Quotulatiousness

June 26, 2011

Product warnings

Filed under: Humour, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:46

Many weird and whacky warnings get attached to products as a result of product liability concerns, but some of them must be generated without legal prompting:

Warning #2: Booze Blues

Seen on a Terrestrial Digital outdoor antenna: “Do not attempt to install if drunk, pregnant, or both.”

Of course, if you’re drunk and pregnant, you probably have bigger problems.

Warning #3: Three-Dimensional Danger

Seen on a Samsung 3D TV disclaimer: “Pregnant women, the elderly, sufferers of serious medical conditions, those who are sleep deprived or under the influence of alcohol should avoid utilizing the unit’s 3D functionality.”

Man, those drunk moms-to-be just can’t catch a break!

Warning #4: Options, Options

Seen on a computer software package: “Optional modem required.”

The writer’s mandatory English language class, incidentally, was not completed.

June 25, 2011

“How very lucky we humans are in that all other animals are so goddamn stupid”

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:23

I think my niece mentioned this show over dinner the other night. Ilkka explains:

I recently watched two episodes of “Swamp People“, another low-budget realimentary that sets the camera to follow people with exciting and physical jobs and edits the result down to a highlights reel of action and drama with some narrative added on top. The show not only reminded me of the essay “Rednecks” by Fred Reed, but also of Tommi’s old observation of how very lucky we humans are in that all other animals are so goddamn stupid, really just simple and predictable automata. Armed with but a boat, a baited hook and a shotgun, these fellows hunt, kill and pile up 500-pound prehistoric monsters that will then be given a more useful and productive existence as delicious meat, suitcases and boots. Come on, you can’t tell me that this show doesn’t beat the initially amusing but then later just repetitive and a little bit too obviously scripted “Pawn Stars” any day…

Tim Harford analyzes the ECB’s real problem

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:30

Tim Harford puts the head of the ECB (Essex Community Business association) on the couch:

“With all due respect, doctor, I don’t think it’s me who needs to see a shrink.”

“Don’t worry. A lot of people feel a bit awkward when they first lie on this couch. This is a safe, non-judgmental space.”

“I wish the Essex Community Business association was as relaxed.”

“But you’re the chairman of the ECB association. Tell me why you feel that way.”

“Look, I always felt that the ECB association was supposed to be an informal talking shop, a way for people with shared interests to make new friends and perhaps even launch joint projects. Everyone was really happy when Georgios, the new owner of the Plaka Taverna, wanted to join — the more the merrier.”

[. . .]

“So if I understand the situation, you’re lending money to Georgios that you know he can never pay back, and demanding that his staff make sacrifices they are transparently unwilling to make, in order to protect Mr Saville’s bank, in order to protect José, who in some unspecified way is connected to Georgios’s fate.”

“It does sound a bit strange when you put it like that. I think the theory is that if we don’t throw money and yell impractical and unwelcome management advice at a transparently bankrupt business, then maybe a perfectly viable business will be damaged. Especially since there won’t be any money left, because we’ll have given it all to Georgios, who will have given it all to his waiters. Does that make sense?”

June 23, 2011

Yahtzee reviews Duke Nukem Forever

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

June 21, 2011

American history, retold

Filed under: History, Humour, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

Frank J. Fleming reminds his readers about “the principles this country was founded on”:

Back before the Unites States was an independent nation, people lived in horrific conditions under British rule. The British weren’t providing very good free health care (wait time for a poor person to get an MRI was over 200 years), they were refusing to increase taxes on the rich, and they had very few laws dictating what colonists were allowed to eat, causing many to become obese on the high-fructose maize syrup the Indians taught them to make.

So the colonists kept demanding that the British give them big government to regulate their lives and provide for their basic needs while confiscating all their wealth. “We’re stupid,” they’d cry out to the British. “Please rule us and make us do what you think is best!” But the British kept refusing, saying, “No, you guys are doing okay by yourselves. We want you to have the freedom to run your own lives.”

