Humour « Quotulatiousness

October 15, 2010

The Two Scotts both pick Minnesota over Dallas

Filed under: Football, Humour — Tags: BrettFavre, DallasCowboys, MinnesotaVikings, NFL — Nicholas @ 12:28

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Feschuk-Reid affair without some light banter:

Dallas (plus 1.5) at Minnesota

Reid: I’ve always thought that when a girl plays hard to get, it’s time to start sending her up-close photos of your bait and tackle. On the field, Favre may be guided by pure instinct but off the field he appears to be a careful thinker. Shrewd strategies designed to achieve maximum impact. That’s what I take away from this entire Deadspin affair. And like Wade Phillips, I look forward to seeing how Tony Romo blows this game in the fourth quarter. Pick: Minnesota.

[. . .]

Feschuk: Favre got nailed in the bag with a pigskin during practice this week, and that’s not even a euphemism. Clearly, the football gods are taking rare pleasure in delivering the gunslinger’s comeuppance. The video of Favre taking one in the tenders was funny enough on its own, but even funnier in this treatment by the folks at Kissing Suzy Kolber.

Pick: Minnesota.

An alternate interpretation of the video was from Mark Craig who suggested that it was “NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell (not pictured) visited Winter Park today to deliver his punishment to the future Hall of Fame quarterback.”

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October 14, 2010

Little Bobby Tables must speak Swedish

Filed under: Europe, Humour, Politics, Technology — Tags: Computers, ElectionWatch, Sweden, xkcd — Nicholas @ 13:19

By way of Bruce Schneier an opportunity to show another xkcd comic:

Exploits of a Mom

So, what’s the Swedish tie-in?

As you may have heard, we’ve had a very close election here in Sweden. Today the Swedish Election Authority published the hand written votes. While scanning through them I happened to notice

R;13;Hallands län;80;Halmstad;01;Halmstads västra valkrets;0904;Söndrum 4;pwn DROP TABLE VALJ;1

The second to last field is the actual text on the ballot. Could it be that Little Bobby Tables is all grown up and has migrated to Sweden? Well, it’s probably just a joke but even so it brings questions since an SQL-injection on election data would be very serious.

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Old stereotypes still thrive in niche ecologies

Filed under: Humour, Randomness — Tags: EqualRights, Fail, Prejudice, Women, Writing — Nicholas @ 07:49

An exchange that wouldn’t have been at all surprising in, say, 1950:

"Jo, As much as I appreciate your reply, I think this manuscript is perahps [sic] too heavy for you. Don't get me wrong, I am not remeaning [sic] your professionalism, it's just VERY profound and maybe too much for a female to edit. A delicate mind I do not want editing this. Best regards, Etc"

Jo Caird called on deep reserves of patience to respond:

"Dear Etc, Thanks for your prompt reply. Thanks too for your candid (not to mention eloquently expressed - although I believe the word you were looking for was 'demeaning', not 'remeaning') appraisal of my intellectual and professional capabilities. It's reassuring to me, as a 'female' (again, I believe you mean 'woman') of delicate sensibilities and feeble judgement, to know that considerate gentlemen such as yourself exist to protect me from that which I lack the depth of character to understand. As to how you've assessed that I am too weak-minded to work on, or even indeed to read, your manuscript, given that we have never met, or even spoken on the phone, I can only speculate. I wish you, in any case, all the best with it. Have a lovely weekend. Kind regards, Jo"

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

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October 13, 2010

“I just taught them a new game . . .”

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: Fail, Parents, Psychology, Teenagers — Nicholas @ 00:28

H/T to Martina for the link.

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October 12, 2010

Female characters in modern fiction

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: Movies, TV, Women — Nicholas @ 13:13

The Female Character Flowchart looks at “the one- and two-dimensional female characters we see over and over again in modern fiction.”

Click image to see full size flowchart

H/T to Royce McDaniels for the link.

Mitch Miller, drawing upon years of “men are simple/women are complicated” media memes, responded:

Wow! That’s a lot of female characters, considering that there’s only five male characters:

The Good Guy
The Bad Guy
The Good Bad Guy
The Bad Good Guy
and
The Sidekick

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Terry Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: TerryPratchett — Nicholas @ 12:18

I’m being self-sacrificing, having sent my copy off with Victor when he went back to campus yesterday, so this review by Cory Doctorow just highlights what I’ll get to read in a couple of week’s time:

Terry Pratchett’s newly released I Shall Wear Midnight is the fourth volume in the Tiffany Aching books, about a young girl born to be the witch of a chalky, sheep-farming area called, simply, The Chalk (the other three volumes being Wee Free Men, Hatful of Sky and Wintersmith). Tiffany’s old gran was the “Wise Woman” of the hills, and her gifts came down to Tiffany, who, at the age of 7 or 8, began to need them — first to rescue the Baron’s son when he was kidnapped by the Queen of Faerie (Tiffany hit her with an iron frying pan) and then to learn proper magic while apprenticed to a real witch, and finally to kiss the Wintersmith during a morris dance, and then have to set the seasons to right.

