Error message:

Two stories with Niall from tonight.

First, Niall, Nonna (my mom) and I were watching a cartoon:

Cartoon: I think I just cracked my Artex!
Joshua: What’s an artex?
Nonna: Must be a {seal}.
Joshua: What’s an artex seal?
Nonna: Ceiling.
Joshua: Sorry, thought you said “seal”.
Niall: A “ceiling” would be a baby seal!

Successfully hacking diminutives is such sophisticated humor for a six-year-old.  Also, Artex here, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Second, while getting him out of the bath and asking what he wanted before bed:

Joshua: Do you want a story, sing you a song, …?
Niall: I want you to play me a song on the {fawoot}.
Joshua: The what?
Niall: Flute.
Joshua: Flute?
Niall: FLute.
Joshua: I don’t have a flute.
Niall: [looks at me]
Joshua: Oh, the harmonica?
Niall: Yes.
Joshua: OK, I can play you something on the harmonica.

Problem is, I only know how to solve major-key musical improvisations one way — I work myself into a corner, like you do, and need to resolve the melody line, and all my endings sound basically the same.  Mozart used the first half of his career employing — “inventing” is probably closer to the truth — “discovering”? — major key endings like that, but when I try it, it just sounds like the “amen” chorus at the end of the “Johnny Appleseed” hymn.

Niall didn’t mind.  Little boys are awesome.

Conversation just now with Sebastian [cat]:

S[c]:  Look at me!  Look at me!  Look at me!  Look at me!
JHM:  What?  What do you want?
S[c]:  [runs to the window, looks out it, then turns back to me:] Come here!  Come here!
JHM:  [goes to cat:] What about it?
S[c]:  [withering gaze]
JHM:  That it’s raining?
S[c]:  MMMMMRRRRAAAAO!
JHM:  Yes, I’m aware that it’s raining.  It’s raining on the side you haven’t checked, too.
S[c]:  mraaaaaaaao-o?
JHM:  Sorry.  Nothing I can do about it.

I’ve learned that the world is 4,500 million years old.  If you’re very religious, it’s not 4,500 million years old, it’s 6,000 years old.  One of these is not correct.  Using simple logic here.  Now the science boys: they’ve got anoraks, they’ve got glasses, Bunsen burners, and Petri dishes … Then if you’re religious, the religious boys: they’ve got a book … [mimes trying to think of anything else.]  Some really interesting stuff in the book, good stories in the book …

And there’s slavery in there.  Maybe — crime against humanity there?  In a good moral book?  Maybe shouldn’t be in there?  Maybe an editor should have put a line through “How to sell your daughter”?  It makes me think there isn’t a God.  You know?  I used to be an agnostic, now I’m an atheist …  I believe in us!  I don’t believe in God, I believe in us!  Human beings! …

[God writing the Bible:]  “Sorry about the slavery.  Couldn’t get the staff.  They seem to like it?  Shit!  Alright, forget this bit.  ‘In the beginning was The Word!’”

(From Stripped)

There is an awesome xkcd about perfect phrases:

While xkcd meshes really well with my sense of humor, I like to baffle people a bit more, so from Lost (S05E12) comes the perfect response to someone explaining his behavior:

Is [action] what Jacob wants?

A story my dad told me about visit to an electronics store in the early 1990s just sprang into my head:

Electronics Store Employee:  … and some batteries [hands him a package].

My Dad:  Duracell?!

Electronics Store Employee:  Yes, they’re the best.

My Dad:  Really?!

Electronics Store Employee:  Yes.

My Dad:  But … but … the bunny!

Electronics Store Employee:  The … wait, what?

My Dad:  Are you saying the bunny lies?

Electronics Store Employee:  …

My Dad:  The bunny wouldn’t lie!

