mcgees.org

“Zarusoba: Ochazuke has you have paste and hail and tea with the paddle rice which there was.”

got raisins?

The cause of death for Camus was obviously the plague; Darwin was simply unfit to continue; Einstein, to his misfortune, diced with God.  Freud slipped, Decartes stopped thinking, Galileo stopped moving.  It was clearly Luther’s diet of worms that did him in, while for Rousseau it was a contract job.  For Sartre it was nausea, for Spinoza substance abuse.  And Anselm?  A disease no greater than which can be conceived.

A requirement for a philosophy degree might be for the candidate to get each of the 100+ jokes.

What will the new [Euro] coins look like?

There are to be eight euro coins worth, in descending order, two and one euros, then 50, 20, 10, five, two and one cents…

And the notes?

There will be seven notes, ranging upwards from five, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 euros - the last worth around £300 [US$450]…

Who wants a note worth £300?

Rich people, probably.

        - Euro notes and coins, Guardian Unlimited, 30 August 2001

Over the weekend, Jenn, accidentally misquoting the Kellogg’s elves, uttered the memorable phrase “Crack, Snapple, Pop”, sounding a good deal like the shopping list of one addicted to chemical stimulants.

Do check out the site Computer Stupidities if you need to be cheered up.  This site houses a great collection of people being triumphantly stupid in the face of technology.  I present a tiny sampling here.

I own a computer store. One day, two policemen came
into the store and told that they owned a 486 and a
286. They asked if a 486 and a 286 could be assembled
together into a 686. I replied to the dumb request by
asking them if two 200 horsepower police cars can be
used to make up a 400 horsepower Ferrari. The
policemen didn’t get it and replied angrily that
altering car engines is strictly forbidden by law.

---

• Customer: “I have a very big problem! If you don’t
  help me right now I will return the computer!”

• Tech Support: “Well sir, what can I do for you?”
• Customer: “Well, I just got my system today, and my
  friend installed a screen saver, and it comes up
  fine…BUT EVERY TIME I MOVE THE MOUSE IT GOES
  AWAY!!!!!!!”

---

Fact: Boston Computer Museum sells chocolate bars shaped like floppy disks.

Fact: Three year old kids see daddy boot his computer using a floppy to play games.

Fact: Computers are warm inside…even some quite expensive computers.

I don’t want to talk about it.

---

One user was very angry with me, because the
documentation that I had written did not work for him
at all. So I walked him through the document step by
step. As I went along, I asked him what had happened
on screen as he completed each step. When I got to
step 5, I got total silence as a response. When I
asked him again what happened when he did step 5, he
said, “Oh, I didn’t understand what that step was for,
so I skipped it.”

And one that turns the tables a bit…

---

A few years ago, my daughter took over my computer
sales and service business. Although she is probably
“techier” than I am now, at the time she was pretty
inexperienced, particularly when it came to hardware.
As part of her training, she assisted me while I did
various repairs. I remember stressing to her, “When
diagnosing and repairing problems, it’s important to
stay calm. If you panic, you’ll make mistakes.”

We were installing a hard drive in one particular
machine. The workbench was cluttered, so she had the
case, and I had the keyboard and monitor a few feet
away. After plugging everything in, I told her to hit
the power switch while I got ready to access the CMOS
from the keyboard. I was looking at the monitor when I
heard her calmly say, “Ok, now the drive’s on fire. Is
that normal?”

I had certainly never seen a drive actually burst into
flames before (obviously it was VERY faulty), and I
immediately shouted in a panicked voice “Turn it off!
Turn it off!” My daughter, however, was completely
calm.

On Russell Crowe: “animal magnetism combined with an unsophisticated demeanour (think Doctor Dolittle meets Eliza Doolittle.)”

- Dennis McCafferty.  “Honey π.”  Sunday Herald online.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is dedicated to the memory of the author who gave us the passage “It was a dark and stormy night.”  The contest, held annually, solicits contributions of bad opening sentences to hypothetical novels.  Here are three of my favorites from the 2001 contest.

The graphic crime-scene photo that stared up at Homicide Inspector Chuck Venturi from the center of his desk was not a pretty picture, though it could have been, Chuck mused, had it only been shot in soft focus with a shutter speed of 1/125 second at f 5.6 or so.

         - Rephah Berg

Virgule gazed across the vast, cold, steel expanse past his inquisitor to
witness the full consequence of his previous decision - feral, withered
children, in tattered, filthy garments, toiled mindlessly at his command in
a single chamber which reeked of oil and burning animal flesh - his time
had come to deliver the final instruction; “Yes! I would like fries with that.”

