North Korea has announced that, effective from today, they will no longer forge US dollars. They described the dollar as a useless piece of shit and had spent many laborious years perfecting their copying techniques, only to find that it was costing them more to produce fake dollars than they were worth. They will now switch their attentions to the Euro, the currency of choice for the mafia, the IRA, and Eastern European drug lords alike. Kim Jong-il was contemplating one last splurge with the $500 million left in his bank account. He wasn’t sure whether to buy two bottles of bourbon or that nice hat he saw in Macy’s last spring…
Ten Inventions the World Really Needs
February 20, 2008 at 5:31 pm (humour, inventions, Science)
- The Carrot-Stick. A very large, genetically-modified carrot with a tough exterior capable of throttling someone, but delicious when cooked.
- Taser-phone: combined mobile phone and taser. If someone steals your phone, you just need to dial it, enter a special password, and electrocute the thief.
- Take away meals with built-in heat pads. Pull the cord and heat the meal on the move.
- Wheels that go sideways on cars, for those tricky parking jobs.
- Laser analyser that detects corked wine while it is still in the bottle.
- Invisibility shields: for avoiding those awkward moments with people you’d prefer didn’t see you
- Self-cleaning and self-ironing clothes
- Cows that can milk each other
- Eggs that produce white-only or yellow-only bits. Saves all that waste when you only need one or the other
- Little nano-robots that clean your teeth while you sleep
Spot the odd one out
February 20, 2008 at 12:24 am (humour)
- If every Mars bar ever eaten was lined up, they would stretch from here to Mars.
- If everybody in China inhaled simultaneously, it would cause a tornado to develop over Texas.
- An area the size of Belguim is covered in dog poo every year in the world.
- Scratching burns calories faster than walking does. Scratching your arse takes up even more.
- In France, every child drinks, on average, 380 litres of wine per year. Totalled up, it is bigger than Lake Erie in Canada.
- A disease afflicting vines has been called “Black Goo” by experts.
- Avro Part stole his best melodies from migrating blue whales and got the Icelandic government to kill them when they threatened to sue.
- A special court in India has been set up to arbitrate disputes between monkey tribes.
- If you suck boiled sweets too hard you can damage your brain.
- Lingustic analysis of ancient written scripts has indicated that the first written words were probably “Dear John”.
Answer Below:
Resolutions worth making…
January 3, 2008 at 12:41 pm (humour)
It’s that time of year again: when we choose a list of resolutions that aim to improve our lives, once and for all. Invariably, they end up confirming our innate resistance to change. Worry no more! Here are my top 5 resolutions for the year 2008 (or 2009 or 2010…it doesn’t matter) that will end up succeeding and make me feel better!!
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I resolve to fail at completing at least one of my new year’s resolutions. (Note: if I keep them all, then I fail at this one, hence I kept it. It’s a paradox, so be careful to not be driving the car when you ponder it…)
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I resolve to get pissed at least once this year (Let’s start with the easy ones!)
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I resolve to stay in more and avoid walking, cycling, or unnecessarily straining my body.
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I resolve to get severely annoyed at one of the following this year: organised religion, politicians, the M50 motorway, advertising, or spam.
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I resolve to completely forget about these resolutions by February.
There. I feel better already. No more impossible resolutions. As Homer says: “It’s not the taking part that counts, it’s drinking the beer afterwards.”
Announcement of a Scientific Breakthrough
December 11, 2007 at 3:39 pm (humour)
The use of computer screens has led to the increasing prevalence of eye-strain, sore necks, dry skin, the emission of dangerous fumes, the inordinate use of power, and other social problems. But rescue is at hand – thanks to a revolutionary new discovery being developed by a high-tech startup in Silicon Valley.
According to Tom Harpur, CEO of the Pulpdo company, “We envisage a situation where people will use small, hand-held devices to make marks on a revolutionary new material. These marks will be called ‘writing’ and the material we will call ‘paper’”.
Jeremy Bloom, the chief of technology at Pulpdo, told us: “The ‘paper’ will consist of extremely thin, flexible, white material made from natural resources. We’re currently experimenting with fermented yak’s stomach linings, but there are promising materials we haven’t tried yet, such as the dried skins of the willow spider. Producing commerical quantities of such substances remains an issue, but we’re confident we can overcome them.”
We questioned him about the concept of a ‘pen’ too. “We have many promising possibilities. We’ve worked out a working prototype.” was all he would tell us. While Mr. Bloom was silent on the precise details of the pen prototype, insiders told us it was over nine feet wide and took four men to carry. All he was able to say was: “We have plans to reduce that size to a workable model soon”. As for the substance that will produce the marks, he could only tell us that it was subject to investigations: “Right now we’re confident that the blood of some exotic octopus species look promising…”
But some analysts remain sceptical. Says Sarah-Ann Dunne of KPMG Consultants, “Quite aside from the technical problems of producing paper and pens, we just cannot see people being able to use these devices without many years of expensive education. They cannot compete with the computer-screens’ friendly glow and simple click-and-go interface.”
