Quotulatiousness

May 2, 2014

Australian Financial Review says the “World is Fukt”

Filed under: Australia, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:09

In my mundane jobs, occasionally filler text is accidentally included in an otherwise ready-to-publish piece of work. Much more rarely, someone on staff uses placeholder headings that are never meant to go beyond their small circle of fellow scribes (sometimes funny, often scatological, risky-but-stress-relieving kind of things). When I was working for [defunct international telecom equipment manufacturer], a fellow writer included the instruction “If you find an error in this document, please dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT” on a cover page. The divisional VP was not amused when that hit his desk.

This is bad when it escapes to the internal audience outside the working group, but it’s much worse when it somehow goes out to the general public:

Australian Financial Review - World is Fukt

The financial newspaper which accidentally published a front-page headline reading “World is Fukt” apologised today to its readers for the error-ridden edition.

The respected Australian Financial Review, in a message from editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury, said the mistake was due to a production and printing error.

“The Australian Financial Review apologises to Western Australian readers for the obviously unacceptable state of the newspaper’s front page on Thursday,” he said in an apology in Monday’s newspaper.

The accidental front page quickly found fans on Twitter, who approved of the headline which read in full: “Arms buildup – Buys planes, World is Fukt”.

They also enjoyed the fact that the headline for a story about a major budget speech by Treasurer Joe Hockey was empty of meaning, reading “Three lines to come here”.

H/T to my best source in Oz, Roger Henry.

May 1, 2014

QotD: Leadership

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

I’m a little slow on the uptake from time to time. Occasionally people mistake this form of aphasia for things right in front of my face as a kind of aplomb — it isn’t. To coin an aphorism by butchering Kipling quotes: If you seem to be keeping your head because you’re a little dimwitted, while everyone else is smart enough to be losing theirs, they’ll often put you in charge of that pack of panicking headless men, for all the wrong reasons, and then you’ll be a man in a world of trouble, my son.

Sippican Cottage, “Real Estate, Red In Tooth And Claw “, Sippican Cottage, 2013-11-12

April 30, 2014

What if real life had lag like online games do?

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

You wouldn’t accept lag offline, so why do it online? ume.net, a fiber broadband provider that offers up to 1000 Mbit/s, performed an experiment. Four volunteers got to experience internet’s biggest disturbance in real life – lag.

H/T to Jeff Sher for the link.

April 29, 2014

The briefest NFL draft scouting report you’ll read this week

Filed under: Football, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:11

Arif Hasan pulled together the most informative short briefing for this year’s NFL draft you’ll find anywhere:

As we get closer to the NFL Draft, it’s critical that fans and media alike find ways to aggregate the mountains of information they have and concisely explain what we need to know about the top prospects about to enter the NFL. In the interest of doing so, I’ve compiled one sentence scouting reports on the Top 40 players as determined by CBS’ draft rankings — among the best in the industry.

  1. Jadeveon Clowney, DE South Carolina — He’s great, but he’s no Julius Peppers
  2. Greg Robinson, OT Auburn — He’s great, but he’s no Orlando Pace
  3. Khalil Mack, OLB Buffalo — He’s great, but he’s no Lawrence Taylor
  4. Sammy Watkins, WR Clemson — He’s great, but he’s no Wes Chandler
  5. Jake Matthews, OT Texas A&M — He’s great, but he’s no Ron Yary
  6. Blake Bortles, QB Central Florida — He’s great, but he’s no John Elway
  7. Johnny Manziel, QB Texas A&M — He’s great, but he’s no Joe Namath
  8. Taylor Lewan, OT Michigan — He’s great, but he’s no Tony Mandarich
  9. Mike Evans, WR Texas A&M — He’s great, but he’s no Calvin Johnson
  10. Justin Gilbert, CB Oklahoma State — He’s great, but he’s no Deion Sanders

