funny

Shelby Foote on how Faulkner one-upped Clark Gable

From Carter Coleman, Donald Faulkner, & William Kennedy’s interview of Shelby Foote in “The Art of Fiction No. 158” (The Paris Review: Summer 1999, No. 151):

You’ve heard that thing about Faulkner and Clark Gable haven’t you? Howard Hawks was taking Faulkner out on a quail shoot and came by to pick him up a little before dawn to get to where they were going by first light. Clark Gable was in the car, and Faulkner in the backseat. As they rode along, Gable and Hawks got to talking. Gable said, You know, you’re a well-read man, Howard. I’ve always been meaning to do some reading. I never have really done it. What do you think I ought to read? And Hawks said, Why don’t you ask Bill back there. He’s a writer, and he’ll be able to tell you. Gable said, Do you write, Mr. Faulkner? Faulkner said, Yes, Mr. Gable. What do you do?

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Intelligent Design? How about a flat earth?

From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):

Contradictions between scripture and scientific knowledge have occurred again and again, and have generally been accommodated by the more enlightened among the religious. For instance, there are verses in both the Old and New Testament that seem to show that the earth is flat, and as noted by Copernicus (quoted by Galileo in the same letter to Christina) these verses led some early Church fathers like Lactantius to reject the Greek understanding that the earth is a sphere, but educated Christians long before the voyages of Columbus and Magellan had come to accept the spherical shape of the earth. Dante found the interior of the spherical earth a convenient place to store sinners.

What was briefly a serious issue in the early Church has today become a parody. The astrophysicist Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas, in a fight with zealots who wanted equal time for creationism in the Kansas public schools, founded an organization called FLAT (Families for Learning Accurate Theories). His society parodied creationists by demanding equal time for flat earth geography, arguing that children should be exposed to both sides of the controversy over the shape of the earth.

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Ted Williams’ fishing story

From Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” (Esquire: June 1986):

Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those. There’s a story about him I think of now. This is not about baseball but fishing. He meant to be the best there, too. One day he says to a Boston writer: “Ain’t no one in heaven or earth ever knew more about fishing.”

“Sure there is,” says the scribe.

“Oh, yeah? Who?”

“Well, God made the fish.”

“Yeah, awright,” Ted says. “But you have to go pretty far back.”

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Robin-ism #6

Scott: Pronounce this word: A – G – I – N – C – O – U – R – T.

Robin: Why?

Scott: I just want to hear you pronounce it.

Robin: Welllll … I would pronounce it the way it’s spelled: Again-kort.

Scott: (starts laughing & snickering) Haha!

Robin: I *knew* that would send you into proxyisms of laughter!

Scott: (snickering even more) Proxyisms! Ahahahahahaha!

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My new business idea

A coffee shop where the employees all wear platform shoes, glitter make-up, orange spiked hair, feathers, and silver spaceman pants.

It’s name:

ZIGGY STARBUCKS!

My friend Michael Krider made the following suggestions:

Drink names:

  • The Cafe Young Americano
  • Caffeine Genie
  • Sumatra-jet City

When employees hand your money back after a sale, they say, “Here’s your ch-ch-ch-change.”

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Conversation with Robert

So a bunch of us are talking at the Central West End Linux User Group meeting. Somehow the topic of surgery during World War I comes up.

Robert: What was really bad was that those guys were operated on without any anaesthetic.

Me: Huh? Doctors had anaesthetic then.

Robert: They did? What?

Me: Ether.

Robert: Huh. How’d they deliver it?

Me: Ether bunnies!

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Best Denise quote ever

We went to see Troy last week. At the end of the movie, the Trojans drag the Trojan Horse into the city. They party, celebrating what they think is the abandonment of the war by the Greeks, and everyone collapses into a drunken stupor. Cut to the waiting Greek ships, hidden a few miles away, just waiting for the signal. Later that night, the sides of the horse slowly open, and out clamor the Greeks who were hidden inside.

DENISE (sincerely): Oooh … I knew that was going to happen!

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What can we learn from Scooby-Doo?

From Chris Suellentrop’s “Scooby-Doo: Hey, dog! How do you do the voodoo that you do so well?” (Slate: 26 March 2004):

The Washington Post‘s Hank Stuever concisely elucidated the “Scooby worldview” when the first live-action movie came out: “Kids should meddle, dogs are sweet, life is groovy, and if something scares you, you should confront it.”

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‘Thomas Crown Affair! Thomas Crown Affair!’

