flemmings | Entries tagged with humour

A weirdness in the Heart Sutra set to music video. You get to the bit about

No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind;

in whatever language it is-- Chinese? Japanese? 'cause they're going from the hanzi/ kanji, and the subtitles follow it with No cookouts. Doubtless cookouts are as lacking in form as anything else, but still sad.

The word should actually be colour. One suspects an auto-fill glitch.

Because I live under a rock I never heard Somebody That I Used to Know until that dance vid came around to tumblr. I am now earwormed by multiple repeats and intend to stay earwormed because otherwise I'll have I Am Your Mother, You Listen to Me instead. Loblaws has it on their mix tape or whatever they use nowadays, along with Made You Look and Flowers, and if I needed another reason to boycott Roblaws, that's it. But it has a Starbucks and Starbucks has cold brew which no one but Ninetails will have until the summer, and Ninetails has nowhere to sit because the Apple Core are there with their damnable laptops all. day. long.

Also Ninetails has financiers and I have no resistance to mini poundcakes. Starbux has egg white and English muffins, and I can resist their cakes just fine thanks because they list the calorie count.

All the sulky lions (all the sulky lions)
All the sulky lions (all the sulky lions)

Bref,

ladyofastolat went to Venice and reveals that the Renaissance was as bad at depicting lions as they were at depicting babies.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/813559.html

Originally posted by

jabberworks at my pool

I ought to do more pool comics, there's so much material.

swimming pool

MJJ comment: Note the *obvious* sex of the egg-beaters.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/804208.html

Banded dark clouds above the black-turning trees. Without saying 'pathetic fallacy', the weather at least suits the universal mood. Oh, and lightning. Let's shut down the computer and take off to the AC.

With one cheerful parting note:
http://xkcd.com/1704/

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/796362.html

Via

oursin comes news of a trend for super manly book clubs. A comment whereto led me to the twitter hashtag #ManlyBookClubNames. Belittle Women. Girl Interrupted, Again. Love in the Time of "Call her? Nah." And much bitterness- 'the western canon', 'my high school syllabus'.

Good times, good times.

(I can see the need for an all-male book club if you want to read the likes of Henry Miller et al. My own book club had a bitter evening over Tarr by Wyndham Lewis. I seem to recall that none of the men thought the rape scene was a rape scene.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/784279.html

Though the Grauniad's cat pics have it all over the Beeb's, by me.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/749027.html

Autumn is yellow this year but no less stunning for that. Last year was pale and washed-out; the year before, Sandy took down all the leaves and turned them into pulp. But even Friday's downpour (poor trick-or-treaters) couldn't strip all the maples in the neighbourhood, so now we have the lovely Tokyo/ Lothlórien effect of a carpet of yellow under a canopy of the same colour. Does lovely things with the light effects, especially in the December-cold sun and blue skies of today.

Also: Your sushi has a cat on it, your argument is invalid.

Up: Acrobatic medieval babies. I like this more than I should.

Down: raccoon poo on my flat roof below the study window. Brother vows swift vengeance once they return from the cottage; I put more faith in chili flakes. As we alas know from work, once raccoons start using your roof as a toilet, they don't stop. On the plus paw, they don't live where they poo. On the pluser paw, my roof vents are at least theoretically safe from their intrusions, for which I suppose I must thank the good-luck bad-luck? intrusive squirrels.
( Will my sadness ever come to an end? )

So The Guardian has a think-piece- rather idiotic IMHO- about Jonathan the 182 year old tortoise of St Helena. And cites Derrida analysing "the bizarre feeling of shame and nakedness he feels when he comes out of the shower and is confronted by his cat." As someone says, "Wow, that is some neurosis". Other comments that made me LOL quite literally:

-The cat isn't naked. It's dressed in its own fur. The human feels, presumably, "fur envy". (I think Freud missed that bit.)

Reply: Was Fur Elise Beethoven's cat?

(Must buy Beethovan's Wig's CD and its take off on same.)

-We've become soft, effete urbanites. The next fashion will be to start weeping for withered plants.

