November 05, 2004

Friday crying-on-the-inside thread

Posted by Ted

After a bitter, polarizing election, the gift of entertainment can be such a comfort. This weekend, Americans of all persuasions are sure to come together at a special film event. I’m talking, of course, about Alfie. Bush’s base can clearly identify with a priapic European in New York, wearing designer clothing and bedding everything in a skirt. And as a temporarily despondent liberal, nothing can lift my spirits like watching the handsome and suave Jude Law pad around for ninety minutes like a fucking gigolo tomcat. Let the healing begin.

Sigh.

Here’s the thread: post a link that makes you laugh. I’ve got a few under the break.

The Greatest Picture Ever

Lord of the Rings IV Information Center

Furniture Porn

Literary giants (and also Camille Paglia) woo Britney Spears.

Jay Pinkerton’s Superman sequels

Progressive Boink takes on photo caption contests.

Finally,

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey, buddy, why the long face?” And the horse says, “Because I’m sad.”
Posted on November 5, 2004 06:40 PM UTC
Comments

I fear I have not any brand-new humorous links; I expect most of these come from blogs I have read over the past few years. That said, if any of you have not seen these yet, give them a click, they’re funny.

Black People Love Us!
Creationist Science Fair (which is a joke much as it’s fun/scary to treat it as a real representation of ID thinking)
Despair.com

Posted by Jeremy Osner · November 5, 2004 07:09 PM

Funny and not so,
http://homepage.mac.com/leperous/PhotoAlbum1.html

Posted by Ivaylo Iordanov · November 5, 2004 07:34 PM

http://home.comcast.net/~wwwstephen/americans/

a collection of clips from the show talking to americans. its old, but still funny…

Posted by Adi · November 5, 2004 07:46 PM

Hmmm there’s always:

Homestar
Waterman
ScaryGoRound
And the perfect thing to read when your angry: Get Your War On!

Posted by Hansomdevil · November 5, 2004 07:58 PM

Yes! Here’s something brand-new (courtesy of my friend Gary): Sorry Everybody!

Posted by Jeremy Osner · November 5, 2004 08:27 PM

Sorry, try this link.

Posted by andrew · November 5, 2004 08:46 PM

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender says, “What is this, a joke?”

Posted by Walt Pohl · November 5, 2004 09:04 PM

Andrew — thanks for that link — that site is a work of genius, the poems just keep getting funnier as you read more of them! Likable Wilma, indeed!

Posted by Jeremy Osner · November 5, 2004 09:15 PM

This if you’re looking for something sick, this if you’re looking for something cynical, and this (which I blogged some time back) for no good reason at all.

Posted by Scott Martens · November 5, 2004 10:08 PM

How about this one, from Tristero’s last post?

Posted by tex · November 5, 2004 11:05 PM

Hey. Uh, sorry for being “that guy” and tracking back 16 times. I was trying to get some formating correct, and….

Posted by todd. · November 5, 2004 11:21 PM

I may have linked this before, but here are Henry Raddick’s Amazon reviews.

Posted by Tom T. · November 6, 2004 12:33 AM

This got my biggest laugh today:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/11/05/CALBUDGET.TMP

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he won’t listen to “losers” in the Democrat-controlled Legislature… as he announced that former South Bay Republican Rep. Tom Campbell will head his finance department.

Campbell, a social moderate, will take a leave from his current job as the dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley to join the administration, replacing Donna Arduin, who left after just a year.

Schwarzenegger praised Campbell as “the most brilliant person in California” at a press conference announcing his selection.

“What I like most about Tom is that he thinks the same way I do,” the governor said.

Posted by Ray Davis · November 6, 2004 01:19 AM

http://masamania.com/archives/2004/09/japanese_busine.html
http://www.thetoiletonline.com/leaveit2.htm
http://blennus.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=29&Itemid=
http://www.poe-news.com/features.php?feat=31845
http://picard.ytmnd.com/
http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

Posted by skroah · November 6, 2004 01:49 AM

1
2
3
4
5
6

Posted by skroah · November 6, 2004 01:55 AM

The only website on the internet that I know of that promises more than Bush does, and it even delivers too:

Zombo.com

Posted by Barry Freed · November 6, 2004 04:07 AM

“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to it’s true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt……If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.”

—Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to a friend after the passage of the alien and sedition acts.

Here’s the funny part: the witches are Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and George Washington. So arguably we have it worse. Also, in the sentence before he argues that part of the reason that their reign will not succeed is that they’re weird and ill-starred like the Jews.

Even so, this is bouncing all over the liberal inter-web-thingy for a reason.

Posted by Katherine · November 6, 2004 06:17 AM

These work for me:

albino neutrino

defective yeti

fafblog Of course

izzlepfaff

There are many others on my list of faves, but they are more local and esoteric.

Posted by David Tiley · November 6, 2004 11:47 AM

David Tiley

Thanks for the great sites. I think I’ll keep the Yeti, defective or not it does the trick just fine. Too bad the blogger lives in Seattle, if he was in NY I’d gladly wear that T-shirt at his bus stop.

I do wish I knew something about the writer behind Izzlepfaff, just a city would do. But any blog that features Stavros the Wonder Chicken as a regular commentator is a must bookmark in my book.

(fafblog, of course, is an old favorite-Bow to giblets!)