In Midnight, Tiffany returns. Now she’s 16, and she has assumed all the burdens of being The Chalk’s witch — and they are burdensome — delivering the babies, salving the wounds, clipping the neglected old ladies’ toenails, changing the bandages, and using magic to take away the pain of the Baron, who is dying.

As if being thrust into an early maturity wasn’t enough, witchery has fallen into disrepute on The Chalk — and seemingly everywhere. There are old ladies being crushed and drowned by mobs, there are the whispers and the forked fingers to fight the evil eye when Tiffany passes, and then, when the Baron dies while Tiffany eases him into the next world, there is the wildfire rumor that Tiffany killed him.

This series is a wonderful read for both children and adults: Pratchett’s sense of humour and his touch of magical-but-real provide a great read for both audiences. Highly recommended, especially if you haven’t already become a fan of his main Discworld series.

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October 7, 2010

Breaking: Historians confess they invented “ancient Greeks”

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Humour, Media — Tags: Archaeology, Parody — Nicholas @ 12:41

As many had suspected for years, the entire history of ancient Greece was fabricated by historians:

A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had “entirely fabricated” ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization.

The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing society existing in Greece more than two millennia ago was a complete fiction created by a team of some two dozen historians, anthropologists, and classicists who worked nonstop between 1971 and 1974 to forge “Greek” documents and artifacts.

“Honestly, we never meant for things to go this far,” said Professor Gene Haddlebury, who has offered to resign his position as chair of Hellenic Studies at Georgetown University. “We were young and trying to advance our careers, so we just started making things up: Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates, the lever and fulcrum, rhetoric, ethics, all the different kinds of columns — everything.”

[. . .]

According to Haddlebury, the idea of inventing a wholly fraudulent ancient culture came about when he and other scholars realized they had no idea what had actually happened in Europe during the 800-year period before the Christian era.

I’m glad that they’ve finally come clean on this huge historical fraud. Especially The Iliad, which “was a bitch to write, by the way” but “it seemed to catch on.”

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QotD: The dangers of being a novelist

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: Dublin, Ireland, Writing — Nicholas @ 12:30

I’m in the middle of starting a new novel right now, and the bad thing about that strange phase of existence is that everything you see and hear somehow relates, in the wankmulch your brain has become, to that novel. Even a shopping list becomes a mass of notation and connective lines — because you’re convinced that the six things on it reveal something phenomenal about the world and your place in it, and there’s a place in the novel where you can shove all that in.

Deep down, there’s a little James Joyce homunculus in our hearts, presumably chatting up a saucy-looking ventricle and asking it if it shags, and also spreading the beautifully toxic notion that his book Ulysses actually contains all of Dublin in it and, should it ever be destroyed, a new Dublin could be generated from it like a backup copy, if needs be. And so we peer around at everything, to see if we can image it on a hard drive of a book, ghosting the real world.

Also it’s important to note that when writers — or at least I — get into this condition, we talk very fast and make not a lot of sense.

Warren Ellis, “Ghosting the real world”, Wired (UK), 2010-10-07

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October 5, 2010

The Guild, Season 4 episode 12

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: FeliciaDay, MMORPG, TheGuild — Nicholas @ 07:52

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Another new think tank . . . but this one’s different

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Randomness — Nicholas @ 07:19

These days it seems that there’s a new think tank springing up on every corner, covering so many different issues and interests. But there’s one area that’s still underserved in the think tank world, so Adam Thierer is inaugurating a new think tank to cover those areas:

I’m pleased to announce my new venture: The Sin Think Tank. The mission of the Sin Think Tank will be to promote prurient interests, gun play, gambling, unhealthy eating, and alcohol and tobacco appreciation. Some of our positions or programs will include:

* The Bob Guccione Fellow in Cultural Studies
* The Joe Camel Chair in Environmental Analysis
* The Smith & Wesson Institute for Peace
* The Jack Daniels Center for Spirited Discussion
* The Center for Gambling Promotion
* The Dunkin Donuts Nutrition & Nourishment Initiative (aka, the “Feed the World” initiative)
* The Hunter S. Thompson Foundation for Free Living & High Times

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October 4, 2010

Reason TV’s “Fiscal House of Horrors”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: Debt, Stimulus — Nicholas @ 16:26

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October 1, 2010

Freakonomics trailer

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Media — Tags: Incentives, Interesting, Movies — Nicholas @ 16:23

Since reading the book(s), I often find myself in discussions using the term “incentives” (especially in the sense of perverse incentives: those which produce the opposite of the desired effect). I think there’s much value in this approach to problem solving, and I’m looking forward to seeing the movie.

Update: I guess I’ve gotten out of the habit of seeing movies at all. Freakonomics is in the theatres now, but I seem to have uninstalled the movie theatre information app on my iPhone . . . it figures: it doesn’t appear to be playing anywhere near here.

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September 28, 2010

The Guild, Season 4 Episode 11

Filed under: Gaming, Humour — Tags: FeliciaDay, MMORPG, TheGuild — Nicholas @ 07:46

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September 27, 2010

QotD: Explorers and translation

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Randomness — Tags: Language, Maps — Nicholas @ 16:55

When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic, 1986