Humor

It's good to hope

/ 26 Comments

From Rate Your Students, via Ernie’s 3D Pancakes:

My classes are large, so I mostly use multiple-choice tests. One day, being one question short of a nice round number, I used this question: “The answer to this question is D. Be sure to mark D on your answer sheet.” The offered choices were: (A) This is the wrong answer. (B) This is the wrong answer. (C) This is the wrong answer. (D) This is the correct answer. Be sure to mark it on your answer sheet. (E) This is the wrong answer.

About 20% of the students got it wrong. One possibility is that they couldn’t read any English. Another is that they didn’t care. But one student had the courage to admit that he always marked B for every answer (true, that’s what he did) in hopes that all the answers were B.

One wonders how these students would have performed on Jim Harrick Jr.’s basketball exam?

It's good to hope Read More »

26 Comments

Bad news continues to mount for administration

/ 14 Comments

GREENBELT, Maryland (AP) — Bad news continued to accumulate for the Bush administration today, when senior government officials revealed that someday the Sun will go out and the world will end. Despite attempts to classify this sensitive information, whistleblowers at NASA confirm that our planet’s star does, indeed, have only a finite amount of hydrogen with which to produce energy via nuclear fusion.

Evidence of this scandal came to light only slowly, after investigation of comet dust around a white dwarf star far from our solar system.

“We are seeing the ghost of a star that was once a lot like our sun,” said Marc Kuchner of the Goddard Space Flight Center. In a statement that was edited out of the final news release he went on to say, “I cringed when I saw the data because it probably reflects the grim but very distant future of our own planets and solar system.”

This alarming prognosis was quickly suppressed by officials. Senior sources insist that, in a post-9/11 climate, it is the government’s duty to reassure the public of the stability and security of heavenly objects.

An e-mail message from Erica Hupp at NASA headquarters to the authors of the original release at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said, “NASA is not in the habit of frightening the public with doom and gloom scenarios.”

The Bush administration and its allies in Congress have recently been buffetted by a series of setbacks, including the absence of WMD’s in Iraq, the continuing failure to capture Osama bin Laden, a ballooning budget deficit, increasing anti-Americanism abroad, corruption scandals that have forced Tom DeLay to step down as House Majority Leader, an unworkable Medicare prescription-drug plan, fallout from the disastrously inept response to hurricane Katrina, continuing investigations into the outing of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and Vice-President Cheney’s habit of shooting his friends in the face with a shotgun. These troubles were recently compounded by revelations that NASA had been moving to expunge any mention of troublesome scientific facts from its public presentations. Officials insisted that political considerations played no role in the dying-Sun scandal.

Dean Acosta, NASA’s deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, said the editing of Dr. Kuchner’s comments was part of the normal “give and take” involved in producing a press release. “There was not one political person involved at all,” he said.

A high-ranking White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, insisted that the finite nature of the Sun’s fuel had first become known during the Clinton administration, although apparently no action had been taken to deal with the problem.

Bad news continues to mount for administration Read More »

14 Comments

Is this a date?

/ 40 Comments

Question of the day: Highly-credentialed academics vs. nervous high-school students — is there a difference? The forums at the Chronicle of Higher Education erupt with excited controversy over whether coffee with a colleague is an innocent intellectual meeting, or rife with illicit romantic subtext. (I think it’s available to non-subscribers; let me know if not.)

Is this a date?
Author: Coffee drinker
Date: 01-18-06 11:32

I have been having great discussions with a man that is interested in the same research of which I am involved. After a flurry of emails, I (innocently, really!) suggested that we get together for coffee, which we are doing tomorrow. Today, I received an email from him telling me to “have a great day.” Nothing else in the email, just that sentiment. Is it possible that this man thinks that “coffee” is a euphemism for ______?

Full disclosure: We are both married.

Confession: He’s attractive.

I’m feeling a little panicky right now.

Men! They are so inscrutable sometimes. Who knows what this cryptic email is supposed to mean? The Chronicle’s readers bravely wade in.

Re: Is this a date?
Author: Prytania
Date: 01-18-06 11:38

It’s possibly innocent and possibly not–depending on how coffee goes. You know the answer to this.

Re: Is this a date?
Author: single gal
Date: 01-18-06 12:11

Yup–everything you described to me sounds EXACTLY like a date–the “have a nice day” e-mail is just the kind of thing men send when they are interested in you. It’s textbook.

I was happy for you up till the final part of the e-mail! Get out now.

just coffee
Author: missing Europe
Date: 01-18-06 12:52

Why can’t you people just go for coffee with someone who is pleasant company? What’s the problem?

What a wet blanket is this “missing Europe” person. Sure, it could just be coffee, but what fun is that?

Is it possible?
Author: brewhaha
Date: 01-18-06 12:54

I’ve been thinking of starting a new topic on a closely related question — IS IT POSSIBLE for people who share peculiar scholarly interests to work together closely without feeling turned on by each other’s company?

