Presently, The Skwib is vacated, so I am re-running a seasonally appropriate series of photography from Toulouse Le Grandfig. There may or may not be some jokes in there.
I’ll return next week, and at that point, I will start haunting your blogs (if you have them) if you have not voted for The Skwib at humor-blogs.com. How will I be able to know?
Mental powers.
We have a good one this week folks! Thanks to everyone for listening to my pleas and sending actual satire. Now, if we could get everyone represented below could link to the carnival as well, we’d really have something! (I will be paying attention.)
Satirepatch has a report that Marilyn Manson Is Going Country. Will this radical career shift work? The lyrics say it all:
I guess I was a little high.
I guess you are a little dead.
Sorry that I did some acid
And drove the John Deere over your head.
Allen in Fort Worth found this ancient sacred text while rummaging through a trash heap behind Al Gore’s ridiculously large Tennessee mansion : The Creation According To Saint Albert
In related news, Kevin Colby has learned the Government plans to mandate breathing mask to stop release of CO2.
Did you know peak oil is killing NASA too? The Free-Ass. Press has the story: Astronauts Hardest Hit By High Gas Prices.
lordsomber has this disturbing take on “lifestyle products”: Service, Commitment, Sacrifice: The SetUp™.
James Logan relates his adventure at the Californian DMV .
Madame X has this look at the publishing industry and a Sneak Peek at Future Book Projects .
Homework. Dinner. Life. is less than impressed with the manly art of grilling.
And in the one single, grudgingly allowed non-satire slot, Matthew Boyd reviews a satirical video game: Sailing away with “Harpooned.” Nicely finessed Matthew!
And that’s it for the 102nd edition. Thanks to these fine folks for helping us with webby-stuff: the Blog Carnival for their form; and the listings at the Ubercarnival, Ferdy’s permanent floating ping festival, and for the listings at the Blog Carnival too. Also, you may find some satire here if you poke around a bit. Here too. Thanks to the DogfromSpace for the pic.
Technorati tags: carnival of satire, satire, humor, humor.
Oh my freakin’ God, our brains are hard-wired to speak like Yoda.
For those of us in Western cultures who are familiar with the subject-verb-object construction of language (“I drink wine. ” “You swill gin.” “Undergrads chug beer.”) new research from the University of Chicago will blow your mind.
Susan Goldin-Meadow, a linguistic psychologist, and her team asked their subject to play charades, miming scenes on a computer screen.
As it turns out, this kind of non-verbal communication is constructed more like languages such as Turkish or Korean, which use the subject-object-verb construction. (“I wine drink.” “You gin swill.” “Undergrads beer regurgitate.”)
According to the New Scientist: “Goldin-Meadow argues that this kind of sentence syntax might therefore be etched into our brains. Languages that veer away from this form, such as English, must have been influenced by cultural forces.”
Incidentally, Goldin-Meadow and her team also discovered that we have an inherent loathing of mimes, and that all games of charades lead to the development of one of the players becoming a “charade Nazi” — forcing everyone else to continue playing until he gets one right. (Guilty.)
You charade Nazis will find at humor-blogs and alltop. You New Scientist story read here.
You probably get a lot of funny looks when you employ that adjective.
Some of the looks are from borderline homophobes, who believe that you’d have to be a little too effeminate to be interested in men’s clothing. You can ignore them and their loafer-lightening prejudices.
A large contingent will not know what you mean, or are your fellow-travelers: pseudo intellectuals who falsely believe that ‘sartorial’ has something to do with Jean Paul Satre, and his existential philosophy. The funny look you’re seeing from the them is a simulacrum of understanding, masking their confusion.
The last group will know that many people will not understand the word. They are looking at you strangely because they think you’re a pretentious wanker.
You will find an hirsute, out-of-work intergalactic overlord with questionable tastes in his own clothes among that latter crowd.
You will find nary a pretentious wanker here, nor even a simulacrum of one here.
This is an oldie, but I wanted to post something in honour of Canada Day tomorrow. Now if this insanity is not enough for you, you might want to check out the Carnival of the Insanities, or these collections of blogs, which are short a few pixels.
The Battle of WaterlooNapoleon Bonaparte is an iconic character, not only because he was short, wore a silly hat, and had enough pirate brothers to conquer most of Europe, but because he is the only person in history to meet his Waterloo actually at Waterloo. (The rest of us tend to meet it in boardrooms, law courts, amateur beard-growing competitions, and if you’re English, in Surrey.) Had Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo, civilization would be quite different. For starters, there wouldn’t be 2,050,000 results on Google for the term “French surrender” (there would only be 2,049,999.) Also, we would all eat a lot more snails.
But Napoleon did not win the battle. Later his opponent, the Duke of Wellington (also famed for rendering beef completely inedible and known as “Sally” to his friends), described the fighting as: “The nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,” which was Sally’s way of saying Napoleon almost won. To add insult to injury, Napoleon’s famed Imperial Guard — the closest thing the French Army had to crack assault pirates — ran away:
My pirate brothers and sisters include Captain Stanky and Rank Ol’ Pete.