         - Ed Reffle

Terry the Tarantula and Wendy the Wasp were frolicking and cavorting
together in the Flowery Meadow, (as they were the best of friends in all
the Enchanted Forest of Miggly-Wompsly) when, all of a sudden, and with no
warning whatsoever, Wendy accidentally stabbed Terry with her stinger,
making her very sad for she knew that soon her poison would paralyze her
friend and after a while her eggs would hatch inside him, and then her
happy wriggling larva would slowly eat him alive, but Terry tried to smile
and would have told her not to be sad as this was how the Circle of Life
was continued, but he was in too much pain and, as I mentioned before,
paralyzed.

         - Delano Lopez

Your Test on the Latest Bushisms, courtesy of The Guardian.

Windows XP comes with something called a “File Transfer Wizard” that’s supposed to make transferring files from your old computer a snap.  Unfortunately, said “wizard” requires a fast processor and a big chunk of disk space on the old computer in order to work.  Hey Bill, if my old computer had those things, it wouldn’t be old.

                  - Evan Morris, The Word Detective (15 January 2002)

Exhibit A, from an ad at Yahoo!, highlighting the importance of quotation marks to disambiguate passages:

Get Well - Spoil Her Spa Package                     $99.99

Modern Humorist, a very funny site, ran a feature called Holy Tango of Poetry subtitled “If Poets Wrote Poems Whose Titles Were Anagrams of Their Names”.

One of the poets featured is William Carlos Williams, a founder of the Imagist movement, who is best known (by far) for his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”.  If you have anything even remotely resembling a poetry anthology this is sure to be included because

1.  It is very good

2.  It is historically important

3.  It only takes up about three column inches

It is also notable because

4.  It leads a large number of college freshmen (who do not know the historical context) to decide that the chickens mentioned in the poem could successfully write modern poetry

Here is the poem (I’m sure a number of readers would be able to recite this by heart):

The Red Wheelbarrow

chickens.

Here is Modern Humorist’s Holy Tango poem for William Carlos Williams:

I Will Alarm Islamic Owls

and so dedicated to Allah

Today I was thirsty and went to one of the vending machines here at work.  This machine dispenses 20 oz. bottles of soft drinks for $1.00 apiece; this price seems a bit high to me, so I can justify buying exactly one at this price if I am very thirsty.  I insert my dollar, press the button for Wild Cherry Pepsi, and hear the clunk as the bottle enters the tray.  I pick it up and turn to leave.

As I am turning, I hear another clunk.  Sure enough, there is another Wild Cherry Pepsi sitting in the tray.  What luck!  I am about to leave once more, but I then begin to wonder if the machine is malfunctioning so that it always dispenses two bottles per dollar.  There is no way to confirm one way or the other except by trying, but it seems a win-win situation.  If the machine behaves properly I get a third Wild Cherry Pepsi, making the bottles $0.66 apiece, which is a reasonable price.  But if the machine continues to misbehave, dispensing two bottles, then I will have four bottles at $0.50 apiece, less than what it would cost at the grocery store!  We have a refrigerator in one of our labs, so the extras will stay cold until I want them.  You will note that at no point in these deliberations did any ethical concerns bother me in the slightest.  I put the second bill into the machine.

Care to guess what happened?

That’s right: the machine ate my second dollar.

(Note added 14 April 2003: Today I received a fairly brusque form letter from Roy Rivenburg of Off-Kilter claiming credit for this article and requesting attribution.  So I checked out the column he cites, and, yes, it looks like someone modified his article “Would the DMV
Make Him Wait Too?” for this email forward.  It’s not an exact match: whoever originated the email forward reworded it, dropped some of Rivenburg’s less clever bits, and added some of his or her own clever bits.

Regular readers of mcgees.org know that I am extremely diligent about proper attribution on this site, and to research the attribution for this article I did what I normally do: I selected a phrase from the article and ran a Google search on it.  Problem was, the article had been modified sufficiently that my test sentence no longer appeared in the article.  So, Roy, sorry about the confusion, and here you go: your article.  [If you are curious whether or not Rivenburg said, "Hey, cool additions to my article!": no, he didn't.])

I thought I would share a recent email forward I received, followed by my response.