April 28, 2014

QotD: British and French parliamentary practice

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:48

We are all familiar with the basic difference between English and French parliamentary institutions; copied respectively by such other assemblies as derive from each. We all realize that this main difference has nothing to do with national temperament, but stems from their seating plans. The British, being brought up on team games, enter their House of Commons in the spirit of those who would rather be doing something else. If they cannot be playing golf or tennis, they can at least pretend that politics is a game with very similar rules. But for this device, Parliament would arouse even less interest than it does. So the British instinct is to form two opposing teams, with referee and linesmen, and let them debate until they exhaust themselves. The House of Commons is so arranged that the individual Member is practically compelled to take one side or the other before he knows what the arguments are, or even (in some cases) before he knows the subject of the dispute. His training from birth has been to play for his side, and this saves him from any undue mental effort. Sliding into a seat toward the end of a speech, he knows exactly how to take up the argument from the point it has reached. If the speaker is on his own side of the House, he will say “Hear, hear!” If he is on the opposite side, he can safely say “Shame!” or merely “Oh!” At some later stage he may have time to ask his neighbor what the debate is supposed to be about. Strictly speaking, however, there is no need for him to do this. He knows enough in any case not to kick into his own goal. The men who sit opposite are entirely wrong and all their arguments are so much drivel. The men on his own side are statesmanlike, by contrast, and their speeches a singular blend of wisdom, eloquence, and moderation. Nor does it make the slightest difference whether he learned his politics at Harrow or in following the fortunes of Aston Villa. In either school he will have learned when to cheer and when to groan. But the British system depends entirely on its seating plan. If the benches did not face each other, no one could tell truth from falsehood — wisdom from folly — unless indeed by listening to it all. But to listen to it all would be ridiculous, for half the speeches must of necessity be nonsense.

In France the initial mistake was made of seating the representatives in a semicircle, all facing the chair. The resulting confusion could be imagined if it were not notorious. No real opposing teams could be formed and no one could tell (without listening) which argument was the more cogent. There was the further handicap of all the proceedings being in French — an example the United States wisely refused to follow. But the French system is bad enough even when the linguistic difficulty does not arise. Instead of having two sides, one in the right and the other in the wrong — so that the issue is clear from the outset — the French form a multitude of teams facing in all directions. With the field in such confusion, the game cannot even begin. Basically their representatives are of the Right or of the Left, according to where they sit. This is a perfectly sound scheme. The French have not gone to the extreme of seating people in alphabetical order. But the semicircular chamber allows of subtle distinctions between the various degrees of tightness and leftness. There is none of the clear-cut British distinction between rightness and wrongness. One deputy is described, politically, as to the left of Monsieur Untel but well to the right of Monsieur Quelquechose. What is anyone to make of that? What should we make of it even in English? What do they make of it themselves? The answer is, “Nothing.”

C. Northcote Parkinson, “The Will of the People, or Annual General Meeting”, Parkinson’s Law (and other studies in administration), 1957.

April 26, 2014

QotD: Acting

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

Of all actors, the most offensive to the higher cerebral centers is the one who pretends to intellectuality. His alleged intelligence, of course, is always purely imaginary: no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night. That nonsense enters into the very fiber of the actor. He becomes a grotesque boiling down of all the preposterous characters that he has ever impersonated. Their characteristics are seen in his manner, in his reactions to stimuli, in his point of view. He becomes a walking artificiality, a strutting dummy, a thematic catalogue of imbecilities.

There are, of course, plays that are not wholly nonsense, and now and then one encounters an actor who aspires to appear in them. This aspiration almost always overtakes the so-called actor-manager that is to say, the actor who has got rich and is thus ambitious to appear as a gentleman. Such aspirants commonly tackle Shakespeare, and if not Shakespeare, then Shaw, or Hauptmann, or Rostand, or some other apparently intellectual dramatist. But this is seldom more than a passing madness. The actor-manager may do that sort of thing once in a while, but in the main he sticks to his garbage. […]