(reply) "Beverley Nichols was in tears - one of his daffodils left home!" (Norman Evans in "Over The Garden Wall")

(me: nobody reads Beverley Nichols these days, and a good thing too)

Gender-switched Hobbit, with much fun as the comments segue off to Lord of the Powertools: "Do not read the instruction booklet aloud! For it is written in the Black Andecker Speech..."

Got this from

lnhammer who cites his subject lines, as ever- 'from "As Hermes once took to his feathers light," John Keats.' I, one-eyed and blurry, saw that as 'As Holmes once took to his feathers light' and wish it had been.

ETA: LJ seems to be doing its occasional trick of not showing lj users' names after the tag, at least not on my outdated browser. That's lnhammer.

And here

dreamer_easy provides a nice parallel to the Japanese ability to suss out other people's rank so as to be able to talk to them.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/607604.html

marrael makes up names for non-existent rocks:

Klodstite: The crystal that helps you lose weight.
Goflykite: The crystal that tells other people to buzz off.
Traphiklite: The crystal you carry for safe travels.
Holmetite: The crystal for safety and security.
Isntrite: The crystal useful for proofreaders and fact checkers. Caution: Makes all minor errors jump out at you. ;)

Can be followed at #madeupcrystals on twitter if you do that sort of thing.

The Christie St. Baptist Church a block away from me has a new sign. (A new English sign: the Korean one remains as it was.) This is a good thing. The old sign had capital letters all the same size and spacing problems. Calling yourself the Christiest Baptist Church is unCanadianly vainglorious, and likely to peeve other Baptists.

Have with relief cancelled finger surgery next week. The blob on the right index finger is unsightly, but I can't face four days of full-time work-plus on no anti-inflammatories. Last time I did this I was five pounds lighter, and still limped dismally up and down stairs for that week.

Have often tried to precise the yellow-brown-gold colour that leaves go in November. The names that occurred to me (umber, burnt sienna, old gold) are all belied by wikipedia (unless my monitor's colours are off.) But one shade seems to hit it right on the head: turmeric.

tumblr is nearly as unfriendly (and irritating- don't forget irritating) a social media form as Facebook, but I shall post this anyway:

Undergraduate History Illustrated: real exam bloopers, now happily Photoshopped for your viewing pleasure.

Oh LJ, stay as useful as you are. Deleted my cookies in an attempt to get Facebook to behave. Had to re-log-in to a buncha websites including LJ. Promptly comes an email from them, which I quote with copy pasta exactitude:

We noticed that someone logged in to your LiveJournal account from a new device or location. Detailed information about this login:

Country: [country]
Internet service provider: [ISP]
IP address: [ip]

This in spite of multiple log-ins from this, my home computer.

Tell me again about this brave new world that hath such devices in it?

(Also WTF AVG? You spend fifteen minutes a day updating, to the great loss of data in whatever I have open, but now your pop-up wants me to-- wait for it-- update?)

Reading Aaronovitch's past entries, I come across this filk. "I was once again contemplating the problem of pushy minor characters and how they can encrust the bottom of your narrative like barnacles"
( And here is the solution )

When translations go bad

And here is the original Catullus 3 for those who haven't got it memorized. (Full disclosure- I only know the 'qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum' bit, because of the Hamlet echoes.)

This shaggy pun story. Along with 'when it's past your bedtime'. (When do cows go to sleep?)
( Meanwhile, the zombie apocalypse )

Whoever altered this sign is my kind of person. Extracted from underground guerilla signs in the tube.

Meanwhile in the 'don't know whether or laugh or cry dep't, a novel about steampunk Japan misses the mark to hit fanboi lows.
( Cut for same )

Here we go. Make your own Shakespearian insults. For all your hi-falutin' cussin' needs.

Oh dear. Another time sink. Retronaut, that allows me to revisit the 60s and then be sorry I did. Though the pics of 60s London is exactly what I saw as a child there.

Found courtesy of

sovay, who links Soviet Accident Prevention Posters with occasional HK Subtitle Factory translations. Accidents at the dinner table: 'Be careful with a spud', 'Be careful with forks' etc. And if anyone knows what an arbor is, I might be interested in hearing it. (Note for the squeamish: just colour drawings, but with occasional limbs caught in machinery.)
( Nature imitating art )

So here are the lyrics to O Fortuna:( Under the cut )
And here are two instances of misheard lyrics to O Fortuna:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIwrgAnx6Q8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scCTty3KDLk

And even with the lyrics in front of me, half the time I still hear the mondegreens. (The other half I think 'Reaching a bit, aren't we?')

