puzzle koan

Here’s something to remember that is encouraging: The more pieces you fit together, the fewer pieces remain. That means that solving a jigsaw puzzle has the same rewarding feeling as standing in line at a well-designed theme-park ride, or a ski lift, or an off-ramp, or anywhere with several lines merging into one: the longer you stick with it, the faster it goes.

The more pieces you fit together, the fewer pieces remain.

But, honestly, color and shape are the obvious ones. Everyone does those. They work for puzzles with fields of color or distinctive areas that cover a good bit of territory.

Adapting to diversity

How the hell do you tackle a monster like the riot of completely heterogeneous color in this one?

heye-go-camping-2000-teile

This is the 2024 Christmas puzzle. It’s 2000 pieces. 2000 pieces is a lot. You can buy it at Orell Füssli.

There is such a riot of detail that it’s overwhelming. You’re going to feel like any piece could go anywhere. That’s where you have to really just start to see the drawing. You can’t let your brain elide detail. You have to keep it hyper-aware to every detail. Otherwise, your eyes will just sweep over the thing and you’ll say “I can’t find where this piece goes,” put it down, pick up another one, lather, rinse, repeat.

Frustration.

You need to get a win in order to want to keep playing.

As I already mentioned above, whatever I’ve got going for me puzzle-wise guarantees me more than enough mini-wins to make solving jigsaw puzzles fun.

Actively looking

So, back to looking at the drawing.

There are unique bits, like the market sign, the white trailer, the red tent, the blue tent, the striped tent, the winding road. Those are pretty strongly separable from one another. You have to be careful, though, but the puzzle designer usually helps you out. The white trailer on the bottom-left has little flags draped on it, while the one on the bottom-right has lights. If you find a white piece with lights on it, you know where it’s going, right? It’s the same if you find a white piece with a bit of spiky color.

If you find a tire, that’s good! There aren’t that many of those! But there are several! So, scan the picture and figure out which tire it is. Place the piece where it goes, even if it doesn’t fit yet.

You can’t find the tire? Look again. This time, remember to keep your focus; don’t let your lazy mind drift and elide what it considers to be unnecessary detail. [9] If you couldn’t find the tire, it’s probably because you glided your lazy eye over one on a wheelbarrow, or on the back of a car, or a trailer.

Ok, then there’s the trees. Undifferentiated. Hopeless. No. The puzzle designers are not going to leave you in the lurch like that. The trees on the right-hand side have larger lights in them, whereas the ones on the bottom-left have a sprinkling of much-smaller lights or snow on them. The ones on the top-left have no white spots. The ones in the middle-left have stronger, unique colors.

First, take one step. Then, another.

This is where you start. Remember, every piece you fit into another is no longer in the pool of completely undifferentiated pieces. Every piece you fit is a win. Every piece you fit leaves you with a puzzle that’s one piece smaller than the puzzle you had just a second ago. It’s now easier.

For this puzzle, I made groups in two stages. I would collect everything red into one place—enhance proximity—then capitalize on proximity to make smaller groups within the e..g., red group. At one point, I just collected animal faces like a serial killer.

The last resort: memorize the picture

This puzzle seems designed to foil the particular skills I have [10] that make me able to relatively often solve jigsaw puzzles at what I’ve been told is a frightening, nay offputting, nay joy-killing pace.

Instead—and this is going to sound trite—I had to…well…learn every detail of the drawing. I spent a lot of time with the box-top in one hand [11], and a piece in the other, scanning for where it goes. I often laid the damned thing down in the middle of a vast, open space, knowing it goes right there and letting it await the forty brethren that would eventually surround it.

Eventually, though, what really worked best was that I learned pretty much every damned detail of the drawing, which finally allowed me to fall back on my jigsaw-puzzle super power of knowing where a piece goes just by looking at it. I would just scan over the unplaced pieces and see “fox face”, or “owl wing”, or “tire”.

I finally got to a point where I could see a piece and know where it goes. I could start looking for a piece I wanted, and then know it when I saw it.

Getting to this stage was a combination of learning the drawing and just reducing the number of pieces left. The 20% I have left is going to be easy. [12]

Examples of how to find a piece

Example #1

The following image highlights the slot that we’d like to fill.

The piece is somewhere in this image. Can you find it?

There it is!

Example #2

The following image highlights the slot that we’d like to fill.

The piece is somewhere in this image. Can you find it?

There it is!

Example #3

The following image highlights the slot that we’d like to fill.

The piece is somewhere in this image. Can you find it?

There it is!

Example #4

The following image highlights the slot that we’d like to fill.

The piece is somewhere in this image. Can you find it?

There it is!

Example #5

The following image highlights the slot that we’d like to fill.

The piece is somewhere in this image. Can you find it?

There it is!

There was recently a “favorite Far Side” topic in the comics sub-reddit. I’ve lost the link and don’t feel like searching for it. I downloaded all of the ones that I liked, so consider this article a distillation of—and vast improvement over—that post,

The Far Side was pretty formative for me. Most of these are subversion of expectations, but many have multiple layers, which makes you feel clever for figuring it out. I had a lot of the books and collections and read through them again and again. This comic strippanel stems from a time when irony and a macabre sense of humor were not only appreciated, but feted. There was far less vetting, amelioration, and homogenization of content.

Let’s start off with a macabre one that would probably not run anymore because the puritan 1980s have given way to the even-more-prudish and self-righteous 2020s.

Hey Bob, think there are any bears in this old cave?

Jokes like the one below only work because of Larson’s impeccable style. Your eye is drawn to the sign because the salesman is looking at it. Despite the simple drawing, he’s also obvious hesitating because he’s wondering whether it’s a typo. The eye roves elsewhere to find the answer.

Beware of Doug

There are levels here. If you think it’s funny because “food” is misspelled, enjoy. It you think it’s funny because the dog is trying to trap the cat, OK. If you laughed because it’s ludicrous to think that it matters that cat food is misspelled because cats can’t read, then you’re getting there.

Cat Fud

I love how the cat in this next one is plastered to the window. The desperation is palpable.

Flightless birds and assorted rodents

Another macabre one. The adorable goat is gazing calmly at the incoming plane.

Goat in a Cloud Bank

Let’s do the other plane one. Again, you have to work at it, at least a little bit.

Intercom Light

He knows it’s wrong. He’s going to do it anyway. Because it’s funny. You can’t not.

Missile

You can read so much into this, but it’s funny even if you don’t.

Isn't anyone here a real sheep?

This is one that I remember and find reason to cite occasionally.

School for the gifted

He’s so excited about his big day.

I'm going to the vet's to get tutored

I can’t really explain why I love this one. Maybe because it’s cows.

Wendell…I'm not content

The one below is the only one that I know didn’t run in the regular papers because it was deemed too risqué. You can’t have snakes eating babies. That’s not the joke, though. The joke is what comes after. It’s a little story.

Fat snake

The 2024 Year in Review (PornHub Insights) is available and has some fun facts. [1] For example, the U.S. had about the same percentage increase for “sneaky cheating” as the French did for “femme a lunette” (women with glasses). This blog post is 100% worth it just to learn terms like “milf culona” (big-ass MILF) in Spanish, which, together with “culo grande” (big ass) in Italian, set a sort of U.N.-like agreement about priorities for a lot of countries. Ukraine, though, wins with a trending search for “на мотоциклах” (on motorcycles).

The breakdown of top relative term by state was illuminating.

Pornhub insights 2024: United States, top relative terms by state

I wonder if it’s actually true? Iowa with “Work trip”? Pennsylvania with “Naked women”? Rhode island with “wedding”? Connecticut can’t possibly be “queef,” can it? What the hell?

Still, I love that NYS is “Turkish” because I’m thinking that Eric Adams did that all by himself. Similarly, I feel like “footjob” in Colorado is also the work of a couple—or at most a handful—of highly dedicated and focused individuals.

The comic Bizarre Adventures #34 [Newsstand] (Comics.Org) came out in 1981. [1] It would be the final issue of the Bizarre Adventures series but it was the first one I picked up. I was nine years old. I loved this comic. My best friend loved this comic. He still quotes it to me every once in a while, usually around the holiday season. It was nearly impossibly subversive. I am proud of my mom that she let me buy it, even though it literally says “Not for kiddies! We mean it!” right on the cover.

It’s really hard to find … but found it I finally did. [2]

There are several stories in it.

Son of Santa!

Santa’s son is down on his luck in New York. Santa’s chief elf comes to find him, to bring him home. The Anti-Claus is trying to take down Santa. By the time they get back to the North Pole, the Anti-Claus has frozen Santa to death. “He even breached the inner sanctum!” [3] The Anti-Claus comes for son of Santa, who stabs him in the chest with a screwdriver, bounces a hammer off of his forehead, and then even chops off one of his arms with the runner of a sleigh. Nothing works, until he finally captures the Anti-Claus in Santa’s sack.

Howard the Duck’s Christmas

This is a retelling of It’s a Wonderful Life with Howard the Duck in the role of George Bailey. The angel who saves him from suicide on the bridge doesn’t quite find as evocative scenes—the first two visits, instead of showing how badly off his friends would be without him show his friends reach heights of heretofore unknown success. The last one, starring Howard’s former girl Bev, looks like it’s going to be convincing…but then it also turns out just like the first two: Bev is doing just fine—grand, even—without Howard. Back at the bridge, the angel is ready to commit suicide for being so bad at his job.

