mcgees.org

Great Engrish:

Niall:  What’s a skirt?

Joshua:  It’s like a kilt for girls.

Please, think about the llamas when creating SkyNet (self-link).

Intentionally funny:  Elephant soup recipe, which calls for 1 medium elephant, 500 gallons of boiling water, and onions and potatoes by the bushel.  It lists as serving 3800 people, but if more guests show up than expected, you can add 2 chopped rabbits.

Why it’s funny:  If you’re cooking a whole elephant, two rabbits aren’t going to make a bit of difference, are they?  They’ll serve an additional 4 people, maybe.  That’s lost in the noise and overkill of the elephant recipe.

OK, that was pretty basic.  Let’s move on to The Matrix.

Unintentionally Funny:  Morpheus: The human generates more bio-electricity than 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat.  Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need.

Why it’s funny:  If you have fusion power, you don’t really need human body heat, do you?  Just add an extra teaspoonful of water and replace all of humanity.

OK, moving right along.

Pathetically unfunny:  The MPAA rating of the David Fincher film Zodiac, which reads “Rated R for some strong killings, language, drug material and brief sexual images.”

Why it’s pathetically unfunny, and talks about how screwed up our country’s priorities are:  Shouldn’t it just need to stop at strong killings?  Is there really a parent out there who would say, “Oh, graphic images of murder?  That’s fine, as long as there’s no profanity or brief images of clothed people having sex!”  Are these four criteria really of comparable weight?  Depicting bound people being stabbed multiple times is similar enough to the “f” word to list them in the same sentence?  Isn’t all the non-killing stuff lost in the overkill of the murders?

I used to research route planning.  I’ve never read the following rule formalized, so I thought I’d set it down.  The rule is:

When trying to get off a mountain, “Reverse the directions that got you there” is a better algorithm than “This road has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?”

I believe the rule has even greater validity in December.  In the Northern Hemisphere.  After a snow.  In the dark.  Jesus.

That was the subject of an email I received today.  Unfortunately, it was spam (accidentally empty spam, as it contained a malformatted tag to insert body text.)  C’est dommage.  I would have liked to see a story that could be summed up as “Crispin Glover saved my life”.

Anyone want to try?  Just write a paragraph.  The sentence “Crispin Glover saved my life” must appear.  The more absurd, the better.  Someone will decide a winner.  Then I’ll send the winner a snail mail letter or a banana or something.

To make this post not entirely useless, SBC have you seen photos of Elizabethan gloves?  I hadn’t until I read Will in the World.  They are majestic.  I thought William Shakespeare’s dad’s being a glover meant he (Will) had humble beginnings.  I didn’t imagine that his dad was working with gold filigree, the finest fabrics, and jewels.  He was actually rather wealthy.

At my last job, several years ago, we were sitting around at lunch discussing the topic of sampling in music.  I cited a few instances I could think of, including the famous monologue from the film Cool Hand Luke being sampled in rock band Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Civil War.

One of my colleagues scoffed and said, “I don’t expect many Guns ‘n’ Roses fans have seen Cool Hand Luke!”

I was about to indignantly reply, “Hey, I like Guns ‘n’ Roses!”  But I stopped myself.  There’s an obvious comeback: “And have you seen Cool Hand Luke?”  I hadn’t, so I kept my mouth shut.

I still don’t grok why being a GnR fan would negatively correlate with having seen the film.  But my not having seen it is probably inexcusable.  So I’ll repair that deficiency soon, and do a moviemath entry on it.

moar funny pictures

moarfunny pictures

Courtney Love on Graham Norton, discussing Prince Andrew dropping by her house late at night, uninvited:

CL: He asked me, “So, what do you do all day?”

GN: Oh, that’s rich, coming from him!

I found my hat.  Or someone found it.  It was sitting in the hallway outside the coat closet, so I picked it up, and I’m wearing it right now.

