17 years Ago
Jokes are Subjective as Hell
Published on in Fun
Every once in a while, Reddit does a “tell your best jokes” thread. Here are my favorites from the last one; try not to hold it against me.
Brewer’s Convention
At a world brewing convention in the States, the CEOs of various Brewing organizations retired to the bar at the end of each day’s conference.
Bruce, CEO of Fosters, shouted to the Barman: “In ‘Strylya, we make the best bladdy beer in the world, so pour me a Bladdy Fosters, mate.”
Bob, CEO of Budweiser, calls out next: “In the... [More]
The Pursuit of Happiness
Published on in Quotes
“The great source of both misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Some of those situations may no doubt deserve to be prefered to others but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly or by remorse from the horror... [More]”
That Awful Sucking Sound
Published on in Quotes
“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers. … How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked,... [More]”
Savage Relationship Advice
Published on in Quotes
“Again, the passage of time destroys us all. But you can’t sit on the couch stuffing Twinkies in your mouth and bitch about how shallow your partner is for not finding you attractive anymore because some people get cancer. Please.”
Dan Savage is an advice columnist focusing on questions about sex and relationships. When pushed, he knows how to throw down with the best of them.
Rapturous Truth
Published on in Miscellaneous
Werner Herzog has made many films and not one of them was boring, either to watch or to film (he famously “haul[ed] a boat up a mountainside in [his film] Fitzcarraldo … in the middle of the Amazonian rain forest, [because] audience will know if the shots are real”. His latest is Little Dieter Needs to Fly—a documentary about the only successful escape from a POW camp in Vietnam—with the unparalleled Christian Bale in the lead role. Roger Ebert wrote him a magnificent letter (linked below)... [More]
MNFTIU − October 2007
Published on in Fun
The strips from October 2007 (MNFTIU) have some pretty good lines:
“I used to have a friend who was skeptical about whether bombing the shit out of people was the best way to fight terrorism. I bet he feels pretty stupid now.”
“If Turkey invades Northern Iraq, we should try selling them a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner. I know where you can get one cheap. … You know, if enough countries invade Iraq, maybe we can just slip out the back…”
In response to the possibility that Blackwater employees might be... [More]
Dennis Kucinich: Just Imagine
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
It would be nice if all of the faithful in America would apply their faith constructively for once. Instead of shopping amongst the meatheads on the Republican side or the non-commital shysters on the Democratic side, they should take a look at Kucinich’s platform and believe that he could make it work. Vote him into the presidency and give him four years—if he only accomplishes half of what he would like to, America will be on its way to being the country we were all[1] taught it already was.
Debates... [More]
Pictures with Captions
Published on in Fun
The internet is lately being overrun by pictures with captions. Most of these pictures features cats with bad grammar, but not all of them. For some unknown reason, some are incredibly, laugh-out-loud, tears-in-your-eyes funny. Most of the images are from 100 Top Internet Pictures by TheWalkingDude.[1]
Exhibit (A) below is an image that originated somewhere on the internets—most likely Something Awful or Fark (browse at your own risk/not for the faint of heart/your mileage may vary), but which indicates that it... [More]
Truly Inspired Link Headline on Reddit
Published on in Fun
This picture showed up when you clicked through on this link title: AP Photo of the President and some fucking asshole that bankrupted our country and killed 1,000,000+ people. (Reddit)[1] Sure, it’s a cheap trick, but funny as hell.
What Lou Dobbs Calls the News
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
There’s a fun little video called What We Call the News (JibJab), which lampoons the state of American media today, which has degenerated from “anchors of integrity and three channels to choose” to “a ratings race, with the anchors replaced by blondes with big, fake boobs”. To be fair, it’s not these superficial qualities that form the crux of the problem—Lou Dobbs, for example, is neither blonde nor especially busty. But he exemplifies the problem with the news with his shocking incompetence and... [More]
Improving the Pocket Calendar
Published on in Miscellaneous
This guy kicked off a [a] better design to fit a year calendar comfortably within a business card. (ELZR) There are a lot of, shall we say, unique, entries. Many of them are interesting only in that they actually work, not that they would be more useful than the standard pocket calendar, which uses text too small to read. The winning entry is the Thumb Calendar by Adam Sporka, which is clean and clear:
Here’s how it works:
First half of the year is on one side of the card, the rest of the year is on the other.... [More]
How Low Can You Go?
Published on in Miscellaneous
The International Photography Contest (National Geographic) selected the following picture as the winner in the Animals category of their annual competition. This is wrong on so many levels, not least of which is that a lot of people (yours truly included) tend to have much stronger reactions to the suffering of animals that fellow human beings. Why is that? Is it their helplessness? Their relative innocence? Are people not accorded a similar guilelessness, by default? Or do we just assume that they, while not... [More]
Exhaustive Fast Food Nutrition Information
Published on in Miscellaneous
Fast Food Restaurants & Nutrition Facts Compared (A Calorie Counter) took the time to painstakingly combine the published nutrition (if you can call it that) information for the largest fast food chains in America.
