Ricky JayThere has never been and will never be anyone like Ricky Jay. He was a polymath. He was erudite. He spoke in clipped tones, with words like “disapprobation”. He cited 15th-century poetry from memory, as part of his show. He cites George Bernard Shaw, “Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.”

He was the most brilliant playing-card prestidigitator the world has ever seen. He knew more about tricks and magicians and the history thereof than anyone else before or since.

Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants − Magic show (YouTube)

A large part... [More]

The article Study finds AI-generated meme captions funnier than human ones on average by Benj Edwards (Ars Technica) describes what it says on the tin. As several others confirmed in the comments, the memes all suck, whether generated by an AI, a human, or a combination.

Here is a sheet of the “winners.”

Top memes from study

They are uniformly terrible, at best confusing. Not one is funny.

For example, this is apparently a meme written by an actual human being.

“Threw something into the trash can.. Hit it first try.”

WTF. That is not even... [More]

I started my recent journey of Bill Burr videos with an interview on none other than NPR. Below the video are stream-of-consciousness notes in which I waver on Terry Gross but eventually admit that Burr badgered a decent interview out of her. I wouldn’t make a habit of listening to her interviews, though. It’s a testament to anti-intellectualism that she’s considered a leading light of liberal thought.

Bill Burr on NPR

Bill Burr (extended interview) by Fresh Air / Terry Gross (YouTube)

I love how Bill Burr runs the interview, in that he doesn’t let her... [More]

For its 50th anniversary, Saturday Night Live released its first episode, in full. It was initially aired in 1975. It was quite interesting to contrast the form and style with the SNL that we know today and that has been established for a couple of decades.

The biggest difference is that SNL started out with much shorter skits. They got to the point, delivered the punchline and…basta. They had a lot more skits; the host delivered several monologues; there were two musical guests and they... [More]

I was recently bragging to a friend about how I’d finally just about conquered a difficult jigsaw puzzle with methodology and techniques, My friend of course asked[1] to which methodologies and techniques I might be referring.

Background

I was raised on jigsaw puzzles. We always had a Christmas puzzle at my house. When I was much younger, we did them throughout the year. As I got older, we only had the Christmas puzzle, but we always had that one.[2] Everyone in my nuclear family did it: mom, dad,... [More]

There was recently a “favorite Far Side” topic in the comics sub-reddit. I’ve lost the link and don’t feel like searching for it. I downloaded all of the ones that I liked, so consider this article a distillation of—and vast improvement over—that post,

The Far Side was pretty formative for me. Most of these are subversion of expectations, but many have multiple layers, which makes you feel clever for figuring it out. I had a lot of the books and collections and read through them again and... [More]

The 2024 Year in Review (PornHub Insights) is available and has some fun facts.[1] For example, the U.S. had about the same percentage increase for “sneaky cheating” as the French did for “femme a lunette” (women with glasses). This blog post is 100% worth it just to learn terms like “milf culona” (big-ass MILF) in Spanish, which, together with “culo grande” (big ass) in Italian, set a sort of U.N.-like agreement about priorities for a lot of countries. Ukraine, though, wins with a trending search for “на... [More]

The comic Bizarre Adventures #34 [Newsstand] (Comics.Org) came out in 1981.[1] It would be the final issue of the Bizarre Adventures series but it was the first one I picked up. I was nine years old. I loved this comic. My best friend loved this comic. He still quotes it to me every once in a while, usually around the holiday season. It was nearly impossibly subversive. I am proud of my mom that she let me buy it, even though it literally says “Not for kiddies! We mean it!” right on the cover.

It’s really hard... [More]

KRAZAM makes videos about working in tech and, more specifically, about working in a tech team that has been scrummed out, with lots of layers of management.

This is one of the more recent ones.

Positive Affirmations for Site Reliability Engineers by KRAZAM (YouTube)

“Your friends and family understand what you do.”

“Your friends and family appreciate your humorous work stories…”

“DevOps is a meaningful term.”

“That joke you told in your meeting was funny! If your coworkers were not on mute, you would’ve heard them laughing.”

At the beginning, it shows that... [More]

Malta

Body suit. Naked-looking. Getting dragged around by a bunch of 90s-era-looking background dancers. This is just f*%ing awful. My ears hate me already. Jesus Christ, anyone who thinks this is good should reevaluate their life choices. This is how we’re starting off? No-one will notice when the robots take over. They’ve blindfolded her, flipped her around, they all threw their shorts off, now they’re porn-dancing. She’s got quite a Madonna-style tooth-gap going on. Good for her. There was... [More]

Cyprus

Dances way better than Dua Lipa. But, then, doesn’t everybody? She’s 17 and lip-synced in English. Her backup dancers all look like they go to high school with her. She’s very, very cute. Gorgeous, actually. And, for ESC very special: not in a porn-y way. Good for them.

