Things that need no elaboration to explain why they're awesome

'Vaguely Rude Place Names of the World'

It's good to see Australia get some decent representation in there.

Comedy gold

Oh you dear neglected weblog, I have been most remiss in feeding you of late.

As the blog equivalent of a tasty but not very nutritious chocolate bar, here's some radical videos I saw recently.

First, a British guy giving hilarious uninformed commentary on baseball and football games.





The jokes are even better if you understand both the Commonwealth interpretation and the actual Yank events. Classic stuff.

(via Kottke)

Also, check out this awesome Ikea ad that Spike Jonze did back in the day:



Try doing the Swedish accent at the end, it's highly addictive.

(via Steve Sailer).

Drowning in Words

From a reddit post recently:



Just remember, ignorance of the EU's 26,911 word missive on the sale of cabbage is no excuse!

David Foster Wallace memorably wrote an essay entitled 'Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed', a title which captured the essence of Kafka perhaps better than anything else that could be said about him.

In both his love of brevity and his appreciation of absurdity, I'm sure the great Mr Kafka would find much of interest in the modern regulatory state.

Postscript: Scholars are still debating the authenticity of the the part in the Dead Sea Scrolls that talks about Christ's '10 Commitments'.

Awesome

Steve Sailer links to this fantastic New Yorker comic:


Ouch! Please report to the burn unit of the hopsital!

This hits so many outrageous buttons at once: 'incisively observing an unusual but true correlation', 'needless withering putdown of other people's dubious choices' and 'old school snobbishness' all in one.

I went through the list of people I knew with tattoos for P(Divorce|Tattoo), and it went 'Yep...Yep... Nope...Yep...'. Okay, what about the other direction, of the non-tattoo folks for P(Divorce | No Tattoo)? 'Nope... Nope... Nope... Yep...Nope... Nope.. .'

Day-amn.

If you, like me, are not particularly enamored of the spreading of this social trend, there are far more eloquently reasoned and interesting critiques of tattooing (for instance, this great Theodore Dalrymple essay), but as Mr Mencken put it, one good horse laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms

As to why the underlying correlation exists, I think it works on two levels.

One is the treatment effect of traumatic parental events in a child's upbringing. Part of the appeal of tattoos (as far as I can tell) is the notion of their permanence - being able to inscribe something on yourself that will stay fixed, committing an idea or picture to permanent association with yourself. I can imagine that this desire is subconsciously more sought out by people for whom a significant event in their childhood was the disruption and dissolution of the home life they'd thought of as permanent.

The other is the likely heritability of time preference, and compulsive decision-making more generally. I can imagine that the kind of parent who enters into a rash marriage, or decides to have an affair with the secretary or mailman, will (through probably both genes and culture) result in a child who will think less about how the tattoo is going to look when they're 50 with wrinkled skin, or 26 and applying to the law firm.

Still, whatever the reason, I'm mentally filing this one away in the list of life's correlations to bear in mind when one needs to get all Last Psychiatrist in one's analysis of a person.

Miscellaneous Irreverant Joy

And some fact to round it out:

True Story

Ha!

(via SMBC)

Immature, But Hilarious

Every now and again, I worry that this site may be at risk of being too self-serious.

So with rectification in mind, I laughed hella hard at this one:



Ha!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled high-brow pomposity.

The Colourful History of Pawnee, Indiana

It's rare for civic authorities to have a sense of humour, but check out the classic welcome signs they've had over the years. Comedy gold!

Update: Athenios points out that Pawnee, Indiana is actually the fictional town from the series 'Parks and Recreation', making me feel like a right duffer, as the Brits might say.

Classic!

You have to be both a chemist and skeptic of government policy (which I know applies to at least GS, and possibly others) to enjoy this one , but it's comedy gold - how to synthesise pseudoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine, from the Journal of Apocryphal Chemistry, Feb. 2012:

Pseudoephedrine, active ingredient of Sudafed®, has long been the most popular nasal decongestant in the United States due to its effectiveness and relatively mild side effects [1].  In recent years it has become increasingly difficult to obtain psuedoephedine in many states because of its use as a precursor for the illegal drug N-methylamphetamine (also known under various names including crystal meth, meth, ice, etc.)[1,2].  While in the past many stores were able to sell pseudoephedrine, new laws in the United States have restricted sales to pharmacies, with the medicine kept behind the counter.  The pharmacies require signatures and examination of government issued ID in order to purchase pseudoephedrine.  Because the hours of availability of such pharmacies are often limited, it would be of great interest to have a simple synthesis of pseudoephedrine from reagents which can be more readily procured.

