Humor

My brother just sent me this picture of my nephew:

My first reaction was that I laughed. The second was that I started coming up with possible captions for it (here’s one). It seems like a natural for a caption contest. I’m not holding a contest as I have nothing to give away, but I still invite you to suggest a caption, you know, just for the pure amusement, glory and fame associated with participation. As my brother kindly pointed out to me, my nephew is the one on the left, Pooh is on the right, fyi.

As the resident danceoholic I have to link to this video on the Evolution of Dance. It’s been viewed millions of times so I suspect it’s not new to all of you, but perhaps some of you haven’t seen it yet.

I’m not sure if I should be proud of, embarrassed, excited, or feel pathetic about the fact that of the approximately thirty songs featured in the clip, I have definitely danced to most at parties or clubs in the past (there were 3-4 that I don’t recall). To be sure, I certainly had not used most of the moves featured on the video. I’m more confident that that part is probably a good thing.

Watching the clip is a trip down memory lane as the various moments from life rush back when the particular songs were popular at parties and clubs. For example, Cotton-Eyed Joe by the Rednex will forever transport me back to the Arcade 46 bar and dance floor in the basement of our dorm in Geneva where I spent my junior year in college. Just imagine hundreds of people in this hole dancing away to this and other songs (Macarena anyone?). Those were the days…

Ow ow ow. Michael Bérubé uses his “web” “log” to bring the burninating. Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page attempted to defend incoming White House Press Secretary Tony Snow from charges of racism stemming, in part, from one of Page’s own columns. Unfortunately, he also inadvertently let slip the secret of Tony Snow’s mutant power…the power to see the future! (It’s totally like in this one story from Anne McCaffrey’s To Ride Pegasus, where there’s this mutant empath folksinger!) Read, and be amazed…

Tony Snow is eminently qualified to serve as White House press secretary not only because he is a man of conscience who genuinely cares about solving the tough problems of poverty, bad schools and sour race relations, but also because he can see the future. If you doubt it—or if you think, as an out-of-touch liberal elite critic who doesn’t understand physics, that this sensible blog has suddenly degenerated into trippy Fafblogisms—look again at Clarence Page’s “contextualization” of Snow’s remarks:

“Snow was trying to explain why the former Klansman had just won an estimated 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race. Snow wanted me to know that, just as those of us who attended Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March were not acting out of black supremacy or anti-Semitism, neither were all Duke voters moved by racism.”

That’s right: back in the fall of 1991, when David Duke had just won 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race, Tony Snow was able to compare David Duke’s white voters to black participants in a Farrakhan-led march that would not happen for another four years. That’s the kind of foresight and sagacity the White House needs now! Oh, how I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Tony Snow turned and said to Clarence Page, “You can’t write off Duke’s voters as racists, Clarence. After all, four years from now, many of your people will take part in a march organized by a nutcase anti-Semite. And don’t even get me started on O. J. Simpson! It may be hard for you to see it now, but I have the very strong sense that something bad is going to happen with that man, and many white Americans are going to get extremely upset. David Duke is just proleptically channeling that future racial tension into a right-now campaign, and if mainstream politicians don’t listen to the frustrations of ordinary people and address them in some constructive way, the loony extremists inevitably will move in.”

Man, Trogdor would be proud.

Crooks and Liars has the video of Colbert at the White House Press Correspondents’ Dinner.

One thing that strikes me as funny about this whole “let’s invade Iran” thing…wait, did I actually just type that? I’m looking at the desk and I don’t see any glass tube with burnt-up brillo pad in it, so I probably didn’t just smoke a glittering rock of yeyo. Probably. OK, nothing about this is funny except in a nervous, “ha ha I’m sure he’s just joking way” that one might employ if locked in a room with a drunk person holding a chainsaw and making jokes about how Texans love real meat. The warmongery is starting up, from Mark Steyn columns to “hawkish” “liberals” pontificating on how no options should be off the table (not even A NUCLEAR FIRST STRIKE ARE THEY INSANE???!!!!), to stop-making-me-commit-genocide wankery to credulous NYT articles to James Lileks relating everything back to this one chick who wouldn’t sleep with him was wrong about Iran in the ’70s. (You should really read the Vodkapundit post and accompanying thread. He says you’ll need a drink, and the man is not kidding at all. The story he links to [by Dan Simmons] takes grave misreadings of Thucydides to a whole new level, a category in which the competition is stiff. Simmons is sure to win this year’s coveted “Golden Hanson”. The trophy features a stern VDH uprooting an olive tree with one hand and hitting himself repeatedly on the head with an axe handle with the other.) [Edited for clarity–thanks tom scudder!]

