undyingking | Entries tagged with humour

You maybe spotted this already, but:

Dolly the sheep, first cloned mammal -- Roslin Institute, Scotland;
HQ of the Knights Templar, storage of Jesus' "blood" -- Rosslyn Chapel, Scotland.

Obviously, this means that the Templars set up the Roslin Institute in order to research cloning for their Jesus-breeding project.

The only question is: was the sheep a trial run for creating a cloned-Jesus human, Spawn of God? -- or is the Second Coming actually going to be as much ovine as divine?

Lends a whole new meaning to concepts such as the Ewecharist*...

* You may groan now.

Is not this:

one of the scariest things you've ever seen? Thanks (or maybe not) to

sdn for pointing me at it...

This came out while I was offline, so maybe you guys have already talked about it, but: a Gor cult in Darlington of all places?

venta, can you or your esteemed parent shed any more light on this?

"... the majority of women in our organisation are obviously slaves because women have a submissive streak in them."

You can say that again. (Very quietly, obviously.)

Edited to add: here's the link.

stupidlondon -- tall tales to tell tourists.

I've just discovered this excellent newspaper cartoon, which apparently ran from 1905 to 1927, although that link seems to carry a mostly early selection. The concept is simplicity itself: in the first panel something happens to annoy Everett (a portly old gent), in the second panel he berates (often violently) the perpetrator. The first few compress all this action into just one panel, but it definitely works better with two -- you get a good contrast between the relaxed scene of the setup and the chaotic denouement. Artiness aside (and the scenes are very nicely depicted), though, the beauty of it is the language of Everett's rants.

As an example: panel 1, the desk clerk in a posh-looking hotel is saying to Everett Best I can do for you is a room in the attic - six dollars a day.... Panel 2, Everett has grabbed the clerk round the neck with his umbrella, has hauled him over the desk, and is yelling You take me for a rube because I haven't got my necktie and fingers covered with spangles, and you let me stand around and wait five or ten minutes while you read the sporting news. Don't you! I'll give you a lesson in the first principles of hotel clerking, you simian-headed biped!!!!!

What I love about this is that his fury is so irrational and stream-of-consciousness-y: he doesn't even address what the clerk has actually said to him, which was clearly just the last straw.

Anyone watching the cricket will surely have noticed that painted on the turf, at each end of the wicket, is a large red-and-white logo for a mysterious company called 'Jamodu'.

Any suggestions as to who they are, what they make, etc welcomed...

This one turned up overnight:

Correct your info.

B. Franklin died on April 17, 1790 at the age of 84.

It took me a little while to work out what the hey they were talking about, until eventually I remembered the existence on the dark recesses of the UKG site of this page -- part of the background for the old Inferno game. (NB please forgive ghastly white-on-black design -- it was the 90s, it was fashionable, I was young(er) and impressionable...)

I can't remember now why it was important for Franklin to be dead in the game, but I guess there must have been a reason.

Maybe they didn't read down as far as "Prussians under von Moltke conquer Netherlands, renaming it Wilhemsland, King flees to London".

( Tube warning notice )

;-)

In Snowmail just now:

Witness Chris Martin said he was waiting on the northbound Northern line platform at Stockwell station and a train had pulled in when several men burst on to the platform about 20 yards from him.

"There was obviously some sort of altercation going on, and then they came flying on to the platform and these guys just threw this man into the open doors of the train.

"Then I heard shots, I thought it was three but someone else said five. It sounded like a silencer gun going off, and then there was blind panic, with people shouting and screaming and just running away."

No doubt he went on to add "I-I never meant to run off at the double..."

I came onto this via a comment to Pepys's Diary, but it sort of crystallized something I'd been wondering about for quite some time, namely the (apparent) relative recency of familiarity with simple multiplication techniques.

If you look at this page and go down to where it talks about Robert Recorde, you'll see a discussion of the then (16th century) method for multiplying things like 8 by 7. More than a century later, Pepys, who is at this stage a 29-year old with a degree from Cambridge working as (the equivalent of) a financial manager, is having private classes to learn the arcana of 'the multiplicacion tables'.

What I find difficult to understand is: nowadays (or, actually, I don't know about nowadays, but certainly when I was at school) we think it routine for 6-year-olds to be taught 'times tables', so why was it so unfamiliar just 300 years earlier? Of course, utility considerations would have precluded its teaching to the bulk of people labouring in the fields etc, but surely the time it takes to learn the products up to 10 * 10 would have been well spent for anyone working in commerce or manufacture? And Recorde's method, linked above, is surely more involved than just learning the table of numbers would be?

Or is it something like: people so took abaci for granted that curiosity about how to multiply numbers by hand would have been seen as a bit of an eccentric waste of time?

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

Hullo! Hullo! Good old index.

Entries tagged with humour

The Holy Fleece

(no subject)

Gor blimey!

Quick recommendation

The Outbursts of Everett True

The mysteries of Jamodu

Amusing email of the day

Warning notice allegedly at Notting Hill tube

And it was all yellow

Strange times

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March 2012

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