A quick search of several neighborhoods of the United States revealed that while pseudoephedrine is difficult to obtain, N-methylamphetamine can be procured at almost any time on short notice and in quantities sufficient for synthesis of useful amounts of the desired material.  Moreover, according to government maintained statistics, Nmethylmphetamine is becoming an increasingly attractive starting material for pseudoephedrine, as the availability of Nmethylmphetamine has remained high while prices have dropped and purity has increased [2].  We present here a convenient series of transformations using reagents which can be found in most well stocked organic chemistry laboratories to produce psuedoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine.  

 Ha!

(via jwz)

Ice Hockey

Comedy gold!

LOLs of the day

The police medic:



Comedy gold!

And if you're in the mood for a gratuitously harsh but hilarious heckle by Ace of Spades, this was pretty funny too.

Strike Two!

Via Hector Lopez:

An unfortunate web address:

http://www.fapco.ae/profile.html

(If you didn't get the reference, it's here )

An unfortunate logo:

(If you didn't get the reference, you have a lack of imagination)

The first part I can write off to it being a foreign language company liable to not get English idioms. But the second?

If I'm being punked, it's a pretty elaborate hoax.

Quote of the Day

From The Dogg:

[Y]ou can’t become a vegan, all the vegans I’ve ever met are angry. I’m not sure if that’s because they’re weird or just permanently hungry.

Comedy Gold and +1 Insightful! What a combo.

Seems as good a strategy as any...

Ha!

The funniest picture I've seen recently.

Ha!

My New Desktop Background

is this. Gold!

As you can see, it's clearly working.

Instant Book Review Credibility!

I recently came across, quite by chance, a book called 'The Art of the Start' by Guy Kawasaki. Apparently it's about startups or something, although I never opened it.

But what caught my eye was the front cover words of praise from Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay:

"Guy has done it again - evangelized something useful and meaningful. This time, it's a bottom-up business approach profound in its simplicity: Focus on what's real and forget the fluff. And, please, read the last chapter first."

This is such a great line! It instantly conveys that the person has actually read the book from start to finish, and also that they've understood it on such a deep level that they want to reorganise its contents in a way the author didn't intend because the meaning will be even clearer that way.

I plan to add this to my recommendations for virtually everything, including things I've never read.

Shylock: War and Peace is a great book. But you have to read the last chapter first.

Some Guy: Uh, how will I know who the characters are? And won't it spoil the ending?

Seems intractable, no? But there's an easy way to double down:

Shylock: It will seem that way at first, but it's only once you've gone back and read all the way through from the start that you'll realise the significance.

In this way, they'll spend hours of their life before they figure out that your advice was ridiculous. You'll be laughing so hard you'll barely notice how few friends you have left.

Best 'First Dance' song ever

Everyone always picks boring songs for their first dance at a wedding.

If I were getting married, you know what I'd pick? Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. Think about it, how awesome would that be? There's so much to recommend.

For starters, the music begins sounding sufficiently creepy that they made it the theme to the movie 'The Exorcist'. Whatever dance you choose to do will seem hilarious inappropriate no matter what you pick.



Secondly, it's so damn long - the two sides between them take up 48 minutes and 18 seconds. You can find parts 2 and 3 here and here. People who didn't know the song would be wondering what the hell was going on. People who did know the song would find themselves thinking 'surely they're not going to dance to the whole thing?'. Only slowly would the horrifying realisation dawn upon them.

Musically, it goes through all sorts of odd bits, including the booming voice announcing the musical instruments, and the strange growling demonic sound at another part. And finally, the piece ends with 1:45 of the sailor's hornpipe, a piece only marginally less suited to the first dance at a wedding than the Exorcist theme beginning.



Face it, everyone would hate you, but it would be the funniest prank ever. Which, I assume, is what you really want in a wedding.

Zero Punctuation on Mortal Kombat

It's rare that a review of a video game is entertaining at all, let alone entertaining if you haven't actually played the game. But Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw, of 'Zero Punctuation', meets that unusual threshold of video reviews that are comedy classics in themselves, regardless of whether you know or like the game. Here's his take on Mortal Kombat, a game I used to play the original version of, many moons ago.

If you like it, you should check out his reviews of L.A. Noire and Duke Nukem.

As the man said, comedy gold!