Odds & Ends
3/10/09 Gurrrllurrgle!
Burping, farting, sneezing and snoring are just plain funny to people of every stripe the world over. What can we take away from that? I suppose, if some body function makes a noise, funny. If it doesn't, not so funny. Basically, sound effects are funny.
The Three Stooges applied this principle with a vengence. I mean, without those goofy sound effects they're just a trio of morons abusing each other. If a hammer blow to the head made a thudding, skull-crushing sound it'd be disturbing. But a hammered noggin that clangs like a bell is a laugh riot. A poke in the eye isn't funny unless it goes "plint".
In the panel cartoon world, Don Martin was the king of the sound effect. Which he had to spell out even though most sounds can't really be spelled out. Just try spelling out the sound of a brass band falling down a flight of stairs. Don Martin could do it.
One imagines sound effects were why jesters had bells on their hats. Nodding made them jingle as if their brains were little peas in their skulls. Maybe.
2/18/09 Yank Brits
What's with English actors on TV playing leading roles as Americans?
Hugh Laurie playing Dr. Gregory House being one example. Then there's Damien Lewis playing Detective Charlie Crews in Life. As well as Rufus Sewell portraying Jacob Hood in Eleventh Hour. They all do pretty good American accents. Still, can't Hollywood find Americans to play Americans?
What's curious is both Laurie and Lewis are redheads while Sewell is not, even though his first name, Rufus, means redheaded. Though Laurie doesn't much look it these days what with age and the gray hair. Back when he played English goofball Bertie Wooster it was much redder.
Maybe it's all payback for American Rene Zelweigger playing Bridget Jones. A movie which had a casting twist all its own. Bridget in the book was smitten with the actor Colin Firth who played Fitzwilliam Darcy on the BBC production of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice of which Bridget Jones' Diary was a pastiche where Elizabeth Bennet becomes Bridget Jones and Fitzwilliam Darcy becomes Mark Darcy who in the movie was played by Colin Firth.
At least the English Firth played the two English Darcys as Englishmen.
1/26/09 What is a Human Body Worth?
People have calculated the dollar value of a human body, strictly as an academic exercise. If figured on the basic bits, carbon, water, salt and like that, it ain't much. Maybe less than five bucks. On the other hand, if you base the price on the complex molecular structures like amino acids, testosterone, insulin, etc., it's worth a lot. Just ask any pharmaceutical company what they charge for steroids.
These are both somewhat missing the point because that's the dollar value of the raw material, not the body as a person. A person is worth everything they can accomplish over a lifetime, which might be $billions or next to nothing. In which case I suppose some folks can have negative value. Though I'm not naming names.
Basically, that's what insurance companies evaluate in actuarial tables. It might seem cold-hearted, perhaps, but they do. It's also how slave traders reckoned a person was worth. In court they apply prices to intangibles like pain and suffering on top of that.
So, what is your body worth? It's priceless. After all, you literally can't live without it.
1/9/09 In the Beginning Was the List
They say one of the best ways to get links to a blog or website is by posting lists. Why are lists so popular? Let's see...
Top Ten Reasons We Like Lists
1. Easy reading
2. Easy counting
3. Don't challenge our attention span
4. Don't require writing in complete sentences
5. Require no explaining*
6. We like ranking things one to ten
7. We like arguing about rankings one to ten
8. To know what to get at the grocery store
9. Can seem funny when they aren't
10. Two words, David Letterman
* Sometimes lists do require explaining, for which we have asterisks.
11. We like adding our own entries to them
If you like lists a lot, List Universe has lots of lists, lists of lists including: Top 12 Things you Need to be a Mad Scientist and Top 10 Worst Logos
If you like funny, if foul-mouthed, lists try CRACKED who've got the likes of: 15 overlooked deaths of 2008 and Five Homeless Guys Who Accomplished Amazing Things
Wouldn't you know it would eventually come to this? Top 10 Top 10 Lists of 2008
12/15/08 Multiple Choice Answer
Have a merry, happy, joyous, cheerful, jolly, gleeful, mirthful, festive, jovial, jubilant, frolicsome, rollicking Christmas. Pick one of the above. Or all of them, if you want. Just don't get too giddy about it.