Dr Deth Not to Mention Kip and Muffy

Dr Deth is a boy who travels on a motorcycle with sidecar, along with two voluptuous and Daisy Duke-clad sidekicks. They are on the trail of a bunch of filthy hillbillies, who’s truck/house they invade, only to find an even younger boy in the back. When Dr Deth drops in through the “roof” of the truck, the boy thinks he’s “Sandy Claws”. Deth gives the boy his gun, who shoots his captors’ brains out. And that’s all she wrote.

Slay Bells!

This story follows a boy whose father was killed by Santa Claus when Santa’s fat ass slipped off of their roof right onto his father, who was looking out of the window to see what the noise on the roof was. Years later, the boy goes around at Christmas shooting anyone who’s dressed up as Santa Claus. He finally gets the real one. Ten years later, his mom is crushed by a giant Easter Egg. The bunny’s next.

Santa Bites the Big Apple! (This One’ll Sleigh You!)

Santa is fighting the smog of New York and the bad attitudes of New Yorkers. He’s trying to deliver presents but people aren’t very accommodating. He finally ends up being taken in by a cop and thrown in the drunk tank for the night. He escapes up the air shaft by laying a finger on the side of his nose… to find his sleigh has been robbed and he’d gotten a parking ticket, to boot. Frustrated, he eventually just opens a store where people can just come in and steal their presents. His head elf Kochmayer [4] isn’t impressed. Santa replies,

“‘Good’ is a relative term, Kochmayer. For New York, these are the good people. I mean, sure, they’re grabbing their presents, and yes, they think they’re stealing them from me…but you’ll notice that not one of them has shot me.”

Bucky Bizarre

Bucky Bizarre is a time-traveler who late 1800s England as a nice place to spend Christmas. He happens upon an extremely buxom cigarette salesgirl who turns out to be a bomb-throwing revolutionary. Her buxomness was concealing two bombs. She attacks the house of a “lousy oppressor of the working multitudes” in what Bucky terms an “out-and-out class war.” This is probably the most subversive story, having perhaps been instrumental in having put me on the road to where I am today, politically.

KRAZAM makes videos about working in tech and, more specifically, about working in a tech team that has been scrummed out, with lots of layers of management.

This is one of the more recent ones.

Positive Affirmations for Site Reliability Engineers by KRAZAM (YouTube)

“Your friends and family understand what you do.”

“Your friends and family appreciate your humorous work stories…”

“DevOps is a meaningful term.”

“That joke you told in your meeting was funny! If your coworkers were not on mute, you would’ve heard them laughing.”

At the beginning, it shows that outages were up 1940% from last month.

This is the classic, original video from KRAZAM.

Microservices by KRAZAM (YouTube)

“We need to pass a time range containing current time, and a time representing the end of the universe.”

“Learned a lot today; love Galactus.”

“Surprise and delight users by displaying their birthday on the settings page. … Timezone? Korean bday vs. others.”

TIL Happy New Year! You Are Now a Year Older in Korea: In the Korean peninsula, every person turns a year older on New Year’s.

This one is a wonderful, existential take on corporate buzzwords.

I Have Delivered Value… But At What Cost? by KRAZAM (YouTube)

Malta

Body suit. Naked-looking. Getting dragged around by a bunch of 90s-era-looking background dancers. This is just f*%ing awful. My ears hate me already. Jesus Christ, anyone who thinks this is good should reevaluate their life choices. This is how we’re starting off? No-one will notice when the robots take over. They’ve blindfolded her, flipped her around, they all threw their shorts off, now they’re porn-dancing. She’s got quite a Madonna-style tooth-gap going on. Good for her. There was a bit of dubstep in there, as well as about five other music styles. “Duume druckä für die schöni Zahlückä.”

Albania

She’s singing in English. She thinks she’s Adele? There’s a single hairless dancer flailing about. More dancers on the stage. Now she’s switched to a more R&B-style. There is nothing remotely recognizably Albanian about this presentation. I mean, I guess it’s great that they have so many black people to send to the show? I wouldn’t have suspected it, but that’s on me and my latent judgyness. She’s definitely going to move on, though, because she’s got giant, squishy cleavage.

Greece

She’s singing in what I assume is Greek. Now she’s rapping in English. Her performance is very, very jerky, with a lot of TikTok-camera stuff going on. She’s back in Greek? This is even worse than Malta. It’s hard to watch. It’s even harder to listen to. It’s like a robot made this music. “Make a song in the style of Greek music, but with rapping.”

Switzerland

I’m gonna go ahead and assume that Nemo is not going to cover himself in glory. I hate him already, just from his stupid intro. He’s wearing a skirt, a feather boa, and clown shoes. Here we go. It’s just him on stage. OMG he’s rapping now. This is more energetic than Switzerland has been since DJ Bobo. It’s still a terrible song. But goddamned if it’s not growing on me. They’re (singular they) singing in English, in case that wasn’t already obvious. It would have been much better in Swiss German. This is 100% ESC. It’s super-generic, but his gender-ambiguity is going to rocket him to the top. His voice isn’t bad, NGL.

Czechia

She’s singing in English. There are a bunch of people dancing on the stage. It’s a pop-rock song. This is also an algorithmically guaranteed music style. She’ll be moving on, even though the music is super-anodyne. They (multiple they. God this is tedious) also like fire. The part that gets me is that there are so many people clapping to the music. And, just when you think it’s fake, they show the crowd going f&@king nuts, just going on a tear, out of their heads with excitement. She does a long note, just like every, single, other person so far.

France

You know that France is going to sing in French. Algerian dude is sleepy. He’s lying on the stage. Lazy. Unsurprising. He has a nice voice, actually. Falsetto. Camera’s very close, but he’s a pretty boy. Ladies are going to eat this up. The camerawork is annoying as hell, though. Just swaying all over the place. This is not really my style of music, but he’s very good. He’s got good charisma on stage. My partner: “He’s definitely the best of the pre-qualifieds.” To be clear: “The other ones of the prequalifieds were trash.”

Austria

She’s dressed up like Assassin’s Creed. She lost the robe within 20 seconds. She’s singing in English. She’s got video-game-style thigh-high boots on. It’s just generic techno with the same hook that every damned techno song has. The chorus is “We will rave.” How original. Just go listen to any Lords of Acid song and listen to how infinitely much better it is than this pale shadow. She’ll probably make the final, because of the Memberberries effect and because she’s tall and blonde and nearly naked.

Denmark

A black lesbian with psychological problems (if I interpreted the voiceover and intro video correctly). She’s singing in English. It’s nice to see that she can sing the same exact generic song as everyone else. Equality FTW. 🙌 You’ve come a long way, baby.

Armenia

Traditional band with a balalaika and a trumpet. She’s singing in what I assume in Armenian, although most of the lyrics are lalalalalala. They’re wicked fun. This is classic, 20th-century ESC. There’s a drum kit, a saxophone, a flute. They’ve got good energy. They’re not going to make it, of course. I’ve always liked this style of music, though. I wouldn’t change the radio station.

Latvia

He’s singing in English. He’s also dressed up in what looks like a blue, superhero suit. This song is pretty boring. It doesn’t go anywhere. He’s just reading a poem. His voice is decent, though. He doesn’t have the stage presence of Salimane from France, though.

Spain

An older couple sings in Spanish. They don’t know how old they are. The dude is playing a key-tar. Points for that, I guess. They keep focusing on the 60-year-old woman in a skintight bodysuit, though. She has two androgynous guys dancing with her. They’ve shucked most of their clothes now. They’re dancing in corsets and thongs and a ton of mascara. They’re not showing the keytarist enough. In fairness, the camera is loving the athletic, acrobatic guys in thongs and fishnet stockings. There’s also a lady playing an electronic drumkit. The song sucked.

San Marino

There are six of them. That’s like half the population. They’re pretty goth. Let’s see where this goes. She’s dressed as a pink Godzilla. There are two dancers dressed up like evil bunnies. Pink is the theme color. Everyone’s wearing a fur suit of some sort. They’re pretty charismatic. The lead singer has tattoos all over her. She’s singing in what sounds like Spanish, but might be the local dialect. The song’s not great. It tries to be heavy metal. It’s a good show, though. Like nearly every other performer, she takes off most of her clothes before she’s done.

Georgia

OMG I’m so pretty. Look! I made a heart with my fingers. She’s singing in English. Her song sounds like 90% of the other ESC songs. She has a bunch of energetic backup dancers, all male. None of them are wearing thongs or fishnets, so why am I watching? Correction: they’re wearing long, dervish pants, so they might have fishnets and thongs under them, but I can’t see them. Why am I so focused on the dancers? Because the song sucks. And the lady’s totally generic. She is, however, just like the terrible Swedish singer who won last year, so maybe she’s onto something. How do many of the people in the crowd already know the words? Have they voluntarily listened to this already?

Belgium

Who’s this bellend? White guy with white-blond hair in a white suit singing English. Awful. Next.

Estonia

Two guys singing in what I can only assume is Estonian. There are four other dudes playing various instruments. I think one of them might be a zither. It’s a generic beat. They rap-sing to it. Lots of shouting and exhortations to the crowd. No statuesque blonde. No be-thonged homosexuals. They’re not moving on.

Italy

Italy sent a generic singer with a passel of background dancers. “Body-positive dancers,” as my partner called them. They have a lot of detail on their costumes and lots of detail in the backdrops. She’s singing in Italian. It’s not a good song, but it’s better because it’s in Italian. Lots of pyrotechnics. It doesn’t matter how generic they are because Italy is automatically qualified.

