Category Archives: humour

Amara Graps: What happened to Bush’s Cadillac One?

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amara grapsNow for something a little different…

I’ve been trying for some time to get one of Asymptotia’s regulars, Amara Graps, (click on image to the right for larger view) to give us a guest post. She sent me one by email, somewhat unexpectedly, a couple of hours ago, and I must say I did not anticipate the topic!

So here we have it… Amara telling us a bit about certain recent events in Rome. Enjoy!

-cvj

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What happened to Bush’s Cadillac One?

As recorded by a viewer of the motorcade and posted to YouTube:

It apparently sputtered to a stop. It broke down, right there, on via del Tritone (near the Trevi fountain) in Rome, in the middle of the motorcade. He was ripe picking for a sharp shooter too; no wonder the police were pushing people further back, off of the street. It looks like the solution was to switch limos, because he got out of the limo with Mrs. Bush and climbed into another one.

This is a very special car. If it is a mechanical failure, then the manufacturers have a lot of explaining to do. His visit to Rome had been preceded by a large security operation (perhaps inconsistently). The Tiber was dragged. The sewers were searched. Squares were cleared and roofs occupied. The presidential motorcade […] Click to continue reading this post →

That Ain’t Workin’

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Remember the Tune “Money for Nothing”, by Dire Straits? It was a big hit in the 80s. (Remember those?) Well, Warren of the new blog A Strange Universe wrote a rather brilliant physics version of it, to be sung to the same tune. The “stringer” is the object of the ridicule of the song’s character. The original post is here, where he’ll tell you his thoughts on the song. I can’t resist (I hope he forgives me) posting the entire thing here, rather than an extract, which would break up its impact. (Original song’s lyrics are here, by the way, for comparison.)

So here it is: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Poor Pluto!

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Remember our discussions of Pluto’s demotion/reclassification? (Lots of link reminders at bottom of post.) Well, here’s a sad (and amusing) image* created by artist Mathias Pedersen:

poor pluto mathias pedersen


You can see a high resolution version of this image here. Don’t forget to look at more of of the graphic art of Mathias Pedersen**.

Poor Pluto indeed!

(Take some time to appreciate how good a job he’s done on colours and other features of the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Remote Thoughts

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While coming into work today just before lunchtime, I carried with me one of those little remote controls for today’s seminar speaker to use to click through his computer slides (I highly recommend such a remote, by the way, as they completely free you from having to stand next to the computer, often resulting in a better presentation for all concerned).

Thinking idle off-beat thoughts as I sometimes do, I couldn’t resist pointing and experimentally pressing the button a few times. What was I thinking? Well, it would have been nice to:

    remote 1

  • STOP the 11:55am bus I just missed, and used the BACK button to bring it back to the stop so I could get on it. This would have been useful since (a) I would have made it to the seminar at the right time, and (b) I’m sure I would have sat next to and talked to that fascinating and beautiful woman I’m supposed to meet on some sort of public transport some day. She must be on that one I just missed since she sure as hell is never on the bus I manage to catch! (Wait… maybe I had my one shot at that and blew it already. I remember now…)
  • remote 2STOP that toddler over there from enthusiastically licking the hand rail (I got a bus 9 minutes later) while his mother is not looking! I’m all for kids interacting a bit with the world to auto-immunize, but this seems a bit of an overdose.
  • STOP not just my watch, but all time just for about 9 minutes in order to catch up and make the seminar.

Well, none of that happened (you’re probably not surprised to learn), and the remote stayed in my bag for most of the rest of the journey….

A bit later I realized why the button would not work! […] Click to continue reading this post →

Barbed

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agent takes questionWhile listening this morning to President Bush splutter and stumble his way through a bunch of mostly softball questions from the press at the Whitehouse (as usual), I was put in mind of this recent excellent Onion article, entitled “Heroic Secret Service Agent Takes Question Intended For Bush”.

It’s brilliantly funny. There’s analysis of the event, interviews, etc.

Have a read.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Best Of The Day

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So far today, the three best April Fool’s Day jokes I’ve heard or read have been as follows:

On NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, they had a good piece about new regulation to limit mobile phone ring tones in New York:

mobile phoneThe city’s Center for Reduction of Noise Pollution issued a public call to action last month, citing an increased number of confrontations spawned by a new phenomenon: It’s called “ring rage,” and it involves strangers getting into fights over obnoxious cell phone ringtones.

David Yassky, a member of the New York City Council for the 33rd District in Brooklyn, has proposed a bill to regulate cell phone rings.

Distracting ringtones in the workplace cost the economy more than $1.2 billion each year, says Yassky. His bill mandates that New York residents choose between four more palatable rings, custom-made by the city.

The audio of the interview is here (along with the funny ringtones). NPR almost completely ruined the idea by being too obvious (you could almost hear them going “eh!?”, “eh!?”, after every sentence), not choosing a credible-sounding interviewee as the main subject, and then immediately reminding you of the date at the end of the interview. Are they afraid people will sue? It’s such a shame they had to be so obvious.

Much better was the following: […] Click to continue reading this post →

New Directions in Real Estate?

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keats real estate imageOn NPR’s finance programme Marketplace yesterday, there was a somewhat unusual piece. It seems that conceptual artist Jonathan Keats is making some money by selling the extra dimensional rights to various properties in San Francisco! (You can see him at the Modernism Gallery there1).

Since there’s no known way to build on or otherwise occupy this new extra dimensional property (let me explain a bit further in an enormous footnote2), the prices are awfully reasonable. Here’s a transcript of a transaction that I found on their website. Reporter Nathaneal Johnson is observing a sale to punters Oscar Villalon and Mary Ladd:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →

Those Fun Paper Titles

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Scanning the listings on the arxiv just now, I found what has to be the best paper title I’ve seen for a while:

“Would Bohr be born if Bohm were born before Born?”

It is a paper by H. Nikolic, in the history of physics classification, and I have not read it, but I love the title. It’s brilliant!

This reminds me of the process that happens to me sometimes when I’m working on a research project. I suddenly think of a really great title, and then get excited about finishing the project so that I can write the paper with that title! (You’ll have noticed that I do that with some of my blog posts too.) It’s often just a nice turn of phrase, like […] Click to continue reading this post →

Missed Chance

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The show on television called “24” has an interesting format. It is sort of meant to be in real time, and so each episode – roughly an hour long, including advertisements – charts what took place in an hour of a particular day. A whole season is one day. A very harrowing day for the characters in the show, particularly agent Jack Bauer. They are part of an counter-terrorist unit (CTU) trying to save the America from various highly complicated terrorist plots. The terrorists are obsessed with Los Angeles, it seems, which is convenient given that the unit is based in Los Angeles. Having watched two or three seasons of the show now, I’ve also come to appreciate the fact that the terrorist plots hand over to more and more complex and dastardly ones as the show goes along through the day. And the “controlling mind” bad guy earlier in the day is hardly ever the worst and most dastardly person our heroes will meet. There’ll be a really really bad guy along later on with an even worse plan than the one before lunchtime, and so forth. Another reason that it’s lucky that they’re obsessed with Los Angeles, since there’s an excellent supply of theatre and television actors here to be cast in various partsa.

What I’ve really been hoping to see is an episode of the show when Jack Bauer is not saving America/LA. Instead, he’s just… chillin’. Imagine it now: […] Click to continue reading this post →