It would only work for a 15-second bit, so Robot Chicken may be the only program that could do it, but I’d like to see a comedy sketch in which a critically-injured guy is raced on a gurney through an emergency room with ER-style jargon flying, as nurses cut his clothes off him.  Then everyone notices he’s not wearing clean underwear, can’t stop laughing, and he dies.

[mp3 link]

It is rapidly becoming apparent that the surname “McGee” has achieved a definable meaning in colloquial English, as a post-modifier.  I, Joshua McGee (recreational lexicographer; possessor of the surname “McGee” since 1978; and owner/maintainer/founder [1999 - present] of mcgees.org [website and related merchandising] wherein the token “McGee” appears several sigma beyond its incidence in the average website), assert that I am a competent authority on the usage of “McGee”.  I offer the following:

The construction is “Noun/Adjective McGee”, where Noun/Adjective is capitalized to construct a standard Western two-token name, fancifully consisting of a putative “given” name and the “surname” McGee.  In such contexts, the resulting name is applied to an individual, and the meaning is roughly “epitomizing noun/adjective in an unflattering manner”, or the closely-related “tending to be identified or recognized as noun/adjective to such a degree that nothing else is apparent or relevant.”

Examples:

1. Tits McGee: “A nickname for a woman with good sized boobs.” (appears in Urban Dictionary [retrieved 2009]; similar colloquial usage in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy [film] [released 2004])
2. Spandex McGee: (presum.) “A woman who wears a large amount of the fabric Spandex unflatteringly” (appears in Twitter [website], user overfab [posted 2009])
3. Fatass McGee (uncapitalized in original): (presum.) “An extremely obese individual / An individual about whom only obesity is noticed” (appears in Twitter [website], user theazn1 [posted 2009])

It should be noted that:

1. the use of “Fatty McGee” as a generic term for an individual presumably meeting certain (currently unknown) characteristics in the work of monologist and comedian Jon Stewart (b. 1969) is incompletely understood, and is deserving (in this editor’s opinion) of further study, and that
2. reverse application of this construction to the fictional character “Fibber McGee” in Fibber McGee and Molly [radio and (later) television program airing prior to 1961] resulting in the assumption that the character was so named because he “prevaricates to an unseemly degree” or “prevaricates in such a fashion that little else is noticed”, seems, at present, unwarranted

I formulated “McGee’s First Law” in college:

Everything is more complicated than it at first appears to be, even when McGee’s First Law is taken into account

Startlingly, someone else (presumably Mr. or Mrs. McGee) also formulated a “McGee’s First Law”:

It’s amazing how long it takes to complete something you’re not working on

I’m not sure which I like better, but one of us has to reindex.

Setting that aside for a moment, I’m fairly confident, after the sixth or seventh spontaneous occurrence, that I have “McGee’s Third Law”:

If I see an actor in a role, I don’t recognize him, and he creeps me the fuck out, I’ve seen him play a villain on Law & Order: Criminal Intent

(I will avoid officially enumerating a new law I just discovered a couple paragraphs ago, namely, “There are infinitely more ways to misspell occurrence than to spell it correctly.”)

I usually hate these sort of memes, but here is The Yes or No quiz, (at least this mutation) via Bob Mike:

Rules:

1. You can ONLY answer Yes or No.
2. You are NOT ALLOWED to explain ANYTHING unless someone messages or comments you and asks. — and believe me, the temptation to explain some of these will be overwhelming because nothing is exactly as it seems.

Now, here’s what you’re supposed to do: Copy and paste this into your notes, delete my answers, type in your answers and tag as many of your friends as you’d like to.

