Nothing much interesting today, just Human Tetris. Enjoy!
Archive for the 'funny' Category
The UK National Lottery has apparently pulled one of their recent contests because of some numerical confusion among their populace. The game involves buying a lottery card, then “scratching away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on the card”. Unfortunately, because the UK has foolishly chosen to use the metric system for temperature, that means negative numbers are common. And that just leads to disaster.
“On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
I phoned [the lottery company] and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I’m not having it.
You know, I’ve always said that the lottery is simply a tax on people who are bad at math—but this isn’t exactly what I meant!
“Gah! That’s why they’re so light, it’s been turned down!” I was talking about the toaster, of course. The dial, usually at around five or six, was now sitting at two. My English muffins were not quite toasted to their usual crispness. “You know, I never look at the toaster settings before making toast. That’s my only weakness.”
DW began to guffaw. And by guffaw, I mean laugh. Uproariously. For about twenty minutes.
Seriously, she laughed through about four rooms in the house, collapsed on the bed laughing, and returned to the kitchen still out of breath from laughing so hard. Her side began hurting from laughing so hard, and still she kept on. Finally, when she managed to sneak in a few breaths during the pauses, she crowed, “The saddest part is I think you think it’s true!”
She then proceeded to injure herself even more due to excessive laughter. I must say, I don’t feel one bit sorry for you!
Sealionii brings us a bit of doggerel macaronic verse:
O sibili siemgo
Fortibus es inaro.
O nobili demis trux
Watis inem? Causand dux.
This little bit of faux-Latin has brought me no end of amusement. A bit of Googling reveals hundreds of different variations—the poem is apparently quite old. Google Books has a scanned copy of a publication from 1892 containing a variant quoted from the New York Tribune: “I Sabilli Hoeres ago / Fortibus es in : Aro / Nosces Mari the be trux / Votis innem . . . pes an dux.” I can only imagine that if this clever little rhyme had made it to the New York Tribune by 1892, it must be considerably older than that. The oldest reference I can find is from something published by Oxford University Press in 1849—over a hundred and fifty years ago.
The relative ancientness of it, and its many extant variations, make it quite a rich source for linguistical curiousities. The only line that remains consistent appears to be “fortibus es”, although even that has variations (such as fortubus es and fortebus es, as well as non-bus related variations), making it difficult to find all the different possibilities. But simply from the first ten google hits for fortibus es we find quite an amazing amount of differences.
In the first line, we find “Civili”, “Civile”, “Sybilli”, “si vile”, “Isabili”, “sibile”, “Sybili”, and “sibili”—some with the vocative “O” and some without. “Si ergo” is the most common continuation, although “si ego” is also relatively common. Sealionii is the only hit for “siemgo”, although there is a “sidemgo” and also “heres ago”, which is closer to the much older versions.
After “fortibus es” we find “in ero”, “in aero”, “in aro”, “enero”, and “inero”. That line, as I mentioned earlier, stays the most consistent among all the versions.
The next line has some curious variations, however. The 1849 version reads, “No ces billi themis trux,” whereas the 1892 version has Mary as the contradictory party. All the first-page Google hits had either “nobili” or “novili” (again with or without the vocative), but no extraneous “says” in between. The latter half of the line has plenty of variations, though—while “trux” remains constant, the word before can be “demis”, “doser”, “deus”, “themis”, “deis”, or “thebi”. Even curiouser is an extra bit in some versions in between the address to Billy/Willy and the correction: “doser nobus” and “deus nobuses es”.
The final line is the curiousest still. The question ranges from “watis inem” to “vadis inem”, “vatis inem”, “vattis inem”, “sivat sinem”, “vadis indem”, “vatis enim”, “vates enim”, “se vatis enim”, and “vatis indem”. The final answer, despite “peas and ducks” being the climax of the older versions, is almost always cows and ducks, although various spellings are of course present: “causand dux”, “causen dux”, “causet dux”, “causan dux”, “causem dux”, and “causa an dux”. (I guess cows somehow make more sense than peas?) There are only two exceptions: one hit which didn’t include the fourth line at all, and one “pax a dux”, which I can only assume is meant to be read as “packs of ducks”.
