Friends have inside jokes. When an outsider or newcomer asks “What’s so funny?” sometimes the only serviceable response is “You had to be there” or “You just don’t get it.”
But the truth is, that’s not true. You could explain the inside joke so that any outsider could understand it. What’s much harder is explaining it so that the outsider feels it. This is a common insight when it comes to jokes. Explanations of jokes are like dissections of lab animals: In order to demonstrate how they work, you have to kill them.
Jonah Goldberg, The Goldberg File newsletter, 2016-10-21.
August 16, 2018
QotD: Anatomy of a joke
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August 14, 2018
Demon Hunters S.O.L.: Cleanup Crew
Zombie Orpheus Entertainment
Published on 23 Jul 2018Honor. Glory. Adventure. The Clean-Up Crew gets none of these things. What they do get is every dirty, stinky, nasty job on this plane of existence. When you need a demon slain, call someone else. When you need that demon’s corpse to be disposed of per Guideline 345b while keeping the normies none the wiser? That’s when you call the Clean-Up Crew. It’s a dirty job, and they are the ones who have to do it.
Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License.
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August 12, 2018
QotD: Journalism
Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.
David Burge (@iowahawkblog), Twitter, 2013-05-09.
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August 5, 2018
Zim Tzu returns
I’m only just getting caught up on reports from Minnesota Vikings training camp (now in Eagan, MN rather than Mankato as it had been for half a century). This is why I didn’t catch the first meditation from Zim Tzu until just now. Take it away, Ted:
The Vikings Warrior Poet Coach dispenses his words of wisdom
ED NOTE: This has bad words. None of the other things we write on here do, but this one does. It seems to be a popular bit, so until the law catches up with me, I’m going to keep doing it. Thanks for understanding, and thanks for not reading and not letting your kids read it if bad language isn’t your thing. Hope you enjoy the rest of our articles — Ted
Every great warrior poet has his comeuppance. Napoleon had his Waterloo, Patton slapped a guy in Sicily, Rommel got routed in North Africa. Even Robert E. Lee had his Appomattox.
When you are handed a humbling humiliation, you can do one of two things. You can either slink back in to the corner and become a footnote in history, or you can reflect, rebuild, and try to re-conquer. Because reflection is for the weak, and rebuilding your Army and starting a new campaign is what warrior poets do. Because fuck those horse shit eating douchebags, that’s why.
Because you are Zim Tzu, The King In The North, High Septon Of Eagan, Lord Commander Of The Iron Range And Twin Cities, Master Of Fortress TCO, Honorary Elder Of Mankato and Protector Of The Realm.
When you re-assemble your Army after such a humbling defeat, you must grab their attention, and let them know you mean business. How do you do that? With language that hits home, right between the eyes. Only, when you speak so publicly, you gotta go through Mexico to get to Canada when you’re making your point. Because although you need to set everyone straight, The Great Unwashed can’t handle such auditory brutality at point blank range.
So that’s where we come in here at The Daily Norseman.* We take Mike Zimmer’s verbal artillery, water it down to some something a little less powerful than snakes and sparklers (because what the hell with fireworks being illegal in Minnesota and shit),** and it comes out on the other side fresh and clearly understood.***
*By ‘we’ I mean ‘me’. I tried to talk the new guys into taking the fall for this, and even they weren’t dumb enough to sign on for this.
**Like seriously, not even fucking bottle rockets? Lame. As. Shit. Homeland.
***It’s all utter bullshit. I make everything up, kind of like Jameis Winston explaining his side of the story.
For those of you that are new to the ways of Zim Tzu, we take his official press conference transcript, look at what Mike Zimmer actually said, and then translate what he said into the real meaning right below.*
*Seriously, I make it all up, if you can’t tell five minutes into this.
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On The Far Side
Today I Found Out
Published on 9 Jul 2018Check out my other channel TopTenz! https://www.youtube.com/user/toptenznet
Never run out of things to say at the water cooler with TodayIFoundOut! Brand new videos 7 days a week!
More from TodayIFoundOut
What Ever Happened to the Creator of Calvin and Hobbes?
