Comedy – Page 10 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Sorry but not sorry

I liked this, from the Megan Mullally character in Will & Grace (latest series, episode 6, beginning of):

“Sorry I’m late, but I got here as soon as I wanted to.”

At their frequent best, American sitcoms keep on nailing down these universal feelings about the world and its various demands, yet in a way that you never heard before. It’s like they show you the world, but with perfect subtitles attached, explaining everything. My sense is that a gag like that one is proposed by one person, and then talked through by a huge team of gagsters at a big table for about half a day until it is polished and refined down to its pure and perfectly funny essence. (Either that, or some bloke just thought of it, just like that.)

In general, I really like American sitcoms, because, in addition to being funny, they are another world, but another world where they speak an almost identical language to mine.

In English, and also in American it would seem, sorry is definitely the hardest word.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Cheetaroo

This Friday’s Other Creature is this:

Found it here. Thank you Clarissa for telling me about this.

It’s all in connection with Australian Ball Tampering.

My favourite factual discovery re this rumpus: Cricket Australia has a Head of Integrity. Reminds me of this guy.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Islam can’t be made nice

Says Armin Navabi:

The only way to reform Islam is to get rid of Islam.

A short video, lasting just over two minutes. Navabi is right, provided by “reform” we mean “make nice”. That verbal quibble aside, agreed.

There are many nice people who want to remain nice but also to remain Muslim. Can’t be done. Islam demands nastiness from its followers, and there’s no way round that, only out of it.

The current Western governmental view of Islam is: resist the bad stuff, appease the good stuff. But the only good stuff in Islam is good people trying to be good but being told not to be good by Islam. Islam itself is the enemy.

The way to defeat Islam is to persuade a large number of its current adherents to stop being its adherents. That will put Islam on the defensive, both ideologically and physically. Muslims will be put in the position of trying to explain that Islam is nice. They will fail, but will then look weak, because they will have abandoned their strongest weapon, which is the fact that Islam demands nastiness. And the Muslims will thus lose. There will still be many “Muslims”, so-called, in the world, but the ones who really believe in it will become a beleaguered minority, constantly betrayed to their enemies by other “Muslims” who are trying to prove, to the world and to other Muslims who are thinking of leaving Islam, how nice they are, despite going through all the motions of saying that they still believe nasty things.

In other anti-Islamic news, Dawkins notes a stirring of atheism in the Islamic world. I hope, and more and more think, that this is right, and very good news. The more I learn about this man, more I admire him, even though I mostly don’t agree with him on domestic political issues.

If you are now, still, a Muslim, stop it.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Wartime Encryption for Pigeons

As a Blackadder fan, I have long known about the use of pigeons during World War 1, to send messages. Pigeons like the one in this photo:

Twitter caption:

War Pigeons were very effectively deployed in the First World War. For instance, they carried messages, like the one being attached to a pigeon by Austro-Hungarian soldiers on the Isonzo Front, which can be seen in this picture.

Quite so. But what made me decide to post the above photo here was this exchange, in the comments.

“Liagson”:

Were they normally encrypted?

Wayne Meyer:

They used WEP. Wartime Encryption for Pigeons. It was a very early wireless standard.

Blog and learn. Not only did I just discover that pigeon messages were – of course, they’d have to have been – encrypted. I also learned that you can link directly to individual Twitter comments.

And what better way could there to learn about the activities of birds than via Twitter?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

But are we any happier?

A tweet reminded me about this wonderful rant from Louis CK:

That’s the version of it, with dots inserted by him, that Steven Pinker quotes in his new book about the Enlightenment.

Pinker is concerned to explain why increasing affluence doesn’t seem to make everyone ecstatically happy. Deidre McCloskey, in her Bourgeois trilogy, is fond of talking about how the Great Enrichment has made regular people as of now nearly three thousand percent richer. So, why aren’t we three thousand percent happier? Because we don’t seem to be.

Lots of reasons. First, you are happy not according to your absolute level of affluence, but rather according to how affluent you get to be and how meaningful your life gets to be compared to what you were expecting, and compared to how well everyone else seems to be doing, because that tells you how well you could reasonably have expected to do yourself. You may well have been raised to expect quite a lot. Second, although technology hurtles along, for most this hurtling is both pleasing and rather unsettling, the less of the former and the more of the latter as time goes by. We don’t experience, in our one little life, how much better things like Twitter are than is looking after cows, out of doors, all year round, with not enough food or heating. What we experience, as we get older, is how confusing things like Twitter are, or alternatively, if we ignore something like Twitter, how demoralising it is that it has defeated us and denied us its benefits. Or how tedious air travel is, compared to what we’d hoped for rather than compared to a horse drawn wagon in a desert. Yes, I live three thousand percent better than that wretched cowherd three hundred years ago, and if a time machine took away my life and gave me his life, I’d be three thousand percent more miserable. But that’s not the same as me being three thousand percent happier than he was. Happier, yes, definitely. But not by that much.

It’s because we don’t feel that much happier that Louis CK has to rant, to remind us of how lucky we are. And that Steven Pinker has to write his book, to make the same point.

But what if progress continues to hurtle forwards? What if someone reads this posting, centuries from now, and he says: Good grief, those Twenty First Centurions were very easily satisfied. Five hours to get from New York to California?

It must have been hell.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A twentieth century bank robber gets a nagging from the cashier he is robbing

I still get cheques through the post, and then I insert these cheques into my bank account by going physically to my local physical branch of my unlocal bank and by handing the cheques over to a cashier. My bank, however, doesn’t like this. Just like Tesco, they want me to do the work. In Tesco’s case they now demand that I become my own check-out person and operate their computers for them. So, it’s Sainsbury’s and Waitrose for me, from now on. Bye bye Tesco. In the bank’s case, they want me to do their work for them while I sit at home. But, I like the exercise. In the huge bank queue, I get to read a book concentratedly, because there is nothing else to do. Good.

All of which is a preamble to the fact that when I came across this, I LedOL:

“Are you aware that you can now do all of this online?”

Genius. K. J. Lamb, well done.

One of the many techniques they use to put you off actually going to the physical local branch of your Big Bank is to keep changing the people behind the bars. And these total strangers are constantly, and insultingly, asking you to prove that you are who you are. Well, madam, I’ve been banking with your bank for the last half century. Who the hell are you? Please could you give me proof that you actually do work here?

Someone should make a movie about a twenty first century bank robbery, where the robbers, who are disgruntled ex-employees of the Big Bank that owns the bank branch they bust into, bust into the bank branch, overpower the witless bunch of newbies who happen to be running the place that day, and park them all in a back room for the day with tape over their months, and then the robbers run the bank all day long, while one of their number hacks into the mainframe computer of the Big Bank that owns everything, and sucks all the money out of it. The point is: none of the customers who visit the branch while all this is happening would find it in the slightest bit odd to be confronted by a bunch of total strangers. That would ring no alarm bells at all, because this happens all the time.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

But they didn’t mean this thing to look like a penis

You wait nearly thirteen years at BMdotcom for a giant penis photo, and then, out of the blue, two come along. That one, in the post before last yesterday, and this one:

Crikey, blimey, etc.. Or as we Brits also used to say: Well I’m blowed.

Fox News, so also “other creatures”.

You Had One Job calls this an “unfortunate helicopter shot”. But I bet the photoer could hardly believe his extreme good fortune.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Penis park

Here:

The best comment I can think of is another photo, one of the many that I took in the Churchill Dungeon, this one being an item for sale in the gift shop:

I love words. I sometimes I fail to think of the right ones, but they never fail me. It just that I am sometimes not worthy of them.

But I found some good ones this time, I think.