The Boss: “But the web’s a valuable customer interface!”
The Operator: “If you’re Amazon or Sendit, but not if you’re us. We’re a web nothing! Baby seals get more hits!”
Simon Travaglia, “BOFH tests the law of redundant supply”, The Register, 2004-10-04.
December 8, 2019
QotD: Web traffic
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December 4, 2019
The Twelve Labors of Hercules – Rules Lawyering – Extra Mythology – #2
Extra Credits
Published 2 Dec 2019Hercules (or Herakles in the Greek) needs to finish the last five tasks on the list before he will have properly atoned for murdering his family, but it isn’t going to be so easy. The king, seeing that Hercules has completed the tasks declares that two of them are invalid since Hercules got outside help. And I guess that’s technically cheating? More sidequests abound and we meet a familiar face from an older Extra Mythology!
The flesh-eating horses might be the worst monsters we’ve had on Extra Mythology. Something about those eyes. D:
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December 1, 2019
QotD: Religious belief
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2004-10-18.
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November 28, 2019
QotD: The native view of the Pilgrims
Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 2006.
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November 25, 2019
YouTube vs Grey: A Ballad of Accidental Suspension
CGP Grey
Published 24 Nov 2019Join my email list: http://www.cgpgrey.com/email
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November 24, 2019
What every shared office kitchen is like
Alistair Dabbs describes most office kitchens I’ve encountered over my career:
Talking of timeslip, there is a wormhole in every shared office kitchen. I’ve experienced it at each of my clients’ premises so I guess it may be true everywhere.
When I arrive early in the morning, non-specific-gender-fascist swot that I am, I stride past the kitchen or kitchenette, admiring how spotless and twinkly it is from the deft attentions of the overnight cleaning contractors. Not for long.
It only takes a few seconds to pick my hot-desk location for the day since it’s always the same one, i.e. the only hot-desk not already baggsied by someone else the night before by leaving a spare jacket/cardigan/set of false teeth hanging on the back of the chair, i.e. the shitty desk next to the fire exit door that doesn’t quite shut properly and lets the weather in.
Pausing only a moment to brush away the mini snowdrift that has accumulated next to the power block, I put down my backpack and head straight back to the kitchen to brew up some chai.
When I get there, barely a minute after I passed it earlier, the kitchen has transformed into a disaster zone. Spilt milk, coffee and various puddles of water cover every level surface. Brown liquid of different shades are splattered artistically across the walls. The floor is carpeted with a layer of granulated sugar and broken mug handles which crunch unpleasantly underfoot.
Torn cardboard boxes and heaps of scrunched sheets of kitchen towel are arranged around the edge of the vast but glaringly empty dustbin. A cupboard door is swinging open on its only remaining hinge. The cutlery drawer has been pulled out and is now face-down in the sink. The kettle is on its side. The microwave is on fire. Where the dishwasher used to be is now a smouldering hole in the floor.
No worries, the cleaners will be back overnight to put it all shipshape again, wipe down the surfaces and shovel away any charred body parts.
As I have mused in this column on previous occasions, it makes one wonder what people’s houses must be like if their workplace kitchen etiquette extends to the personal domicile as well. This isn’t meant as a “bah dropping standards etc” whinge but a genuine interest in what the otherwise sane and talented individuals I meet in offices get up to in the privacy of their own homes.
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November 23, 2019
History Summarized: Ireland
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Nov 2019Get 3 months of Audible for just $6.95 a month — that’s more than half off the regular price. Choose 1 audiobook and 2 Audible Originals absolutely free. Visit http://www.audible.com/overlysarcastic or text “
overlysarcastic” to 500 500.While the rest of Europe was flailing aimlessly through the Dark Ages, Ireland was both preserving the ancient world and setting the stage for the Medieval Period. Then England showed up.
Sources & Further Reading:
How the Irish Saved Civilization: https://www.audible.com/pd/How-the-Ir…
Modern Ireland: 1600 — 1972 by R.F. FosterMusic from https://filmmusic.io
“Marked”, “Traveler”, “God Rest Ye Merry Celtishmen” by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…)Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
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November 17, 2019
Mark Steyn on the post-Basil-Fawlty John Cleese
He’s trying fairly hard not to turn into one or another of the stock characters he’s played over the years:
John Cleese at the Byline Festival, 2017.
Photo by Raphael Moran via Wikimedia Commons.
“John was a boy that kept to himself,” recalled Mrs Hicks, Reg and Muriel Cleese’s next-door neighbor in Totnes in Devon, deploying the formulation traditionally reserved for the landladies of suburban serial killers. “I suppose he was all right with his Cambridge people, but us being country folk he wouldn’t say very much. At one time I looked after John for a couple of days and did his bedroom when his parents were away. He was writing something on his desk at the time. Course I didn’t look at it, but it was sarcastic sort of stuff about Churchill. I do often wonder what happened to him.”
Listening to Mrs Hicks, you appreciate the particular challenge of comedy writing – for who could ever improve on that? Nonetheless, she’s not the only one to wonder what’s happened to John Cleese. He turned eighty a couple of weeks back, and the jubilations were more muted than one might once have expected. My local PBS station still shows Fawlty Towers as part of its Britcom lineup, but Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, bemoans that Cleese has now turned into Basil Fawlty lui-même. Younger “comics” regret that the a great comedic talent is now the pub bore he played in his youth.