Kissed any one of your Facebook friends? — Yes
Been arrested? — No
Kissed someone you didn’t like? — Yes
Slept in until 5 PM? — Yes
Fallen asleep at work/school? — Yes
Held a snake? — Yes
Ran a red light? — Yes
Been suspended from school? — No
Experienced love at first sight? — Yes
Totaled your car in an accident? — Yes
Been fired from a job? —Yes
Fired somebody? — No
Sang karaoke? — Yes
Pointed a gun at someone? — No
Done something you told yourself you wouldn’t? — Yes
Laughed until something you were drinking came out your nose? — Yes
Caught a snowflake on your tongue? — Yes
Kissed in the rain? — Yes
Had a close brush with death (your own)? — Yes
Seen someone die? — Yes
Played spin-the-bottle? — No
Sang in the shower? — Yes
Smoked a cigar? — Yes
Sat on a rooftop? — Yes
Smuggled something into another country? — No
Been pushed into a pool with all your clothes? — Yes
Broken a bone? — No
Skipped school? — Yes
Lied to avoid a ticket? — Yes
Ridden in a helicopter? — No
Shaved your head? — Yes
Blacked out from drinking? — Yes
Played a prank on someone? — No
Hit a home run? — No
Felt like killing someone? — Yes
Cross-dressed? — Yes
Made your girlfriend/boyfriend cry? — Yes
Eaten snake? — No
Marched/Protested? — Yes
Had Mexican jumping beans as pets? — No
Puked on an amusement ride? — No
Seriously & intentionally boycotted something? — Yes
Been in a band? — Yes
Knitted? — Yes
Been on TV? — ?
Shot a gun? — No
Gave someone stitches? — No
Eaten a whole habanero pepper? — Yes
Ridden a surfboard? — No
Had surgery? — Yes
Streaked? — No
Taken by ambulance to hospital? — Yes
Passed out when not drinking? — Yes
Donated Blood? — Yes
Grabbed electric fence? — No
Eaten alligator meat? — Yes
Eaten cheesecake? — Yes
Eaten your kids’ Halloween candy? — Yes
Killed an animal when not hunting? — Yes
Peed your pants in public? — Yes
Snuck into a movie without paying? — Yes
Written graffiti? — No
Ever loved someone you shouldn’t? — Yes
Think about the future? — Yes
Been in handcuffs? — Yes
Believe in love? — Yes
Sleep on a certain side of the bed? — Yes

And — and — I have 47 yeses to Bob Mike’s 49, and being that close surprises the everliving fuck out of me.

Boy, do I miss industry! (Flash, video, audio, automatic start)

10. They liked it better when it was called JANE EYRE and didn’t suck.
24. The alternative-history genre has lost its appeal. Everyone knows it doesn’t matter what else would have happened if the South won the Civil War and the Nazis won WWII: George W. Bush would still have been elected president.
27. You know the talented creative writing professor who told you your work showed so much creativity and promise? Turns out what he really meant was that he wanted you to blow him.
29. Everyone who attempts to load a copy of the manuscript onto their Kindle is found dead three hours later.
36. God may have told you to write this book, but he didn’t tell you how to give it a decent ending.
38. For the first 20 pages, everyone who reads it is certain it’s the funniest book they’ve ever read. Unfortunately by the 21st, they finally realize you’re actually being serious.
45. A general rule to follow when writing for kids: If you could go to jail for saying it to them in person, you’re better off not putting it into print.

And as for ultramegaouch:

15. It’s not technically a novel until you’ve written it down first.

You can expect truth from the Boston PD in the case of zombie attacks.  I had been wondering.

“PD” stands for “Police Department”.  If you are the petrified parent of a teenager (tweenie?) and need help with more difficult ones such as “FMLTWIA” or why your kid always types “PIR” at lightspeed when you enter the room, look no further than Fox for assistance.

Many — most? — know The Llama Song (Flash, audio, no automatic start)

And maybe a bit dated, but doesn’t “Barack Obama” flow off the tongue just as well? (Flash, audio, automatic start)

It is startling, the degree to which President Obama manages to be pitch-perfect all the time (OK, almost.)  Even with great writers, his delivery at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, linked to above, is impossibly adept.  Compare this with professional comic Wanda Sykes’s sharp-intake-of-breath-inducing material.  If Bush’s slide-show of his failing to find WMDs under tables and behind furniture was nauseating at the time, it is even more stark and hideous when compared to our current President’s remarks.

