Amusing: December 2003 Archive Page

I went into the office for about an hour and a half tonight. When I came back, my wife was writing busily at the kitchen table. "I've got a blog entry for you," she said. This is rather momentous -- she has very little interest in cyberculture. But here's what she wrote. (Let this be a warning to other couples who start a family when they are both English Ph.D. students.)

It is dangerous to sing children's songs at dinnertime.

Carolyn, at 20 months, satisfied with any song, happily repeats the last word of any line like a sweet echo. Peter, on the other hand...

First I try "Found a Peanut," but Peter asks too many theological questions ("Why did he kick the angel?") so I say nevermind, here's a better song, and sing "On Top of Spaghetti."

On top of Spaghetti
All covered with cheese
I lost my poor meatball
When I had to sneeze.
It rolled off the table
And onto the floor
And then my poor meatball
Rolled out of the door.
It rolled off the front porch
And under a bush
And then my poor meatball
Was nothing but mush.

Peter has been growing red in the face and teary-eyed. I stop singing. "Are you crying about that meatball?" I ask. He nods.

I try to explain that the song is supposed to amuse children, not to make them sad.

"I just can't stop thinking and thinking about that poor meatball," he says, tears rolling from his pinched, squinting eyes. "I've been thinking about it for an hour. Is an hour 60 minutes?"

"Yes."

"For who would want to eat it when it's mush under a bush?"

"Ants?" I suggest. "Or maybe a dog will find it."

"And another thing... they should close the front door. Then the meatball would just bounce on it and roll back to him."

"Good point."

"Or maybe he should remember to cover his mouth when he sneezes."

Peter seems to be regaining his composure, but a few minutes later, he bursts into full crying. I kiss his red face and try to think of other ways to soften his horror at the meatball's hard fate. [Mushy fate. -- DGJ] Maybe the boy was dawdling, and the meatball sat on his plate too long, and wouldn't taste good anymore anyway. He doesn't seem convinced. I encourage Peter to finish his pizza (he's been dawdling for over an hour), because pizza is Italian food, just like meatballs & spaghetti, and the meatball might be glad he ate Italian food.

Finally I tell him we'll write down how he feels and put it on the Internet, so that everyone knows it's not a good song to sing. This is all that will console Peter, and help him feel he's set things right.

"But you'll never be able to distract me from that meatball."

Indeed, a few minutes later, he again bursts into full crying, wailing, "Oh! If only that boy dived on the floor and saved the meatball!"

I put on The Wiggles to distract Peter, who still asks, "Are you writing yet?" while I try to clear the table. "You write down the words and put it on the Internet!"

As I write, he comments that it should have been a cancer cell, not a meatball.

"What would a cancer cell have been doing on top of spaghetti?" I ask.

He shrugs. "Probably putting germs on it."

A little while later, he supplies the title ("The Meatball: Not a Funny Rhyme") and composes the following song for parents to sing instead:

"Lucky Meatball"

There was a meatball all covered in cheese.
His father went to close the front door
And said if you sneeze, please sneeze at the floor.
The meatball was poked on a fork
The cheese fell onto the spaghetti
When the ball went up, it went into a mouth and got chewed by teeth.
The cheese was on the first noodle that the boy scooped up.
The meatball got digested into crumbs.
And the boy brushed his teeth.
He said his prayers and went to bed.

Peter is in bed now while I am typing this. "The song about the meatball... do you think it's funny?" he just called out.

"I don't know," I said. "What do you think?"

"I don't think it's funny," he said, his voice trembling. "I think it's sad. The meatball had nourishment for him."

Here you go, Internet... make things right for a little boy.

Patrice Moore, 43, had apparently been standing up when the books, catalogs, mail and newspapers swamped him on Saturday. Firefighters and neighbors rescued Moore on Monday afternoon and he was hospitalized in stable condition Tuesday morning with leg injuries. --Man Trapped Under Mountain of Books, Papers (CNN/AP)

Note to self: find a sturdy box and insert all the papers students didn't pick up last term. Mark box for recycling at the end of next term. Reuse same box at end of next term, so a mound doesn't start to grow. (What to do with all the abandoned 3-ring binders?)

"A hole in the ground, like any other structurally engineered design, is just an artifact of human technology," said Will Whitfoot, mayor of the town of Michel Delving and a spokesman for the hole-dwelling community of Hobbiton. "Like any tool or technological artifact, it has no moral imperative per se, but performs strictly according to the needs of its user." --Hussein Capture Unfairly Stigmatizes Holes, Say Hobbits (Watley Review)

Perfectly silly.

Thus we are pleased to announce the winners of The Chronicle's First Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative MLA Paper Titles (also known as the Provokies). All selections are cited as listed in the program for the 119th MLA Annual Convention, to be held this month in San Diego. (In other words, no paper titles were made up.)...[T]he judges quickly reached consensus on Most Provocative Panel Title: "Apertures and Orifices in Chaucer." As luck would have it, Most Provocative Paper Title went to a presentation to be delivered during that same session: "'The Entree Was Long and Streit, and Gastly for to See': Visual and Verbal Penetration in the Knight's Tale," by Disa Gambera of the University of Utah. --Scott McLemee --Signifyin' at the MLA (Chronicle)

One of my favorite MLA paper titles was "The Semiotics of Sinatra," presented by the former chair of the University of Toronto's English department. (Yes, that's Frank Sinatra.)

