Category: Humour

Funny. Or meant to be funny. Or about funny.

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Humour Technology

Take Me To Your Media

Braun HF 1 television receiver, Germany, 1958
This is what my Media Centre PC doesn't resemble most

I’m still hiding in a happy kernel of geekery, away from a cruel and now markedly more expensive world. Much of last night was spent setting up the new old PC as what I expansively call a “Media Centre”. That is of course just fancy talk for a computer attached to a TV, worthwhile though since we got a wide-screen one. (Well, wide-ish.) My mother will appreciate this when she gets the hang of it, but things may be a bit confusing for the transition. I’d barely got her to stop calling the computer monitor “the TV”, now I seem to have arbitrarily reversed my position.

But I’m sitting here writing this on my knees. With a wireless keyboard on my knees, I mean. I’m not on my knees. And to clarify my clarification, I didn’t think that you thought I was writing this column on my knees, with a pen. I have the keyboard on my knees, but the words are appearing on the TV. Which is the sort of thing people liked to do in science fiction films. Cool. And simultaneously – as it is a fairly wide screens – I’m also catching up with episodes of QI on YouTube. (The one with Nina Conti the ventriloquist.)

Ideally the screen would have about four times the area, but this is actually pretty nice. If nothing else, it improves my work posture – from hunched over on the couch to sitting back on the couch. I feel slightly better-off already.

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Cosmography Humour

Something In The Water

Bertie
Lithium Isn't Going To Fix this

Psychiatrist and – if you recall – former TD Dr Moosajee Bhamjee has been doing some… I’ll call it lateral thinking about Ireland’s worryingly high suicide rate. While others wring their hands, he at least has suggested a solution: Medicating the water. He believes that a small dose of lithium salts would go unnoticed by most of us, while being effective enough as a mood stabiliser to lower the suicide rate.

I was going to go into a long tirade about the problems with this, but in the end I think I can boil it all down to a single question:

Is he mad?

To quote the Oxford Handbook of Psychiatry:

As Lithium is a highly toxic ion, safe and effective therapy requires monitoring of serum levels. Up to 75% of patients treated with lithium will experience some side effects.

And frankly, I would describe that as the least worrying aspect of introducing forced psychoactive medication to an entire population.

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Humour Technology

Truth – There’s An App For That

Back in the day – which, to clear this up once and for all, ran from 1997 until 2003 – I was a big fan of The Brunching Shuttlecocks, perhaps the first really successful Web-based comedy team. Sure there were funny sites before, but they tended to be collections of jokes that could have – and often had – been published in other forms. There were Web incarnations of humour that already existed in other media, such as The Onion. There were webcomics, but again they could have appeared anywhere – if anywhere much still published comics. The Brunching Shuttlecocks though did humour that was, to a large extent, native to the Web.

Which didn’t just mean it was geek humour – though yeah, a lot of it was. More importantly though, much of it was among the first comedy that simply could not have appeared in any other medium. Items like The Bjork Song or Tina The Troubled Teen took advantage of technologies like scripting and object embedding to do jokes in new ways.

The Brunching Shuttlecocks are with us no more alas. The website isn’t even available now due to a hosting dispute, (though word is it will return soon). Main contributors Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg and Dave Neilsen have long moved on to other things. Despite its eight-year lack of existence though, there’s still a surprisingly active fan community.

And now, you can Brunch (as we say) on your favourite portable Apple product. One of the best-loved items on the site was Good Or Bad?, an interactive feature where readers could vote on whether a random range of bizarre things were, well, good or bad. Votes were collated, and their fundamental value discovered. The free app actually expands on the original idea because it allows you to add your own items for the crowd-sourced assessment of other users, though it comes with the original (and hilarious) Good or Bad? content as ‘seed truth’.

Ever wanted to know whether that feeling you get in your stomach when a lift goes down, or the weirdly satisfying sensation of accidentally treading on a snail, or the big button at the pedestrian crossing that doesn’t apparently do anything is a good thing or bad? Now you can, definitively.

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Humour

Toys R Weird

Realistic Gripping Action

I was at a five-year-old’s birthday party the other day, which was sweet. I bought her a Winnie-the-Pooh nature adventure 3-D jigsaw puzzle game book. I don’t even understand how that works myself, but I’m pretty sure I’d have thought it was really cool when I was five.