So while I laughed at the President’s self-effacing lines (”In the next 100 days, I will strongly consider losing my cool”), I thought the point would be over-stretched in Salon’s Obama is Spock — Salon just being Salon.  And while I found the article, at times, wince-inducing with its metaphors, it is hard to resist an article that quotes a famous MIT figure that both are people who can “bitch slap you with [their] brain[s]“, Obama himself as saying “Issues are never simple“, and (OK, this one is pretty sketchy) a comparison of the Obama cabinet to the Enterprise crew.  Read (or plod) through it, though: the payoff involves Leonard Nimoy, a sardonically-Vulcan observation, and a certain famous split-fingered gesture.

Here’s one way to get me to click on your ad:

The shirts are crazily overpriced, which is sad, because, in addition to that one above, tons of them are fantastic, including ones depicting an argument between mathematical constants, consoling a dwarf planet, featuring friendly crocodilians parting, helping panhandle for a Montoyan cause, and trying a weirdly-semantic pickup line.

No kickback and, as I said, ridiculously overpriced.  Still tons of fun to browse.

Passing the Torch — contributions still courted.  Advertisers, heads-up: the page gets shloads of traffic.

I believe that I have been reading too much dialogue between kittehs: when I saw the URL for the (sublime) doihaveswineflu.org, I pictured a photo of a hung-over-looking tabby asking “Do I haves wine flu?”

cheezburger…

I don’t think this is too techie for most site readers.  Egads.  It’s not 1 April, so I’m taking it at face value.

Like the article at that site (with which I’m unaffiliated)?  Not to belabor anything, but if you do, click some of the ads.

http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/humor/check.asp

Seriously.

If you do come up with a punchline, find something that strokes my ego for going all anti-commercial this Christmas.

The complete series megaset of Danger Mouse (the show, my clever electronica fans) is available for $10 on preorder.

Believe it or not, I’m not getting a kickback on this one.

Craig Ferguson was explaining that he had read that the best guard dogs were actually geese.  They would chase everyone away from the house, he said: even the owners of the house.

“They’re mean, pointless animals,” he continued.  “They’re like feathery qvibepr lawyers, and the world would be a better place without them.”

(Explanation of the post title.)

This was going to be a comment on the previous post, but got rather out of hand.  So here it is, as a FPP:

I was just being a smartass when I linked to the Wikipedia entry on “Joke”, but now I’ve read it.  Despite being deeply flawed and in need of serious overhaul, it was profoundly interesting.

In the section on joke “cycles” (as a form of literature), the following is noted: “the Rastus and Liza Joke Cycle, which Dundes describes as ‘the most vicious and widespread white anti-Negro joke cycle.’”  Wow.  OK.  Never heard of that.  Exactly what are the bounds of the “most vicious … anti-Negro joke”?  Would it qualify as the “most vicious joke” generally?  So I did a Google search, and could not find a single page that collected such jokes.  Not one.  Are the jokes so verboten that they cannot even be discussed historically and academically?

I don’t think this is a very good prohibition.  To be sure, I do not want, in any hedonistic fashion, to pollute my brain with hate.  But I do think it the responsibility of educated people to understand what the explored limits are, if only to keep them from recurring.  This is the way I felt when I read the plot synopses of the “most extreme” horror films at IMDB, or decided to find out what “putrid pornography” really entails, or eventually, although I am not looking forward to it, reading Mein Kampf.  It’s all nauseating, but so is visiting Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and I think those are very worthwhile ventures.

To show how unusual this belief seems to be, I guarantee you that the previous paragraph will get this entire site permanently banned by blacklisting and filtering technology, as soon as their spiders appear.  Some of you are not going to be able to browse this site at work any longer.  Sorry.