It was this laissez-faire attitude that led to the Boston Massacre, in which five people died of heart attacks in Boston from eating fatty foods a proper government would never have let them eat in the first place. Finally the colonists had enough of not being bossed around and decided if the British weren’t going to provide them the all-encompassing government they wanted, they had to make it themselves.

They started by throwing tea into the Boston Harbor since they determined it had too much caffeine and people shouldn’t have been allowed to drink it. Then they formed militias to collect more taxes from the colonists to spend on welfare and government works projects. The British tried to strike back by ending regulations and giving tax rebates, but the colonists were now ready to fight to make sure some large entity would tell them what to do. And many were rallied to the cause by Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me a large government telling me what I can and can’t do while spending most of my money, or give me death!”

June 9, 2011

Those ungrateful peasants

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

I had wondered about the origins of that bit of verse:

I asked if people were perhaps not tricked, but legitimately voting against the left because they objected to socialist policies such a massive spending and multiculturalism.

He responded that these issues were indeed difficult for ‘common people’ to comprehend, and therefore for the right to take advantage of. He reiterated however that the problem was not with the policies, it was that people did not ‘understand’.

This was a revealing statement, for it is a typical line of thinking across the left-wing political spectrum, from the most hardened communist to the most moderate social-democrat. While all leftists claim to be for the ‘people’, at the same time they have utter contempt for the people.

They believe they know what is best for the people, and if the people — uppity ungrateful peasants — object, then the people be damned.

Bertolt Brecht — ironically himself a dedicated Marxist — poked fun at this leftist mentality in a now famous poem, Die Lösung (The Solution), following a workers uprising against the Communist East German government in 1956.

    After the uprising of the 17th of June
    The Secretary of the Writers Union
    Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
    Stating that the people
    Had forfeited the confidence of the government
    And could win it back only
    By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
    In that case for the government
    To dissolve the people
    And elect another?

June 7, 2011

Not funny: Germany tops another international poll

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Some national stereotypes are apparently more accurate than we think:

Now an international poll appears to reinforce the humourless national stereotype after concluding that Germany is the least funny country in the world.

More than 30,000 people in 15 countries were asked to rank the nations with the worst sense of humour and Germany came out on top.

But before Britons become too smug, the survey did not rank the UK a great deal higher, placing us fourth behind Russia and Turkey.

Countries including Canada, Holland and Belgium all performed better than the UK when it came to demonstrating wit.

The UK boffins are scrambling to find an answer, as Lester Haines points out:

As the Telegraph notes, humour doesn’t translate too well, so it’s a bit difficult for the average Johnny Foreigner to understand just how complex and advanced we are in this most challenging of fields.

Having said that, the pollees were spot on about the Germans.

June 5, 2011

India as seen by “a cool Bangalorean”

Filed under: Humour, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:32

India as seen by a cool Bangalorean

H/T to Gerard Vanderleun who posted it on his Tumblr site.

June 2, 2011

It actually does explain why the “prequels” sucked

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:11

H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.

When menu translators go feral: “Timid and rapidly grown prostitutes”

Filed under: Food, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:16

Victor Mair finds the menu items lost something, but gained humour, in the translation:

The basic Bèn School Method seems to be to look each content word up in a bilingual dictionary, and to pick the most amusing and least grammatical option among the alternatives on offer. The word order of the translation seems to be a semi-random compromise among the various languages involved.

H/T to Tom Vinson for the link.

June 1, 2011

QotD: “Gender-free parenting”

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:25

Earlier this month, the Toronto Star published a story called “Footloose and gender-free,” which sympathetically profiled a young couple trying to raise a child in a completely gender-neutral environment — so gender-neutral that the mother and father won’t even tell people outside the family whether Storm, their four-month-old child, is a boy or girl. “If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs,” says David Stocker, the child’s father.