Any minute now I’ll have to read from K-Lo about how hypocritical western feminists don’t care about women being oppressed in Iran. I can’t be the only one to find the machinery a bit creaky. Are the warbloggers’ hearts in it? The more important question is whether the US will really do something so extraordinarily, supremely crazy, but I’m firmly committed to lowering the tone at CT. If that means ignoring the important issues of the day to make mocking, ad hominem comments, then let the chips fall where they may.

No, the thing that strikes me as funny is that everyone who supports was with Iran is all about the “mad mullahs” and how they can’t be deterred by normal deterrance because they’re crazed jihadis content to incinerate their own country, plus OMG THE HIDDEN IMAM!!! The people making this argument now insist that of course MAD worked back when we faced rational opponents like the USSR or, you know, Mao’s China or whatever. But now, in a new era of crazy people having nukes, all bets are off. It’s like Iran is one big suicide bomber! The limits of the internet and my own laziness prevent me from researching this at all, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet that all these people (over a certain age) did not regard the commies as secular rationalists who weighed the costs or war carefully back in the day. Not at all. Much more of the “they’ve got a plan to retreat to their bunkers and sacrifice their own hapless citizens upon the altar of destroying America!!!” Just a theory. (Obligatory on-the-otherhanding: I’m sure some of the liberals now advocating deterrance railed against MAD at the time as an armageddon-hastening nightmare.)

I’ve promised to give a talk at the local High School on the pre-history of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. This is something I know a depressingly large amount about, not least from endless listening to the nostalgia strands on BBC7. But I wouldn’t have agreed to give a talk on it but for the delightful discovery that there are surviving episodes of both the immediate predecessor shows, Do Not Adjust Your Set and At Last the 1948 Show (Region 1, NTSC, believe it or not: Brits here and here). 1948 is more like Monty Python, not quite as good but containing, for example, the original version of the 4 Yorkshiremen sketch (with Marty Feldman!). DNAYS, though, is wonderful. It was a kid’s show, with Idle, Jones, Palin, David Jason, and Denise Coffey, and the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band appearing in various roles as well as themselves. The legend is that they did whatever they wanted because the kiddie-time slot meant that the executives didn’t bother to watch (those were the days!). I’d heard a great deal about it, and have long owned the album from the show (but the more or less complete bonzos is a better deal and contains Tadpoles), but I always imagined that it was lost to posterity. Wrong. 9 episodes survive and they are, really, exactly as the legend suggests. In fact, apart from not being in colour, they have aged better than Monty Python itself. The sketches are shorter, better structured, end with punch-lines, and the sense of anarchy is more palpable. You can see them enjoying themselves, and there is no sense, as there is in the later Pythons, that they are straining rather to get a laugh. The other marvel, though, is seeing the late lamented Viv Stanshall perform; I’ve always preferred Neil Innes to Stanshall, in the same way that I prefer McCartney to Lennon, but Stanshall commands the screen whenever he is on it. Brilliant. The local high school kids have a treat in store.

In 2002, Google brought us PigeonRank.

Today, Ask brings us RhymeRank. Check out the results for Crooked Timber (right-hand side of the screen) or try the service on your favorite search term. [UPDATE 4/2/06: As of April 2nd this is no longer available.]

Yahoo! went a bit too geeky on this judging from reactions to my various past posts by making their April Fool’s all about Web 2.0 and calling it “All Your Web 2.0 Are Belong To Us”. After all, if you don’t know what Web 2.0 is then you’re certainly not going to find that post amusing. In any case, it’s just a blog post on their Search Blog, it’s not as though they introduced a whole new service.

What other April Fool’s have you come across today? No, they do not have to be search related.

This year’s Google April Fool’s joke is Google Romance, a service that will help you find your romantic match. It’s sort of cute, although I think some of their past jokes have been better.

The site does bring up something I have been meaning to blog about so I’ll take this opportunity. It concerns the paradox of matching services such as dating Web sites or job search sites. I haven’t thought about this issue too much, but enough to blog about it. (What’s the threshold for blogability, by the way?:)

Services such as dating and job search sites promise the user to find a perfect match, whether in the realm of romance or the labor market. But deep down, is it really in the interest of these sites to work well? After all, if they do a good job then the seekers are no longer relevant customers and the sites lose their subscribers.