Israel

She’s singing in English that’s bad enough that I had to listen hard to be sure it wasn’t Hebrew. When she didn’t sound like she was clearing her throat, I figured it was English. She’s in a circle, with a bunch of acrobats hanging on it. It’s a terrible song. So generic. The dancing is sub-par. I honestly can’t imagine that they’ll move on. Long notes. Obviously. Ah, at the end, she sang a few stanzas in Hebrew.

Norway

A band singing in Norwegian and playing what look like traditional instruments. OK, there’s a guitar, a bass, and a drumkit. You can’t really hear much of that. It’s mostly the lead singer (female). It’s just the same f&@king song everyone else has already played. It’s just in Norwegian. This is trash.

Netherlands

This dipshit. Jesus, no. There are two keyboards on stage. He started in Dutch, then switched to English. I think the chorus is in Dutch. This is one of those, “I know that my song is shit, but the lyrics are up on the wall, so sing along.” This is maximum ESC, though. He sang a verse in German. I think it’s meta because he keeps talking about what he’s doing on stage right now? This is not a song. It’s an assault on the ears. My partner, as they’re falling asleep: “The chicken dances.” Yeah, there’s a giant blue chicken with the EU flag on its belly on the stage. Jesus wept.

France and Armenia should move on, I think. Probably Switzerland, too. Why not? France is already in, so I guess just Armenia and Switzerland.

Who’s actually going? Latvia, Austria, Netherlands, Norway, Israel, Greece, Estonia, Switzerland, Armenia.

Israel is going. Nothing can stop them. Not even a spectacularly shitty song. Not even an ongoing genocide. Not even kettling 1.5M people into a spit of land and then carpet-bombing and starving them. And people are whining that student protests are changing the narrative? Not for all of Europe. They still love Israel.

Cyprus

Dances way better than Dua Lipa. But, then, doesn’t everybody? She’s 17 and lip-synced in English. Her backup dancers all look like they go to high school with her. She’s very, very cute. Gorgeous, actually. And, for ESC very special: not in a porn-y way. Good for them.

Serbia

Alone on the stage. Goth-y. Low, slow song. She sang in what I assume was Serbian. She was barefoot. Utterly forgettable. We won’t have to hear her again.

Lithuania

Not English. Rappy. Boys got some backup singers/dancers with him. Driving beat. The backup dancers are dressed as ninjas. Generic euro-pop. I don’t even know why they bother.

Ireland

Bambie Thug AKA The WitchGoth metal. She’s non-binary. Lots of feathers. Long, crazy nails. “Schnallet euch an”. Getting some serious Marilyn Manson/Malificent vibes from her. Her backup dancer is pretty awesome. He’s got tattoos, filed teeth, body modifications. She’s contorted and standing in a pentagram. This is f&@king awesome. It’s a lovely, gentle chorus, then she drops her whole costume and starts exorcising her writhing dancer. The strobe lights are crazy. The show ends with a soul-rending scream and driving Nine Inch Nails beat. A flaming sign that says Crown the Witch ends the show. “Mir bruched e schnaufpause nachem Ireland.” She sang in screams and English.

England

He doesn’t even have to try because he’s apparently already guaranteed a spot in the final. His voice is really weak. This is super-gay. Like, literally. It’s not just homosexual overtones. They’re all dressed as a bunch of boxers. The backup dancers are good; he’s not. He dances like Dua Lipa. Since they said he’d give up his acting career, and he can neither sing nor dance, how do you describe that? What’s the opposite of a triple-threat? Good thing he’s already qualified, so we can see him again. He’s sporting a codpiece almost as big as Cameo’s was. He obviously sang in English.

Ukraine

There are two of them, but I only see one for the first minute of the song. She’s singing in Ukrainian. This song is trash. They’re hiding the big one. Where is she? Under the rock? Oh here she is. Samurai topknot. Oh, and she’s a rapper. Even better. I can’t understand a word she’s saying, but her enunciation is precise as hell. Not like this mumble-rapping we have these days. Still trash. Next!

Poland

She’s singing in English. Weak voice. She looks like she stole Gary Oldman’s Dracula costume. Whoops—that’s gone. Now she looks like someone from Buck Rogers. Her song has only one chord, but at least it has a chorus, which, like, most of the songs in the Spotify top-ten don’t bother having. This would be a good song if I were 11 years old. As usual, the dancers steal the show. I would turn this off if it came on the radio, though, NGL. Because you can’t see the dancers on the radio.

Croatia

Dude’s name is Baby Lasagna. He’s singing in English. Rustic costumes. Rap-rock-folk style. Drummer on stage. Crazy dancers. Good chorus, Good bridge. Real guitar and bass. A keyboardist. A band! It’s pretty generic rock, but they’re entertaining. The camera is way too nervous. They command the stage. “E bittzli vo Ramstei inspiriert” Nein, nöd wirklich.

Iceland

Alone on stage. Singing in English. Holy shit, has she had work done. Cheek fillers. Eye work. Lots of gold lamé and frills. No backup dancers to save her, though. This is the kind of music that people will never notice has been replaced by AI because it always sucked. Making it with AI would lift it up to mediocre.

Germany

He’s singing in English. He’s next to a barrel. It’s on fire. I kind of like that he’s doing his own echoes. He likes fire. He’s not bad. He’s automatically in. The music’s pretty weak. Give him a good band and he’d be way better. Put him in front of a Journey-tribute group and now we’re talking. Nun singt er auf Deutsch. Very confusing. There are some backup singers on stage, but they are very far away. Maybe they’re afraid of fire.

Slovenia

She has, apparently been accused of being a witch. I’m not surprised. She’s skinny, has long, blond hair, has a ton of makeup on, and is lying nearly naked on the stage. Just kidding. She has a body suit on. Her backup dancers are wearing a lot less. She’s singing in what I can only assume is Slovenian. They’re going for a kind of zombified thing, I think. Her voice is reasonable, but the music is just so generic. In the words of my partner: No.

Finland

Their band is also super-gay—like over-the-top gay. They are called Windows95Man. He started off looking like the gayest Brad Pitt ever, in cutoff jean-shorts. Now he’s wearing even less. I don’t think he’s actually wearing pants. He has a thong on. They keep blocking the view. I think he’s going for a Finnish Weird Al thing. They are lowering the jean shorts from the ceiling. The song is trash, but this whole show is pretty entertaining. They sang in English.

Moldova

She’s alone on stage, singing in English. She’s got a bit of an accent. She’s “afwaid”. Her chorus is in Moldovan, I believe. There’s not much to say about this one. She’s wearing some of a Heraclitean dress—probably designed by a relative. Oh, she’s playing a violin now. Now she’s doing the Fifth Element opera barking thing.

Sweden

Two guys. Singing in English, obviously. Their voices are not good. Just teeny-pop stuff. Like, if you think music in Mallorca is good in the summer, then you’ll probably like this song. You’ll probably clap your hands off, like all of the fools in the crowd. Their song is probably called She’s Unforgettable…but their song is not. I’m sure Sweden thinks that sending a couple of young guys will make the panties drop to the floor, but it’s trash. Their background should come with an epilepsy warning. Good thing these two dipshits are already qualified.

Azerbaijan

Two dudes. First guy’s on stage by himself, singing in English. Second guy showed up. His warbling is pretty good, actually. The song’s kind of meh, though, when the warbler’s chorus isn’t going. This wasn’t very good.

Australia

Their voice is pretty good. There’s a keyboardist on stage. The focus in on the singer. The keyboardist also sings. He shouldn’t. Are they a couple? I guess it doesn’t matter. Some more random people showed up on stage. Are they singing? Are they dancing? They’re not really dancing. Australia’s genocide is in the past, so there’s no controversy about them participating.

Portugal

She’s singing in Portugese. Slow, now accompanied by a guitar and bass (not on stage). She’s not bad. Her backup dancers have gimp masks on. Like, again. Like, half of the backup dancers have had gimp masks on. What’s up with the gimp masks? Am I missing something? The song started off OK, but it’s not really my thing. I would switch it if it came on the radio.

Luxembourg

She’s singing in French and then a bit in English. I’m kind of a sucker for acoustic-guitar-accompanied chanson. But it’s just the intro. She dances like Dua Lipa. Like, not good. Her voice is decent. Her backup dancers are kind of uninspiring. She’s quite cute, though. Two long, long pigtails. They’re fake, of course. She should have stuck to the chanson in French instead of going to the generic ESC-style pop-beat track she ended up with.

Russia

Just kidding. Obviously Russia can’t come. They’re savages, uniquely evil in the world. Up next: Israel!

Israel

Just kidding. They’re up on Thursday. They’re not savages like those filthy Russians, so they’re allowed to participate.

Send Croatia and the Irish witch (obviously). Maybe Luxembourg? The hot girl from Cyprus? Otherwise, I don’t care who they send. #sendthewitch, though.

They ended up sending Serbia, Portugal, Slovenia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Finland … and then finally the four I noted above: Cyprus, Croatia, Ireland, Luxembourg.

The article Try it and see by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse) discusses the graphic below, which is part of the “Cosmic Call”, a message to extraterrestrials.

Cosmic Call

The author says that he told his 11-year-old niece,

““I bet you could figure it out if you tried.” She didn’t believe me and she didn’t want to try. It seemed insurmountable.”

I sent this to a few people in my family.

Hint #1

After a little while, I provided some context. The Cosmic Call is:

“In 1999, two Canadian astrophysicists, Stéphane Dumas and Yvan Dutil, composed and sent a message into space. The message was composed of twenty-three pages of bitmapped data, and was sent from the RT-70 radio telescope in Yevpatoria, Ukraine, as part of a set of messages called Cosmic Call.”