Children’s toys are generally quite surreal these days. There was a toy train at the party too, chuffing about the floor. Except… it was chuffing songs. It was chuffing chuffing Christmas carols.

And then there’s this thing, called a Wild Podgey. Yeah, at first it looks like an ordinary giraffe. Well, not an ordinary giraffe. A giraffe that lacks the single feature most helpful in identifying it as such – viz., a neck. Interesting that it’s still perfectly recognisable. But otherwise, a cute cartoony stuffed animal toy, right?

Well no. Matter of fact, this is the creepiest thing I’ve come across in quite some time. You see the bellybutton? It is elasticated. It… grips.

Brrr.

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Humour Politics Technology

What Comes After The Euro?

Chance image: An alarm clock where a "sad...
Sad Alarm Clock Is Sad - But Not For Long!

So the euro is in ‘real danger of collapsing’, is it? We’re expected to worry about that, but I wonder what it actually means. Would it really matter if our currency was suddenly worth nothing at all?

I don’t know about you, but I’d be fine frankly. It’s true there probably isn’t a lot of work for a cartoonist in a collapsed economy, but I have other strings to my bow – which these days is getting to more resemble some sort of harp. Something I am not at all bad at is making broken things go again. I started as a small boy on alarm clocks, I do it now with computers and such. I reckon I’ll be getting plenty work after the currency collapses and no one has the means to buy new things. I will accept payment in food and body warmth.

What happens though if someone needs my services, but doesn’t have anything I can use right now? I can’t eat when I’m not hungry after all. It will be down to good old barter. You could give me some copper wire and I could exchange that with someone for, say, a big ball of wool, which someone else may be willing to barter for a bag of salt, which I could then swap for six bundles of sticks, which I can finally trade for the Blu-ray of The Adventures of Tintin I need.

It would be a lot easier though if we had some system of tokens, so you could trade with those instead of carrying goods with you everywhere. Say, special printed documents with distinctive designs on them. And as luck would have it, there’s one readily available. We could use all those unwanted euro notes.

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Humour

Spontaneous Com… edians

Speaking of spontaneous things in Galway, our own Spontaneous Theatre People have gotten together with two other comedy outfits to form a sort of improv supergroup. I’m having a lazy Sunday, so here’s their press release:

The Make-Up Artists Comedy Improv Tour – “A Tale Of Three Cities”

Hold on to your hats! If you live in Dublin, Limerick or Galway, ‘A Tale of Three Cities’ is coming soon to your City. Following an incredible impromptu ‘improv jam’ session at Electric Picnic in 2010, some of Ireland’s top improvisers decided that there was too much fun to be had to leave it it that.

Plans were hatched, and they decided a three city comedy improv tour was in order. Members of No Drama (Dublin), Choke Comedy (Limerick) and The Spontaneous Theatre People (Galway) have joined forces and become the Improv ‘Supergroup’ known as The Make-Up Artists!

Improv Comedy is an incredibly exciting form of theatre. It is energizing for the audience and performers alike, and no two performances are ever alike.

The Make-Up Artists‘ show promises to be a great night of weird and wonderful comedy antics. All the scenes and games are unscripted, and many are based on the audience suggestions. It will have you on the edge of your seats wondering what could possibly come next, and delighted when you find out what does!

Dublin – Thursday 8th December, Doyle’s Pub, College St
Show starts at 8.30pm, admission €10

Limerick – Saturday 10th December, The Belltable, O’Connell St
Show starts at 8pm, admission €10

Galway – Sunday 11th December, Upstairs @ The Townhouse Bar, Spanish Parade.
Doors at 8pm, admission €7/5

Any additional enquiries, email spontaneoustheatre (at) gmail (dot) com

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Cosmography Humour

Spontaneous Combustion Controversy Rekindled

Human male and female - anatomical features po...
A diagram showing where fat occurs in the human body. Not gratuitous nudity at all.

Thank you, Professor Marie Cassidy, for putting the sane side of the story.

A couple of months back I was horrified by a coroner here in Galway describing a case of a body catching fire as “spontaneous human combustion”. Working on a comparable case, Professor Cassidy took the opportunity to call that description a myth. And as State Pathologist – and a professor of forensic medicine – she is perhaps better qualified on the subject than a GP.

