“When I die, I’m leaving my body to science fiction.”–Steven Wright
Steven Wright. Would science take this?
When I die, I’m just leaving. Happy paraprosdokian spring.
Cosmic Quote #37
April 1, 2014 by 7 Comments
Funny Names Thursday : A Special Investigative Report
January 9, 2014 by Leave a Comment
Being vain, I don’t usually reblog anything that is not by me or about me. But in this case, I’m making an exception. Brilliant investigative reporting here by my fellow Blog of Funny Names correspondent, Arto.
And now for something completely different. Here is a special report filed by our European Field Agent Portnoy Macademia. Enjoy.
In a nondescript office building in central Lausanne, Switzerland, there is a global registry of unusual names. A man named Herland Howitzer is the curator, sole customer service representative and by unfortunate necessity, janitor. He is essentially the registry embodied, the only employee aside from a nice old woman from Missouri by the name of Janet who has the job of sitting at a desk, holding open a very large book and smiling nicely to you when you ask about this or that name, before ringing a small bell that brings Herland over to actually talk to you.
The reasons behind the Registry’s founding remain shrouded in mystery. Herland has worked here “more than several decades”, he tells me, and so did the curator/janitor before him. He has a…
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2013 Funny Names In Review: Introducing the Horsey Awards!
December 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Another guest post on the Blog of Funny Names. Check out the first annual Outerbridge Horsey Awards!
“I don’t deserve this award. But then I have arthritis and I don’t deserve that, either.”–Jack Benny
Oscars…Emmys…Tonys…Pulitzers…who cares? There is a new accolade that every up-and-coming celebrity can now aspire to, over and above anything else out there.
Welcome to the first annual Outerbridge Horsey Awards, given to the best of the funny names honored herein during the previous 12-months. Yes, not to be outdone by the actors, journalists, broadcasters and pig farmers of the world, we can be just as self serving as any of them. Here are the inaugural winners of the Horseys; they are sure to be the envy of the galaxy, if not the entire universe. (Note: if you don’t know who Outerbridge Horsey is, you haven’t been paying attention to this blog. Shame on you.)
To imbue a Hollywood-like aura to this affair (and please be wearing a tuxedo or evening gown…
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Cosmic Quote #30
October 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment
“In my next life, I want to live backwards: start out dead ….and finish as an orgasm.”–Woody Allen
I just had to put up another Woody quote after my last post. Can you just imagine what Benjamin Button would have been like if Woody filmed it (or wrote it originally!).
OK, enough distraction; conjecture #5 is coming next. I promise.
Equations of Everday Life #1.1: Smartphone Distraction Update
September 11, 2013 by 9 Comments
“What’s the killer app? Making a phone call.”–Steve Jobs
“I only have dummy phones.”–Don Rickles
With the announcement of the new iPhone models 5S and 5C its time to revisit, with slight modification, the original post of this series. Appropriately enough, I now use an app on my iPhone for tracking my bicycle treks. So now I have distracted cycling to go along with distracted everything else. To paraphrase Don Rickles, we only have dummies with phones. Present company? No comment. For the original version of this post, click here.
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THE ALGORITHM OF SMART PHONE DISTRACTION
Don’t be deceived. It is far more complicated than it looks. Where attention to the outside world in the absence of a smart phone (Aa)equals 1, then attention to the outside world in the presence of a smartphone (As) is approximately equal to the inverse of the number of cool apps on said smartphone (n) times the I-Phone or equivalent model number (m). Yes, approximately equal to—because nothing is that precise in the quantum mechanical world of electronics, and anyway I like using that smart looking squiggly thingy over the equal sign. Taking the example of my own I-Phone 4, I have 14 apps I would describe as being “cool.” As 14 x 4 is 56, then when I am packing my phone, my attention level to the outside world is an astonishingly small 1/56th of normal. This is dangerous. As I’m reputed to be a major space shot to begin with, I should probably be banned from breathing and texting at the same time. But that calculation can wait for another day, as even the basics get much more complicated.