A few tidbits:
- In the french fries department, Dairy Queen at 1530mg delivers almost five times the sodium of McDonald’s fries and 730 kCal for their large size.
- Carl’s Jr weighs in with a regular hamburger that has 470 kCal and 1060mg of sodium.
- The unlimited weight class for sandwiches/burgers has... [More]
The Ethics of Being Carnivorous
Published on in Quotes
“Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way as we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme – and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious... [More]”
Writer’s Strike
Published on in Miscellaneous
The Writer’s Guild started their strike this week, bringing all new television production out of Hollywood to a screeching halt. For those who haven’t followed it too closely, the Guild have put together a video covering the main points.
Another member of the guild involved in the negotiation wrote Why We Want Our Words’ Worth by Michael Winship (Common Dreams), which noted that much of what is breathlessly reported by the media is vastly distorted or flat-out incorrect—pretty much par for the course for the new channels,... [More]
The Matrix
Published on in Quotes
“People who have realized that this is a dream, imagine that it is easy to wake up, and are angry with those who continue sleeping, not considering that the whole world that environs them does not permit them to wake. Life proceeds as a series of optical illusions, artificial needs and imaginary sensations.”
The Joys of Commuting
Published on in Miscellaneous
As cities in America grow bigger and bigger, with suburbs being surrounded by exurbs and people travelling around, through and between city centers regularly, the question of public transportation arises. It’s only really in the States that large cities look at public transportation as a question rather than as a right. It’s only in the States that trains, subways, light rail and metro commuter lines are discussed in terms of profitability instead of usefulness, environmental friendliness and... [More]
An Understandable Mistake
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
The Congress spent the weekend proving, once again, that they have no idea what the safe word is in the sub/dom game they’ve been playing with the executive branch since early 2001. And, despite the title of this article, Hillary Clinton Votes for War — Again by David Bromwich (Common Dreams), it’s not just Hillary grinning madly around the ball gag, either: she’s joined by 75 close friends in the Senate who also saw fit to approve the following language[1]:
“…that it should be the policy of the United States to stop inside... [More]”
Understatement
Published on in Quotes
“Despite the best that has been done by everyone, the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
Often quoted by the now-silent Billmon in response to stunningly undetstatements offered by politicians at large. The most recent spate come from the king of rhetoric, George Bush II, S = r * t (My Alter Ego Speaks) cites him: “I do know that we have not succeeded as fast as we wanted to succeed”, with other variations being “I thought we would succeed quicker than we did” and “I am disappointed by... [More]”
Statetris
Published on in Fun
Statetris is Tetris, but with countries or states/counties. You can choose from the following difficulty levels:
- Easy – States/countries are labeled and already rotated to the correct position.
- Medium – States/countries are labeled and are rotated to a random position.
- Hard – States/countries are not labeled and are rotated to a random position.
Some of the countries are really small and must simply be placed into one of the magnifying glasses. It’s a pity that they don’t leave the... [More]
Infallibility
Published on in Quotes
“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution[1] which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.... [More]”
Almost Six Years and Counting
Published on in Public Policy & Politics
On the subject of the suspiciously quiet home front in the war on terror, there’s Things I Used to Know by Scott Adams (Dilbert Blog):
“We Americans know that Al Qaeda has cells in America planning to attack. And we know that there are more terrorists than ever, thanks to the Iraq war. It’s easy to get people and explosives into the country on private boats or across our porous borders. The woods must be full of terrorists by now. Apparently all the slow ones came to America. I mean, Iraq has almost as many car bombs as... [More]”
Art on Slashdot
Published on in Fun
Every once in a while, there’s something on Slashdot worth reading. More often than not, it’s in a comment rather than one of their “articles” (quotes intended to convey ample contempt for the editing process there). There’s a discussion there, High Court Trims Whistleblower Rights (Slashdot), in which one participant got pretty shrill in responding to a troll[1], trotting out all of the arguments that trolls dearly love to feed on (as well as those ever-delectable tears of frustration and rage).
Some... [More]
Poor Man’s Backup with tar
Published on in Tips & Tricks
The application tar
is ubiquitous in the Unix/Linux world. It rolls multiple files and directories into a single “tarball”, which can be transferred more easily and expanded at its destination. A single option, -z
applies a compression to the resulting tarball, giving the file the by now well-known extension .tar.gz
(for tar-balled and g-zipped). Extracting this file involves two operations, in which first the compression is removed and then the tarball unrolled.
The easiest way to back up a... [More]
OOP and Generics
Published on in Quotes
“OOP without generics is like a car that only turns left – sure you can go right, just take three lefts.”