The Occasional Joke


Nurse: Patient's name?

Centurion: Marcus Licinius Crassus

Nurse: And his date of birth?

Centurion: 115 BC.

Nurse: All right. And what is he here for?

Centurion: Cataphract surgery.


Saturday, October 15, 2011

Not a good week for Chinese technology

In this story, a two and half million dollar yacht sinks upon launch. Notice the high tech launching ramp, made of logs.

And here, a JH-7 craters at an air show.

Time to re-invade France

Serves 'em right.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Quotations of the week

From the 10/08 edition of New Scientist:

"Brain dead in one country but not in another"

"It's the job of us (sic) theorists to bash out all the possibilities, like monkeys on a typewriter"

"What was it like, sleeping like a chimpanzee?"



Connected by DROID on Verizon Wireless

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

The ghost of ic.net

One of Ann Arbor's old, original (not the original, but close) Internet Service Providers was ic.net. We were DSL customers of theirs for many years, but a bad acquisition by 2020comm.net ran them into the ground, and they eventually sold (or gave, for all I know) the broadband business to AT&T. There was the usual hell you'd expect in such a changeover, but we limped along with it for another year; finally gave up on the total unreliability and huge disparity in price/performance, and went with Comcast. After running side by side for a month, I just cancelled the DSL line. Guess what the customer service number is: 800-288-2020.

The healing can now begin.

My old stompin' grounds

I went to high school in Perry, but this is probably the most excitement they've had since I escaped graduated myself.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Unexpected consequences

"Tigers, Lions create jobs, boost sales for Ann Arbor restaurants"

Although you might not suspect it, having large carnivores roaming the Detroit area can be a boost for local economies. "After you've been bitten by, say, a lion," said an Ann Arbor restaurant owner who spoke on condition of anonymity, "a nice dinner out can be restorative."

The Department of Natural Resources issued a statement denying that Michigan had any populations of Tigers or Lions or Cougars or Woodchucks or Squirrels or Ants or Fruit Bats or ... (at this point, the spokesman for the DNR began to foam at the mouth and fell over backwards.)

A fundamental law

The law of conservation of idiots appears to be operating as theoretically proposed, as demonstrated by experiments carried out at the Large Idiot Collider, located near Geneva, in Switzerland.

"With several important idiots having vanished or 'decayed' from the GOP Presidential ticket, it was theoretically necessary for an equivalent mass of idiocy to enter the race in order to preserve the balance of both sides of the equation," said Dr. Itchy Verboten of the Max Planck institute. "With the announcement from Karen Bellino, it appears that the theory has been adequately demonstrated."

"We should see some stability resulting from this event, up to the point at which Newt Gingrich reaches his half-life. At that point, I would expect something easily detectable to occur, for example a third party bid by Ross Perot."

Anthony Weiner was not involved

2011 10 13: Update the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council speaks out!

And the article doesn't say if ketchup or mustard were. But someone flung a hot dog at Tiger Woods. "Just an idiot," said an official, but it was unclear who he was referring to, the sausage terrorist or Woods.

See this post, from many years back, on another public figure being assaulted with food.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Think back, now

A right-wing, socially-conservative pizza company president tries to influence national and international affairs, funds off-the-charts activism ... sound familiar to Ann Arbor people? What is it about the pizza business that attracts (or produces) people like Herman Cain and, yes, Tom Monaghan? I wonder if they've met.

By the way, Tom isn't resting on his laurels. He's decided to take another run at the bad-for-you food business, but this time with burgers. Could it be that he signed a non-compete in the pizza biz when he left Domino's?

Monaghan is 74 and says "... my doctor tells me I have the arteries of someone who is 55, ...” Who that unfortunate person was and how much his estate got paid was not reported.