What will happen if I upgrade to the new I-Phone 5s and add the pernicious feature known as Siri?
It gets ugly in a hurry. The equation now looks like this:
Yikes! We now have to square the denominator and in the personal example stated above, my attention level would be 1/702of my normally spaced out self. This computes to 1/4900.
I don’t know if the Planck length applies to this, but a few more apps and new models and my attention level will certainly approach it. Also note that the “s” on the right side of the equation stands for Siri and has no numerical value. It just makes the equation appear more complex and disguises my general ignorance of advanced mathematics. Anyway, this demonstrates why I don’t yet have Siri. If I did, I would have proposed to her long ago and been off to Vegas for a quickie divorce from my wife by now. Ah, for the days when the internet was still in black and white.
Endnote: The addition of the new model 5C creates a conundrum. How should we calculate for that, and for that matter, what’s the difference? Well, C apparently stands for cheap, and that’s as in construction, not price. Any suggestions how to compute that?
Google This! Search Term Haiku #3
August 24, 2013 by 17 Comments
“The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”–Gilbert K. Chesterton
While poems about cheese may be few and far between, there is no shortage of cheesy poetry, especially on the web. Far be it for me to not to jump on that band wagon. So, until some cheese-related phrases start turning up in my search terms, I’ll have to settle for cheesy. You, like the chickens at left, are more than free to ignore me. The rules, once again, for search term haiku, are as follows:
- Every phrase must come from search terms actually used to find this blog, per my WordPress stats page.
- The poems must follow the accepted Anglicized format of the traditional Japanese art form: three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables respectively.
- Each line must constitute an actual individual search term phrase, verbatim. The only changes allowed are punctuation and truncation. (Phrases may be taken from within search terms).
- Words may not be changed or rearranged. Typos and misspellings must not be corrected.
- Phrases may be combined or extended to multiple lines, as long as the previous four conditions are met.
When you are done ignoring the haiku below, you can ignore more of them here. These were a bit harder to construct, folks. Cheesy search term haiku requires cheesy search terms queries; get out there and throw me some Gouda.
Tacky Education
Vinyl lettering
education wallpaper
of Mark Twain quotes
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Three Course Meal
Dog swallowed brillo,
a veterinarian
and Schrödinger’s Cat
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Meow vs. Woof
How to count like cat?
My schipperke is clever
physics equation.
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Existential Stench
I am alone in
Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub blog
with Pepe Le Pou*
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Equation #2
Real life example
of Lindsay Lohan cup size
celebrity meme.
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*SIC
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The Sackler Laws #4: The Law of Political Activism
July 6, 2013 by 12 Comments
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, things are not going to get better. They’re not.”–Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
“If god had not intended us to eat sugar, he wouldn’t have invented dentists.”–Ralph Nader
Note: In general, I have avoided the controversies of religion and politics in this blog, though there have been hints at my views on both. This post tiptoes dangerously towards the precipice of both, though it clearly points no finger at any specific political or religious viewpoint. I’m bound to get flamed, anyway.
For the fourth and final** installment of the Sackler Laws, I bring you Law #4: The Law of Political Activism. This is not to be mistaken for Law #1, The Law of Bumper Sticker Activism. On the other hand, maybe it should be. Both have to do with taking a good thing too far. It is simply stated:
First class activists remain forever activists. Second class activists run for office.
The greatest first class activists of all time, if you look at it carefully, rarely if ever ran for office. Think Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Susan B. Anthony. Yes, it’s true that great activists for freedom such as Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa ultimately became president of the entities their activism wrought; but they were effectively drafted by popular acclaim that arose from the ultimate success of their leadership, they did not attempt to become politicians.
As a primary example of the type of second class activist I present to validate this law, I give you two words.
Ralph Nader.