By “turn on” I don’t mean necessarily that sexual involvement is inevitable. Hardly. But I’ve noticed of late that a lot of people seem to have intellectual crushes on each other. I’m no exception. I’m wondering if it’s just human nature, then, that spending such time together with a member of the preferred sex makes romantic attraction (of whatever degree) inevitable.

I’m in Coffee Drinker’s shoes constantly — where the male colleague starts showing signs of extra-scholastic interest. For the most part, I keep my husband up to date on these developments and he has so far found them to be exceedingly amusing (maybe it makes him feel more macho that his wife is considered attractive by other men). I’ve also discussed this with a close friend/male colleague who has a similar problem — he says it’s because we both look people in the eye more than others (Americans) do, and so normal humans perceive it as flirting behavior, even though it’s not intended as such.

Coffee Drinker, tread carefully. A few months ago, I had a very bad experience with a senior colleague who apparently thought something was going on between us because of the awesome intellectual rapport of our conversations. (That I shared with my husband a blow-by-blow of each and every conversation didn’t make a difference).

I suppose the question we should try to answer is: WHAT CAN WE SAY OR DO, IN A NON-THREATENING COLLEGIAL WAY, TO NIP THIS IN THE BUD — that is, without coming across as mental (or vainglorious).

Whoa! “brewhaha” ups the ante, suggesting that it’s impossible for colleagues who share intellectual interests to work together without getting turned on. (For the record: brewhaha is not right. It’s perfectly possible to work with members of various genders without getting all distracted. But let’s run with it a bit.)

Re: Is this a date?
Author: ExPat in UK
Date: 01-18-06 13:46

Coffee drinker wrote:

> Today, I
> received an email from him telling me to “have a great day.”
> Nothing else in the email, just that sentiment. Is it possible
> that this man thinks that “coffee” is a euphemism for ______?

I’m totally confused… just where and when has ‘have a great day’ turned into ‘I want to suck your toes’

Finally, someone had the courage to put all of our thoughts into concrete imagery. Thanks for that, ExPat.

Re: Is this a date?
Author: single guy
Date: 01-18-06 14:16

“Yup–everything you described to me sounds EXACTLY like a date–the “have a nice day” e-mail is just the kind of thing men send when they are interested in you. It’s textbook.”

“single gal” knows men! she’s right–men don’t email women wishing them a good day if they have no interest. plus, you invited him for coffee–to a man (and we’re notoriously bad at reading signals) this says “ding, ding, ding, she likes me (in some way.)”

I so don’t believe that “single guy” is a single guy. Regardless, there is some truth there. It’s not so much that men are bad at reading signals — they just read them whether they are there or not.

Re: What?
Author: Varying degrees
Date: 01-18-06 14:47

It’s kinda fun to have these innocent meetings and conversations with the sexual tension bubbling beneath the surface. It’s a bit naughty while being completely innocent. The forbidden fruit is tempting. It’s nice to look at it, hold it, smell it, squeeze it, but oh no, I don’t dare taste it…oh but it would be so delicious. Alas, I cannot….

Well, we should stop here, as this is a family-friendly blog. There’s much more. Suffice it to say that “Coffee drinker,” while perhaps confused, hasn’t lost all perspective.

Re: What?
Author: Coffee drinker
Date: 01-18-06 14:49

Prytania wrote:

>
> She’s totally titillated by this experience but has no one to
> share it with for the obvious reasons.
>
> You know you are, OP. No judgements here.

Yeah, well, maybe. But not enough to shave my legs before I meet him.

Is this a date? Read More »

40 Comments

Like this!

/ 2 Comments

You know who I would not want on my baseball team? A. J. Pierzynski.

Google the phrase clubhouse cancer and the first two results will be stories about Chicago White Sox catcher A. J. Pierzynski. Teammates and members of the media use those words and others—unprofessional, immature, arrogant, aloof—to describe him. His baseball misdemeanors are legion: chirping at the opposition, bitterly contesting balls and strikes (very stupid for a catcher, who must win goodwill for his pitcher), and venting his frustrations on opposing first basemen. “He doesn’t have a lot of baseball etiquette,” says one ex-teammate. “He’ll deliberately step on your foot at first base, then say, ‘Man, I didn’t mean to do that!'”

The most telling of the many, many (seriously, you wouldn’t believe how willing people were to talk about this guy) Pierzynski anecdotes we heard took place during spring training in 2004. Pierzynski, crouched behind the plate, took a pitch to the groin. Rushing to his aid, trainer Stan Conte asked him how he felt. “Like this!” Pierzynski grunted, then savagely kneed Conte in the balls.

“You just want to choke him,” says the ex-teammate, who has also played against him. “You want your pitcher to hit him in the head.”

Via Gapers Block.

Like this! Read More »

2 Comments

First they came for the liberals wearing T-shirts…

/ 2 Comments

We all know that, especially under the current administration, Republicans are a mite touchy when it comes to T-shirts, those notorious vehicles of seditious speech. Cindy Sheehan, as you may have heard, got bounced from her seat at the State of the Union (as a guest of Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey) for wearing such a T-shirt. Glenn Greenwald respectfully comments.

