Humor

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

If only…

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A perfect juxtaposition of headline and photo, from the Anchorage Daily News last month:

If only it were true...

One has to wonder how intentional that was.

(via Jaime)

I've found religion!

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The Lord is my coder;
I shall not crash.
He maketh me to use Mac OS X;
he leadeth me beside BSD and Linux.
He restoreth my file system:
he leadeth me in the paths of open source for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of MS, I will fear no Windows:
for thou art with me;
thy C++ and thy kernel comfort me.
Thou preparest a firewall before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my hard drive with mp3s;
my disk drives runneth over.
Surely stability and efficiency shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will code in the OS of the Lord for ever.

(from Phil)

Theft is for the birds!

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This got passed on to me via e-mail at work today:

Bill owns a company that manufactures and installs car wash systems (Magic Wand Car Wash Systems, just in case you want to buy one). Bill’s company installed a car wash system in Frederick, Md. Now understand that these are complete systems, including the money changer and money taking machines.

The problem started when the new owner complained to Bill that he was losing significant amounts of money from his coin machines each week. He went as far as to accuse Bill’s employees of having a key to the boxes and ripping him off. Bill just couldn’t believe that his people would do that, so they set up a camera.

Scoping the territory

That’s a bird sitting on the change slot of the machine.

Make it quick!

The bird had to go down into the machine, and back up inside to get to the money!

Caught red...beaked?

That’s three quarters he has in his beak!

An accomplice at work

Another amazing thing is that it was not just one bird — there were several working together.

Once they identified the thieves, they found over \$4000 in quarters on the roof of the car wash and more under a nearby tree. The theory is that the birds were “cleaning” the coins out of the Auto Cashier in order to prepare it as a nesting place…but those coins just kept coming back!

(via Tim)

Terminators of Endearment

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This is wonderful — a few people in the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup have hit upon the idea of a cross between the Terminator sci-fi series and the writings of Jane Austin…

“Indeed,” said the man (whom Patience could not help but think of as made of clockwork, though he manifestly was something far stranger), “I speak of these things not merely because of the way that I am made, though indeed a machine should do that which it is made to do, but because I have found that I have developed, through our many conversations, a feeling of that which is proper, both within the bounds of your society and without; and being that I am, here, a gentleman, I find that I am also bound to behave as a gentleman would, and indeed, Lady Patience, I must warn you that this Mr. Connor is a man of less than sterling character.”

(via BoingBoing)

April Fools!

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Well, yeah, okay, so it’s the 2^nd^ now. In lieu of actually posting any sort of joke, a few fun April Fool’s links:

First off, two self-links (because my ego is just that out of control). Neither of these were April Fools posts, but they fit in with the spirit of the day — just me having fun.

  1. Hippies on Mars! Inspired by a photograph of Mars that, because of false-color imaging that made it look like a tie-dye pattern, I mangled a NASA press release. Groovy.
  2. Mars needs a facelift! After seeing some high-resolution pictures of the Cydonian “face” on Mars that effectively proved that it didn’t really look like a face after all, I decided that that wasn’t nearly entertaining enough. The end result is still one of my favorite pieces of inspired sillyness. I did my best to write the entire piece from the mindset of your typical conspiracy/UFO kook, and apparently pulled it off — one reader told me that until my giveaway lines at the end, he was convinced I was entirely off my rocker. High praise indeed, under the circumstances!

Other fun links:

  1. The top 100 April Fool’s Day hoaxes of all time, from the Museum of Hoaxes. Some of these I’d heard of before, some I hadn’t. Quite a few are worth a giggle. (via /.)
  2. Also from the Museum of Hoaxes, the top ten college pranks of all time. The number one spot is well deserved, and the number ten spot has amused me for a few years, though I never knew it was originally an MIT prank. Learn something new every day! (via tbmaddux)
  3. The MIT Gallery of Hacks tracks the best of the infamous MIT hacks (“a clever, benign, and \” ethical \” prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community [and sometimes even the rest of the world!]”). People with too much intelligence and a sense of humor. (via i22y)

Bada-bing!

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From the BBC this evening: Children “having sex at 11”

That’s nothing. In my day we had sex at 11 and 11:30.

Found this on Antipixel today, and it reminded me of this old joke I’ve had bouncing around in my head for years:

Celluloid factory burns down. No film at 11.