Who really killed Hamlet's dad? What does King Richard III want with a horse anyway? And where did the gravedigger get that gorgeous pink dress? Avenge your father, defeat your evil uncle and ascend the throne of Denmark in William Shakespeare's long undiscovered text adventure. --Robin Johnson --The Most Lamentable and Excellent Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Online Residence of Robin Johnson)

Very nice, Scott-Adamsesque implementation of Hamlet as a text adventure. Doesn't shoot nearly as high as Graham Nelson's verson of The Tempest (game | my review) but the JavaScript interface looks very smooth. I've got a long-dormant work-in-progress that features a character with a speech impediment, so I was amused to see Johnson's treament of Ophelia.

Spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed Monday that [US Secretary of State Colin] Powell had indeed appointed [James] Brown to be the first US "secretary of soul and foreign minister of funk" but said the job description for the post had not yet been drawn up. --Powell 'appoints' soul legend James Brown to new diplomatic postYahoo/AFP)

And yet again, life imitates The Onion

"The time has come to face facts: To move forward, we've got to get on up, and stay on the scene, like a sex machine," said Brick House Majority Leader James Brown (G-GA), one of getting on up's most vocal supporters. "Say it loud: Only when we have gotten up offa that thing will we, as a nation, finally get back on the good foot."

Think about it -- do you really believe that person who says they couldn't do something because "something came up?" That they couldn't do their homework because the printer broke? Lame.... These lies will work as excuses because no one believes excuses anyway! And to think, if they are outrageous lies, they will become more believable because they are just that inventive!

Some examples:

• "A plane crashed off the coast of Madagascar."
  
• "I was stranded on a desert island."
  
• "I had an unfortunate run-in with an overhead projector, and now must wear goggles until my wound heals."
  
• "The sun didn't come up this morning at my house, and I rely on roosters to wake me."

--Julie Young --Spam and excuses (Work in Progress)

Julie's comments about Spam are fine, but it's the excuses that made me want to blog this. I'm not sure the two observations really go together, but it's still blogworthy. I like particularly the goggles and the roosters.

OK, that's enough fun for today. I've really got to get to my grading now.

"The technology is simple," said Microsoft Office Research Division Head, Richard Greenwood, "students have been doing it for years. Thanks to the power of Microsoft Word 2004, anybody can turn a five-hundred-word report into a ten-thousand-word masterpiece." --Word 2004 to Pioneer AutoUnsummarize Feature (BB Spot)

Not the best spoof news site, but this article isn't bad.

A solid agreement has been reached between BlogShares founder Seyed Razavi and technologist Jay Campbell -- the site is coming back! --Blogshares: Coming Back Soon

I figured that a good idea wouldn't lay dormant for very long.

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history -- with the possible exception of handguns and tequila." --Christopher Harper Mitch Radcliffe? Ratliff?Computers, handguns and tequilaAnd That's The Way It Will Be... News and Information ina Digital World)

Found this quote in a paper written by a student. I'll have to get that book.

Update, 09 Dec: Whoops, it looks like Harper was quoting a statement attributed to someone named Mitch Radcliffe or Ratliffe. No time today to explore this little mystery.

Santa Claus needed Rudolph, Hermey, and Yukon Cornelius, and during the show's climactic blizzard, the outcasts negotiated a place within the North Pole's hegemonic power structure... | One can only imagine the looks on the faces of the children who unwrapped the misfit toys. Did they laugh and cheer for the squirt gun that sprayed jelly and the cowboy who rode an ostrich? The polka-dotted elephant might have been fun, but I have a feeling that the poor kid who received the choo-choo with square wheels cursed Santa for caving into Rudolph's demands. | That's the flaw in the moral universe I share with Rankin and Bass's animagic creations. The program refuses to deal with the consequences of dropping special-needs toys into unprepared homes. --Jon T. Coleman --The Trouble with Misfits (Chronicle)

It's only fair to note that the references to the Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are only part of an extended metaphor that introduces a point about Ph.D. hiring committees. Yes, it's overdone, but that's probably the point. Even professors can have fun on the holidays.

Merry Christmas!

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. --Why Santa is Dead (Spy Magazine/Physics Humor)

I've seen this on the Internet and in my e-mail, but this is the first time I've seen the Spy citation. Take it for what it's worth.

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." -- "Fooot in Mouth" winner US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld --Donald Rumsfeld 'honoured' for confusing comments (Plain English Campaign)

When I first read the "unknown unknowns" statement, I thought it was definitely too confusing for a sound bite, but important in that it demonstrates that the known and the unknown are much more complex than a "memorize what the teacher says and spit it back on the quiz" education leads us to believe. Rumsfeld wasn't babbling or struggling with the language. Granted, he could have probably made his point better with a venn diagram.