You don’t know what a big deal this is.  This is the only hat I own that has ever fit me.  Baseball caps, even large ones, fit like yarmulkes.  I groan every time I find out that the free giveaway at an event is a hat.

My father, who stands several-plus inches shorter than I (and is shrinking, I think), has an even larger head circumference.  He once spent approximately the GNP of Finland on a custom Stetson, I believe, and it comically rests on the bridge of my nose when I try to wear it.

This is the curse of the McGee head.  These massive skulls.  My brother has one.  My son has one, the uncomfortable details of which I’m sure my wife could inform you about.  And yet — and yet — I was treated for a Chiari Malformation last year.  My brain was literally too big for this head.

Don’t worry, I won’t let that fact go to my head.

The presumably-foreign spammer who keep asking me to go to their site to talk to a pretty girl have a list of names they are pulling from, apparently.  Clue: you won’t pique my interest by talking about a girl named Hellga [sic].

University of Wisconsin — Madison: Go for the cheese, stay for the white girls.

He’ll save children, but not the British children (NSFW).

“Its translucent color so alluring and taste and aroma so gentle and mellow offer admiring feelings of a graceful lady.  Enjoy soft and juicy Kasugai Muscat Gummy.”

Three meta-limericks:

Origin unknown

A decrepit old gas-man named Peter,
While searching about for the meter,
          Lit the gas with his light
          And arose out of sight
And as any reasonably educated reader will immediately be able to discern,
 this also destroyed the meter.

Via David Johannsen

There once was a girl from Japan
Whose limericks never would scan
          When asked why this was
          She responded, "Because
I always try to fit as many words into the final line as I possibly can!"

Via Dan Dennett

There once was a woman named Tuck
Who had the most terrible luck
          She went out in a punt
          And fell over the front
And was bit on the leg by a duck!

Irène Jacob turned 40 on Saturday.  Famke Janssen is 40, too.  Lena Olin is 51.  All the hottest actresses in Hollywood are over 40 now.

No big deal?  You must not mind getting old as much as I do.  Our fantasy women get older as we get older.  Bummer.

So maybe it’s time for a new generation.  Christina Hendricks, A.J. Cook, Morena Baccarin, Michelle Williams (thinking of the Oscars here), and Keira Knightley are all ‘78ers or later.  Long may they live, and never get older than I.

Add contributions as you will to the comments page.

I was watching the Brazil-Ghana match, and the play-by-play announcer narrated on one play that “a moa chases it down for Ghana”.

This is really not fair, having giant extinct ratites on your football team.  They are so tall, so big, so fast.  A stray kick can shatter the ribcage of a grown man.  Their backwards-bending knees give major unpredictability to where a penalty kick is aimed.  Unfair, but a genius move nonetheless.  Must be the Mensa contingent on the Ghana team.

(Also, I cannot justify a whole post for a bad pun, but someone has to say that Beckham “puts the freak back in free kick“.)

1. Find a wallet containing 1,000 euros.
2. Track down the owner and extort a 100 euro finder’s fee for the return of the wallet and money.
3. Profit!  I mean, jail!

“It sounds like a job for Wallace and Gromit. A ‘monster’ rabbit has apparently been rampaging through vegetable patches in a small village in northern England, ripping up leeks, munching turnips and infuriating local gardeners.

In an uncanny resemblance to the plot of the hit animated film ‘Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit,’ angry horticulturists in Felton, near Newcastle, have now mounted an armed guard to protect their prized cabbages and parsnips…

‘This is no ordinary rabbit. We are dealing with a monster,’ [local resident Jeff Smith] was quoted by newspapers as saying… ‘We have two lads here with guns who are trying to shoot it, but it is very clever.’”

Pop-up Potpourri: Funny, funny error messages.

Got Time?: “Please program in more days.”  Or, if you like, “Please teach your programmer arithmetic division.”  It hurts the brain.