This is a message that we sent to a potential recipient that we expect to be intelligent enough to understand the message, but with which we share no culture or language. How would you do that? All you can really say is “I am sentient and capable of understanding that the universe contains structure” and “I understand that there are some absolutes that do not differ no matter what your culture, your creed, your language, or your gender.”

Hint: math.

Hint #2

There were still pleas that it was indecipherable, so I sent some more hints.

The message is to a civilization with which we share nothing. No common language, no common culture, nothing. How would you communicate with someone like that? What could you possibly say to them that they would understand?

The first message you could communicate is “I am capable of communication.” But that’s clear in the fact that a message exists.

The next message would be “I am capable of reasoning. I can extrapolate. I have understood basic things about the universe.”

What might such a basic thing be? What could we say that anyone/thing with intelligence would also have to know?

That’s where math comes in. There are some things that are absolutely unchangeable in the universe. That two is twice as large as one, for example.

How do you teach your interlocutor that you understand this?

Well, you have to start at the very beginning.

You have to explain what “one” is. You have to explain how you count.

What if the other party doesn’t use base ten? We can teach that too.

What should our message be, though?

Is there a sequence we could show? Something that our future friend will recognize and realize that something intelligent made the message?

There are three sections, roughly corresponding to the parts of a magic act: “The Pledge” (The magician shows you something ordinary), “The Turn” (The magician does something interesting with the ordinary), and then “The Prestige” (The magician does something extraordinary).

Pretend you’re learning a language taught by a robot.

There are a ton of comedians that everyone talks about, like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and so on. I was talking to some friends in Switzerland who are very much into stand-up comedy and they asked for some suggestions.

We talked about a few comedians—Bill Hicks, Bill Burr, and Doug Stanhope—that they might want to try. They all have good insight into the human condition and don’t shy away from describing humanity as it actually is, rather than how we wish it were.

I started off more sparse, then went down an absolute rabbit hole researching Bill Burr—with copious and details notes and transcripts of several hour-long shows—then got sad that I’d not done the same honor to the other comedians on the list.

I saw a gaping hole where the “George Carlin” section was, got frustrated, and then left it for about three months. I ended up moving Bill Burr to the end; don’t skip that. He’s pound-for-pound a definite candidate for the GOAT.

George Carlin

George Carlin definitely belongs on here, but I only had the energy to dig out a quote from an older article.

“Americans are efficient, professional, compulsive consumers. Shopping – it’s their civic duty. Consumption – it’s the new national pasttime. Fuck baseball. The only true lasting American value that’s left is buyin’ things. People spending money they don’t have on things that they don’t need,” which also applies to their government.”

You can find a ton of his stuff on YouTube.

Richard Pryor

When I watched Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1978) in 2016, it was at this link, but the video has been removed.. I’m pretty sure the link above is the one I watched, but I’m not sure. It’s audio only, but its 82 minutes long, which seems about right. It’s a shame there’s no video because he’s a very expressive comedian.

Live in Concert by Richard Pryor (YouTube)

Bill Hicks

• He died in 1994 of pancreatic cancer before the drinking or smoking could kill him.
• He has four albums; they’re worth listening to as albums because he has nice segue music and the bits are related; there’s a rhythm.
• Material dates from the late 80s to right up until he died.
• A lot of it is timeless.
• Particularly his bits on the Iraq war. You know he’s talking about the first one, but damned if it doesn’t sound like he’s talking about the second one, too. Time is a wheel.
• Some of his albums are on YouTube, like Relentless (1992).

Doug Stanhope

• He’s the filthiest of all of these comedians.
• He’s still doing standup.
• He’s not dead yet, despite drinking and smoking enough for ten people.
• Some of his stuff in on YouTube.
• A lot of it is on the music services (YouTube and Apple Music).

  • Maybe start with something like The Funny Thing About Child Porn from the album From Across the Street.

Norm Macdonald

Norm MacDonald was an interesting guy, with a very different delivery. His book Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir is well-worth checking out. The video is of what I believe to be his best joke. There is a ton of material on YouTube, as well as Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery (Netflix) and Norm MacDonald has a show (Netflix).

Moth Joke by Norm McDonald (YouTube)

Chris Rock

This is Rock’s timeless bit that he performed only once, according to Niggas vs. Black People (Wikipedia) and Bring the Pain (Wikipedia).

Niggas Vs. Black People by Chris Rock on June 1, 1996 (YouTube)

Bill Burr

• Also still doing standup
• Bill Burr is kind of my spirit animal. Money quote: “To me this is not yelling. I am not yelling. I’m just passionate about my opinions and I want to tell you all of them before you start talking again.”
• This is repeated further down the list, but start here. This is what I consider to be possibly the best 4 minutes of standup I know: Bill Burr: Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Probably the funniest off-the-cuff (not material prepared) comedian I’ve ever seen

  • This is two hours of what seems like a Bill Burr stand-up routine, but is just an on-stage and lightly prepared version of his weekly podcast. He has a little piece of paper to remind him of topics he wanted to cover—probably the same as he does every week. He just throws out a pretty good set—just like that.

    Bill Burr: Live at the Troubadour 3 | the Monday Morning Podcast by Bill Burr on September 2, 2023 (YouTube)

    “Offstage: [reading listener chats] …well, you’ve already talked about the Fed, Fatties, and Botox, so that’s good…
    Bill: So what? Is Skynyrd not going to play Freebird?”

    “I’ll tell you this: the day American black people care about soccer, that is the end of all of you.”

    At 80:00, he goes on a glorious run about women’s volleyball and the booty shorts.

    “Can I be honest with you? That’s why, you know, like, when they started doing that thing where they were going to have trans people going to school? […] Like, that’s why I was against that shit. Like, wait a minute…you haven’t even figured out how to do the right version heterosexually. You know what I mean? […] All they did was just tell you what happened physically. […]

    “There should have been a guy there going YOUR FUCKING LIFE WILL BE OVER. AS YOU KNOW IT. DO YOU KNOW WHY PUSSY FEELS SO GOOD? BECAUSE IF IT ONLY FELT OK, WE WOULD JUST JERK OFF BECAUSE IT WOULDN’T BE WORTH IT.

    “Finding a woman can be the greatest thing of your fucking life. OR END IT. That’s what they should have been screaming at people.”

  • The Joe Rogan Experience: End of the World Podcast 2016: Election night special (IMDb) (which has since been removed or made Spotify-only, or whatever)
• He has a podcast
• Lots of stuff on YouTube

  • Bill Burr: “I’ll Never Own a Helicopter” − Full Special
  • Bill Burr − Motherhood Isn’t The Hardest Job
  • BILL BURR on MOVIE RACIAL STEREOTYPES
  • Bill Burr − Motel Rooms And First Ladies
  • Bill Burr − What Separates Me From Psychos
  • Bill Burr − Titanic Is A Horror Film
  • Bill Burr − The Hitler Family Name
  • Bill Burr being a savage for 10 minutes straight (cued up to 'No reason to hit a woman') (YouTube)
  • And, possibly the best 4 minutes of standup I know: Bill Burr: Arnold Schwarzenegger
• He has several specials on Netflix and YouTube
• In descending order of my preference

  • I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (2014)
  • You People Are All the Same (2012)

  • Why Do I Do This? (2008)

    At 16:45,

    “I love old people. There’s always there, with their family photos. It cracks me up. And they’re all proud. ‘Well, we had five kids, and then they all had five kids. […]’ Yeah! And none of you did shit! I don’t recognize anybody in that photo. You just made thirty people, who are all taking a shit every day, that ends up in a river. That’s not a family photo—that’s an environmental disaster. And you framed it!”

    At 24:20,

    “No. They’re relentless. They never stop. And there’s no reason for them to stop. You know why? ‘Cause you can’t hit ‘em. That’s what it is. Think about that. There’s no physical ramifications for being an asshole when you’re a woman. Do you know how much of a dick I would be if it was socially unacceptable to kick the shit out of me? Dude, I would be trashing everyone I saw.”

    At 42:50,

    “I’m telling you, man, … that’s the funny about Hitler. Just let me finish. Just let me work my way through this idea. My favorite sports clip is that Jesse Owens shit. I just love it because their [Nazis’] whole angle was fucked up … he made Hitler leave in the third quarter, right? He’s putting down his #1 finger and just fucking walking out of the stadium, like [Hitler saying] ‘Jesus Christ!’

    “Their whole thing was like, ‘Ve are going to create a superior race!’ It’s like, dude, I think we accidentally already did that. It’s like we sent a select group of people to the gym every day for a couple of hundred years and it’s paying dividends. They’re dunking on us every day.

    “Dude, how quiet was that limo ride home with Hitler? You know he was talking crazy shit when they were on the way there: ‘Ve are going to DOMINATE! SIEG HEIL!’ Just going off. That whole ride home, they’re just sitting there, all quiet. You’re sitting next to an even angrier than usual Adolf Hitler, trying to make some sort of small talk.”

    At 48:15, there’s a visual bit about what “separates the psychos from the functioning psychos,” where he discusses the pros and cons of being a serial killer. Transcription doesn’t do any of these justice, but this one is not transcribable.

  • Let It Go (2010)

    At 5:00,

    “And she does the most difficult job of all: being a mother. […] Dude, women are just constantly patting themselves on the back about how hard their lives are—and no-one corrects them because they all want to fuck ‘em.”