But the bizarre bit comes in the “English” reading supplied for the last line. In two of the ten hits, the poster of the verse describes the last line as “geese and ducks”. This led me to discover yet another series of variations, seemingly morphed into Spanish and almost all, even stranger, talking about “lorries” rather than “buses”. What makes Señor go together with lorries? I don’t know, but Google says they do.
Si senor, der dago
Forti loris inaro
Demant loris, demam trux
Fulla cowsan ensan dux.
I’m selling a bunch of Pokemon cards. Why? Because my kids sneaked them into my shopping cart while at the grocery store and I ended up buying them because I didn’t notice they were there until we got home. How could I have possibly not noticed they were in my cart, you ask? Let me explain.
Thus begins the entertaining story of another mother of many (six, in this case) getting fed up with the kids and letting loose amusing anecdotes of grocery shopping antics into an otherwise mundane eBay listing of a few dozen Pokemon cards. For whatever reason, this simple story, familiar to most with kids, has catapulted “mom2my6pack” into the global spotlight. Her posting was featured on sites like digg and reddit and managed to receive 149,023 hits at her last count. Her blog (mom2my6pack.blogspot.com), filled with many more hilarious tales of childrearing, has gotten 18,417 hits in a single day from over 60 different countries.
Here’s another link to you, Pokemon-mom. Hope you can keep it up. (Both the entertaining writing and the successful parentage of half a dozen munchkins without going insane.)
The elevator in my building has a little news-screen that gives you tidbits of today’s news, the time and weather, some stock prices, etc. Today on the way home, it told me, “Studies show that blue is by far the favorite color of both men and women, with girls preferring a redder shade of blue, and men preferring a greener shade.”
The headline? “Girls Like Pink”.
Wait, huh? I thought you just said that girls like blue just like boys do. I guess with a bit of fudging you could say girls like red and boys like green—but pink?
But sure enough, everyone is touting this as the study that shows that “Girls Like Pink”. The London Telegraph, for instance, has the headline, “Girls really do prefer pink, study shows”. The article starts out:
Girls really do prefer pink—or at least a redder shade of blue—and boys prefer blue, according to research that shows that men and women see the world differently.
It continues with such outlandish statements as, “A love of salmon, fuschia and coral does seem to be hard-wired into females,” its evolutionary claims apparently supported only by the fact that both Chinese and British subjects were used in the study (which was basically a colored-squares version of kittenwar). And again, I might remind you, blues were the most commonly chosen colors in this study, not “salmon, fuschia, and coral”.
Other popular headlines include, “Pink for a girl and blue for a boy—and it’s all down to evolution” (from The Guardian), “Women may be hardwired to prefer pink” (from New Scientist), “Division of sexes is colour coded” (from The Australian), “Why Girls Prefer Pink” (from CBS), and “Women Hardwired to Like Pink, Study Suggests” (from Live Science).
Oh well. I like Pink too. Who knew?
CNN has an article about a “death cat” in a Rhode Island nursing home. Turns out this kitty sidles up next to people who are about to die. The angel cat of death, I suppose you could call him. Of course, some people theorize that the people he picks are both alive and dead until somebody observes them.
In any case, it’s better than the poor kitties on this Japanese site: http://www.petoffice.co.jp/catprin/. What will they think of next?! (My personal favorite is the one about halfway down the page on the right-most column, just above the frog suit. Absolutely adorable.)
The other day, I posted an article about a Japanese Poodle Scam, in which poor unsuspecting Japanese people were duped into thinking their shaved sheep were actually poodles. This story was reported by a number of reliable US sources such as Fox News … but it turns out that the scam might be a scam itself?
Turns out the story of the poodle/sheep mixup is a popular Urban Legend in Japan that makes its rounds every so often. The Japanese moviestar in question had simply repeated it on a news show as something she had heard about a friend, not a personal experience. Somehow the rest of the story got invented out of thin air and copied from paper to paper.
Reminds me of the time Fox News picked up a story from the “humor” section of another news outlet about how Muslim students were outraged at the presence of a ham sandwich and compared it to starving Somalians. They repeatedly stated (as you can see for yourself in the linked video) “We’re not making this up!” … which I suppose technically was true…
I’ll give you guys a break from the Fifteen Game clues and instead just give you a link to xkcd, one of my favorite web comics:
http://xkcd.com/c250.html
Remember to always check before forwarding on that email!
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