Other sceptics point to the human propensity for simplicity. “I cannot see how attempting to interpret marks of illegible type will be possible”, says Anthony Felming of Harper and Kings.
But Tom Harpur remains confident. “People will appreciate the intimacy of paper, the touch and feel of a hand-held ‘pen’, and will treasure the lack of eye-strain.”
Living life to the Max
December 4, 2007 at 4:53 pm (humour, Maximilian Ambergis)
In the story of Maximilian Ambergis, inventor of the delete button, we left it with one large, unexplained gap: “Eventually, Max drifted to Russia, via Alaska, and disappears from history, until he emerges, relatively intact, in 1917 in St. Petersburg, alongside Lenin.” Now, new papers have emerged which show, in fact, that during this period Ambergis reached a crescendo of creative endeavour unparalleled in the modern world. The crucial papers are letters he sent to his sister, recently discovered in an attic in Leeds and hinted at in his autobiography, “Delete My Mistakes, Inspire My Spirit”.
Shortly after his arrival in America, in 1894, Max became frustrated with the slow means of communicating with his sister back in Leeds. To this end, he founded a cross-continental system involving spirit mediums. His company was called Spiritcom and rested on a simple premise: spirits in the after-life face no barriers of distance in travel. If you could transmit a message to one spirit, via a medium, asking them to pass it on to another spirit, then get that spirit to further pass it on to another medium in a far distant place, then you could – theoretically – organise for messages to span the globe, instantaneously.
Spiritcom Promo Poster 1895 – “One World, One Message”
Spiritcom opened to huge public acclaim, transmitting the first messages from San Francisco, on April 22nd, 1895. The venture soon ran into trouble. Max claimed that reliable spirits were hard to employ for the relatively mundane tasks of passing on messages. Many simply wanted to bemoan their eerie state or whine miserably about Hades and the eternal fire. Many messages got garbled along the way, with a simple message like “Arrive Friday. Stop. Prepare Reception. Stop.” Being passed on as “Arrive Friday. Stop tormenting me with those forks, I only wish to repent my sins and escape this eternal hell fire…” etc, for another 22 pages of text, before finally ending with “Prepare Reception. Stop.” Despite employing his newly invented delete button to expunge such irrelevant nonsense from the actual messages being passed, the end result was often unfortunately garbled.
The final blow to Spiritcom came in August 1896, when due to a mix up with a pair of psychics, a message to a customer in New York sent on August 5th, saying that his nephew had died, actually arrived on August 3rd, to much consternation. Facing public humiliation, Max fled in September of that year.
Burdened down with debts, he trekked north to Alaska. He spent his time inventing new mining gear, including conducting experiments into mine canaries. He was fascinated with one particularly clever canary called Canute. Indeed, visitors to Max’s camp in the far north of Alaska were greeted to the amusing sight of Max, typing away on Max TWO or Max THREE, with the canary standing on his shoulder.
Canute and Max start training
After many years of elaborate training, where Canute was taught to recognise every word in the English language, he would cheep twice if Max mistyped a word. Hence, the world’s first working Spell Checker had been invented! (Patent pending…) However, attempts to replicate this success failed. Finding canaries clever enough to recognise words, beyond the rudiments of the word “seed” and the phrase “juicy morsel of insect” proved impossible. Canute was one of a kind.
Max derived his Law of Universal Canariability – which roughly states that “If a canary can do it, anybody can do the can-can”, which is just a derivation of Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem.
It was during this period that Max, newly flushed with money from his canary venture, visited Europe. He paid a visit to Sigmund Freud, then interested in theories of mesmerism (or hypnotism). Max and Freud struck up an instant friendship and a mutual love for cocaine. Fuelled by one particularly large consignment of highly-pure Colombian nose powder, Freud persuaded Max to allow him to hypnotise Canute. Freud had already hypnotised bees, mushrooms, and goldfish, with mixed results. This experiment in animal hypnotism ended badly when Canute became convinced that he was the King of Persia. Scorning mere bird seed, he would only eat cake and drink fine champagne. Despite every attempt to keep Canute alive, he passed away within two months of their visit to Vienna. He did, however, die a happy little bird.
Part Three to Come Soon….
Search This
November 19, 2007 at 4:10 pm (humour)
WordPress allows me to view the search strings that brought people to my blog. I am astonished by some of the searches, for what they reveal about the human mind and the vast, incredible diversity of the Internet.
