Susie and I voted today. That is it. I cannot stand anymore listening to television commentary and worrying about the outcome. I gave a lot of money, I raised a lot more, I blogged, I anguished, and Lord knows I have lost sleep and I just cannot do it anymore. So I will wait 13 more days, stay up all night on the eighth, and see how it comes out.
Does anybody know a good joke?
What's the difference between a (luxury car of your choice) and a porcupine?
ReplyDeleteOn a porcupine, the pricks are on the outside.
Thank you, Chris. That helps, although not as much as a second glass of wine
ReplyDeleteGood joke. Woody Allen, as usual.
ReplyDelete"I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.“
California makes it really easy. A couple of weeks ago I got an email from the SOS that my ballot was in the mail. Got it a few days later. There's a drop box at the nearest market but I was going into town so I dropped it off at the Registrar's office. Got an email Friday from the SOS that my ballot had been accepted and counted. There's no good reason for those lines in lesser states.
ReplyDelete“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”
ReplyDelete"I've seen this line attributed to (Groucho) Marx, but it seems in fact he never said it."
s.w., thanks for reminding me - it's good to periodically revisit Woody Allen's quote page. :) A few I hadn't seen before:
ReplyDelete"I'm not really the heroic type. I was beat up by Quakers."
"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons."
"There have been times when I've thought about suicide but with my luck it'd probably be a temporary solution."
Michael,
ReplyDeleteThanks. The remarks about being beated up by Quakers literally broke me up. I can't stop laughing.
It's another one.
I just took a speed reading course.
I read all of War and Peace in half an hour.
It's about Russia.
Really silly joke:
ReplyDeleteA man walks into his doctor’s office. He has a carrot in one ear; a pickle in the other; and an asparagus in each nostril.
He tells the doctor, “I haven’t been feeling well lately. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
The doctor looks at him and says, “I don’t think you’re eating properly.”
Better joke.
Sam, who is 62, asks his friend Bruce, 72, “Are you on Social Security?”
Bruce says yes. Sam asks him how does he like it.
Bruce says, “Well, at my age, it’s a little like sex.”
Sam says, “I don’t understand.”
Bruce replies, “I get a little each month, but not enough to live on.”
I've never considered suicide because it would please all the wrong people.
ReplyDeletel don't have health insurance so when I get sick I make chicken soup with low grade poultry and hope the antibiotics seep out. —Katie Hannigan
ReplyDeletePeople ask why Americans are so friendly. It's simple: if we don't have enough friends to crowdfund for us when we get sick, we'll die. —Ariana Lenarsky
ReplyDeleteFor reference, I should note that I'm Canadian where we have free healthcare, which is why I joke about US healthcare. Having said that...
ReplyDeleteDoctor: sorry sir but your body has run out of magnesium.
Me: 0mg.
Ask and it shall be given. Seek and ye shall find.
ReplyDeleteA guy staggers into a bar and sits at the counter next to the only other patron. He orders a whiskey, throws it down, and mutters 'Assholes! Goddamn assholes.' The patron next to him glances over, then looks away. The guy orders another drink, throws it down, and says 'Good-for-nothing, lying, cheating, immoral, vicious, greedy, goddamned assholes!' The patron next to him looks over, nods, and looks away. The guy orders yet another whiskey, throws it down, and says 'Those goddamned lawyers are all assholes!' The other patron says "Hey, buddy, that's enough; you're way out of line.' The guy says, "Oh, man, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. It's just that I'm getting a divorce, and it's awful. Are you an attorney?" The other patron responds, "No, I'm an asshole."