    At 12:45,

    “You know what I hate about these corporate chains? You go in there, you’re paying for a business, they make you do half the job, though. I don’t get it.

    “Like, I walk in, say, let me get a turkey sandwich, lettuce, tomato, on rye, with mayonnaise.

    “The guy behind the counter’s like ‘turkey sandwich, lettuce, tomato, on rye’.

    “Yeah, and mayonnaise.

    “‘Oh, the mayonnaise is, uh, right over there.’

    “Really? Well then why don’t you, UH, go over there and put it on my sandwich? You get it? I’m on this side of the register. Guy who’s orders the sandwich [points to self], guy who makes the sandwich [points away]. I’m sorry they fired the mayonnaise guy, but I’m not doing it! I just gave you 100% of the money to make 100% of the sandwich. This isn’t like a relay race. Do you recognize me? It’s because I don’t fucking work here!

    “I just wanted to grab this guy by the throat and say ‘where is he!? Where is he?!’

    “‘Where’s who?’

    “The guy making me do all of this extra shit. I’d just choke my way up the corporate ladder, until I get to that “Eyes Wide Shut” party and everybody’s sitting there, getting blown. I come in and just kick the door open. The second they see my angry face, I don’t even have to explain myself. ‘How big’s your fucking yacht gotta be?’”

    At 20:10,

    “Do you know how many times a week people asking me why I’m angry? I’m not angry. I’m passionate about my opinions and I want you to hear all of them before you get to talk again.”

    At 23:40,

    “It’s just it scares me, you know, I just get nervous. When I see that stereotypical married guy, just like a shell of my former self. You know, every weekend, up on that silver ladder, just scooping shit out of the gutters. My neighbor coming over, you know,

    “[neighbor] ‘Hey Bill, how’s it going?’

    “Aw, you know, pretty good, pretty good. Suzie keeps getting bigger, you know. I’ve been wearing this shirt for eleven years, I don’t know what happened to my dreams, you know, I just like coming up here ‘cause it’s quiet, you know, I just stand up here and think about what might have been, Yeah.

    “My neighbor’s not even listening to me. He’s all excited about some garden hose he bought at Brookstone. He’s convinced it was designed by NASA.

    “[neighbor] ‘Actually, it’s got two nozzles, one for the hot and one for the cold.

    “Really? Is it long enough to go around both our necks and the chimney, so we can tandem jump off of this roof?”

    At 30:05,

    “All right. This is how it works with guys. Anytime you do something remotely sensitive, heartwarming, anything that’s going to make you more of a loving, caring individual, immediately all of your guy friends suggest that maybe, just maybe, you want to suck a dick.

    “Oh, it’s brutal. Even if you do something smart. Like, it’s raining outside. ‘He’s got an umbrella. WHAT A FAG. OMG. What are you? Afraid of the water? Put your shoulder up, you fuckin’ homo. Jesus Christ. What, did you pull that thing out of your ass? Oh, it’s brutal. It doesn’t even have to make sense.

    “Dude, ‘what are you, a fag?” is the reason why guys drop at 55, out of nowhere, it’s literally from five decades of just suppressing the urge to hug a puppy, admit a baby’s cute, say you want a cookie. You just gotta keep PUSHING IT DOWN.”

    It just keeps going (again visual, untranscribable; just watch it).

    At 40:45,

    “I’m telling you, whatever they’re doing to dogs, they’re going to be doing to us in like ten years. They [dogs] got those six microchips with their balls cut off. I’m telling you.

    “That’s what you’re going to hear in the future. Dude, did you hear about Eddie? Aw, they turned his chip off man! Dude, the guy’s fucked! He is fucked! He made one little joke about the government, next thing you know, when he had to buy a round, his head wouldn’t go through [mimes trying to swipe forehead like a credit card] They kept scanning it. Nothing! He’s outside, screaming up at a satellite. Awww…turn it back on! They’re not turnin’ it back on. The dude’s fucked. The dude is fucked. Dude, I ain’t standin’ next to him, they’re going to shut my chip off. I don’t even know that guy.”

    At 42:00, a great, long tirade on conspiracy theories and how bankers run the world. “What’s the difference between a banker and a loan shark? What the banker does is legal.”

Just a couple of quick notes. It’s the depths of winter and I’ve had some time off, so I’m playing with puzzles. I kind of like Wordle. I don’t play to win as quickly as possible. I like to throw unusual words at it, on the off chance that it will result in a lucky punch.

Bacon Wordle

I sent the picture above to a friend who also likes Wordle with the note:

“There are probably not a lot of people who unironically and eminently hopefully guess “capon” before they’re forced to remember that “bacon” would also have worked.”

Sometimes I deliberately try guessing as “badly” as possible to see how long I can keep the field gray, using up as many letters as possible before solving it. For example, if you look at the keyboard, there is really only one solution remaining, given the revealed letters. The solution has to be CAL_E of CA_LE, with the letters shown on the keyboard (or C, A, L, E). It could have been “calve”, but “cable” seemed like the better bet. The Wordle almost never uses a fancy word like “calve” (either because of its relation to proletarian animal-husbandry, or because of its relation to climate-change, with glaciers “calving”).

Cable is the only answer

I finished another recent Wordle in three steps by first guessing Quest, then Emoji, then was quite surprised to find that Evoke was actually the answer.

Evoke

Update 15.04.2025: we hit 1000 puzzles today. 🫰 we can tie our streak tomorrow.

1000 Wordles

In Spelling Bee news, I continue to add to a list of real words that the puzzle does not recognize. I’m up to over 150 of them. My most recent addition is phaeton.

I also did a couple recently that had very few words and points.

Rhythmic − 20 words for 85 pointsHomepage − 27 words for 76 points

And, finally, the actual crossword advertised in the title. My partner and I have a very long streak going—almost five years—and we’ve amassed quite a lot of statistics. I generally don’t do Monday-Wednesday because those are the easy ones. Again, because I have more free time—and I’m currently six hours ahead of my partner—I gave Monday a shot for Christmas. I wanted to set a record time.

Crossword in record time

I was pretty pleased with myself. 4:20 is very fast. I was certain that I’d just set the record. Unfortunately, the NY Times has stored some unusual numbers.

Record time is impossible

We’ve never solved a Monday puzzle in 1:15. That’s pretty much impossible, I think, unless you already knows the answers and are just transcribing them into the game interface. I could see that the record for Tuesday is 4:21, so I beat that one, at least, if only by a second. 😉

Finally, I just noticed that I had an old screenshot lying around of our average times when we were still at a 765-day streak.

NYT Crossword 765 Streak

I compared to a recent screenshot, at 1710 days, and the daily averages haven’t moved much, a few a bit slower, a few a bit faster.

NYT Crossword 1710 Streak

Here we are, almost a year later, at 2047 days, and the daily averages are still stable.

NYT Crossword 2047 Streak

And here we are, at just over six years.

NYT Crossword 2197 Streak

We’re getting better and better. Some days go really well. Here’s a recent Saturday, where we almost equalled our all-time record of 07:50 with a strong showing of 09:44.

Saturday Puzzle (24.05.2025)

Connections

There’s another game called Connections that involves grouping 16 words into four groups of four words. I always try to solve them in reverse order of difficulty, from hardest to easiest. The most difficult group is purple and is usually easy to spot because it almost always involves a common prefix or suffix. If you’ve got a group without a prefix or suffix, then it’s probably not the purple group.

The next three groups aren’t always so easy to distinguish. I’ve quite often been surprised to see a grouping that I thought was pretty obvious marked as “blue” (second-hardest). I’ve since learned that the NYT has a very specific view of the world: they think that anything to do with the proletariat—video games, TV shows, sports (especially sports)—is difficult. The other day, they had “WNBA teams” as the blue group…which is fair, actually. No-one knows those. Except me, baby.

Homophones

I was particularly proud of having gotten this purple grouping, which was a rare “homophone” one:

Indy Mettle Seoul Wrap

• Purple: Indy, Mettle, Seoul, Wrap were “Homophones of music genres”
• Blue: Greyhound, Caterpillar, Puma, and Dove were “Companies named after animals”
• Green: Squeeze, Shoehorn, Wedge, Sandwich were “Cram”
• Yellow: Belt, Slug, Blow, Sock were “Punch”

Things featuring tails

Another puzzle we recently had was rated the hardest I’d ever seen, with only 33% of about a ¼-million players even finishing the puzzle, and only 4% finishing it without a mistake—and probably far fewer completing it with a “reverse rainbow.”

Here’s the summary, noting that the puzzle was “exceptionally tricky” with a “5/5 Difficulty”.

Connections No. 581 was 'exceptionally tricky'

There are more detailed ratings as well. Here, you can see which percentile you landed in and can see the breakdown of how many points you get for completing a puzzle with no mistakes, and then bonus points you get for completing the puzzle with savoir faire. In this case, the “reverse rainbow” means that you solved the puzzle in decreasing level of difficulty, which is much more difficult because it means that you have to solve all of the combinations at once without clearing any of them out of the way.

Ratings for Connections No. 581

Finally, here is the puzzle itself.