Here are my Top Ten Funniest Searches over the last 7 days:
1. rules for looking at breasts
Are there such things? This raises very interesting notions in my mind: Never get caught staring at breasts. Glance from side to side to prevent your neck seizing up. Never stare at breasts when you are taking another girl out. Come to think of, it is rather complicated, isn’t it? Hmmm…
2. people with very long necks
As yes, the old neck issue. This refers, I think, to my article about the Irish woman with the world’s longest neck, one Beverley “Brass Neck” Flynn.
3. titty machine
What the hell is a “titty machine”? And, I wonder, is this search from the same person who wanted to know what the rules were for looking at them? What is doubly mysterious is that my blog mentions nothing at all about titties, nevermind titty machines. Bizarre.
4. “john terry” underpants totty
Okay, so I wrote about John Terry, cyborg king of Chelsea football club. But why underpants and totty? Is there a brewing scandal here?
5. teenagers from outer space
Aren’t they all?
6. heroin dublin phoenix park
Phoenix Park, heroin capital of Europe…Is this a search for where to buy the best gear? The Internet is such a vast mine of information!
7. the old woman of ireland
That woman again, Bev Flynn…
8. giraffe pee
Imagine our searcher, sitting down to do a school essay about the Serengeti, and pondering the great questions of life. He’d be sitting there considering ecological diversity, predators against prey, the natural balance of life in Africa’s heartland. And then the most profound question of all would occur to him: “How does a giraffe pee?”. I mean, it is so tall. The pee would spread everywhere, wouldn’t it? Interesting when you think about it!
9. humongous neologism
The bigger they are, the better they are.
10. dogs fantasy football
Do dogs play football? Why not? They even have their own fantasy league for God’s sake!
Irish Rugby Team and drugs
September 26, 2007 at 12:28 am (humour, rugby)
I want to raise a very serious issue. Are the Irish rugby team on performance-enhancing drugs or not?
On the eve of a very important match against Argentina, the reputation of Irish rugby sits in the balance. We need to know what artificial, life-threatening drugs these players are on. Like anabolic steroids, testosterone, or cocaine. The world awaits an answer. Are they to follow in the footsteps of Michele de Bruin-Smith, legendary triple gold-medal winner in the Olympics and infamous drug cheat? Or are we to follow the standard set by that Irish lad, whose name escapes me now, who was clean but came nowhere, ever, in the swimming?
And if they are clean – totally clean – I want the Irish management to explain why the fuck they are clean. Why? And can you not just stuff them full of bucket loads of a cocktail of pharmaceutical wonder drugs, just anything to get them to play a little better. Please!
Random words of nonsense
September 18, 2007 at 11:48 am (humour)
Part of the problem of modern life is understanding the jargon. It is not just difficult to understand the underlying concept, but the words they use are deliberately confusing too.
Real estate: As opposed to what? Unreal estate? Virtual estate? Even better – they now have “virtual real estate” on Second Life. Sigh.
A sub-prime loan: A you-can’t-be-trusted loan.
Limited upside: This is worthless.
Soft-landing: Prices are falling.
Sub-prime loans for virtual real estate have limited upside and prices will experience a soft landing. Perfectly reasonable.
And then there’s the whole world of “political ethics” (what an oxymoron!)
Political donation: Bribe
Fiscal rectitude: It’s Charvet shirts for me, hairshirts for you.
Strictly financially controlled: Blank cheque
Fiscal rectitude can be alleviated by strictly financially controlled political donations.
Tourist heaven
September 17, 2007 at 2:41 pm (humour)
In a report today the BBC says: The Minneapolis airport toilet where US senator Larry Craig was arrested for allegedly soliciting gay sex is now attracting tourists, say airport staff.”
So, it got me thinking. What other odd places in the world deserve to be made into tourist attractions? After all, everytime someone gets shot (John Lennon, President Kennedy) or does something remarkable, they turn it into a money-spinner. So here are a few more suggestions.
- The fax machine office from which actor Daniel-Day lewis dumped – via fax – his then seven-months pregnant wife Isabelle Adjani
- The train station in London where drunk Kevin Reynolds recently punched Sir Alex Ferguson in the groin
- The “Brown-paper Envelope Tour”: Starts at AIB branch on Baggot St., passes the AIB on O’Connell St., then up north to St. Luke’s in Drumcondra, before ending at Abbeville (apologies to my non-Irish readers!)
- The “Gross Corruption/Planning Fiasco Tour”: Takes in Tara and the M3, Quarryvale, Carrickmines Castle, Eircom’s Ballsbridge site, the IFSC, and Lucan(ditto)
- The hotel in Brooklyn where David Beckham and Posh Spice conceived their son, Brooklyn
Sailing to Byzantium 