It is commonly urged in defense of certain actors that they are forced to appear in that sort of stuff by the public demand for it that appearing in it painfully violates their secret pruderies. This defense is unsound and dishonest. An actor never disdains anything that gets him applause and money; he is almost completely devoid of that aesthetic conscience which is the chief mark of the genuine artist. If there were a large public willing to pay handsomely to hear him recite limericks, or to blow a cornet, or to strip off his underwear and dance a polonaise stark naked, he would do it without hesitation and then convince himself that such buffooning constituted a difficult and elevated art, fully comparable to Wagner’s or Dante’s. In brief, the one essential, in his sight, is the chance to shine, the fat part, the applause. Who ever heard of an actor declining a fat part on the ground that it invaded his intellectual integrity? The thing is simply unimaginable.

H.L. Mencken, “The Allied Arts: The Cerebral Mime”, Prejudices: Second Series, 1920.

April 24, 2014

UKIP’s Nigel Farage as the Tories want you to see him

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

The Torygraph‘s Tom Chivers has unearthed a photo that will shake the very foundations of the British political scene!

Prepare to be AMAZED. The photo of Nigel Farage that the Ukip ESTABLISHMENT didn’t want you to see:

Nigel Farage as a punk

It’s not so much the fact that he’s such an awful rebel, with no respect for the great British institution of the police, that’s embarrassing for the Ukip leader. The real problem is that this photo was apparently taken in 1983 and Mr Farage still looks about 40.

Of course, it’s not just this damning and clearly not at all Photoshopped photo, which has been doing the rounds on Twitter because of its obvious veracity. There are dozens of equally upsetting Farage photos which his party apparatchiks have been desperately trying to ban.

April 22, 2014

QotD: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed driving all over Los Angeles County – from Topanga to Watts, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station. We had sampled almost everything else, and now – yes, it was time for a long snort of ether. And then do the next 100 miles in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor. The only way to keep alert on ether is to do up a lot of amyls – not all at once, but steadily, just enough to maintain the focus at 90 miles an hour through Barstow.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas”, Rolling Stone, 1971-11-11

April 21, 2014

QotD: Vikings!

Filed under: History, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:41

VikingTimesQuote-350x240

– Spotted yesterday in the Times (which is behind a paywall) of the day before yesterday by 6k. “Very good” says he. Indeed.

Brian Micklethwait, “Samizdata quote of the day”, Samizdata, 2014-04-19.

April 20, 2014

QotD: Musical tastes

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:46

It was my business for a long time to tell people that approached the bandstand that their favorite song was of absolutely no interest to everyone else in the room, and we weren’t going to play it. It’s a delicate thing to tell people that the song that contains both the name of their illegitimate children and their pit bulls, and whose album cover is featured on both a tattoo on their chest and painted on the side of their van, isn’t very entertaining. Such information upsets people, like going to the monkey house at the zoo and throwing your poo at the apes. Those monkeys stop in their tracks and stare at you, I’m telling you.

Don’t ask me how I know that.

Sippican Cottage, “Well, I Put The Quarter Right In That Can, But All They Played Was Disco, Man”, Sippican Cottage, 2013-05-06

April 18, 2014

QotD: Opera

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

Opera, to a person genuinely fond of aural beauty, must inevitably appear tawdry and obnoxious, if only because it presents aural beauty in a frame of purely visual gaudiness, with overtones of the grossest sexual provocation. The most successful opera singers of the female sex, at least in America, are not those whom the majority of auditors admire most as singers but those whom the majority of male spectators desire most as mistresses. Opera is chiefly supported in all countries by the same sort of wealthy sensualists who also support musical comedy. One finds in the directors’ room the traditional stock company of the stage-door alley. Such vermin, of course, pose in the newspapers as devout and almost fanatical partisans of art; they exhibit themselves at every performance; one hears of their grand doings, through their press agents, almost every day. But one has merely to observe the sort of opera they think is good to get the measure of their actual artistic discrimination.