ReplyDeleteMikhail Gorbachev drops into the Oval Office to chat with George Bush Sr. Bush says 'Mikhail, I'm worried about Dan Quayle. He doesn't seem too smart, not much grey matter, not a bright bulb, ya know what I mean?' Gorbachev says, "I worry same Boris Yeltsin, so I test him. I ask him 'Who, besides your brother, is your father's son?' Boris replied, 'It's me!', so I knew he smart.' Bush says 'Gr-r-r-eat!' After Gorbachev leaves, Bush calls Quayle in, and says 'Danny, I got a question for ya. Who, besides your brother, is your father's son?' Quayle knits his brow, starts sweating, leaps up and says 'I gotta go to the bathroom; be right back.' In the hallway he runs into Dick Cheney, and so he asks him 'Dick, who, besides your brother, is your father's son?' Cheney says 'It's me!' Relieved, Quayle goes back into the Oval Office, and Bush says 'Well, Danny, now tell me: who, besides your brother, is your father's son?' Quayle replies, 'It's Dick Cheney!' Bush says, 'No, you fool, it's Boris Yeltsin.'
ReplyDeleteWell here are some short summaries of famous books which I hope will cheer you up.
ReplyDeleteIndividuals without an overarching power would make a mess of things: therefore we need absolute governments to make a mess of things on an international scale (Hobbes: Leviathan).
Man finds love with drunk lord. Same man finds love with drunk lord’s sister. But the drunk lord and his sister are both Catholics so it does not work out even though they have a really nice palace. (Waugh: Brideshead Revisited )
Small person goes on long journey. Saves friends; betrays friends. Comes back with much less treasure than he expected. (Tolkien: The Hobbit).
Tall, cultivated and long-lived man explains that the life of man in naturally nasty, brutish and short (Hobbes: Leviathan)
Small person goes on long journey to throw away valuable object. (Tolkien: Lord of the Rings)
Hot girl rejects advances of proud rich guy. Proud rich guy saves hot girl’s sister from ruin. Hot girl relents. (Austen: Pride and Prejudice)
Silly sister falls for guy who dumps her. Sensible sister falls for guy engaged to someone else. Silly sister ends up with old guy in a flanneled waistcoat. Sensible sister gets the guy she wants when his fiancée dumps him. (Austen: Sense and Sensibility)
Put-upon poor relation nabs rich prig cousin. (Austen: Mansfield Park)
Hot rich girl makes a mess of things. Marries moralistic older man (Austen: Emma)
Napoleon wins one war and loses another. Rich Russians have love affairs, fight duels and lose money gambling. Soldiers die in snow. Author gives lectures on the philosophy of history. (Tolstoy: War and Peace)
Man argues that metaphysics does not make sense by appealing to a principle which does not make sense. ( Language,Truth and Logic)
Man does as he is told a) by three witches and b) by his wife. It does not end well. (Shakespeare: MacBeth)
King develops flimsy pretexts for unjust war. Murders political opponents; threatens war crimes; agonises about how tough it is being a king; commits war-crimes; bullshits princess; dies. (Shakespeare: Henry V)
Effete King loses crown to scheming cousin. Agonises endlessly. (Shakespeare: Richard II)
Not really a joke, but it crossed my path at just the right moment and made me laugh like an insane person...
ReplyDeleteAccording to this Wikipedia article: Any sentence consisting solely of the word "buffalo" repeated any number of times is grammatically correct.
Michael,
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. It took me a few minutes to figure it out.
Can anyone think of another English word which is simultaneously an animal, a verb, and a geographic location which can produce a similar coherent sentence?
Karl,
ReplyDeletecould that be one more?:
A young man is told that he will kill his father and that he will have s** with his mother. He is shocked and to prevent this, the young man flees and goes on a journey, killing first an old man who could be his father and then marrying an older woman who could be his mother... then cursing his fate. (From Greece to Freud's sofa)
At the risk of being a bit too crude for this crowd (but I can't help myself!):
ReplyDeleteA chicken and an egg are lying in bed. The chicken, with a look of relaxation and deep satisfaction on his face, plucks a cigarette from the ashtray on the bedside table, takes in a long drag, and lets the smoke out slowly. "Well," he says, glancing over at the egg, "I guess we answered THAT question."
a propos the iterated buffalo sentence:
ReplyDeleteFirst, a two word version: Men shoot (Men men shoot shoot ; Men men men shoot shoot shoot). The original point of these was the observation that, though they are all grammatical, our linguistic processing unit can't handle 3 and up.