Also from the page: “Surrealist or minimalist jokes exploit semantic inconsistency, for example: Q: What’s red and invisible? A: No tomatoes.”  This is hilarious.  I can’t stop laughing at it.  This probably tells a great deal about my psyche and very little about the joke.

Also, don’t miss the entry for the World’s Funniest Joke, which offers four contenders.  I find only the first to be wickedly funny.  The second is amusing but very predictable, and is not even the funniest Holmes joke, in my opinion.  That was, I believe, provided by John Cleese in The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It (if I’m remembering correctly), in which the entire premise is that Holmes only appears brilliant in Watson’s accounts because Watson is an imbecile.  Consider the following (paraphrased):

Holmes: “I am Holmes and this is Watson.  He understands very little.”
Watson: (Patting him affectionately on the knee:) “Thank you, Holmes.”

Visitors to my home recalling their first introduction to my cat Sebastian may make a connection: I usually introduce him by saying, “This is Sebastian.  (Pause.)  He understands very little.”  This is funniest when familiar with the original.  It is surprising that Holmes should consider Watson feeble-minded.  It is not at all surprising that I should have a poor opinion of the semantic insight of my pet cat.  But it points to the extreme importances of meta-levels to my sense of humor.

The other two, apparently considered the funniest jokes in Britain and Australia are, curiously, funny only in their cruelty to women and children.  I didn’t even chuckle.

Here, for the record, are three of my favorite jokes:

Two lengths of rope walk into a bar.  One goes up to the bartender and orders two beers.  The bartender replies, “You’re a length of rope, aren’t you?”

The length of rope replies, “Yes, I am.”

The bartender says, “We don’t serve your kind in here.”

The length of rope sulks back to the table.  The other length of rope, upon seeing this, irrevocably tangles himself and unravels at his ends.  He approaches the bar and orders two beers.  The bartender replies, “You’re a length of rope, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m a frayed knot,” comes the reply.

The transcription of the second is listed wholesale from Metafilter:

Jesus is hanging on the cross, when he looks down and weakly calls out, “John…”

Wanting to hear the final words of the lord, John makes his way towards the base of the cross but is stopped by guards who break both of his legs and throw him back down the small hill.

After pulling himself up, John looks to the cross and still hears Jesus saying, “John…John”

Again, he pulls himself up the hill towards the cross, but again the guards beat him, this time until both of his arms are broken and push him back down the small hill.

After regaining consciousness, John looks up to the cross one last time, still hearing his name being called. Slowly, but surely, he crawls up the hill while in constant pain, and this time the guards let him pass, thinking there is no harm he can do in his condition.

Exhausted upon reaching the base of the cross, John looks up to Jesus and utters the words, “Yes, my Lord?”

Jesus looks down and then out across the land and says, “John… I can see your house from here.”

Finally:

Q: What’s the difference between a duck?

A: One leg is both the same.

I would contend the jokes are very different.  The first is an effective pun.  The second, while it appears cruel at first, is really effective because it subverts some of the most deeply-ingrained melodrama in our culture: the significance of every moment of Jesus Christ on the cross.  The third is hilarious because it syntactically mimics a very familiar pattern, but does so in a semantically empty fashion.

So, what are your favorites?  And is there a uniting theme to my faves that I am not perceiving?  They are maybe united by being vaguely “surreal”.  But that’s a rather weak inclusion.

Reading Gould just now, I ran across the word molluscan meaning pertaining to a mollusk.

This is so cool.  I haven’t been so excited about an animal adjective since cygneous.

Now I have to quickly learn how to program a TWAIN driver so that I can release a Linux scanning program called MolluScan.  It will, of course, need hooks into the Nautilus file browser, but I can skip having to write OCR functionality into it because no mollusk — not even a cephalopod — can, to the best of my knowledge, read.

(Yes, this is a joke.)

So, that was a fun night of soul-crushing insomnia.  As opposed to sole-crushing, which are already flat, whether you’re an icthyologist or a podiatrist.