Posted by Barry Freed · November 6, 2004 03:28 PM

A cure for what ails yer all.
http://www.lambsheadguide.com/about/index.html

If not, screw it all at
http://merlin.blogs.com/bitterblog/

then leave a note for posterity at
http://www.upennmuseum.com/hieroglyphsreal.cgi

and then chill out with some good music at
http://www.cenedella.com/stone/archives/000302.html

accompanied by yer own multimedia show
http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/2/9/6/12962/12962-h/12962-h.htm

Posted by Nabakov · November 6, 2004 04:17 PM

Thanks for those too Nabokov,

I wonder though if the Lambshead guide will prove even a smidgen as captivating as the ancient copy of Krafft-Ebing I inherited from my grandfather.

The multimedia show is great. When I lived in Morocco I basically avoided the American kvetching corner like a plague. I made many Moroccan friends including a few traditional students who were studying for a 12-year degree in what is arguably the world’s oldest university, al-Qarawayyin (Egyptians beg to differ) One of these students and one of my closest friends grew up in the south of Morocco known as the Souss (he is Soussi, or Shilha, or Tashilhait….wonderful people). He was pretty much orphaned and grew up in a kuttab, a school where you basically spend most of your time memorizing the Qur`an and maybe a few other basic texts. One afternoon we were hanging out at my place which was in the old Jewish quarter in the New City, which was only about 1,000 years old. I had just cooked us some lunch and we were hanging out in the kitchen, the afternoon light was streaming through the windows some 20-feet overhead (the house looked palatial). And I started to do some hand-shadows, first a bird, then I tried for what for me was the ultimate: Nixon. Not that my friend would recognize it, in all likelihood. So immediately walks in front of the Butagaz container we were using as a screen and goes right into the most amazing lifelike camel I’d ever seen, saying, “ba`eer” (one of the many words for camel, more or less equivalent to our word cattle.”)

I cracked up. He was an encyclopedia of hand-shadows, each done with life-like perfection, complete with sound effects and all. I was astounded and asked him where in the world did he learn all this and how did he ever find the time to perfect them all? “Fi’l-kuttab” In the Qur`an school, he said.

Such was life for poor students in the days before Game Boys or comic books.

Posted by Barry Freed · November 6, 2004 04:46 PM

I thought Bush assassination stuff on the exile.ru was pretty funny, with mock opinon articles by George Will, Thomas Friedman and all the rest of it. Enjoy.

Posted by abb1 · November 6, 2004 05:20 PM

Best thing yet: http://www.filmstripinternational.com/.

Posted by Scott Martens · November 6, 2004 07:33 PM

Mini-biog of George W. Bush: “former town drunk of Crawford, Texas”

From comments here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_W._Bush#Crystal_ball.3F

Posted by Mouse · November 6, 2004 09:09 PM

Here are two with lotsa foul language that cracked me up recently:

Dean Wins! The incredible story of how Howard Dean became President of the United States.

Brian Heater’s transcript of Kerry’s concession speech

Posted by adamsj · November 6, 2004 09:13 PM

I can’t help but notice the way that bitter political humor has crept back in when the entire point of Ted’s post was obviously an attempt allow for a bit of a reprieve, an escape for a moment or two, from the gaping abyss that stares back at us and wills only to swallow us all. I can’t complain much myself as I’ve always had a peculiar fondness for gallows humor.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Because his coop had been turned into a giant hog farm complete with odiferous waste pools due to deregulation by the Bush administration.

Posted by Barry Freed · November 6, 2004 11:45 PM

No roundup of comforting, spirit-lifting, healing sites is complete without Arthur Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism.

Posted by W. Kiernan · November 7, 2004 12:11 AM

I’d recommend this Fafblog post – in fact, any Fafblog.

Also Michael Kelly’s Page of Misery.

Posted by Helen · November 7, 2004 05:38 AM

and http://deuceofclubs.com/amusive/easap024.htm

Posted by chris borthwick · November 8, 2004 03:38 AM
Followups

→ Nice smug me.
Excerpt: Ted at CT set up a thread for people to post amusing things, as a way of making us all feel better after this week. (Apprently our solution, a lot of vodka Wednesday night, did not occur to him.) Via...Read more at back to the lab!
→ Nice smug me.
Excerpt: Ted at CT set up a thread for people to post amusing things, as a way of making us all feel better after this week. (Apprently our solution, a lot of vodka Wednesday night, did not occur to him.) Via...Read more at back to the lab!
→ Nice smug me.
Excerpt: Ted at CT set up a thread for people to post amusing things, as a way of making us all feel better after this week. (Apprently our solution, a lot of vodka Wednesday night, did not occur to him.) Via...Read more at back to the lab!
→ Nice smug me.
Excerpt: Ted at CT set up a thread for people to post amusing things, as a way of making us all feel better after this week. (Apprently our solution, a lot of vodka Wednesday night, did not occur to him.) Via...Read more at back to the lab!
→ when in doubt...
Excerpt: Crooked Timber is looking for sweet laughter in hard times - and has a heap of suggestions to crack a smile from the most focused of philosophers. Go particularly to our very own nabakov in the comments....Read more at BARISTA
→ when in doubt...
Excerpt: Crooked Timber is looking for sweet laughter in hard times - and has a heap of suggestions to crack a smile from the most focused of philosophers. Go particularly to our very own Nabakov in the comments....Read more at BARISTA

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.