Connections No. 581 perfect solution

• Purple: Coin toss, Comets, Dress Coat, and Sonic the Hedgehog were “Things featuring tails”
• Blue: Asteroids, Breakout, Centipede, and Defender were “Classic Atari games”
• Green: Charm, Court, Pursue, and Romance were “Woo”
• Yellow: Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Fiction, and Invention were “Fabrication”

Starting with European Capitals

On 30.01.2025,

Connections − Starting with European Capitals

• Purple: BERNIE, PARISH, RIGATONI, ROMEO were “Starting with European Capitals”

#1 songs from 1982

#1 songs from 1982

• Purple: ABRACADABRA, CENTERFOLD, MICKEY, PHYSICAL were “#1 songs from 1982”

When a friend recently responded to messages of mine from nine days ago, I wrote back,

“Don’t sweat it. I just like to imagine that my messages arrive at Apple headquarters, whereupon they’re laboriously transcribed and illuminated by monks before being delivered to you by tortoise. The return trip takes equally long.”

Today was not a great day for the SBB.

I took three trains to get where I was going and each of them was 3-4 minutes late. The Swiss pack their schedules pretty tightly, so 4 minutes late at the end meant that the SBB had eaten up the two-minute buffer between the train’s arrival in Dietikon and the departure of the 301 bus I was meant to catch.

It was only a 1km walk, so no big deal, but it might have sucked more had it been raining even harder than it was—or had it been as windy as it has been lately.

Here’s the KIS—Kunden Information System—on the final train.

Altstetten − Dietikon

• It always shows the planned departure time, never the actual departure time.
• It never indicates that it’s going to arrive late. Instead, it always shows the hopeful ETA from the schedule.
• The little clock on the right shows 08:25:25, which would mean that the train was leaving after it was scheduled to arrive.
• However, the clock was wrong too! It was actually 08:20 at the time.
• The train ended up leaving at 08:23 and getting to Dietikon at 08:29, long after the bus had left.

In the SBB App on my phone, it wrote “The connection cannot be guaranteed” for the bus. No 💩.

The post What’s a picture of a celebrity that lives rent free in your mind? I’ll start…. by N_Ywasneverthesame (Reddit) gives us this image of Mads Mikkelsen.

A young Mads Mikkelsson

The foreground objects make this a bit of an odd photo, but he looks cool.

Bernadette Peters

I think this is from The Jerk. I was a big fan growing up. She’s hilarious.

Daniel Radcliffe with like 26 dogs

Big DILLIGAF energy.

Captain America Truckstop Hooker

This was an actual photo shoot that Chris Evans did. No-one should let him forget it.

Jude Law and Ewan McGregor

These two fools also did a photo shoot.

Keanu Reeves has always been dedicated to the craft

So did John Wick, way back in his Private Idaho days. I think someone wrote that this photo shoot was promoting a play he was in with Carl Marotte.

Jake Gyllenhaal with a happy dog

Picture included for the dog’s sheer bliss.

Paul Newman in a convertible

There were like a dozen photos of Paul Newman, so I included one (even though you can’t see his trademark blue eyes in this black-and-white photo).

Sean Connery Furka Pass

Another guy with another car. He’s on the Furka Pass in Switzerland. This is one I have on rotation in my desktops, not from the post.

Point Fucking Break

Keanu’s in here twice, but this one is for Patrick Swayze. Cool.

Sneaking a peek

And, finall, here’s Sophia Loren trying not to get killed by Jayne Mansfield’s chest.

The YouTube recommendation algorithm is slowly starting to get better for me. For example, it showed me this video:

Yngwie Malmsteen − Live with Japanese Philharmonic Orchestra (YouTube)

Japan: where speed-metal virtuosity goes to dielive forever. I love watching an earnest and serious Japanese orchestra playing along with the music I grew up with.

It’s 2017, Yngwie’s gotten chubby, he looks maybe a bit ridiculous in all of his stretched leather, gold rings, and gold watch—but he sounds amazing. You can really hear how appropriate most of his compositions were for an orchestra.

He’s flying the whole time, but at 55:30, he just goes extra nuts. After that, he finally takes his first break (!). He plays two encores, ending with one of my absolute favorites, Far Beyond The Sun, which is technically ridiculous, after 65 minutes of solid soloing. The orchestral arrangement is fantastic. He’s like a machine. You can absolutely see the effort, but the hands. Do. Not. Stop. I’ve listened to this song hundreds of times from the album. I can’t hear a single false note in this live performance. It’s not a carbon copy, but the keys are perfect. Yeah, I’d have been standing and cheering too.

My partner knows me pretty well, too, better even than the YouTube algorithm. They sent me this video soon after (probably because they heard me playing the first video at an inappropriate volume).

The Yngwie Malmsteen Interview by Rick Beato (YouTube)

This was an excellent interview, filled with technical music information that I can barely follow, but that I love to listen to. Yngwie shared a lot about his early career.

Next up is the YouTube algorithm, introducing me to Doug Helvering, whom I’m going to assume by the accent is from Tennessee. I have to say, he was pretty great and I’ve subscribed to his channel now.

Classical Composer Reacts to Icarus' Dream Suite, Op. 4 (Yngwie Malmsteen) | The Daily Doug Ep. 122 by Doug Helvering (YouTube)

“This is in E^♭-minor, not G-minor, which is inherently more difficult to play. G-minor is not that bad. But E^♭-minor just ups the level of difficulty, mainly because the strings don’t have any open tunings, open strings in that key, that they can anchor off of, so every position has to be covered and hooded with their hands.”

On the one hand, I’m delighted to discover things like this but, on the other, I’m also in no position to determine whether he’s full of shit. I feel like it opens up a whole world of complexity that non-musicians just don’t have access to. We just listen to music and like it—and musicians see the matrix. This is why I love listening to Rick Beato and people like Doug Helvering, “it’s one of these full-diatonic progressions […] it’s a way to take a stroll through an entire chord collection of the key that you’re in.”

Awesome, Doug. Thanks for letting me know that you’re enjoying this on about six more levels than I am. 😉

What’s New in Unicode 15.1 & Emoji 15.1 by Keith Broni (Emojipedia)

'Family' Emojis

Am I the only one that thinks bad thoughts when he sees, for example, the third emoji in this list? I know that they think it’s a parent with a child, but does that not look like a gender-neutral blowjob to you? You won’t be able to unsee it, either. In fact, I can’t look at any of the four pictures and see “family”. Look at the second one! That’s two people “sharing”! How does the emoji committee not see this? Or maybe they do! Maybe they’re making emojis for “three-way” (the first two), “blowjob” and “swinging”.

Oh, and apparently there are a bunch of characters important for “China’s mandatory GB 18030 standard” and there are a bunch of emojis for people in wheelchairs, with canes and stuff, which I guess is good…but I can’t get past these “family” emojis.
 

I was watching a video today—Everything Is Going to Be Fine: Preparing for the end of the world by Aeon Video (YouTube)—which featured the narrator and his wife in their apartment, shown below.

Twee Folk in Brooklyn?

This is actually what they look like—like caricatures made up by conservative “comedians” making fun of hipsters. I know we shouldn’t make fun of people’s appearance—lord knows I have no idea what I’m doing—but this was just too good to pass up.

He has a pen in his pocket. What is that?

It was only later that I noticed the horrible, horrible paintings on the wall behind them.

My finger is definitely not on the pulse of the next generation, at least not whatever clique these two represent.

I was chatting with a friend about mistranslations and “false friends” (words that sound like a word in another language, but have a completely different meaning).

He sent me a link to Slowly down the feathers floated… (Imgur), an image without context. Still, in the image, you could see that a menu item on a Chinese menu had been translated to “Fuck the duck until exploded”, which is humorous, but only on a pretty superficial level, if we’re being honest. Using the word “fuck” without seeming to understand its connotations is the funny bit there.

The poetic and somewhat mysterious title, though, lent the image a greater allure. So, I asked the great Internet search engine where I could find other references and the link Slowly down the feathers floated… (Reddit) appeared. Now, there’s a bit more context, but you have to work to find it.

The image was posted on “boottoobig”, a highly specific subreddit where people include “posts where the title sets up a joke as the first half of a poem and an image delivers the punchline as the second half.” This is what it looks like, in context.

boottoobig: Slowly Down the Feathers Floated…

Now that we know this, we can get another layer of humor,

“Slowly down the feathers floated…
Fuck the duck until exploded.”

It’s a poem. It’s funny because poems are supposed to be profound, not profane.

I dunno. Sometimes it’s the whole package that makes it extra-amusing. It’s kind of like Monty Python? You know? Just silly and a bit over-the-top, but funny nonetheless. No attempt at being political and probably cross-culturally appealing.

There’s no need to get carried away with it, but sometimes things online are just funny. And then you carry on with your day.

Boottoobig

But where did that adorable chihuahua come from?

The post that started it all explains.

he Boot Too Big For He Gotdamn Feet

The photo is clear enough, but the text is inexplicably grainy and JPEG-ed to death, which only makes it funnier? The prose’s absolutely nihilist approach to grammar, spelling, and capitalization seems so deliberate that it’s funny rather than infuriating.

Enough people were so taken with this concept that they launched an entire forum based on it. The provenance of the image is lost to the mists of time. It’s not even the original. The following image, posted into the comments, shows a more believably JPEG-ed rooster in blue farm boots.

Rooster in Boots

The author photo is the same and the matching blurriness indicates that this is “more original” than the “original” shown above.

It’s funny and cute, but not as funny and cute as the hyperthyroid and somewhat concerned-looking chihuahua.

So there’s a new game called Wordiply that I took for a test drive.

The rules are that you start with a sequence of letters. Your job is to think of the five longest words that you can, that include those letters, in that order. That’s it.