While you're at it, you are free to chose from the same set of synonyms for your New Years. You can even have a gay New Year if that's your bent. So, as the old ditty goes, don you now your gay apparel, fa-la-la-la-la. Which might make you a Mary Christmas, or a Christmas Carrol.
Dumb pun, I admit. Toss down a rummy holiday egg nog or two and maybe it'll seem funny. Cheers.
Happy Thanksgiving to any and all. The tradition of stuffing our pie holes with turkey goes back to the pilgrim fathers. Though likely as not the pilgrim mothers actually cooked the darned thing. The tradition of turkey day falling on a thursday is credited to Abe Lincoln.
The tradition of Thanksgiving football was started by the Deroit Lions back in the 1930s. Feel free to insert your joke about turkeys and the Lions here. Lord knows they deserve it, but I'm going a slightly different rout.
Q: What do you call forty men watching the Superbowl on tv?
A: The Detroit Lions.
Happy Halloween and all that rot. It's a holiday celebrating... what exactly? Ghouls, ghosts and things that go bump in the night. It's fun, but essentially meaningless to most of us. Still, there is a couple things that leave me scratching my scalp.
Kids prowling darkened streets clamoring for candy with the magic words "trick or treat." Any other night of the year showing up at someone's front door in a mask demanding goodies "or else" would be looked at with an unkindly eye. What this boils down to is a festival of extortion for sweetmeats.
Now then, what's with the costumes folks wear nowadays? What's so scary about a fairy princess, a bunny rabbit or a Spongebob Squarepants? When did it become a masquerade party? Stranger than that, some people suppose it's clever dressing up as non-beings like dirty laundry, a potted plant or somesuch. Huh? Where are all the witches, spectres and ghastly undead that should be wandering the Earth on All Hallows Eve?
Wizards wore cone hats, or so goes the cliche. Conical hats don't seem fashionable nowadays, if they ever were. Then again, headgear in general, other than baseball caps and stocking caps, have pretty much gone the way of monocles, spats and white gloves. Sorry, Mr. Peanut.
Sporting a cone atop your bean makes you magical, somehow. Witches wore them, right? Either that or it makes you a dunce. Maybe there's a connection there. At any rate it's rather a peculiar fashion statement. The statement being "I'm magical, or an idiot."
Some hats are associated with a calling or profession. There's a couple other throwback bits of haberdashery which are rather odd-looking in my view. Chef hats and mortarboards. I suppose we can blame the French for the first, which at least serves the purpose of keeping the cook's hair out of the food.
As to mortarboards as worn by college folk, how festooning your noggin with a square plate is supposed to make you look brainy is a mystery. If that look weren't goofy enough, what about that tassel dangling over the edge. Whether on shoes or on stripper's pasties, tassels are just silly-looking on anything other than drapery or flags. Even then.
Language doesn't always make sense. Especially the way some people use it. What I'm really referring to, though, is some rules of grammar that don't seem to add anything to help understanding. Specifically the way the noun changes the verb. Take for instance...
I am, you are, he is, they are.
Am, is and are all mean the same thing really, to be. Why three words meaning the same thing? If we change to past tense...
I was, you were, he was, they were.
Now there's only two forms of the verb. One for I and he, another for you and they. Then again, if we have a different verb...
I run, you run, he runs, they run.
In this case I, you and they go together and he has another form. Where's the consistency in all this? The topper is when we go to past tense...
I ran, you ran, he ran, they ran.
It's the same for everybody! Which means you really don't need a different verb for different nouns, the noun differentiates itself by itself. Of course, it could be worse. We could have gender as other languages do which change the article as well. In English this might be something like...
The children are, da boy is, la girl be.
What a mess that is. It adds nothing as far as I can tell. I'm pretty sure we can tell a girl is feminine without the feminine lead-in or verb after the fact. What's the point?