To be as fair as possible to that coroner (Dr. Ciaran MacLoughlin), I’m sure he wasn’t envisioning the phenomenon as it appears in fiction: A person becoming so saturated with alcohol – and possibly sin – that one night they just burst into flames. But in finding spontaneous combustion to be the cause of death, he asserts that living people can ignite of their own accord. Which is… nuts.

What does seem to be a real – if rare – phenomenon is a person’s dead body catching fire and burning with no source of kindling other than their clothes or perhaps the chair they were in. The simple if somewhat disturbing fact is that we contain a lot of fuel. Human fat – which even the most svelte of us have – is basically oil after all.

What’s not real is the spontaneity bit; an external cause of ignition is sometimes hard to find, but it seems more than likely that there always is one. Nor is the entire body consumed as in a cremation – despite what some of the more sensationalist papers reported. And it was most certainly not, even in this case, the cause of death. There was good evidence that the ‘victim’ was already dead when their body caught fire.

So how did MacLoughlin conclude that this was spontaneous human combustion? By logical fallacy, apparently. Fire investigators had found no proof that any nearby source – including the open fire burning in the grate – had ignited the body. (One wonders how you could prove that.) He appears to have taken this lack of proof that it was the source as proof that it was not. In formal logic, this is a category of error known as being a dur-brain.

Well, Professor Cassidy can put down the myth of spontaneous human combustion. What she can’t do is quash the rumour that we have state-appointed medical professionals in this country who believe it.

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Categories
Cosmography Humour

Spontaneous Combustion Controversy Rekindled

Human male and female - anatomical features po...
A diagram showing where fat occurs in the human body. Not gratuitous nudity at all.

Thank you, Professor Marie Cassidy, for putting the sane side of the story.

A couple of months back I was horrified by a coroner here in Galway describing a case of a body catching fire as “spontaneous human combustion”. Working on a comparable case, Professor Cassidy took the opportunity to call that description a myth. And as State Pathologist – and a professor of forensic medicine – she is perhaps better qualified on the subject than a GP.

To be as fair as possible to that coroner (Dr. Ciaran MacLoughlin), I’m sure he wasn’t envisioning the phenomenon as it appears in fiction: A person becoming so saturated with alcohol – and possibly sin – that one night they just burst into flames. But in finding spontaneous combustion to be the cause of death, he asserts that living people can ignite of their own accord. Which is… nuts.

What does seem to be a real – if rare – phenomenon is a person’s dead body catching fire and burning with no source of kindling other than their clothes or perhaps the chair they were in. The simple if somewhat disturbing fact is that we contain a lot of fuel. Human fat – which even the most svelte of us have – is basically oil after all.

What’s not real is the spontaneity bit; an external cause of ignition is sometimes hard to find, but it seems more than likely that there always is one. Nor is the entire body consumed as in a cremation – despite what some of the more sensationalist papers reported. And it was most certainly not, even in this case, the cause of death. There was good evidence that the ‘victim’ was already dead when their body caught fire.

So how did MacLoughlin conclude that this was spontaneous human combustion? By logical fallacy, apparently. Fire investigators had found no proof that any nearby source – including the open fire burning in the grate – had ignited the body. (One wonders how you could prove that.) He appears to have taken this lack of proof that it was the source as proof that it was not. In formal logic, this is a category of error known as being a dur-brain.

Well, Professor Cassidy can put down the myth of spontaneous human combustion. What she can’t do is quash the rumour that we have state-appointed medical professionals in this country who believe it.

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Humour

And My Fourth Career Is…

I wrote a play last night. Well I exaggerrate – I reached the end of the first draft of a play. Well, of a rewrite of a play I originally finished fifteen years ago. And I’ve been working on it for three weeks. But these caveats aside, I can say with some pride that last night, I finished writing a play.

Today I started writing it again.

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Humour

Some More #ExtendedProverbs

Winston Churchill
I'll leave out the urine

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, that Pigs might fly.”

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. No matter what you do.”

“Measure twice, cut once, drop the head neatly into the basket.”

“Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals. Delicious equals.”

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. I explain and I am forgotten.”

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat and urine.”

“The more we know, the more we know we don’t know. The more we know we don’t know, the more we know we know we don’t know we more know.”

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances. That’s how you tell them apart.”

“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning of the other end.”

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