Police police
Police police police
Being Color Blind is kind of a grey area.
ReplyDelete"I don't drink water. Fish fuck in it."
ReplyDeleteW.C. Fields
for more sustained humor, check out a comedy bit called "The Great Flydini" by Steve Martin. And keeping with Mr. Martin, listen to his recording titled "Atheist Don't Have No Songs."
Matching the indecorous salacity of the recent humor contributions, here is mine.
ReplyDeleteDave has been deserted on a desert island (where else would one be deserted?) for over three weeks. He has been subsisting on bananas and coconuts.
Suddenly, he sees a gorgeous woman emerging from the surf out of nowhere, wearing a skin tight one-piece bathing suit.
She approaches him and asks him if he would like a cigar.
He responds, nervously and incredulously, Yes, sure.
She draws a cigar and lighter from her bathing suit, places the cigar in his mouth and lights the cigar.
As he is puffing away on the cigar, she asks him if he would like a martini.
He again answers, incredulously, Yes, absolutely.
She miraculously takes a martini glass, a bottle of vermouth and a bottle of vodka from her bathing suit, pours them into the martini glass, and hands the glass to Dave.
As he is sipping on the martini, she asks him, “Would you like to play around?”
Dave gasps and exclaims, “Don’t tell me you have a set of golf clubs in there too!”
To be meaningful, "men men shoot shoot" relies on a slang expression -- i.e., the word "shoot" used here to mean roughly "to hell with them."
ReplyDeleteBy contrast, a sentence like "buffalo buffalo buffalo" does not rely on slang but rather on the fact that "buffalo" can be both a noun and a verb (as has already been pointed out).
P.s. it just occurred to me that "men men shoot shoot" could also be a repeated command, but it's a little bit weird at least when written that way.
ReplyDeleteJanuary 6th insurrection: a Republican party.
ReplyDeletePer LFC’s observation:
ReplyDeleteCommand given towards the end of the movie, “Paths of Glory.”
By no means humorous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt37sGBqtEg
The movie showcased one of Kirk Douglas’s greatest performances, surpassed only by his portrayal of Vincent Van Gogh in “Lust for Life.” As a testimonial that life is not fair, Kirk Douglas, though nominated several times, never won a Best Actor Academy Award. (He was given an honorary Academy Award in 1996.)
Marc
ReplyDeleteA good many of the movies you mention I've never seen, but I have seen 'Paths of Glory' albeit a long time ago. Don't remember the details, but I remember that it involves a court-martial at the end. It's basically the opposite of a movie that glorifies war, as I recall, though it does portray ordinary soldiers as courageous, which one pretty much had to be just to show up on a WW 1 battlefield.
P.s. but I don't really remember the plot. Will look at the clip later.
ReplyDeleteRe. "Men men shoot shoot" -
ReplyDeleteI'm not a linguist/grammarian/whatever, so this may be wrong or at minimum very inelegant, but I read it as equivalent to: "Men, who are shot by men, shoot" (just without any of the optional punctuation, pronouns, etc.). I don't think it necessarily has to do with the slang meaning of "shoot."
Rewritten with the active voice rather than the passive voice, that paraphrase would be: "Men, whom men shoot, shoot." In any case, I think, the last (and only the last) instance of "shoot" can be read either as imperative or as indicative - i.e., "Men [whom men shoot], I command you to shoot!", or, "Men [whom men shoot] in fact perform the action of shooting.")
As for further repetitions of "men" and "shoot," here's how I picture it:
1. Take the sentence, "Men shoot." Abbreviate this sentence as simply "A".
2. Then, "Men men shoot shoot" can be rewritten, "Men A shoot"; now, abbreviate this sentence as "B."
3. Then, "Men men men shoot shoot shoot" can be rewritten as, "Men B shoot"; and so on.
Again, in each case, the very last instance of shoot (but no earlier instance) will admit of interpretation as either imperative or indicative.
