…as seen on the Simpsons. If we were ever on the Simpsons, that is. Courtesy of the character generator in The Simpsons Movie website.
Humor
Things that make me laugh, or that I think will make others laugh.
THE Final Exam
(I have no idea where this originally came from, I’ve had it bouncing around my hard drive for years. Given that I’m midway through finals week, though, it seemed appropriate…)
Instructions: Read each question carefully. Answer all questions. Time limit: 4 hours. Begin immediately.
HISTORY: Describe the history of the papacy from its origins to the present day, concentrating especially but not exclusively, on its social, political, economic, religious, and philosophical impact on Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. Be brief, concise, and specific.
MEDICINE: You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze, and a bottle of Scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until your work has been inspected. You have fifteen minutes.
PUBLIC SPEAKING: 2,500 riot-crazed aborigines are storming the classroom. Calm them. You may use any ancient language except Latin or Greek.
BIOLOGY: Create life. Estimate the differences in subsequent human culture if this form of life had developed 500 million years earlier, with special attention to its probable effect on the English parliamentary system. Prove your thesis.
MUSIC: Write a piano concerto. Orchestrate and perform it with flute and drum. You will find a piano under your seat.
PSYCHOLOGY: Based on your knowledge of their works, evaluate the emotional stability, degree of adjustment, and repressed frustrations of each of the following: Alexander of Aphrodiseas, Ramses II, Gregory of Nicea, Hammurabi. Support your evaluation with quotations from each man’s work, making appropriate references. It is not necessary to translate.
SOCIOLOGY: Estimate the sociological problems which might accompany the end of the world. Construct an experiment to test your theory.
MANAGEMENT SCIENCE: Define Management. Define Science. How do they relate? Why? Create a generalized algorithm to optimize all managerial decisions. Assuming an 1130 CPU supporting 50 terminals, each terminal to activate your algorithm; design the communications interface and all necessary control programs.
ENGINEERING: The disassembled parts of a high-powered rifle have been placed in a box on your desk. You will also find an instruction manual, printed in Swahili. In ten minutes a hungry Bengal tiger will be admitted to the room. Take whatever action you feel appropriate. Be prepared to justify your decision.
ECONOMICS: Develop a realistic plan for refinancing the national debt. Trace the possible effects of your plan in the following areas: Cubism, the Donatist controversy, the wave theory of light. Outline a method for preventing these effects. Criticize this method from all possible points of view. Point out the deficiencies in your point of view, as demonstrated in your answer to the last question.
POLITICAL SCIENCE: There is a red telephone on the desk beside you. Start World War III. Report at length on its socio-political effects, if any.
EPISTEMOLOGY: Take a position for or against truth. Prove the validity of your position.
PHYSICS: Explain the nature of matter. Include in your answer an evaluation of the impact of development of mathematics on science.
PHILOSOPHY: Sketch the development of human thought; estimate its significance. Compare with the development of any other kind of thought.
GENERAL KNOWLEDGE: Describe in detail. Be objective and specific.
EXTRA CREDIT: Define the Universe; give three examples.
Inappropriate Thoughts
Slightly tangentially related:
I once knew someone (in fact, I still know him, though I hesitate to identify him for fear of recrimination — or, perhaps, incrimination) who told me that, upon meeting the new husband of an ex-girlfriend of his, had to suppress the urge to say, “I took your wife’s virginity.”
Wrong. Rude.
And — in my world — very funny.
Steam Trek
(via TrekMovie.com)
Wamu Sees All!
Last September, I put these eyes on a small sign at the driveway in to the Northgate Washington Mutual bank.
Last night, as I was walking home from work, I noticed that eight months later, they’re still there.
This makes me rather ridiculously pleased with the universe.
The most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!
I love the internet.
I’ve been working my way through reading the archives of xkcd (“Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language [which may be unsuitable for children], unusual humor [which may be unsuitable for adults], and advanced mathematics [which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors].”), which just catapulted into the ranks of ‘favorite web comic’ after I stumbled across the Map of Online Communities yesterday. I just came across this strip…
Embedded as a tooltip (the little pop-up text that shows when you hover over an image) was the text, “The younger folk in the audience think this is a joke.”
Curious, a quick Google search led me to this story:
On a fishing trip in Plains, Georgia, President Carter had an encounter with a “swamp rabbit”. This seemingly trivial event was seized upon by the press and became a sort of Rorschach test of the Carter presidency: reporters and commentators saw in this story whatever they wanted to see in Carter’s administration. Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, described the affair in his 1986 book The Other Side of the Story:
It began late one afternoon in the spring of 1979. The President was sitting with a few of us on the Truman Balcony. He had recently returned from a visit to Plains, and we were talking about homefolks and how the quail were nesting and similar matters of international import.
Suddenly, for no apparent reason — he was drinking lemonade, as I recall — the President volunteered the information that while fishing in a pond on his farm he had sighted a large animal swimming toward him. Upon closer inspection, the animal turned out to be a rabbit. Not one of your cutesy, Easter Bunny-type rabbits, but one of those big splay-footed things that we called swamp rabbits when I was growing up.
The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.
The President then evidently shooed the critter away from his boat with a paddle.
(Photo in the public domain, courtesy the Jimmy Carter Library.)
Overheard in Seattle
Not overheard by me, unfortunately, just too bizarre and funny not to share. This is ganked directly from overheardsea on LiveJournal:
Select lines from a guy having a very long conversation with what I believe was his significant other on his cell phone sitting directly behind me [on the #26 bus]:
“I’m on my way to my brother’s to pick up weed, and them I’m going to get a cat at the Humane Shelter.”
“So last night I went to meet up with that couple I told you about. They’re a gay guy and a tranny girl. The interview went real well. They called me back later that same night and said I was their favorite, so things are looking good there.”
“I’m making dinner tonight with my housemates. No, honey! Honey! I told you I was doing this tonight! Well, we’ll have to play really quickly in the bathroom tonight because I have to be there for the dinner. I love you, too.”
Charts Don’t Lie
(via The Slog)
Quote of the Day
There’s a long standing theory that Hollywood action movies deliberately play up US urban gang violence…a part of a propaganda effort to persuade foreigners that America is not to be [messed] with. The British equivalent is Faulty Towers and Monty Python, which simply makes people want to stay the hell away in case it’s contagious.
— originally somewhere in this forum thread, via learethak
A little tense…
One of the most common constructs of political speech is what’s technically known as the ‘passive tense,’ which conveys what happened without directly assigning any specific responsibility. For example:
The passive is used when the subject of the verb action is not as important as what happened. Note the difference between
- He burned down the house. (Active verb)
The house was burned down. (Passive verb — who, or what, caused the house to burn down is not known, or is not as important as the fact that it burned down.)
Politicians use this form a lot, as it’s a convenient way to weasel out of why something happened.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales fell back on a classic Washington linguistic construct on Tuesday when he acknowledged that “mistakes were made” in the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors last year.
The phrase sounds like a confession of error or even contrition, but in fact, it is not quite either one. The speaker is not accepting personal responsibility or pointing the finger at anyone else. It is a construction that other officials, from Richard M. Nixon’s press secretary to Ronald Reagan to John H. Sununu and Bill Clinton, have used when someone’s hand was caught in the federal cookie jar.
While listening to this week’s edition of NPR’s ‘Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!‘, I heard mention of a wonderful new term for the passive tense, also mentioned at the end of the just quoted NYT article:
The nonconfessions inspired William Schneider, a political guru here, to note a few years ago that Washington had contributed a new tense to the language. “This usage,” he said, “should be referred to as the past exonerative.”