But alas, the problem with thought police is that they can get somewhat overly enthusiastic, and it can be really hard to tell which thoughts are supposed to be policed. So poor Beverly Young, wife of Republican Congressman C.W. Bill Young, also got bounced from the SOTU for wearing a T-shirt. (Via Shakespeare’s Sister.) Hers read “Support the Troops – Defending Our Freedom.”

Young said she was sitting in the gallery’s front row, about six seats from first lady Laura Bush, when she was approached by someone from the Capitol Police or sergeant-at-arms office who told her she needed to leave the gallery.

She reluctantly agreed but argued with several officers in the hallway outside the House chamber.

“They said I was protesting,” she said in a telephone interview late Tuesday. “I said, “Read my shirt, it is not a protest.’ They said, “We consider that a protest.’ I said, “Then you are an idiot.”‘

She said she was so angry that “I got real colorful with them.”

You see what all this postmodernism and irony has done? It’s become wicked difficult to tell the difference between old-fashioned support and subversive protest. Better to be rigorously fair, and stomp out all T-shirt-based speech acts.

Freedom is on the march!

Update: The Capitol Police have dropped the charges they had filed against Sheehan, and are now apologizing to both Sheehan and Young. Turns out that wearing T-shirts with slogans during the State of the Union is not, in fact, against the law! Who knew?

First they came for the liberals wearing T-shirts… Read More »

2 Comments

Perspective

/ 6 Comments

Political humor is always a tricky business; taking a strong stand tends to annoy more than half of your potential audience rather than make them laugh, while wishy-washy moderation just isn’t that funny. This post at Joe’s Dartblog pops open the hood on an editorial cartoon and looks inside, showing something we don’t usually get to see: three cartoons about a single topic, by the same artist, taking three different ideological perspectives (left, moderate, right). Even though I love political humor when it’s insightful and agrees with my predelictions, this exercise actually highlights the rhetorical limitations of the medium. A joke isn’t an argument, and the techniques of humor can be much more directly employed to bolster opinions that people already have than to make them see things in a new way. (Via the Volokh Conspiracy.)

Perspective Read More »

6 Comments

Word crisis

/ 31 Comments

Forget about Peak Oil, here’s the real looming crisis: we’re running out of new words. Do you realize how hard it is, in our hyperactive age, to come up with a word that hasn’t already been invented for some purpose or another? Surely we’ve all had the experience of mistyping a word into Google and nevertheless hitting a handful of results. So as a little experiment, I made up some strings of letters that sounded like they could be words, checked in the dictionary that none of them actually exists as a conventional English word, and asked Google to go look for them. Here’s how many hits I got.

  • antrith (865)
  • splicky (230)
  • queigh (43)
  • nurdle (885)
  • tobnet (53)

“Splicky” is a pretty sweet-sounding word, actually; I’ll have to start dropping it into conversation. Admittedly, most non-words appear on Google as abbreviations or computer terms or simple nonsense, and furthermore it’s not that hard to invent random strings that don’t get any hits. Still, I’m worried. If Shakespeare were alive today, I’m pretty sure he’d feel that Google was cramping his style, coinage-wise.

Word crisis Read More »

31 Comments

Quick hits

/ 12 Comments

Two quick things noticed on Cynical-C.

First, very much up the old Cosmic Variance alley, a list of the Ten Most Beautiful Physics Experiments ever. I have a funny feeling we’ve linked to it before, but it’s worth a visit. I would have voted for Archimedes taking a bath over Galileo dropping balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which after all probably never happened. (He did, however, amuse himself during sermons at the next-door cathedral by using his pulse to time the chandelier swinging overhead, thereby discovering that the period of a pendulum is independent of its amplitude.)

Our fan base will verify that we here at CV are utterly beholden to the dictates of political correctness, so this other link is somewhat outside our normal fare: but it is perhaps the best blonde joke ever.

Quick hits Read More »

12 Comments

New media

/ 4 Comments

Insight into contemporary culture, passed along by Josh at the American Sector.

Sunday morning, 8:30 am. Kitchen table.

Undercaffinated groggy blogger reading newspaper: “hrumph..”
Cheerful ten year old with endless energy: “Can I see the coupons and advertisements from the paper?”
UCGBRN: “Why?”
CTYOWEE: “I don’t know… I just want to see what’s going on in the world.”

New media Read More »

4 Comments

Friggin' scientists

Continuing the Cosmic Variance/Dinosaur Comics synergy: T. Rex contemplates multiple universes.

Dinosaur comics

I’m pretty sure that T. Rex would have eventually gotten around to explaining eternal inflation and the landscape, if only that downer Utahraptor hadn’t been such a buzzkill. Maybe we should get Ryan North as a guest blogger?

Except that: there are plenty of borderline-plausible theories that we haven’t yet put forward. We’re working on that.

Friggin' scientists Read More »

Scroll to Top