In this video:
For 15 years, Gary Larson took millions of readers over to the Far Side. Using anamorphic animals, chubby teenagers, universal emotions, a simple drawing style and a really bizarre, morbid sense of humor, The Far Side became one of the most successful – and praised – comic strips of all time.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p…
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July 28, 2018
QotD: “And are we doing okay?”
“And are we doing okay?”
Waiters have all started talking like preschool teachers in the past several years. It is perplexing. It makes me want to do something shocking and violent, but instead I usually just reply with something like:
“Well, we are, last we checked, not, in fact, plural. And we are therefore slightly confused by our insistence upon addressing us as though we had a mouse — or mice? — in our pocket.”
(I only do this if I am alone, inasmuch as it tends to make dinner conversation awkward when your date shrinks into her seat in mortification.)
Kevin D. Williamson, “You and Who Else?”, National Review, 2016-10-02.
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July 27, 2018
QotD: All pizza is local
When it comes to pizza, you like what you like; and the weird regionalized nature of pizza suggests that we are most likely to like what we know. Real travellers are aware that it is almost impossible to anticipate what you might get ordering pizza outside its twin cultural homes of Italy and North America. Try it in the U.K.: any sort of two-dimensional horror might materialize. Is that yogurt? Endive? Are those eggs? To the depraved British, it makes sense, like Marmite.
Colby Cosh, “The Edmonton pizza hypothesis”, National Post, 2016-10-03.
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July 26, 2018
The life and strange death of Godfrey Elfwick
Poor old Godfrey has been taken from us by the Grim Twit-Reaper, felled in his Xirs prime in the midst of Twitter’s most recent mass-banning. At Spiked, Andrew Doyle pays tribute to the late Arch-Ubertroll of social media:
In November 2016, the Guardian published a comment piece in which the anonymous writer described how he was radicalised into the ‘alt-right’. It started when he watched a few ostensibly harmless videos by the American liberal Sam Harris. From there, he graduated to material of an anti-SJW (Social Justice Warrior) and anti-feminist disposition, before eventually becoming a fan of the dreaded Milo Yiannopoulos. As the writer dramatically put it: ‘The indoctrination was complete.’
Soon after, a well-known Twitter troll called Godfrey Elfwick claimed to be the author. It made complete sense, even though it wasn’t true. Elfwick was a brilliant caricature of the excesses of the liberal-left. He, or rather xe, identified as a ‘genderqueer Muslim atheist’ who was ‘born white in the #WrongSkin’. His ‘transblack’ status began as a satire of Rachel Dolezal, the US civil-rights activist who was born to white parents but identifies as black. ‘I have light skin’, he tweeted, ‘yet I know in my heart I am black and act accordingly’. Elfwick’s #WrongSkin hashtag soon began to trend worldwide on Twitter, fooling many in the process. Even the Mirror and the BBC published articles which did not rule out the possibility that the campaign might be authentic.
Similarly, Elfwick’s claim to have penned the Guardian comment piece was effective precisely because it was so feasible. The satire was double-edged. On the one hand, Elfwick had accentuated the inherent absurdities of the article in question, exposing the self-parodic nature of the Guardian. On the other, he had successfully duped public figures such as Sam Harris, Maajid Nawaz, and leading Gamergater Ethan Ralph, all of whom had been so quick to take his tweets at face value. The hoax claim was in itself a hoax.
Elfwick’s brand of satire depended on this kind of ambiguity. Those who took his posts seriously were inadvertently enhancing the impact of the joke, especially when they expressed such boiling outrage. It is no coincidence that objections to Elfwick tend to come from po-faced peddlers of identity politics who are unhappy about being ridiculed. The same goes for the ideologues of Twitter, who have an established record of deleting accounts for political reasons and have now permanently banned Elfwick from their platform.
A few gems from the Trolling Hall of Fame:
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July 23, 2018
Jeremy Clarkson is a maniac
Ove Bakken
Published on 19 Oct 2017
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July 20, 2018
No end in sight for our national fake poutine crisis
A few key posts from the Twitters to illustrate the problem:
I'm sorry to say, nine months after this story, the National Post did not get action. https://t.co/yuYS7QSymO
— Jake Edmiston (@jakeedmiston) July 18, 2018
Like out west and in BC, people really have no idea what we mean by squeaky curds and why it is pointless to buy them there.