I wish this well-meaning fellow could have attended my 7-year-old daughter’s birthday party at a pottery and painting studio last week. There, he would have seen 10 little girls, all of them sitting quietly at a table, studiously creating beautiful little masterpieces. The boys, meanwhile, took about 30 seconds to slop some paint onto a ceramic dinosaur or car — and then spent the next hour chasing each other around the facility, occasionally hauling one another to the ground so they could act out professional wrestling moves they’d seen on Youtube.

Not that the boys weren’t “creative.” One of them had been given a cheap video camera from his parents, and spent 10 minutes taking footage of the (unoccupied) toilet in the studio bathroom. This pint-sized Truffaut had a cheering section: The boys assembled around him found the documentary project to be the most hilarious thing in the world, and some became literally incontinent with laughter (ironic, no?) as they took turns passing the camcorder from hand to hand watching and re-watching the footage. Occasionally, the girls would look over at the boys — much as well-dressed diners in a fancy restaurant might gaze out a window to watch hobos fighting over a liquor bottle in an alley — and then sighed and returned to their artistic labours.

As any (normal) parent can attest, such vignettes are entirely typical of parties featuring young boys and girls — who generally are so different in their behavior as almost to compose different species. Stocker is entirely wrong: There is no other single datum of information about a young child that will tell you more about his or her temperament, interests, energy level and maturity level than his or her sex.

Jonathan Kay, “Take it from me — ‘gender-free’ parenting doesn’t work”, National Post, 2011-06-01

May 31, 2011

Colby Cosh tweets

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:49

Colby Cosh works for Maclean’s, which is owned by the same corporate entity that provides his cell phone service. He’s not been impressed with his employer’s other line of business:

Tue 31 May 04:28 (On the whole, I would rather buy a mealworm-infested phone from a Somali pirate than deal with Rogers any further.)

Tue 31 May 04:32 (A pirate prob wouldn’t tell me how *lucky* I was to get a refurbished battery to replace the inert one in the phone he sold me 4 wks ago.)

Tue 31 May 04:34 (…which I had to relinquish for 2 weeks in order for the incalculably complex operation of “swapping in a working battery” to be executed.)

Tue 31 May 04:34 (…Not a NEW battery, mind you. I bought the PHONE new, but the replacement battery is refurbished. I am explicitly supposed to be grateful.)

May 28, 2011

Feeling optimistic about peoples’ common sense?

Filed under: Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:15

A few visits to this site will quickly disabuse you of that feeling.


It’s how some folks on Facebook react to stories from The Onion as if it was real news.

May 24, 2011

Forget May 21st: world now ending October 21st says Camping

Filed under: Humour, Media, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:42

If you were terribly let down not to ascend on Saturday, don’t worry: Harold Camping has recalculated the correct day of the Rapture!

California preacher Harold Camping is unrepentant following his second unsuccessful attempt to predict Judgment Day, and now says true believers should pack their bags for ascension to heaven on 21 October.

Camping’s first stab at nailing the Rapture advised Christians to get their earthly affairs in order before 6 September 1994. When the world failed to end, due to a “mathematical error”, he reset the clock for last Saturday at 6pm EST.

Christians expecting a rapturous elevation to glory were once again left twiddling their thumbs and their Bibles, but Camping now says he simply misinterpreted the word of God and 21 May “was not really the end of the world but the spiritual beginning of the physical end”, as the San Francisco Chronicle explains.

So the good news is that the world didn’t experience the Rapture on Saturday, and that we don’t get five months of Satan striding among us waving his evil appendages in the faces of the doomed, while those taken up in the Rapture watch us from Heaven, exulting in our pain and suffering while gobbling down popcorn-flavoured Manna bits. The bad news is it all comes to an end on October 21st anyway.

May 22, 2011

Taiwan’s CGI animators do “The Rapture”

Filed under: Humour, Media, Religion — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:08

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