Legalese, Canada Style: [The teacher] replied to students’ answers on occasion — “That is not what your mother said last night” which the students interpreted as the Member implying that he had spent time socially with that student’s mother.

(Magic post)

I went to the Ravnica prerelease today and had a blast.  Got some nice cards, too.

At the table where we were constructing and playtesting our decks, I played a game against a EE major from Cal Poly SLO. I was using a card with a mechanic called Dredge, which has, as a cost, putting cards from your library into your graveyard. One time when I used the ability, I lost the one card from my deck that could have won me the game against him.

“That’s why Dredge is dangerous,” he said.  “You can lose your best cards.”

An aerospace engineer, another technical person, and I all chimed in to disagree. We contended that it was just as likely that worthless cards would be put into our graveyard, giving us access to our better cards.

The technical person to my left said “I consider the top card of my library at all times to be the superposition of all the cards in my library until drawn,” and grinned.

“But then you open up your deck box and your cat is dead,” I countered.

The engineer exclaimed “What’s this dead cat doing in here?!”  And we all laughed.

“We’re nerds,” I said.

Last year’s film Suspect Zero wasn’t that bad.  It gets a 5.7 at IMDB.  I gave it a 6.  Unlike my brother, I like to watch director’s commentaries. I almost always watch them, especially if I either loved or loathed the movie. If I’m just apathetic about it and can’t imagine sitting through it again, I might skip it. So I put in the commentary for the movie. I made it two and a half minutes in. I transcribed the beginning of it for you. Enjoy.

My name is Elias Merhige and I am the director of Suspect Zero.

I did not set out to make a serial killer genre film, I did not set out to make a film about serial killers, I set out to express something much more deep, about the nature of the unconscious and the nature of justice and the nature of how the human mind works. These opening titles demonstrate the synapses of Orion’s brain, as each neurological fiber of his brain screams out to find and hunt. Right out of the titles we pull out of a drainpipe off of some lonely, forgotten highway. We come out of the unconscious, out of the earth, out of the bowels of the earth, and what do we see? A lonely can, tossed aside. A baseball that’s been used; for how many games? A broken doll that was once loved. Where is its owner?

We come upon a grimy milk carton. The rain begins to wash away the grime. The dirt falls away and we see this adorable, innocent child. Her date of birth. She’s been missing. Where is she? Most people don’t know, but since 1972, that this close to ninety thousand people: adults, women, men, children, that are all missing [sic].  Their bodies unaccounted for, their whereabouts unaccounted for.  Where are they?  That’s a fact, that’s not a fiction.

!  No idea what it means, but it’s sure fun to pronounce in English.

I was watching The Two Towers with my brother. It came to the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and all the young children were being ushered into caves while the men and older boys were being armed.

“I care about the kids as much as the next guy,” I said, “but surely even a seven year old boy or girl could ferry arrows to the front lines?”

“We don’t talk about the arrows!” said my brother.

Another Magic post. In 1994 I was trading cards on Prodigy, but I didn’t have very easy access to information on the rarity of cards. I offered my Demonic Tutor for someone’s Demonic Attorney. The Demonic Attorney was rarer, and I’ll never forget the response I received from the guy, namely, “Yeah right! What are you smoking and where can I get some?!”

Today, the Demonic Tutor is worth $7.23 and the Demonic Attorney is worth $1.52. I still have, and play with, the Demonic Tutor. It’s very nice.

But I won’t mention the Mox Sapphire I sold for $15 that same week.

<campvoice> It’s all just soooo reassuring! </campvoice>

Ten years ago, Ron Avitzur was sneaking into the offices of his former employer, Apple, to continue development on a project that had been officially discontinued:

Q: Do you work here?

A: No.

Q: You mean you’re a contractor?

A: Actually, no.

Q: But then who’s paying you?

A: No one.

Q: How do you live?

A: I live simply.

Q: (Incredulously) What are you doing here?!

(via Richard Eriksson)