— wheatie (@wheatie4) July 18, 2018
As @perreaux just discovered, this is untrue (if only because, for starters, plenty of westerners have been to Quebec). You can obtain squeaky curds from individual dairy farms or lots of places in the Ottawa Valley; there’s just no supply infrastructure for urban poutine.
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) July 18, 2018
You're both right. I was surprised to hear how many people weren't aware cheese curds were supposed to squeak. So without a discerning cheese curd public – of the kind in Ottawa and Quebec – you're not gonna have the demand to support daily shipments from rural dairies.
— Jake Edmiston (@jakeedmiston) July 18, 2018
But also, [dairy supply management is a crock of shit dot macro]
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) July 18, 2018
The legacy dairymen all assure me that there is no market for niche or innovative dairy products, such as [checks notes] what is now the defining item of our national cuisine?
— Colby Cosh (@colbycosh) July 18, 2018
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QotD: The modern mission of the university
God makes a portion of each generation intelligent well above the average, and despite the best efforts of our state school systems, His handiwork is hard to suppress. The task of the modern progressive university is therefore to corrupt and unbalance the intelligent; to pit their minds against their common sense; to adapt their brains as a useful putty — a kind of “semtex” or plastic explosive to press into the folds and corners of the society the progressive must destroy to rule.
David Warren, “Halls of memory”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-10-01.
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July 16, 2018
Monty Python RAF Banter
bakerco502
Published on 30 Apr 2007secretly why I put a RAF impression together hahah
I’ve also disabled comments because people were starting to turn it into a pissing contest over who did what during the war.
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July 6, 2018
Funny British Army Recruitment Video
Matsimus
Published on 9 Jun 2018
Some old school British Army recruitment video which was very well made but also just hilarious lol!Hope you enjoy!!
(DISCLAIMER: This video is for entertainment purposes only. The views and opinion come from personal experience or information from public accessible sources.)
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July 5, 2018
QotD: Vegetarians
Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.
To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.
Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold.
Oh, I’ll accomodate them, I’ll rummage around for something to feed them, for a ‘vegetarian plate’, if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential, 2007.
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June 30, 2018
Adventures in Sicilian non-verbal communication
At El Reg, Alistair Dabbs recounts some tales from a recent trip to Italy:
This isn’t the first time I have strayed into a Twilight Zone of cross-lingual and intercultural bafflement during this vacation. Throwing caution to the wind a few days earlier, I’d rashly allowed Google Maps to plot a walking route from the centre of Palermo to La Zisa. Why I did this, I cannot say, especially given my poor experience of Google Maps’ walking routes in the past. This is, after all, the app that once directed me to walk through the centre of an unlit Hyde Park at 2am and whose audio inexplicably but routinely barks “Turn left!” when you’re supposed to turn right.
On this occasion, Google Maps decided to take me on a scenic tour of the city’s most impoverished slums. Given that what few pavements existed along the way were knee high in refuse and canine excretia, it was less of a walking route than a wading route. The final 100 metres appeared to be some kind of theme park attraction along the lines of Disney World’s “Pirates of the Caribbean”, except this was “Dope-addled Inbreds of the Mediterranean”.
To access this den of iniquità, I had to pass through one of those pedestrian gates design to stop cyclists from riding through it. It was blocked by a tweenager who’d been trying to ride his bicycle through it and got stuck. The unlikely resolution of such an attempt was emphasised by two obvious challenges: it was an adult bike and the boy was so fat that he looked like an inflatable sofa. Both the bicycle and his body were at least two sizes too big for him.
By waving his arms around, he indicated that I was welcome to pass through the gate. By waving my arms back at him, I indicated that I would certainly do so after he had extricated himself. This attracted some shifty onlookers who helpfully grunted and waved their arms around at both of us until eventually we were all gesticulating like delegates at a semaphore convention.
Fearing an unfortunate outcome from this clash of cultures in unfamiliar territory, I coaxed the fat kid and his bike out of the gate and taught him to play the banjo he was carrying, ending with a spontaneous duet between the two of us. It was only by sheer luck that I’d remembered to pack my bagpipes.
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