For what approaches a Monty Python skit, check out John McDowall's "interview" of Donald Davidson---a good clip of which is offered on Leiter's blog' Good cringe-worthy humor. Were they both high?
ReplyDeleteMichael
ReplyDeleteI'm not a linguist or grammarian either, or a philosopher of language etc, but, respectfully, I don't follow you here.
I don't see how you easily get from "men men shoot shoot" to "men, who are shot by men, shoot." You can't just imagine missing words in a sentence and then decide the sentence means X because you've mentally put in the missing words. At least not here, I don't think. You're also changing the tenses ("shot" or "are shot" vs. "shoot").
But I don't want to get into this at length. I shdnt have gotten into it in the first place. You're right that the slang meaning of "shoot" is not necessarily involved, but when I saw the four words "men men shoot shoot" that's the first thing that came to mind when I imagined someone saying those words. In an era when educated people speaking on TV or radio often seem unable to match up subjects and verbs, this seems a bit arcane and beside the point (whatever the point is).
P.s. even if you just insert the single word "whom," I don't know where the license, so to speak, to do that comes from.
ReplyDeleteI find it more interesting, at the moment, to follow Canadian politics. You're done? That's what Justin Trudeau is thinking, too. Or more broadly, I am intrigued at how the Left’s traditional bastions—the old socialist and Communist strongholds in France and America’s traditionally unionized blue-collar towns—swung massively to the populist Right.
ReplyDeleteOn my phone, so, apologies if this contains more typos than my last comment, but hopefully this helps -
ReplyDeleteI’m reading “Men men shoot shoot” as structurally akin to “Birds cats chase fly.” The latter (which is nonetheless grammatically correct) can be restated more clearly as “Birds, which cats chase, fly” - it doesn’t change the meaning at all, just removes the appearance of gibberish. Similarly with the rewrite of “Men men shoot shoot” to “Men, whom men shoot, shoot.”
Michael --
ReplyDeleteOk, I understand what you're doing now. Thank you for the explanation.
P.s. I'm acquainted slightly with a philosopher of language (a somewhat convoluted family connection). A month or two ago I read an interview w him online. It was very long, but on a quick read-through I found most of it completely incomprehensible. (Draw whatever moral seems appropriate.)
ReplyDeleteDanny, don't forget the "Red wall."
ReplyDeleteOn a serious note - the Biden admin is violating intl law by turning away all Venezuelans at the border: see a piece on this on the radio program The World this evening.
ReplyDeleteSo here is a joke that I like very much but never seem to find an opportunity to relate to anyone. So, I will use this venue to share it and get it out there. Here it is:
ReplyDeleteAn Associate Professor from one of those big midwestern sports dominated state universities publishes a book that causes a stir in a number of academic circles. Harvard University invites the professor to give a talk at the Harvard campus. The professor is thrilled by the invitation and readily accepts. Not only has he never been to Harvard -- he has never been to the East coast. Arriving at Logan Airport, he is met by a grad student who drives him to a posh hotel in Cambridge. Excited about the prospect of seeing the historic Harvard campus as well as Harvard Square, he begins to explore. He visits a few bookstores and grabs a coffee at a local coffee shop to experience the ambiance. After finding his way to Harvard's campus, he realizes that with all the distractions of the day, he had not visited a bathroom since leaving Logan. With impending urgency, he scans the vicinity for a possible restroom but to no avail. He notices a seemingly preoccupied elderly man walking towards him who exudes the appearance of a professor passing between classes. The midwestern professor approaches him and asks, "Pardon me, but could you please tell me where the restrooms are at?" The elderly man stops dead in his tracks, looks at the professor, and says, "Excuse me?" The midwestern professor responds, "Oh yes, just wondering if you could please tell me where the restrooms are at?" The elderly man looks him up and down with what can only be described as the most withering of withering looks. Finally, after a short pause, the elderly man states, with an air of authority and a good deal of disdain thrown in, "Here at Harvard, we do not complete our sentences with prepositions!" The midwestern professor is shocked by this response. Bowled over, really. But, without missing a beat, he replies, "Oh, I'm sorry -- I understand now. Let me rephrase: Can you please tell me where the restrooms are at, asshole?"