Here is a guy who pissed off half the country–mostly the corporate world and the Republican right–with decades of pain-in-their-asses activism and left-wing proselytizing. Then he ran for president on a 3rd party line and pissed off most of the other half of the country. His siphoning of votes from the left in 2000 almost certainly enabled the election of the candidate most diametrically opposed to his beliefs. Not satisfied with having made the world, as he saw it, worse, he ran again in 2004 just to thumb his nose at those that might have otherwise been his ally.
That’s about all there is to that. The only one thankful to him, other than a few diehard loyalists, is me, if only because he gave me the best real world validation I’ve ever had for this aphorism.
But the question then arises. If we know what a second class activist looks like, what does a third class activist look like. That one’s even easier.
Robertson
Sharpton
And you were wondering how I would manage to piss off the religious nuts as well? If you want inspiration for political activism, the Dr. Seuss quote above is a good place to start. If you want religious inspiration–you’ve come to the wrong place.
**Nothing is final except death and…well, except death. This will only be the final installment of the Sackler laws if I die before thinking up another one.
Cosmic Quote #25
June 21, 2013 by 6 Comments
“Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.”–Casey Stengel
If the ‘ol professor Stengel was right–and who am I to argue with him–one can surmise that Alex Rodriguez and his .132 post season batting average have spent the last three Octobers in the Bronx pulling all-nighters.** I guess it pays off, as in getting Cameron Diaz to feed you popcorn at the Super Bowl (see video). On the other hand, Derek Jeter seems to have a much better batting average than his controversial teammate, both with runners in scoring position and with women in scoring position. He seems to performs well, both on the field and with the ladies, at all times. Yet according to one article that appeared on the net couple of years ago, he was just 6 for 100 during the previous season. That is, he has dated 6 of Maxim Magazine’s hottest 100 women in the world. That’s a batting average most guys would love to have. Eat your heart out, A-Rod. Thanks to my friend Dave Carlson at The Blog of Funny Names for the nifty work of art below.
**I quantify A-Rod’s futility in clutch situations in the next Equations of Everyday life, now in post production.
Summer Rerun: Equations of Everyday Life #2, Inane Celebrity Memes
June 10, 2013 by 8 Comments
“I enjoy watching reruns of Saturday Night Live and counting all the dead people.”–George Carlin
Hey, I need that!
Ah, summer. I’m not actually on vacation, but my neurons are. Here then, forthwith, is a rebroadcast of my post that was Freshly Pressed on WordPress last September. I’m still getting Google hits on this one, though we might have to call it Slightly Stale Pressed now.
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September 23, 2012
“You’re not famous until my mother has heard of you”–Jay Leno
(Jay Leno graduated from Emerson College the same year I did. Aren’t you unimpressed?)
Lindsay Lohan…Paris Hilton…Charlie Sheen…you just gotta follow these people to be “with it” in this day and age. What I can’t figure out is exactly what “it” is. The nonsense involving these silly (do I dare say ridiculous?) excuses for humanity, and the speed with which their inane meme virality propagates throughout the internet and general mediasphere is stultifying.
How do we quantify this vacuous tripe? Quite obviously with:
The Index of Inane Celebrity Meme Virality
Get out your calculators folks, though the math on this one may require something more like a Cray supercomputer. This process requires not one step, but three.
- Rate the inanity
- Compute the Virality Index
- Classify the virality using the Virality Classification Scale
Rating Inanity
This part is for those of you who—like many politicians—prefer fuzzy math. In order to compute the virality of an inane celebrity meme, you first need to give it an inanity rating. This, however, does not compute. You need to estimate it by a process that could be seen as similar to the way we old folks were taught to compute square roots in days before electronic calculators. You sort of have to zero in on it—surround it, using a combination of whatever logic or intuition works for you.
Using a scale of 0 to 1.0, we rate the inanity based on how unusual, how cable newsworthy and, of course, how inane it appears to be. Using the Lindsay Lohan example, let’s rate some real and imagined events.
Lindsay Lohan gets up in the morning and brushes her teeth (or not). Probable rating=0 (probable rating because, again, there is some subjectivity here).