I had begged for four more hours of sleep to augment the 3.5 hours I had been getting.  Like the old joke about the fortunate Russian balloonist, something got mangled in the transmission, and I actually got 4 fewer hours of sleep.

Yes, I had a night of -0.5 hours of sleep.  Or, as my Pentium claims, -0.499838 hours, which is apparently close enough for non-scientists.

As you can see, negative sleep leaves me in a state in which my only means of conversation is bad jokes (”Did you hear the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the dude wearing lederhosen?  You see, the dude wearing lederhosen thought the golfer thought himself to be Arnold Palmer.  He absolutely had no grapes, though, which is funny because horses named Thorndike can’t talk.”)

Successively blunter mechanisms — we are now at “cinder blocks” — have been wished for to pound my brain into submission.

Sigh.  Which is actually more characters in HTML (<b><i>Sigh</i></b>) than ””Sigh””, but is paradoxically much easier to remember.  I don’t want to hack Wordpress right now to give me four actual straight single quotes around that, so please use your imagination.

A certain patient Mississippi Penguin will wonder whether I succeeded in finding legal papers in the allotted interval.  The answer is, “No, that would be absurdly responsible.”

””Sigh””.  That’s “double-secret-bold-italic”.

Have I gotten a joke in for all my subscribers?  Answer: No, not close.

Quick, what’s the difference between a duck!?  Answer: Mohammad Chung.

III.I.72, which is entirely different from the cryptic percentage at the bottom of my sidebar that has been so far incomprehensible to readers, although if no one else, Karina should get it.  Entirely different.

Behold sentence fragments. Another.  Good device.  Will be used more later.

As Alan Ruck would say after being handed the phone: “Oh, darn….”

♪I had negative sleep, negative sleep, negative sleep, and I’m profoundly not stoned.♪

Shame on your browser if you see something different (and uglier) than the musical notes above.

Check the Passing the Torch post for what is actually more intelligent writing than this.  Give me four more hours: I’m going for Outlaw’s record, which I will rehabilitate with a eulogy for a dead hamster.  A mixed-race hamster.

Maybe it’s time for the serious stuff: a memorized Eddie Izzard DVD.

(My guess: the Russian balloonist is bothering you most.  Should we have a contest to determine who is most conversant in bad jokes?  The answer is not found in Mission: Impossible, but it’s worth entering anyway, as I’ll snail mail something bizarre from my apartment to the winner.  Honorable mention [and imaginary prize] to the person who successfully counts the number of obscure references in this post.)

Python.  Flight of the Conchords.  Python.  Tenacious D.  Python.  Barenaked Ladies.  And did I mention Python?

Tally Hall.  Brilliantly, amazingly, infectiously, almost irritatingly awesome.  You have been warned.

In my apartment complex, the interior-facing above-ground-floor apartments have balconies of sorts: little stucco protrusions from the balustrade.  Walking back to my apartment tonight, I saw an attractive Mediterranean-looking young woman leaning over one and saying something quietly.  Presumably no one but she could make out the words.

I had my mouth open to exclaim, “She speaks: O, speak again, bright angel!” but bit my tongue — not so much for “esoteric” as for “creepy“.

Starting this October, U.S. television network NBC will be running an action series starring Christian Slater.

Startled, I contacted NBC/Universal, and was given the following explanation:

We at NBC were initially reluctant to risk a high-budget series with Christian Slater in the lead roles.  But that’s before we secured Scott Weiland to score it and Terry Gilliam and Orson Welles as co-directors.  With this combination of talent, we decided there was no way we would lose our time and money.

(Nerds, hover over that Christian Slater link.  He is assigned a number that implies that he was the 225^th added to IMDB.  The first?  Serq Afgnver.  Bracketing him?  Nyvpvn Fvyirefgbar at 224 and Jvyy Fzvgu at 226.  WEIRD.)