From Improv Everywhere’s “Missions: Best Buy” (23 April 2006):

Agent Slavinsky wrote in to suggest I get either a large group of people in blue polo shirts and khakis to enter a Best Buy or a group in red polo shirts and khakis to enter a Target. Wearing clothing almost identical to the store’s uniform, the agents would not claim to work at the store but would be friendly and helpful if anyone had a question. There aren’t any Targets in Manhattan, so I decided to go with the two-story Best Buy on 23rd Street. …

We met at Union Square North at 3:30 PM. Around 80 agents showed up, most them looking like wonderful Best Buy employees. …

The reaction from the employees was pretty typical as far as our missions go. The lower level employees laughed and got a kick out of it while the managers and security guards freaked out. …

Security guards and managers started talking to each other frantically on their walkie-talkies and headsets. “Thomas Crown Affair! Thomas Crown Affair!,” one employee shouted. They were worried that were using our fake uniforms to stage some type of elaborate heist. “I want every available employee out on the floor RIGHT NOW!”

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Fouche’s blackmail of Napoleon

From Napoleonic Literature’s “The Court and Camp of Buonaparte: The Ministers: Fouche“:

[Fouche,] who was so profoundly versed in the state of parties, — who was obeyed by one, courted by another, and feared by all; who, by means of his countless agents, could at any time congregate the scattered elements of resistance to the authority of government, was too formidable to be allowed to continue for ever in so dangerous a post. To this we may add that Buonaparte well knew the channel through which the knowledge of his amours passed to Josephine. Of the extent to which the head of the state was subjected to this galling system of espionage, Fouché furnishes us with an amusing proof:–

One day Buonaparte observed that, considering my acknowledged ability, he was astonished I did not perform my functions better, — that there were several things of which I was ignorant. ‘Yes,’ replied I, ‘there certainly are things of which I was ignorant, but which I now know well enough. For instance, a little man muffled up in a grey cloak, and accompanied by a single servant, often steals out on a dark evening from a secret door of the Tuileries, enters a closed carriage, and drives off to Signora G—-. This little man is yourself; and yet this fanciful songstress jilts you continually out of love for Rode the fiddler.’ The Consul answered not a word: he turned his back, rung, and I immediately withdrew.”Memoires, tom. i. p. 233.

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Friendster doesn’t get security

From Annalee Newitz’s Cracking the Code to Romance (Wired: June 2004):

Moore’s buddy Matt Chisholm chimes in to tell me about a similar hack, a JavaScript app he wrote with Moore that works on Friendster. It mines for information about anyone who looks at his profile and clicks through to his Web site. “I get their user ID, email address, age, plus their full name. Neither their full name nor their email is ever supposed to be revealed,” he says.

Notified of the security holes Moore and Chisholm exploit, Friendster rep Lisa Kopp insists, “We have a policy that we are not being hacked.”

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Lawyers playing childish games

From Adam Liptak’s “Lawyers Won’t End Squabble, So Judge Turns to Child’s Play” (The New York Times: 9 June 2006):

Fed up with the inability of two lawyers to agree on a trivial issue in an insurance lawsuit, a federal judge in Florida this week ordered them to “convene at a neutral site” and “engage in one (1) game of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ ” to settle the matter.

… The judge, Gregory A. Presnell of Federal District Court in Orlando, wrote that his innovation was “a new form of alternative dispute resolution.”

The proximate cause of Judge Presnell’s ruling, issued Tuesday, was a motion saying the two lawyers in the case could not agree about where to conduct the deposition of a witness. The choices were the building where they both work, four floors apart, or a court reporter’s office down the street.

… wary that the lawyers would start a new battle over where to conduct the rock-paper-scissors showdown, Judge Presnell gave them a default site: the front steps of the federal courthouse in Tampa.

That will not be necessary, said David J. Pettinato, a lawyer for the plaintiff. He and his adversary have agreed to meet on June 30, Mr. Pettinato said, at “an undisclosed location.”

Mr. Pettinato added that he had been wasting no time since the order came down and had been training with his daughters, who are 5 and 9. They have advised him to open with rock. Mr. Pettinato said he was inclined to agree “because my case is solid as a rock.”

That would be an unusual opening for a lawyer, said Matti Leshem, the co-commissioner of the USA Rock Paper Scissors League, which he described as the governing body of the sport, whose headquarters are in Los Angeles.

“I guarantee you right now,” Mr. Leshem said, “that both lawyers will open with paper. Lawyers open with paper 67 percent of the time, because they deal with so much paper.”

Mr. Leshem offered to officiate the match. “What I don’t want,” he said, “is some rogue element of rock-paper-scissors coming down from the bench. When the law takes rock-paper-scissors into its own hands, mayhem can occur.”

The second lawyer in the case, D. Lee Craig, declined through a spokesman to preview his strategy. Judging from the spokesman’s tone, Mr. Craig did not find the matter especially amusing. …

“Apparently you think it is in your client’s interest to create as much misery and bad feeling as you are able,” Mr. Craig wrote [in a letter to Mr. Pettinato last week]. “In those endeavors, you are most able.”

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