Amusing: April 2006 Archive Page

It was in Romania, while making a film about Ceausescu, that I first stumbled across the historical legacy of the communist joke. There I learned that a clerk from the Bucharest transport system, Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, had spent the last ten years of Ceausescu's regime collecting political jokes. He noted down which joke he heard and when, and analysed his total of over 900 jokes statistically. He measured the time gap between a political event and a joke about that event, and then drew up a graph measuring the varying velocity of Romanian communist jokes. He was also able to assert--somewhat tenuously--that there was a link between jokes and the fall of Ceausescu, since jokes about the leader doubled in the last three years of the regime. The story of Stefanescu, the statistician of jokes, was, ironically, much funnier than the jokes themselves. It seemed to capture the prosaic reality of the little man struggling against the communist universe. --Ben Lewis --Hammer & Tickle (Prospect)

"Rock is so important to me," Harris said, gesturing to a cabinet where he files articles concerning all of the live shows he attends and detailed transcriptions of interviews with artists who live only blocks away. "If I couldn't write about music and collect music, I have no idea what I'd do instead."

The social misfits who chronicle rock seek not only to log facts, but also to influence public opinion about obscure rock issues, something most people care little about. --History Of Rock Written By The Losers (The Onion (Satire))

She was supposed to slam the door, but Baldwin held the door so tight, she couldn't close it.

"He made a drastic change in the blocking," she said. "He was showing me the door, metaphorically. The stage management apologized to me about it later."

Baldwin said, "If, in one show out of the scores of shows we have done, I changed the blocking in some modest way that wasn't to Jan's liking, I sincerely apologize. But Jan never said the lines in the play as Orton wrote them, and it wasn't my inclination to tell The Post."

Maxwell insists she knew all her lines: "Did I ever make goofs onstage? Yes. Did Alec? Yes. That's just live theater." --Curtain-Razing Baldwin Blow-Up: Off B'Way Star Quits Over Tantrums (NY Post)

Oh, those crazy artistes.

I'm not blogging this because I care about the personal lives of the actors. Instead, I'm amused by the different spins the two parties put on a core of facts about which they agree.

This is unusual because it doesn't seem to be the reporter acting independently to put a scandalous spin on a routine event. Each of the two parties is trying to use their celebrity, and the reporter's desire for juicy quotes, in order to attack the other.

The 23 blank pages, which literary experts presume is a two-act play composed sometime between 1973 and 1975, are already being heralded as one of the most ambitious works by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Waiting For Godot, and a natural progression from his earlier works, including 1969's Breath, a 30-second play with no characters, and 1972's Not I, in which the only illuminated part of the stage is a floating mouth.

"In what was surely a conscious decision by Mr. Beckett, the white, uniform, non-ruled pages, which symbolize the starkness and emptiness of life, were left unbound, unmarked, and untouched," said Trinity College professor of Irish literature Fintan O'Donoghue. "And, as if to further exemplify the anonymity and facelessness of 20th-century man, they were found, of all places, between other sheets of paper." --Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play (The Onion (Satire))

Dear Candidate: Thank you again for meeting with us at the American Historical Association's annual conference. We have narrowed down the applicant pool to three very strong candidates, yourself included, but we just can't decide among them! We hope you would be willing to come to the campus, along with the other candidates, and fight to the death for our amusement. --"Dexter Coisson" --Groundhog Day on the Market (Chronicle)

Five hundred quatloos on the newcomer!

Agent Marks and I were uncertain how to end it, but thankfully, our undercover agents came to our rescue. They mounted a joke insurgence and effectively re-took the NJZ. It started off with each undercover agent coming into the zone, one after another, telling jokes in a town-crier fashion. --Guerilla Improv: No Joking Zone (Improv-Abilities)

A great piece of activist anti-comedy.

If more people did this, we could just walk out on the streets for our amusement, and wouldn't be lashed to the TV set.

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." --Hunter S. Thompson --Hunter S. Thompson on the Music Business (QuoteDB.com)

Happy thought of the day.

CHERYL:
Wait a minute! Did you see that? An apple fell out of that tree!
[dramatic music; slow motion shot of falling apple]
This means there must be some sort of FORCE!

DARREN:
A force -- a gravitational force!

CHERYL:
Yes -- and wait a minute -- suppose the force stretched all the way to the moon!
Could that solve the problem?

VOICEOVER:
To check on her theory, Cheryl must now do some abstruse calculations?
[CUT to images of Cheryl scratching head, blowing wisps of hair out of eyes, staring into computer screen, scribbling copious mathematics on paper (speeding up to very fast pace at the end)]

{Producer's note -- use that Tensor Calculus maths stuff from the Einstein program, it looks really good}

CHERYL
(Throwing down pencil): Got it! Its the INVERSE SQUARE!
[CUT to large red-painted plywood square on studio floor. Enter four men in white coats, who turn it over]

PRESENTER:
Cheryl has found that an inverse square law of gravity can explain the path of the moon and the sun around the earth. The crystal sphere theory is finally laid to rest!

[CUT to slow motion shattering of glass globe. Hold 2 minutes.] --The Science Detectives (Lab Lit)

A great spoof of fluffy science lite TV shows, from a website that focuses on the literary representation of scientists.

Fanny Pack

This is great if you're trying to create a singularity of pure geekness that will open up a portal to an alternate universe where they're still making episodes of Reboot. But if there are even two working neurons in the style portion of your brain, the same neurons that explained that Mr. T's haircut won't look as good on you, then you're going to want to pass on this one. On the other hand, if you've burned those neurons out through years of cosplay, more power to you. Just don't stand near me. --Lore Sjöberg -- Gotta Ditch the Fanny Pack, Dude (Wired)

Ditch the fanny pack?

Over my cold, dead, fanny.

Update: My sister just threatened me with this.

A merchant adressing a debtor
Remarked in the course of his lebtor
   That he chose to suppose
   A man knose what he ose;
And the sooner he pays it the bebtor. --Poems showing the absurdities of English spelling (The Simplified Spelling Society)

"Wouldn't shooting cell-phone users in research libraries be counterproductive?" you might well ask. "Wouldn't that actually make the library more noisy?"

A fair point. Yes, it would. But not for long.... --Scott McLemee --The Silencer (Inside Higher Ed)

"It must be true. I read it on the internet." Au contraire, mon frere. Internet hoaxes have been around for as long as the internet itself, and we never run out of people willing to fall for them. --10 Best Internet Spoofs