Serbia

Alone on the stage. Goth-y. Low, slow song. She sang in what I assume was Serbian. She was barefoot. Utterly forgettable. We won’t have to hear her again.

Lithuania

Not English. Rappy. Boys got some backup... [More]

The article Try it and see by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse) discusses the graphic below, which is part of the “Cosmic Call”, a message to extraterrestrials.

Cosmic Call

The author says that he told his 11-year-old niece,

““I bet you could figure it out if you tried.” She didn’t believe me and she didn’t want to try. It seemed insurmountable.”

I sent this to a few people in my family.

Hint #1

After a little while, I provided some context. The Cosmic Call is:

“In 1999, two Canadian astrophysicists, Stéphane Dumas and Yvan Dutil,... [More]”

There are a ton of comedians that everyone talks about, like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and so on. I was talking to some friends in Switzerland who are very much into stand-up comedy and they asked for some suggestions.

We talked about a few comedians—Bill Hicks, Bill Burr, and Doug Stanhope—that they might want to try. They all have good insight into the human condition and don’t shy away from describing humanity as it actually is, rather than how we wish it were.

I started off more... [More]

Just a couple of quick notes. It’s the depths of winter and I’ve had some time off, so I’m playing with puzzles. I kind of like Wordle. I don’t play to win as quickly as possible. I like to throw unusual words at it, on the off chance that it will result in a lucky punch.

Bacon Wordle

I sent the picture above to a friend who also likes Wordle with the note:

“There are probably not a lot of people who unironically and eminently hopefully guess “capon” before they’re forced to remember that “bacon” would... [More]”

When a friend recently responded to messages of mine from nine days ago, I wrote back,

“Don’t sweat it. I just like to imagine that my messages arrive at Apple headquarters, whereupon they’re laboriously transcribed and illuminated by monks before being delivered to you by tortoise. The return trip takes equally long.”

Today was not a great day for the SBB.

I took three trains to get where I was going and each of them was 3-4 minutes late. The Swiss pack their schedules pretty tightly, so 4 minutes late at the end meant that the SBB had eaten up the two-minute buffer between the train’s arrival in Dietikon and the departure of the 301 bus I was meant to catch.

It was only a 1km walk, so no big deal, but it might have sucked more had it been raining even harder than it was—or had it been as windy as it has... [More]

The post What’s a picture of a celebrity that lives rent free in your mind? I’ll start…. by N_Ywasneverthesame (Reddit) gives us this image of Mads Mikkelsen.

A young Mads Mikkelsson

The foreground objects make this a bit of an odd photo, but he looks cool.

Bernadette Peters

I think this is from The Jerk. I was a big fan growing up. She’s hilarious.

Daniel Radcliffe with like 26 dogs

Big DILLIGAF energy.

Captain America Truckstop Hooker

This was an actual photo shoot that Chris Evans did. No-one should let him forget it.

Jude Law and Ewan McGregor

These two fools also did a photo shoot.

Keanu Reeves has always been dedicated to the craft

So did John Wick, way back in his Private Idaho days.... [More]

The YouTube recommendation algorithm is slowly starting to get better for me. For example, it showed me this video:

Yngwie Malmsteen − Live with Japanese Philharmonic Orchestra (YouTube)

Japan: where speed-metal virtuosity goes to dielive forever. I love watching an earnest and serious Japanese orchestra playing along with the music I grew up with.

It’s 2017, Yngwie’s gotten chubby, he looks maybe a bit ridiculous in all of his stretched leather, gold rings, and gold watch—but he sounds amazing. You can really hear how appropriate most of his compositions... [More]

What’s New in Unicode 15.1 & Emoji 15.1 by Keith Broni (Emojipedia)

'Family' Emojis

Am I the only one that thinks bad thoughts when he sees, for example, the third emoji in this list? I know that they think it’s a parent with a child, but does that not look like a gender-neutral blowjob to you? You won’t be able to unsee it, either. In fact, I can’t look at any of the four pictures and see “family”. Look at the second one! That’s two people “sharing”! How does the emoji committee not see this? Or maybe they do! Maybe they’re making... [More]

I was watching a video today—Everything Is Going to Be Fine: Preparing for the end of the world by Aeon Video (YouTube)—which featured the narrator and his wife in their apartment, shown below.

Twee Folk in Brooklyn?

This is actually what they look like—like caricatures made up by conservative “comedians” making fun of hipsters. I know we shouldn’t make fun of people’s appearance—lord knows I have no idea what I’m doing—but this was just too good to pass up.