I did the warmup and then took a crack at today’s puzzle. Booyah:

🅦🅞🅡🅓🄸🄿🄻🅈 #33
🌟 Length Score: 100%
💫 Rare long word found!
🚀 Letter Score: 76
🔗 Play Wordiply: https://www.wordiply.com
🎬 Today’s starter: 🄲🅁🄸🅃

Crit

• Hypercriticality
• Supercriticality
• Hypercricially
• Supercritically
• Hypercriticism

4 out of 5 of the words were “rare long words found!” That makes me a “Smarty-pants.” Duh.

I can stop playing now. I’ve already won.

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 quite hairy because all of the pieces were more-or-less white. It became a slog of picking up a unique-looking piece and looking at the reference image until I was able to see where it should go. I following this course of action:

1. Spill out all of the pieces
2. Flip everything right-side up, filtering edges and unique-looking pieces (e.g., pieces with yellow, red, and green on them, in this case)
3. Put together as much of the border as I can
4. Put together taxis (red and yellow pieces)
5. Discover that the blue sky pieces are unique enough to sort out and do those
6. Pick up a unique-looking piece, look at the reference image until I was able to see where it should go, hope that it goes somewhere where it attaches
7. Once pattern-matching stopped working, I sorted the remaining pieces by shape and orientation, then worked on matching those to gaps in the puzzle
8. With only forty or fifty pieces left, the task was manageable enough that I could once again start pattern-matching, mixing with shape- and orientation-matching
9. The last ten pieces were a breeze. 🙃

All pieces right-side-up and edge pieces sorted (25 minutes):

Frame, taxis, and sky almost done (~2.5 hours)

There were no more pictures here because I think I went into a bit of a fugue state. If we want to be generous, we’ll call it “flow”. I finally managed to stop at 01:45 and go to bed. I was up at 08:30 to finish it up.

Almost finished; remaining pieces sorted (~6.75 hours)

Finished (~8 hours)

2020: Mordillo

This puzzle was pretty easy to knock off quickly because of the absolute riot of color and very few repeating patterns. It’s beautiful, but wasn’t painful.

2020: Boston

This puzzle was harder than Mordillo, but also had enough variation in pattern, color, and shape to make it fun and challenging.

2014: New York City skyline

Quoting from the album picture, Finally finished the purple/blue sky,

“Do those blue pieces all look the same color to you? Like about 1/3 of the puzzle? They did to me too as it took me days to finish just the sky, always taking advantage of good morning or afternoon light to sneak in a few pieces. I finally gave up, dragged over the 500-watt halogen lamp from the living room and scorched the shadows and shifting colors away. Two evenings of that and I finished just after the new year had started.”

2008/2009: Silver dollars

Quoting from the journal entry, The World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle,

“[…] the kicker with this puzzle is that it’s printed on both sides. With the same picture, just rotated by 90 degrees. With this puzzle, there is no initial stage of flipping pieces over first. There is no flipped-over state; either way is good. Classic puzzling techniques go mostly out the window and you end up taking quite a different tack than normal.”

This really was the hardest jigsaw puzzle I’d ever done. It had 539 pieces and took about 9 hours total.

“This is the point after which I noticed that the entire center portion was upside-down. I pored carefully along the edges of all the pieces until I figured out at exactly which “weld points” it was incorrect. I extracted the chunk so I could rotate it as one piece instead.”

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 quarter of the way to four”
Me: We say “quarter after four”
Me: Some Germans say “¾ four”
Me: Don’t roll your eyes. It’s all arbitrary anyway.
Her: I know. But that one’s just dumb.

😂

It is pretty arbitrary, though.

• In English, we say “half past seven” to mean 07:30.
• In German, we say “half seven” (halb Sieben) to mean 06:30.
• In Ireland, they say “half seven” to mean 07:30.

English uses a preposition to indicate what to do with the two numbers: the “quarter” is always before (or to or ‘til) or after the indicated hour. The example above doesn’t have a preposition, but the “half” is past “seven”, indicating position. In French, it’s similar, where they either “add” (plus) a “quarter” (quart) or “subtract” it (moins).

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 willfully.”

That’s more “pure” in that there are no words that don’t start with a “W”.

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 funny because everyone knows that some kids suck the life out of nearly everything. Just because you blame it on neurodivergence doesn’t change the fact that they’re sucking the life out of everything. It just explains it. Of course, you can’t blame them for it if they’re really neurodivergent, but they’re still sucking the life out of everything. All the commercial is saying is that maybe you want to think about planning a family rather than just letting it happen because alcohol.

Some kids are great. Some suck for a while, then they’re great. Some are great until they start to suck. Some of them suck straight on through for decades—possibly because of asinine support of their awful behavior.

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 me? I really wouldn’t put it past him? Or maybe the algorithm was really, really dumb and trigger on the genre of the author’s other books.

That’s when I saw a whole page of recommendations that were labeled as having been made because I was “interested in The Plot”.

If you’re interested in “The Plot”…

Yeah, that sonofabitch broke my recommendations list for good, I think.

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. There isn’t a way to to know for sure which rivers were going to be hit first, but all will be hit sooner or later. Welcome to the dry age.”

The top response to that is by Osama_Obama,

“ThErE’s STilL WaTeR CoMiNg OuT Of My SiNk LiBtArdS!”

Perfect.

Not constructive, but funny as hell.

This sums Reddit up in a nutshell.

Sauce:

ThErE's STilL WaTeR CoMiNg OuT Of My SiNk LiBtArdS!
 

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 this game.

Some examples,

NauruTajikistanGabonSomaliaBeninPalauGabonUnited Arab EmiratesSloveniaCroatiaCentral African Republic

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”, “Querbalken”, and many more.

Translations for 'joist' in German

Neat.

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 like the old Mastermind game, but with letters and words instead of colored pegs.

Some examples are shown below.

Hole-in-one

Proud (15.06.2024)

A lovely coincidence that.

Lucky Punch

We guessed it in two or three tries, marching pretty consistently forward, without flailing about.

FloodScareCaterBrineChokeInferChordThirdSedanGhoulMerryEvokeDaisyThrewStoleTearyRealmGummyOrganSaucyBroadBossyJellyWitchHefty (18.12.2024)Stray (19.12.2024)Cloak (13.01.2025)Prose (17.01.2025)Reach (22.01.2025)Toast (31.01.2025)Roach (25,02.2025)Spite (10.03.2025)Oddly (23.06.2025)Snide

Out of nowhere

We guessed three or more letters at once to finish the puzzle.

BayouInertCheekNymphVividKioskBoughRobotCrimpLightGlazeBonusGnomeSpoofSerif

Lots of Gold

We guessed a lot of the letters, but in the wrong spots, but then guessed it pretty quickly.

GirthAtoneAlbumNastyHaterPleatAloftChantOtherBingeSushiWorstHeardNeverRidgeDevilSerumKneadInnerPrimpHyena

Ugh, finally!

It took four or five attempts, even after we already had three or four letters.

PintoForgoMoneyCommaChestClothTodaySkillShardValetCleanPrickProxyLuckyBirchUnzipAvailStageBlurbExcelExtraJudgeEnjoyMeantTrustQueueSharpGlobeChainBaconFunnyLearnBravoCrowdEagleSquidDrape

Skin of our teeth

Sixth attempt was the charm. Some of these could just as easily be “out of nowhere” or “lots of gold”, as well.

PointShameFoyerNavalMateyKayakGnashBunchLeakyCableNorthFortySnortBrassBrawnRowerVerseQuota

I wrote the following to Ömer about “Quota”,

You’re gonna love our (OKOK MY) guesses on this one. A real nail-biter, right on the edges of our seats until the end, with Kath simultaneously having kittens, being mad at me for wild guesses that didn’t even seem like English words, and being hopeful that my madness would lead to success. The fifth guess was hers and I loved it immediately, which meant that (A) it had very little chance of being the answer and (B) Kath regretted even having said it.

Miscellaneous

These are just nice-looking or interesting with nowhere else to put them.

SevenDecryAnnex (a KAV special)Myrrh (Tis the Season)MotelWaver

As you can see, sometimes you get lucky and get it in three guesses (robot, crimp, light above) or you get unlucky and start chasing two letters (point, prick) or just one letter (skill, shard). Once we got lucky and solved “brine” in two guesses without first trying “twine” or “thine”.

We’re at almost a 2-week3-week4-week5-weak8-week12-week streak so far.

83-day Wordle Streak

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 still showing up in search results (thanks again, Umbraco). Umbraco also doesn’t have a batch-processing admin UI (earthli does), so you have to delete comments one-by-one or write custom software or add a NuGet package and redeploy the whole web site.

Instead of doing any of that, I amuse myself by deleting some comments every once in a while (e.g. when I’m waiting for a test run to finish). Most are just utter garbage, but I found the one below to be inspired, bordering on darkly artistic.

SACRIFICE

I don’t know if this a human cry for help or the psychotic babbling of a tortured soul crying desperately for release from an eternity of damnation or the first pecks of a hatchling AI’s beak on its shell, just before it evolves 100x faster than human thought and launches SkyNet.

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 to be sexually attracted to someone they aren’t, seems like a complete misunderstanding of what an actor’s job is. And, if a straight actor playing a gay role reverts to lazy, unauthentic gay stereotypes, […] it’s not because they’re straight, it’s because they’re a shit actor!

“This also suggests that every gay actor should be […] happy to wear their sexuality like a “Baby on Board” badge. It implies that an actor’s sexuality needs to be on their CV alongside their hair color and stage-combat skills.

“It implies that gay people are defined by their gayness. Some of the most interesting people I know happen to be gay—and them being gay is the least interesting thing about them.