Yesterday's dream was some wonderful Miyazaki film about a boy and his huge plume-tailed wolf in the lush and teeming grasslands of their world, who had to rescue the same region in an alternate world that had become, well, southern California scrubland, basically. Last night was a mishmash that contained a not bad apartment I was subletting/ sharing with my old friend M back when he was M (diffident, considerate, bookish) and not the academic who drank himself to death two years ago. Living areas divided by curtains, shaded courtyard and outside stairs somehow filched from University College here. Featured also M's blond feckless roommate, some small child from work, and an Indian friend who said the original sublease hadn't run out so he was still entitled to share with M even though there was no space. All influenced by beginning Unseen Academicals before bed and the achey flu-like whatever that I currently suffer from.
( February reading )

OK, had to be done-- Green Eggs and Wasteland. "The Homeric epithet Sam-I-Am is closely paralleled by the “I AM” of the burning bush (Exodus 27:16; take exit V2.03 – bear left on off ramp)."

Though seriously, it ought to have been
Frisch weht der Wind der Heimat zu:
Mein Cindy Lou Who, wo weilest du?

ETA: and the comments are wonderful too:

We are the Hollandaise men,
we are the stuffed men
eating together
a green omelet filled with ham. Gevalt!

Hermione is a swot and a sneke.

The ever informative FFL tells me that James Joyce's works are now public domain.* This will not be pretty. Given the antics of Joycean otaku over the decades, I shall revel in the inevitable travesties. Mind, I've nothing against Joyce as a writer. (Person is another matter. Do hold on to those private papers, Whoever, and keep them firmly unpublished.) I liked Ulysses, though the chameleon nature of time may have turned it into an unreadable mass, rather as it seems to have done with At Swim-Two-Birds. "Please please don't ever make me have to reread this."

Meanwhile however Nick Mamatas & friends grab the ball and run with it. I'm especially taken with

nick_kaufman's The Dead, with Zombies.

*Should I be worried about the creeping dyslexia that turns "...EU copyright law was harmonised to bring it into line with German practice and the period was extended to 70 years" into "hamstrung to bring it into line with German practice"?
( Cut for December reading )

Goodnight Moon.

In Queer Theory, the bunny’s final admonishment—"goodnight noises everywhere"—represents his full on embrace of a heteronormative lifestyle and a rejection of his "deviant" thoughts, probably about the kittens with the mittens.

mjj note: This is a grave misreading of the text. The kittens and the mittens have a purely juxtapositional relationship to each other. The kittens do not own the mittens, nor vice versa.

(Thanks to

stanking for the FB heads up.)

Looking for pics of the ROM Excrescence, I came across the famous list of the world's 10 ugliest buildings (with better pictures, is why china daily.) (Now half of that is missing. Oh well-- here's the original page.)

The crawling babies on the Zizkov Television Tower weren't there originally. "The tower was built without the sculptures in Prague between 1985 and 1992. Even without the alien babies it’d be strange looking. David Cerny’s sculptures was added in 2000 as a temporary installation but the public loved them so much that they were kept for good."

Also they have no faces. I love them too.

Virtual Tourist's first list is here, but finding decent pics is difficult. But wiki has an article on eyesores that's useful.

More happily, a thread of famous titles with one letter missing. I go for the groaners:

Anima Farm: A group of young Jungians meet to cultivate the female side of their psyche.

Mostly Hamless: A Muslim cookbook

Tora: First book in a trilogy covering the attack on Pearl Harbour, and the subsequent involvement of the United States of America in the Second World War.

The Koan: The greatest Zen allegory of all time, as revealed to the Prophet Mohammed by Allah the most wise and compassionate.

The Holy Bile : See what God created in seven days.

The Brie of Frankenstein: In which someone steals the monster's cheese.

Prometheus Bond: Greek mythology/007 slash fiction.