The genuine music-lover may accept the carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of actual music within, but that is no sign that he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing through it. Most musicians, indeed, prefer to hear operatic music outside the opera house; that is why one so often hears such things as “The Ride of the Valkyrie” in the concert hall. “The Ride of the Valkyrie” has a certain intrinsic value as pure music; played by a competent orchestra it may give civilized pleasure. But as it is commonly performed in an opera house, with a posse of flat beldames throwing themselves about the stage, it can only produce the effect of a dose of ipecacuanha. The sort of person who actually delights in such spectacles is the sort of person who delights in plush furniture. Such half-wits are in a majority in every opera house west of the Rhine. They go to the opera, not to hear music, not even to hear bad music, but merely to see a more or less obscene circus. A few, perhaps, have a further purpose; they desire to assist in that circus, to show themselves in the capacity of fashionables, to enchant the yokelry with their splendor. But the majority must be content with the more lowly aim. What they get for the outrageous prices they pay for seats is a chance to feast their eyes upon glittering members of the superior demi-monde, and to abase their groveling souls before magnificoes on their own side of the footlights. They esteem a performance, not in proportion as true music is on tap, but in proportion as the display of notorious characters on the stage is copious, and the exhibition of wealth in the boxes is lavish.

H.L. Mencken, “The Allied Arts: Opera”, Prejudices: Second Series, 1920.

April 17, 2014

QotD: User interface design for all ages

Filed under: Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:51

As your body staggers down the winding road to death, user interfaces that require fighter pilot-grade eyesight, the dexterity of a neurosurgeon, and the mental agility of Derren Brown, are going to screw with you at some point.

Don’t kid yourself otherwise — disability, in one form or another, can strike at any moment.

Given that people are proving ever harder to kill off, you can expect to have decades of life ahead of you — during which you’ll be battling to figure out where on the touchscreen that trendy transdimensional two-pixel wide “OK” button is hiding.

Can you believe, people born today will spend their entire lives having to cope with this crap? The only way I can explain the web design of many Google products today is that some wannabe Picasso stole Larry Page’s girl when they were all 13, and is only now exacting his revenge. Nobody makes things that bad by accident, surely?

Dominic Connor, “Is tech the preserve of the young able-bodied? Let’s talk over a fine dinner and claret”, The Register, 2014-04-17

April 15, 2014

Oval Office trivia

Filed under: Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:08

Chris Kluwe is deputized to answer reader letters for Deadspin. It actually has some football-related stuff, in addition to an answer for this query from Ethan:

    How many people that are not the president, do you think have had sex in the Oval Office?

Has to be at least in the thousands. Think of all the Congressmen working after hours, diligently crafting pork with the help of nubile young interns who’re easily impressed by wrinkly, dead Cryptkeeper flesh and the ephemeral promise of power. One thing leads to another, he says he knows a guy on the Secret Service who can get them into the Oval Office as long as they’re quiet, and boom — now he’s desperately trying to remember where he left the Viagra while she tries to convince herself this will totally launch her career. I bet the Secret Service guys even have a name for it, like the Clinton, or the Kennedy.

“Hey Chip, looks like ‘ol Strom Thurmond’s pulling another Jefferson tonight. Make sure his walker’s outside the door in about three minutes.”

“Greeeaat, I’ll let the cleaning staff know it’s gonna be another late one.”

THANKS, OBAMA.

April 14, 2014

QotD: Collard’s Law

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:08

Given enough funding and little accountability, any organisation tends to look like a shit copy of the public sector.

Lewis Collard, in a comment on ESR’s Google+ post, 2014-04-13

April 13, 2014

QotD: Politicians

Filed under: Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

Being an MP is a vast subsidized ego-trip. It’s a job that needs no qualifications, it has no compulsory hours of work, no performance standards, and provides a warm room, a telephone and subsidized meals to a bunch of self-important windbags and busybodies who suddenly find people taking them seriously because they’ve go the letters ‘MP’ after the their name.

Jonathan Lynn, “Yes Minister Series: Quotes from the dialogue”, JonathanLynn.com

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