One way to deal with this is to offer additional services that go beyond the matching process. For example, the match-making site eHarmony now has a service for married couples. It is an interesting idea. It seems like a reasonable way to expand their user (subscription!) base so they are not dependent on keeping matchless those whom they promise to connect. Moreover, I can see that they may have quite a loyal user base in those whom they helped find their matches. Job sites can also offer services that go beyond the initial match. Nonetheless, I think there is an interesting tension in all this.

On a not completely unrelated note: Happy Birthday to GMail! Fortunately, that was not an April Fool’s two years ago. I came across the Google Romance notice on Google’s homepage, because I saw the GMail birthday icon and wanted to see if they had it in bigger on the Google homepage (a page I never visit otherwise, because why would I in the age of search toolbars). The birthday image is not reproduced there, but I did see the Romance link. (Yes, I’m obsessed with knowing how people end up on various sites and I’m projecting here by assuming that anyone else cares.)

Monty Python and Philosophy is now available (US;UK). Other CTers have expressed skepticism about the value of the Popular Culture and Philosophy series, and I must admit that this is the first one I’ve had a really good read of, but I think it provides a pretty accessible and fun introduction to a range of topics in philosophy, especially those less well represented by the CT team. There’s a great little essay by my much-missed erstwhile colleague Noel Carroll (splitter!) about why we laugh at Mr. Creosote, and nice essays about ordinary language philosophy, existentialism, and philosophy of religion, all set within a Python framework, and accessible to a broad audience. I’d have loved to have read it (or something like it) when I was in high school, and have acquired a bunch of copies to distribute to my Python-loving friends who are curious about philosophy. (Full disclosure: I contributed a chapter ostensibly about the Argument Clinic, but really about method in political philosophy, which, I’m embarrassed to say, works least well of the 11 essays I’ve so far read).

1. “Since he is of no use anymore, there is no gain if he lives and no loss if he dies.”

2. “I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.”

Easy, right? The less bloodthirsty one is Pol Pot. (As Brother Number One famously mused “Look at me now. Am I a savage person?”) It’s only fair to note here that Christopher Hitchens is not, in fact, a genocidal maniac. Well, not someone who has actually killed anyone, that we know of. It’s also nice to know that Pol Pot has a myspace profile. (His interests include taking control of Kampuchea and social experimentation. Music? DK, obvs.)

Then again, given Chertoff’s overall record, maybe they did place the nation’s security first and foremost:

“I wouldn’t feel safe nowhere on this compound as an officer,” former guard Derrick Daniels told The Associated Press. Daniels was employed until last fall by Wackenhut Services Inc., the private firm that protects a Homeland Security complex that includes sensitive, classified information.

An envelope with suspicious powder was opened last fall at the headquarters. Daniels and other current and former guards said they were shocked when superiors carried it past the office of Secretary Michael Chertoff, took it outside and then shook it outside Chertoff’s window without evacuating people nearby.

I know life is meant to imitate art and all, but is it supposed to imitate Benny Hill episodes? I can just imagine the guards running around in fast-motion, shaking clouds of powder out just below a hacking Chertoff’s window. And if a somewhat zaftig, topless woman in a nurse’s uniform could be worked into an ensuing chase scene, then so much the better.

Microsoft redesigns the iPod package. Hey, it’s funny, so it must be true, right? (Actually in this case that’s correct.) Via John Gruber.

Looks like the site is getting killed right now. Try this link.

Horowitz has now given us the opportunity to vote for the worst of the worst , and Michael Bérubé is way out in front. Keep the votes pouring in and expose this dangerous radical as the dangerous danger he is to apple pie and all that.

Cracked Magazine, the unbearably crappy MAD rip-off of our youth, has been reborn as a sharp humor site featuring such favorites as Neal Pollack and Jay Pinkerton. For starters, check out More Cartoons that Might Offend in the Middle East, or the Spring Movie Preview:

V for Vendetta

IN A NUTSHELL

An ex-mental patient builds a terrorist cell in dystopian future Britain, commits murder and blows up government buildings with the help of a bald-headed Natalie Portman. Luckily the terrorism’s completely inapplicable to real life, since in this fictional scenario, they only do it because the government lies. That sound you just heard was 10,000 impressionable trenchcoat-wearing outcasts cocking their semi-automatic rifles, by the way.

WHY YOU SHOULD HATE IT

Because League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell already proved there isn’t a subtle, textured Alan Moore graphic novel in existence that can’t be turned into a feature-length Hollywood film about a farting donkey CEO on roller skates switching places with a pantsless Rob Schneider… with outrageous results!