Lindsay Lohan gets busted for another probation violation. Approximate rating=0.5 (This is fairly commonplace but due to media culpability still maintains some newsworthiness. Also, the specific story behind the arrest may result in some adjustment up or down; the next item demonstrates this.)
Charlie Sheen stubs his toe on the curb of 34th Street in NYC, stumbles into oncoming traffic causing Lindsay Lohan to swerve her speeding Porsche through a display window at Macy’s, decapitating several mannequins, skidding across the retail floor and then crashing through a sidewall into a back room where she runs over Paris Hilton who was in the act of giving her boyfriend a you-know-what. Absolute rating of 1.0. This theory does not permit a rating higher than 1.0, but we’ll give this one a 1.0 with a star, meaning it also generates spontaneous orgasms in Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and every Fox News and CNN anchor past, present and future. (Note that while coverage on Comedy Central will actually lampoon the coverage by the other networks, this will add even greater fuel to the viral fire than serious reporting).
Computing the Virality Index
Here comes the fun.
ξ = Φ(F+T)(µ-110)
Symbol key
ξ =Virality Index I chose that squiggly symbol because I think it looks like Kate Middleton mooning the paparazzi.
Φ =Inanity rating Aren’t those Greek thingies cool? This one is iota, as in “I don’t give one iota of a hoot about these nitwits”.
F= number of “friends” or “likes” on celebrity’s Facebook page
T= number of Twitter followers of the celebrity There is a reason they call it TWITter.
µ =the median IQ of the set whose members are F+T. For the uninitiated µ is the scientific symbol for micro. How appropriate. (Can’t you just imagine those two sentences being uttered by Dr. Sheldon Cooper?)
To sum it up:
The virality index is the inanity rating multiplied by the combined number of Twitter and Facebook followers multiplied by what I call the vacuity index (median IQ of all followers minus 110).
Classify the Virality
For any chance at virality, the final Index number MUST be negative. This works perfectly fine for most of the personalities discussed above. If we are talking about Stephen Hawking, however, there is a better chance of finding virality in the singularity at the center of a black hole.
The classifications of virality are as follows
If ξ ≤ -100,000 minimally contagious
If ξ ≤ -500,000 highly contagious
If ξ ≤ -1 million immutably viral
If ξ ≤ -10 million globally pandemic
If ξ ≤ -100 million worthy of hours of uninterrupted coverage on CNN and FOX News.
Still to be determined is the threshold at which Geraldo Rivera coverage kicks in.
So if we compute the Charlie Sheen meme virality index for the automobile accident scenario hypothesized above, we multiply the inanity index of 1 times the combined number of his Twitter and Facebook followers (roughly 10.5 million, don’t worry about being exact, this is fuzzy math) times the vacuity index. We will estimate the latter for Sheehan as (100-110)= -10. This may be generous but 100, after all, is the definition of median IQ. This yields a score of -105 million. If you compute and add to this the scores for Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan who were also involved in the scuffle, the Index plunges much lower. The New York Post would be sure to issue a special edition.
This leaves one unanswered question, however. We now know how to compute the manner in which these viral memes are turned on. But what determines how they are turned off? As you would expect, I have the answer which I call the medialogical constant. I will discuss this in the next Equations of Everyday Life post, which may or may not be published within your lifetime.
Images credit: Meme Center All other material in this post ©2012 Mark Sackler
Cosmic Quote #24
June 4, 2013 by 12 Comments
“The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways. But he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers.”–Scott Adams
The most sublime way to say “100.” So what if its only worth $0.02?
Well, whomever he she or it is, he she or it must love this post–#100 in the short and illustrious history of The Millennium Conjectures.™ Now if only we counted like computer code, in base 2(binary) this would be post #1,100,100 which looks way more impressive. Then again, every other post would be on a round number and #100 would have come just a couple of weeks into this gig. The moral of this story–if any of my stories ever had one? Don’t get too crazy over round numbers, and be glad we don’t have 17 fingers.
The Millennium Conjectures™ 