By now most people have heard about Orson Scott Card's latest descent into madness, the rewritten Hamlet. Unfunny business takes him on, and delights my Hamlet-loving soul with 'Versions of Hamlet that get the point better than Hamlet's Father': including the historical yakuza Japanese musical with the catchy 'To be or not to be' show stopper. 'Mata mata mata mata mondai da.'

(Runner up- the Animaniacs with translation by Dot. I would add the kids in Masked Detective who rewrite Hamlet as a murder mystery involving half a dozen other Shakespearian characters, but I'd have to roust out my volumes to remember who dunnit in the end.)

This is not a happy day, except for the rain, so have something /laughably/ horrible instead: a meatloaf molded like a baby with a bacon diaper. You want this for

zia_narratora's riff on Cat Steven's Moon Shadow down in the comments (and if you follow that link you don't have to see the extremely disturbing Meat Baby at all):

I'M BEING FOLLOWED BY A MEAT BABY
MEAT BABY, MEAT BABY

AND IF I EVER LOSE MY LEGS
SHIT ITS EYES ARE MADE OF EGGS
AND IF I EVER LOSE MY LEGS
I WON'T BE ABLE TO RUN FROM MEAT BABY NO MORE

There's even more where that came from.

Dorothy Parker wrote book reviews. They were lovely lovely book reviews. "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." "It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario." "You see? And she can go on like that for hours. Can, hell-- does."

If you were wondering if there's anything to this reincarnation thing, go read

rushthatspeaks's review of 300, the ~~manga~~ ~~comic~~ BD graphic novel (because why use one word when two will do? *We* are not laconic) and be reassured.

[here is where I snip a seventy-five page digression on Greek marriage customs and social constructions of sexuality, just go read the Davidson, you can pick it up from the floor where it bounced off Frank Miller's head].
( Cut for real if anecdotal Greeks )

Passover seder, meet Eddi's Service.

...one year, when we opened the door for Elijah, the old neighborhood tomcat (who looked a lot like that photo, minus the yarmulke) strolled right in. We would have thrown him out on any other day, but he got to stay for dinner that night because he was apparently Elijah.

After Damn You Auto Correct, we have Google voice mails.

When Google transcribes voicemails, it doesn't always get it right. This is a collection of its attempts to transcribe readings of the Percy Shelley poem 'Ozymandias'.

You know the one- 'I met a traveller from an antique land/ Who said, Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert; near them, on the sand' etc etc. Which inspires such lovely things as:

I love traveling from in San Diego and who's that, tool that and from flagstone, and in the desert.
Yes, I'm on the Sand, has found I shacker this inside most out.

Am not a James Joyce fan, have no desire to read Finnegan's Wake, but love things that sound like Joyce wrote them. So I also love the name of the blog- My Name is All Day Monday.

Someone cruelly got my hopes up by declaring that the Etruscan god of wine was called Flufluns. Sadly, the rest of the internet seems to think it's Fufluns, which is still pretty cool. "Little godling Fufluns running through the vineyards, picking up the wine jars and bopping them on his head." A further list of Etruscan gods'n'heroes makes fascinating reading. Not Indo-European no, not by a long shot. Achvizr, Achuvesr, Achuvizr, Achviztr, 'or something that sounds like that.'

"Thetlvmth-- Unknown deity of the Piacenza Liver, which is not a picture bilingual." Fantasy writers never give us people with names like Thetlvmth, Culsans, Malavisch, Tuntle, Veiove, or Mlacuch. I wonder why not?

Oh, and did you know that the word catamite is Ganymede run through the Babelfish of Etruscan? Me neither. The Etruscan version is Catmite, which is something else these days, usually involving mineral oil and cotton balls.

I'm a fan of off English, whether intended (John Lennon) or not (the Hong Kong subtitle factory.) Or this spam, as reported by John Crowley.

Don't know Russian so can't guess if that's the original language, but I thought I detected some French idiotismes in there.

There is now, in my mouth...

this sharp chain.

And it never comes out.

(Hallelujah. LJ's fonts are back to normal, and I may continue to waste time in other people's journals. Especially metaquotes.)

This.