And why would that be? Well, after supporting Brexit, he moved to Nevis in the British West Indies and announced that the imperial metropolis was “not really an English city anymore”. Mayor Khan replied that “Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength” – although, strong as it is, it doesn’t seem much use during a knife attack. During the ensuing Twitterstorm, an opposing Tweeter declared that “I can’t stand Englishness”, and Cleese wistfully responded:
I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing. But in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it.
The Two-Minutes Tweet-Hate rampaged on, and Cleese retreated to the charms of his post-colonial backwater:
Nevis has excellent race relations, a very well educated population, no sign of political correctness… conscientious lawyers, a relaxed and humorous life style, a deep love of cricket, and a complete lack of knife crime …and the icing on the cake is that Nevis is not the world centre for Russian dirty money laundering…
I think it’s legitimate to prefer one culture to another. For example, I prefer cultures that do not tolerate female genital mutilation. Will this be considered racist by all those who hover, eagerly hoping that someone will offend them?
Is this the room for an argument? Not anymore. There are just things you’re not meant to bring up, lest the hoverers pounce.
As it happens, I agree with almost all of the above. But then I always have. It’s odder to hear it from Cleese. In essence, he misses the England of Mrs Hicks, of couples called Reg and Muriel, of saloon-bar majors, bowler-hatted civil servants, Church of England vicars, socially insecure lower-middle-class hoteliers and all the other stock types of a now vanished Albion he mocked at the height of his celebrity. The counterculture triumphed so totally that there is no longer a culture to counter, and the void of “diversity” makes London feel, even overlooking the stabbings and clitoridectomies, just like a large version of every other cookie-cutter multiculti western city.
“I know they were very disappointed with John,” Mrs Hicks told Cleese’s biographer Jonathan Margolis. “Muriel was so excited when she came in here and said John had passed his exams at Cambridge. They thought he was going to be a solicitor, and then he fell in with David Frost and that was it.”
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November 16, 2019
QotD: Millennials as barbarians invading our civilization
Every nation believes its own customs and habits are the best, Herodotus said, and you would have to be nuts to dismiss those prejudices as though they were somehow objectively wrong. (I grant that this is a free translation, but he said it, and it is one of the intellectual breakthroughs with which we associate the Greeks.) As with nations, so it is with generations. The formative experiences, inherited expectations, and learned fears of somebody born in 1985 are hardly less different from mine than a foreigner’s would be.
If I say that my attitude toward millennials is that they are barbarians, I am asking for trouble, but I must insist on being understood: it is only that they are persons whose habits, prejudices, and values are foreign, formed by a different set of events and influences — not that they are inferior. In the right mood I can even be persuaded that their actual knowledge is simply of a qualitatively different character, rather than simply being more meagre because they have lived less long.
Colby Cosh, “‘Millennial’ gets used as an insult. But millennials aren’t actually inferior”, National Post, 2017-10-25.
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November 15, 2019
Shakespeare Summarized: Romeo And Juliet
Overly Sarcastic Productions
27 April 2014Yeah, sorry. I don’t like this play very much. I know it’s a classic, I know it inspired countless other love stories… I… I can’t help it. It’s just too funny. I’m sorry if you actually thought this play was tragic, because I did not respect your opinion here at ALL.
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November 14, 2019
QotD: Memory
Eric Hoffer, “Thoughts of Eric Hoffer”, New York Times Magazine, 1971-04-25.
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November 10, 2019
History-Makers: Machiavelli
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 8 Nov 2019If I could have a conversation with any person in History, it’s Machiavelli. Easy. And I wouldn’t even have to do anything, I’d just say “So, tell me about Rome” and watch the fireworks. In the meantime, I’ll settle for playing Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and liberating Roma with my boy Niccolò.
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QotD: Dunning-Kruger Club
A friend mentioned that it was ignorant bro stuff like this that was causing him to seek out other hobbies, to which I ruefully commented that every hobby has its equivalent; guns and shooting aren’t unique.
And then someone else dropped the bomb:
“[Name Redacted], if you don’t recognize this behavior in other hobbies, it’s because you’re the one doing it.”
Ouch.
But the First Rule of Dunning-Kruger Club is “You don’t know that you’re in Dunning-Kruger Club.”
Tamara “Tam Slick” Keel, “The First Rule of Dunning-Kruger Club…”, View from the porch, 2019-09-30.
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November 8, 2019
Shakespeare Summarized: Macbeth
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 12 April 2014Here it is! The Scottish Play. The bloodiest of the bloody. An epic tale of magic, madness and stabbing. It’s so gory, even Tarantino thinks it’s over the top.
Making it funny was pretty tough. 😀
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November 7, 2019
QotD: Evolved sexual differences
Women co-evolved to try to make themselves look reproductively hot, though that’s not how we think of it. […] Because men are turned on by disembodied photos of boobs, butts, and coochies, they’re quick to pull down their pants, click their cameraphone, and text some woman they just met a close-up of their zipperwurst. Really bad idea.
Men who’ve done this should pick up a Harlequin romance, which is basically porn for women (from the ravishing by some hot gazillionaire to the final commitment-gasm).
See any photo spreads of male crotch shots tucked in there anywhere, boys?
This is not an error of omission. Women aren’t fantasizing about seeing your willy; they’re fantasizing that somebody in the royal family will pluck them out of suburbia and marry them in Westminster Abbey.
Amy Alkon, Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck, 2014.
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