Humor

Things that make me laugh, or that I think will make others laugh.

CSS geek humor

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Last week, CSS guru Eric Meyer and his wife Kat had their first child, Carolyn, which resulted in a large number of congratulatory posts using css-ish puns. Unfortunately, many of these pseudo-CSS concepts didn’t validate, so Eric has responded in turn by “debugging” their CSS code.

Hey, it amused me.

Ooga-chaka! Ooga-chaka!

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Presented for your amusement: one of the most bizarre, funny, and somewhat disturbing music videos I’ve ever seen:

oogachaka.jpg

David Hasselhof singing “Hooked on a Feeling”!\
(Best viewed with broadband…probably a bit much for dial-up users.)

Notable both for how wonderfully horrid the entire experience is, and because many of the shots for said video appear to have been filmed in Alaska, even closing with a shot of Anchorage.

(via Nate, another ex-Alaskan)

A bus driver I can relate to

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Extreme traffic on James St from Broadway to I-5. At one point an ambulance was trying to get through. The driver was on his PA instructing blocking motorists:

“Please pull forward and to the right.”

[PAUSE]

“…and get off the phone.”

(found on co149)

Creators admit Unix, C hoax

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VNS TECHNOLOGY WATCH: [Mike Taylor, VNS Correspondent] [Littleton, MA, USA]

COMPUTERWORLD 17 November 2003

CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX

In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:

\”In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth’s ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading ‘Bored of the Rings’, a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users’ frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called ‘A’. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

for(;P(“n”),R–;P(“|”))for(e=C;e–;P("_"+(u++/8)%2))P(“|”+(u/4)%2);

To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960’s technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago.\”

Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, merely stating ‘VM will be available Real Soon Now’. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.

(via the usual suspects)

Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex

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Brodie: Lois could never have Superman’s baby. Do you think her fallopian tubes could handle the sperm? I guarantee he blows a load like a shotgun right through her back. What about her womb? Do you think it’s strong enough to carry his child?

T.S.: Sure, why not?

Brodie Bruce: He’s an alien for Christ sake! His Kryptonian biological makeup is enhanced by Earth’s yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan, the kid could kick right through her stomach. Only someone like Wonder Woman has a strong enough uterus to carry his kid. The only way he could bang regular chicks is with a kryptonite condom. That would kill him.

— Brodie Bruce and T.S. Quint in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats

Covering the same basic field as the above quote, but in a more scientific, if not serious manner, Larry Niven’s classic speculative 1971 piece Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.

Either Superman has gone completely schizo and believes himself to be Clark Kent; or he knows what he’s doing, but no longer gives a damn. Thirty-one years is a long time. For Superman it has been even longer. He has X-ray vision; he knows just what he’s missing. (*One should not think of Superman as a Peeping Tom. A biological ability must be used. As a child Superman may never have known that things had surfaces, until he learned to suppress his X-ray vision. If millions of people tend shamelessly to wear clothing with no lead in the weave, that is hardly Superman’s fault.*)

The problem is this. Electroencephalograms taken of men and women during sexual intercourse show that orgasm resembles “a kind of pleasurable epileptic attack.” One loses control over one’s muscles.

Superman has been known to leave his fingerprints in steel and in hardened concrete, accidentally. What would he do to the woman in his arms during what amounts to an epileptic fit?

(via Boing Boing)

Bad headline award

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One of the many reasons why I love the English language is how sentences can parse in entirely unintentional ways. For instance, from the Washington Post:

Girl Scout Beaver Traps Upset Activists

Those poor activists! Someone really needs to cheer them up — but first, get them away from that Girl Scout!

The copyeditors really should have caught that one before it made it to press…

(via The Usual Suspects)

The other night I…oh, hi mom!

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A wonderful story from The Onion: Mom Finds Out About Blog!

MINNEAPOLIS, MN—In a turn of events the 30-year-old characterized as “horrifying,” Kevin Widmar announced Tuesday that his mother Lillian has discovered his weblog.

“Apparently, Mom typed [Widmar’s employer] Dean Healthcare into Google along with my name and, lo and behold, PlanetKevin popped up,” Widmar said. “I’m so fucked.”

In an e-mail sent to Widmar Monday, Lillian reported in large purple letters that she was “VERY EXCITED :)!!!” to find his “computer diary,” but was perplexed that he hadn’t mentioned it to her.

Upon receipt of the e-mail, Widmar mentally raced through the contents of his blog. He immediately thought of several dozen posts in which he mentioned drinking, drug use, casual sex, and other behavior likely to alarm his mother.

Luckily, something I don’t have to worry about it. I already know that Mom reads (and comments on!) my weblog, and by now, she should be quite aware that I occasionally imbibe alcohol (though not the “beers so dark they’re served with a knife and fork” that she and my brother enjoy), I experimented with drugs for a few years (and stopped quite a few years ago), and that I take every single one of my multitudes of daily sexual encounters with random strangers very seriously, and not casually at all.

(via Lane)