He has a pen in his pocket. What is that?

It was only later that I... [More]

I was chatting with a friend about mistranslations and “false friends” (words that sound like a word in another language, but have a completely different meaning).

He sent me a link to Slowly down the feathers floated… (Imgur), an image without context. Still, in the image, you could see that a menu item on a Chinese menu had been translated to “Fuck the duck until exploded”, which is humorous, but only on a pretty superficial level, if we’re being honest. Using the word “fuck” without seeming to... [More]

So there’s a new game called Wordiply that I took for a test drive.

The rules are that you start with a sequence of letters. Your job is to think of the five longest words that you can, that include those letters, in that order. That’s it.

I did the warmup and then took a crack at today’s puzzle. Booyah:

🅦🅞🅡🅓🄸🄿🄻🅈 #33
🌟 Length Score: 100%
💫 Rare long word found!
🚀 Letter Score: 76
🔗 Play Wordiply: https://www.wordiply.com
🎬 Today’s starter:... [More]

I just finished my first jigsaw puzzle in more than 2½ years.

A von Ballmoos Christmas tradition is to put together a jigsaw puzzle. The putting-together of it borders on obsession and we stay up ridiculously late, straining our eyes in the dim winter light and ignoring the telephone.

I got started a bit late this year, but still managed to strain my eyes and go to sleep very, very late.

2023: NY Public Library

This one started off relatively straightforward, but the final ¼ or so was... [More]

I was telling a friend about the article How To Be on Time in Estonia by Alex Bellos (Atlas Obscura) and its accompanying solution (PDF).

“[…] in Estonian, a “quarter past the hour” is instead described as “a quarter of an hour on the way to the next hour,” “half past the hour” is described as “half an hour on the way to the next hour,” and “three quarters past the hour” is described as “three quarters of an hour on the way to the next hour.””

Our conversation was as follows:

Me: Estonians say “one... [More]

The following are examples of alliterative sentences from What are sentences called where all the words start with the same letter?

• She Sells Sea Shells by the Sea Shore
• Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers
• The Baker Betty Botter Bought some Butter, But she said “this Butter is Bitter, Bitter Butter is Bad for Batter.”

I looked with nearly exactly the query in the link title after I’d written the following doodle in my notes:

“Which witch will win well when witches wend ways... [More]”

The video One of the most effective ads to air in TV history (Twitter) is of a child misbehaving in a grocery store, with the father looking on in horror as the child escalates a desire to get what it wants into a full-blown tantrum involving destruction of property. The boy yells “je veux les bon-bons”[1] a couple of times, then goes apeshit.

Je veux les bonbons (YouTube)

The fun police showed up almost immediately and settled in to the top of the comment thread.

Kathryn Sucks

Corey Sucks, too

JFC, shut the f#%k up, Kathryn and Corey. It’s a joke. Relax.

It’s... [More]

A friend of mine recommended a book he’d read called The Plot. I didn’t really know what it was about, but his recommendation was enough for me to add it to my list and check it out when it became available.

Pretty soon after I saw the following collection of books at the bottom of my page at the public library.

Recommendations after 'The Plot'

Reckless Hearts, Five Dares, and Love in Play looked quite a bit more overtly racy than I’d expected. I was starting to wonder what he’d recommended. Maybe he was just messing with... [More]

So, Dave Levitan tweeted,

“Someone please tell me if I’m wrong, but I have the impression that the best climate models and projections didn’t really have “all the rivers are gonna dry up, like now-ish” in there”

The Rhine, the Yangtze, the Po by aprettyp (Reddit) is a screenshot of the tweet. The top response by whoareyoutoquestion is wholly informative,

“Except they did and do. “Unprecedented droughts” and “Increased cyclic extremes of weather” are two common things in climate change caused by global warming.... [More]”

Another game that rides on the coattails of Wordle a bit is a game called Worldle. Just like Wordle, you get six guesses. Unlike Wordle, it shows you a country or a territory somewhere on the planet and then tells you how far off you are as well as the direction in which you should go to find the real territory or country. Sometimes, it throws a real curveball, like Christmas Island or French Southern Territories.

Almost all of the “hole-in-ones” are due to my partner, who’s just amazing at... [More]

The article Restaurants Now Requiring Proof Of Ukraine Support (Babylon Bee) shows a sign outside a restaurant that reads,

“Notice: Proof of Ukraine Support Required

“Patrons must show proof of Ukraine support to enter this restaurant. Please have your social media profiles open and a photo ID ready. Thank you for helping us defeat the Russian menace.”

Just be clear—because the world has largely lost its sense of humor and sense of irony—The Babylon Bee is a satirical newspaper.