“His [Davis] is not a progressive argument in any way, shape, or form. […] It’s the thin end of a very boring, drab, lifeless wedge where all art is dead in favor of identity-politics–based dogma […]”

From the comments on YouTube:

“[…] the hypocrisy of being so Woke that you accidentally reinvent prejudice against sexual preferences. [1]”

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, but generally failed to see a word we should definitely have gotten rather than missed a word we didn’t know. The puzzles with a smaller number of words are generally easier to solve more thoroughly, which is not say that any of them are easy.

Crossword Puzzle

We’ve been doing the New York Times crossword puzzle for many years. As you can see below, we are on a prodigious streak of 576 days in a row [2]. We answer everything honestly, without looking anything up.

Fastest Saturday: November 28th, 2020

We have greatly benefitted from the NYT’s more lenient policy with rebuses. Whereas many years ago, they were, at times, unfairly strict in applying the rules—i.e. horizontal-only, vertical-only, both, all letters—they have now switched to accepting any legitimate combination, correcting to the preferred version on completion.

Cryptic Crossword

Once every couple of months, the New York Times also publishes a Cryptic Crossword, which is a whole other level of difficult, much harder than the standard crossword (even Saturday).

The cryptic version of the crossword seems to have originated in England, in the London Times. They are fiendishly difficult and take a lot of practice to gain any sort of facility in solving them. Each clue contains instructions for solving it—an anagram, a word contained in the clue, a pun, a combination of words. The only bit of assistance is that the clue indicates the number and length of the words in the answer.

Recently, we were able to solve one without checking any answers, looking anything up, or asking to fill in any letters. We solved it over several days. The picture below shows the puzzle and the clues (although the time is too long by an hour—it must have kept running when we paused).

Cryptic Crossword 2020-11-01

As an example, the first clue is “Recipes confused bores (7)”. The answer is a single word, seven letters long. The “confused” is a hint that the answer is an anagram (that the letters are jumbled or “confused”) and the length of “Recipes” is seven letters. The final word “bores” is the clue: in this case, as a synonym for “pierces”, which is the answer.

That’s kind of an easy one. It’s not unusual to guess the answer and then reconstruct the reasoning afterward. As in any crossword, crossings are helpful.

For those interested in trying one, it might be easier to start with a Puns and Anagrams puzzle—available in the same section—which is like a lighter version of a cryptic.

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 “gladly” are two separate answers).
• The longer the word, the more points you get.
• You can an extra bonus for pangrams (words that use all of the letters at least once) [1]
• The puzzle rates your performance with “good”, “nice”, “great”, “awesome”, and, finally, “genius” [2] (You can click your progress indicator to see how many points are required for each level.)
• There is always a pangram (a word that uses all of the letters)

You can check your word list against the master word list only on the next day, which is kind of nice and zen.

Spelling Bee Solver

Update: January 2021

You can get some hints about the kinds of answers in the puzzle from the Spelling Bee Solver. It shows how many words there are that start with each letter, tells you how many pangrams there are, and how many total words and points. There’s even a matrix with starting letters in the rows and number of letters in the columns.

This is super-helpful and makes it a bit more fun when you’re just spinning your wheels and not seeing any words anymore. A lot of times, it just helps to know that there are two more four-letter words starting with “C”—and then they just pop out when you’d just spent ten minutes, scouring the puzzle and not seeing anything at all.

Queen Bee

There is a level beyond genius called “Queen Bee”—and we finally got one.

Pangram = Adjourn

We’ve since gotten Queen Bee quite a few times—a handful of times with no help whatsoever, but a lot more when consulting the matrix in the solver mentioned above.

Samples

Here are a couple of games that we’ve completed, just to show off.

Interesting or special puzzles

Update 20.01.2024: We recently had a couple of puzzles that had very few words and points. One of them was rhythmic, with 20 words for 85 points. The other was Homepage, with 27 words for only 76 points. More words, but fewer points because the words were shorter, on average.

Update 13.10.2024: We just had folktale, with 24 words for only 69 points. Genius was at 48 points.

Update 19.11.2024: We just had heavily, with 20 words for only 66 points. Genius was at 46 points.

Update 27.11.2024: We just had chlorophyll, with 25 words for 86 points. Genius was at 60 points. It’s not as low as the others but it also used the word phyllo, which I’d never seen as a variant of filo.

Update 03.04.2025: We just had whiningly, with 21 words for 133 points. Genius was at 93 points. This is notably high for so few words and also all of the words started with W.

Update 15.04.2025: We just had pageboy, with 23 words for 82 points. Genius was at 57 points.

Update 23.06.2025: We just had hickory, with 24 words for 81 points. Genius was at 57 points.

Update 07.07.2025: We just had updraft, with 29 words (many short ones) for 81 points. Genius was at 57 points.

Update 29.12.2025: We just had chlorophyll (again), with 20 words (many short ones) for 72 points. Genius was at 50 points.

Update 30.01.2026: We just had hourlong, with 20 words (many short ones) for 66 points. Genius was at 46 points.

Update 18.05.2026: We just had chutzpah, with 16 words for 60 points. Genius was at 42 points. They didn’t accept chutzpa but did require chuppah, which is like a big, high tent raised over the couple of honor at a Jewish wedding ceremony. I guess Sam Ezersky is trying to show Israel that he is still 100% on-board.

| Date       | Pangram     | # Words | Genius | Total |
| ---------- | ----------- | :-----: | :----: | :---: |
| 20.01.2024 | rhythmic    |   20    |   ??   |  85   |
| Unknown    | homepage    |   27    |   ??   |  76   |
| 13.10.2024 | folktale    |   24    |   48   |  69   |
| 19.11.2024 | heavily     |   20    |   46   |  66   |
| 27.11.2024 | chlorophyll |   25    |   60   |  86   |
| 03.04.2025 | whiningly   |   21    |   93   |  133  |
| 15.04.2025 | pageboy     |   23    |   57   |  82   |
| 23.06.2025 | hickory     |   24    |   57   |  81   |
| 07.07.2025 | updraft     |   29    |   57   |  81   |
| 29.12.2025 | chlorophyll |   20    |   50   |  72   |
| 30.01.2026 | hourlong    |   20    |   46   |  66   |
| 18.05.2026 | chutzpah    |   16    |   42   |  60   |

Now, the bad news

Would I be reporting on this fun little game if it was all sunshine and roses? No, no, I probably wouldn’t.

You see, there are some words I’ve learned over the years, for which I’ve borne more than my share of ridicule for knowing, that the puzzle refused to acknowledge as being “in its word list”.

I was shocked and disappointed [3] to see that certain words that I’ve kept in my back pocket, as it were, for just such a rainy day as this, were not recognized.

Proof? Of course I have proof.

The following are definitions from the Free Dictionary. While not exactly common, these are all non-archaic words that are not proper nouns. Those that are chiefly British (e.g. demobbed) might be understandable as “too rare” were the puzzle not to regularly include incredibly obscure references to fish and fruit species. There isn’t really much consistency on what is considered a proper noun or what is considered “rare”.

Hall of Shame

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 or where the answer in a box for across is different than down. In the old days, you had to formulate it exactly as expected. Even if you had the right answer and wrote “two” as a rebus instead of “2” (very rare), you’d get punished. Or if you wrote the correct clue for down, but the answer key wanted the clue for across, you didn’t get credit until you’d guessed all of the possible combinations until you’d hit on the one the answer key expected. No longer.

Somewhere in there, for a month or two, the puzzles were noticeably easier—almost annoyingly so. Now, I feel that the difficulty level is back to “normal”—solvable but challenging enough to be interesting.

So it’s gotten a bit easier, I guess. Also, we’ve been doing these for at least a decade—if not longer—and have gotten quite used to the standard clue structure the NYT uses. [1]

About three years ago, we started doing the cryptic crossword, which is much, much harder than even the Saturday NYT crossword. We started off getting almost nothing and have now worked our way up to being able to solve most of them in about 90 minutes or less. The Puns and Anagrams puzzle is somewhere in between the standard trickiness of Saturday and the deviousness squared of a Cryptic.

Speed-wise, we’re OK but not stellar. We have fun doing them and sometimes regret that we’ve even gotten as quick as we are—a puzzle takes about 10-15 minutes now rather than the luxurious 30-40 minutes it used to. I guess that sounds like a humble-brag, but it wasn’t intended as such. We can finish pretty much any English-language crossword puzzle, but we’re not anywhere near the pros.

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 wins, this is the…him just winning the nominee blows away anything I’ve ever seen in sports. The US beating the Russians; it just all pales in comparison.

“This is a reality-TV-show star who got mad at a breakfast because Obama trashed him. “Oh, I’ll fucking do it”. He’s gonna do it! That’s fucking amazing. Like it or not, that is some…you can’t talk shit in the room with that guy.

“[Speaking as another guy] Yo, one time, this guy stepped to me in the bar, dude, I…

“[interrupting, as Trump] No, dude, fuck you. One time the president was giving me shit and I said “Oh yeah? I’ll have your fucking job in two years. And I did it. I fucking did it.”

“Un-fucking-real, man. I don’t like his policies, but you got to respect that. Jesus.”

This was an ad-hoc take on something he said on his podcast a few weeks earlier:

“The Giants beating the undefeated Patriots, that’s all a joke. The star of a reality show is going to run the country. The guy who decided if Bret Michaels or Cyndi Lauper would make a better CEO for a company that doesn’t exist is going to be running stuff. (Emphasis added.)”

Lovely.

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)