JIm,
ReplyDeleteRather humorous, rather humorous indeed, but I resent your making fun of an Associate Professor from the University of Michigan.
I didn't see the joke as making fun of the professor from the University of Michigan, but rather of the Harvard professor.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I have a high regard for the University of Michigan. My niece majored in French there and one of my best friends studied psychology there in the 60's.
s. wallerstein, did you have to ruin my joke? Actually, from the perspective of the Harvard alumni who read and comment on this blog, the Associate Professor from a sports dominated Midwestern state university is still an uncouth rube.
ReplyDeleteSorry to ruin your joke, Marc, but I felt a need to put in a good word for the University of Michigan and similar schools. I detest Ivy League snobbery.
ReplyDeleteI have seen Jim's joke before. It's only mildly amusing (bc a bit hard (though not impossible) to imagine it actually happening).
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the joke would be much better set at Yale. Everyone knows that the real snobs are in New Haven (and Princeton too, of course). ;)
What if, instead of the stuff about prepositions, the prof had replied: "Our mission here is to build character, so we don't have indoor plumbing."
ReplyDeleteLFC,
ReplyDeleteYour comment is, in my humble opinion, the funniest comment in this thread – yes, even funnier than my contributions and the exchange between s. wallerstein and myself.
I just learned a bit of trivia today reading a political potboiler by Dan Brown, titled “Deception Point.” I obtained the book for 50c at my local library and have been reading it for relief between reading and commenting on this blog, playing chess, reading “Mind And The World Order,” and researching and writing legal briefs on such fascinating topics as the doctrines of quantum meruit and unjust enrichment. Dan Brown is quite good at disclosing arcane historical tidbits like this. The book is about a U.S. President facing re-election and is opposed by a demagogue (sound familiar?). In one passage, the President is in the Oval Office makes a mental comment about the official seal that is embossed on the oval carpet in the office. As you all know, the official seal of the U.S. depicts a bald eagle holding olive branches in one talon (the right), and 13 arrows in its left talon. So, in which direction is the eagle’s head facing, left or right? According to Brown, during peace-time, the eagle’s head faces right, towards the olive branches. In war-time, it faces left, towards the arrows. Brown states that there are two carpets stored in the White House, which are interchanged depending on the war/peace status of the U.S.
So, I did some research to find out if Brown’s assertion is accurate. It is not. Actually, President Truman issued an Executive Order in 1945 changing the aspect of the eagle from facing left, in the direction of the arrows – which it faced during WW II - to facing right, in the direction of the olive branches. It has been that way ever since.
Now back to writing my brief on the doctrines of quantum meruit and unjust enrichment.
Thanks Marc.
ReplyDeleteNot to get serious, but that really was the mission of, say, Groton (where FDR and a bunch of other elite types went to prep school).
ReplyDeleteJust to explain my comments above about state universities and the ivy league, first of all, I take the point of view of the student, not that of research done, book written or papers published.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience, as a graduate of an ivy league university and as someone who, while not living in the United States for many years, is in contact with a certain number of people of my generation who went to ivy league schools and who went to state universities, if a student in a state university (admittedly, I don't anyone who attended a state university in one of the more "benighted" states such as Mississippi) does all the reading and pays attention in class (less important than doing the reading in my experience), he or she graduates with a general cultural level which is roughly comparable to that of a graduate from an ivy league institution.
The professors in the ivy league university I attended, while they may have published more prestitious works than the people in state universities, were generally not particularly good classroom teachers (I had better classroom teachers in high school) and thus, it was doing the reading and then reading a bit extra that constituted a real quality education at least in my experience.