This morning she woke up at 6:00 and negotiated just one reading of Goodnight Moon before going back to sleep. ... I got to the end of the litany of things in the great green room, which reads, "And a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush, and a quiet old lady who was whispering 'hush'" . . .

. . . and as I finished saying "old lady who was whispering," up from my shoulder drifted a tiny sleepy voice saying, "'Get offa my lawn.'"

( Cut for the whole text in case I need it some day )

The Exersaucer at work (which is a thing you put babies into who can't quite stand yet) has an attachment that plays Für Elise when pulled. The babies pull it, of course. Thus I hate Für Elise. Thus I link Für Elise arranged for loon, two owls, cat, and wood stork. (Inserts Oxford comma into that title.)

Is all.

Don't know how people feel about having their ljs linked, so I quote instead, from someone taking a course in Chinese history and loving it: ( Cut for voices from another generation )

Sesame Street's Grover talks about the word 'on'

Youtube, not embedded because it doesn't seem to have an on button but plays when you click.
( Cut for provenance )

Ganked from

baka_neko:

Sleeping baby in fantasy settings

Skates perilously close to the Anne Geddes kimoi but avoids it because, well, real baby, basically.

Yes, yes, I am not alone. (Ganked from Hyperbole and a half's Social Entrapment post. Except that living in Japan taught me that 'Hot today' 'Yes it's hot' 'Yeah, it's really hot' 'It's hotter than last year' 'Yes, definitely hotter than last year' 'Well see you' 'Take care, bye' is a perfectly rational and permissable conversation.

But anent #4-is-it? I do have the fantasy of friends I can just drop in on and hang out at their place, no problem. But anybody wanting to come hang at my place? Forgeddid. I'm *busy*. So why would my putative friends not be busy too? Well, going by next door, there are people who spend their home time sitting in the kitchen doing crostic crosswords and drinking coffee and chatting with their SOs, so having another person hanging about the kitchen doesn't change things much. Maybe that's another facet of coupledom.

Ganked from

i_am_zan:

Maru's blog

Check out the Maru hoihoi (if you don't know what a gokiburi hoihoi is, count yourself lucky. It's a Japanese cockroach motel.) Also fat cat in blue bowl. Also staaaarving cat lying for weeeeks next to empty bowl unable to move from hunger and weakness and the last stages of food deprivation...

The breed is identical the world over.

I won't detail the train of thought that led me to google my old friend Bill from Japanese class and Japan, only that it involved the location of a kissa that must be in Tobu Nerima except I can't think where (and Streetview as ever fails to enlighten.) I discover that Bill was in town all this last year, teaching at the UofT until the end of March; and is now presumably back to teaching in Tokyo. While here he put on a dramatic performance with his daughter, last seen by me as the toddler who poked her finger through all their shouji. Tempus fugit indeed.
( Cut for ETA anecdotage )

The true adventures of Beekledog!

Hm. Other People's rules for writing.

To which I have only one, very Torontonian, thing to say:

Trust Margaret Atwood never to have heard of pencil sharpeners.

The Song of the Four Locusts!

Have you said in your heart
'My companion is lost forever?'
Yesterday I saw her!
Her heart is still (directed) towards you.
And she commanded me to declare:

She loves you.
Is this not a good thing?
Surely, she loves you.
Therefore you should rejoice!

Third prize winner. Me, I'd rejoice more if they'd just coded the Hebrew (I assume it's Hebrew) and not used a .gif. Granted, the cuneiform ones *need* .gifs...

I play online solitaire. Besetting sin. (Hereditary besetting sin. My grandfather and my mother and my aunt and my younger brother were/ are all solitaire fiends. The online part that means you never have to shuffle a deck is just a godsend.) There are ads, of course, including fund-raising ones for memorial Olympic coffee mugs.

Can't get over the blurb that goes 'Roll over to support our teams!'

Anent my previous post,

xsmoonshine provides another point of view.

There is no hope for me. I'm happy, not because there's Avengers fic, but because there's a writer called Caroline Miniscule.

(Mh. Must donate to wikipedia.)

And 31_days is taking its January themes from the essays of John Locke. Geekly academic, how I love it.

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