From Mike Halloran, forwarded by Rustan Leino:

>  Most people assume WWJD stands for "What would
> Jesus do?"
>  But according to Scott Ostler of the San Francisco
> Chronicle, the
>  initials are shorthand for "What would Jesus
> drive?"
>
>  For centuries, theologians have squabbled over the
> type of
>  transportation the Lord would use: Public transit
> or private car?
>  Stick shift or automatic? A sport-utility vehicle
> roomy enough for all
>  12 apostles or an economy model?
>
>  One theory is that Jesus would tool around in an
> old Plymouth
>  because the Bible says, "God drove Adam and Eve out
> of the
>  Garden of Eden in a Fury". Clearly, this is a
> translation error:
>  The Lord surely would have owned a Sport Fury (the
> powerful
>  sport coupe) instead of the sedate family sedan.
>
>  But in Psalm 83, the Almighty favors Pontiac and
> Geo.
>  The passage urges the Lord to "pursue your enemies
> with your
>  Tempest and terrify them with your Storm".
>
>  Perhaps Yaweh favors Dodge pickup trucks: Moses'
> followers
>  are warned not to go up a mountain "until the Ram's
> horn sounds
>  a long blast".
>
>  Meanwhile, Moses rode an old British motorcycle, as
> evidenced
>  by a Bible passage declaring that "the roar of
> Moses' Triumph
>  is heard in the hills".
>
>  Joshua, likewise, favored Triumphs and had a sports
> car with a
>  hole in its muffler: "Joshua's Triumph was heard
> throughout the land".
>
>  Some scholars insist that Jesus drove a Honda but
> didn't like to
>  talk about it. As proof, they cite a verse in St.
> John's gospel
>  where Christ tells the crowd, "For I did not speak
> of my own
>  Accord..."
>
>  And, following Jesus' lead, the Apostles car pooled
> in a Honda...
>  "The Apostles were in one Accord".

While this is an amusing article, it is clear that Mr.
Ostler is unacquainted with modern Biblical research,
as he leaves off several popular theories.

Among his theories, the theory that Yahweh favors
Dodges is probably the strongest.  Psalms refers to
the “Shadow of the Almighty” (91:1), and even compares
man’s life to a Dodge on the road, saying “his days
are like a passing Shadow.” (144:4)  [Skeptics note
that Yahweh would never favor such a dangerous model,
pointing out the reference to "the Shadow of death."
(23:4)]  Dodges show up elsewhere as well: there are
myriad references to “the Spirit of the LORD”.  The
chief priests in Jesus’ day used Dodges for law
enforcement, even seeking to “arrest Jesus by
Stealth.” (Matthew 26:4)

Calibrating the opinion of the Kings of Israel towards
Fords would be easier if we were told how great of a
sacrifice it was it for Saul that, when he was told of
David’s escape, “he gave up the Expedition.” (1 Samuel
23:13)  But regardless of Saul’s predilections, Ahab,
King of Israel, apparently favored Chevys.  At the
Battle of Ramoth-gilead, “A certain man drew his bow
at a Venture, and struck the king of Israel.”  (1
Kings 22:34)  Solomon, in his great wisdom, would
certainly not share this view.  He strongly admonished
the rich man, whose “riches were kept by the owner to
his hurt, and those riches were lost in a bad
Venture.”  (Ecclesiastes 5:13-14)

The princess of Psalm 45 severely muddles the
automobile-versus-public-transportation question when
“she is led to the king, with [...] her Escort, in her
train.”

The theft of one’s automobile can be personally
devastating, especially when it is an expensive luxury
car.  We find God lamenting this (and probably
dreaming up elaborate anti-theft devices, such as
plagues): “What could I gain from the strength of
their hands, men whose Vigor is gone?” (Job 30:2)

We can absolutely rule one option out: there are very
few auto accidents to be found in the Bible, but fully
two of them involve the same make of Geo.  Job blames
God for his accident, complaining that “thou tossest
me about in the roar [is this a misprint for 'rear'?]
of the Storm.” (Job 30:22)  The Apostles had the sense
not to directly blame God for their auto troubles,
noting simply that they “were violently Storm-tossed.”
(Acts 27:18)

Paul prophetically foresaw this very debate, and
wanted there to be absolutely no confusion regarding
his preference for Hondas: “When you read this you can
perceive my Insight.” (Ephesians 3:4)

But despite all this valuable debate, I feel there is
one, and only one, acceptable answer.  God obviously
prefers Nissans.  How else can one explain the
overriding obsession of Psalms, the longest book in
the Bible, with Stanzas?

From The Industry Standard:

Venture Financing

Kodeos Closes $12 Million First Round

Description: Fiber-optic communications optical subsystem maker secures first round funding led by Jerusalem Ventures and Highland Capital.

Zionist Chieftains to the rescue?

Some time ago … 1995 I think … I stumbled across a CalTech student’s homepage.  On the page was a section titled “Assorted Entertaining Links”, an HTML UL of hyperlinks.  Immediately following this, he had another list titled “Sorted Entertaining Links”, consisting of the exact same set of hyperlinks in alphabetical order.  I still find this tremendously amusing, but it looks like it is a long lost page now.  C’est dommage.