Showing all posts tagged: humour
Do mullets make for great Australian Football League teams?
1 October 2024
I’m not very sporty as regular readers will have gathered. Of the approximate sixteen-hundred posts here at present, less than half a dozen are sport related. Of these, the majority relate to the Matildas, the Australian women’s football/soccer team, which I wrote during last year’s World Cup tournament. To think it’s been over a year now since that happened.
Last weekend though, was the grand final of the 2024 Men’s AFL (sometimes called Aussie rules) competition. The Sydney Swans, who I would regard as my local team — since geographically speaking they are the nearest club to me, and one of only two AFL teams in NSW — faced off against a team called the Brisbane Lions. Long story short, it didn’t end well for the Swans.
Then yesterday, I spot this infographic at FlowingData, illustrating how many players in each of the competition’s teams sport mullets. Interestingly, just four Swans players style their hair accordingly, one of the lowest counts in the league. On the other hand, nine Brisbane Lions players are mullet-ed.
My question: did this mullet imbalance have anything to do with the result of the grand final?
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Seven thousand five hundred tabs open in Firefox, a new world record?
14 August 2024
A dedicated Firefox web browser fan had nearly seven thousand five hundred browser tabs open, all at the same time, at one point. And maybe still does.
Seven thousand five hundred?
I feel I’m lucky to have seventy-five tabs, no, half that number really, open, across the three browsers I run, which include Firefox. That paltry number seems to strain my system. But in excess of seven-thousand open tabs is good going, if you can do it. I’d probably forget what I’d open after a time.
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The website song: everyone is free to write websites, an IndieWeb anthem
13 August 2024
Everybody’s Free (To Write Websites), by Robb Knight, and Keenan. Spectacularly riffing off Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrmann’s 1999 video, the Sunscreen Song, this is for the graduating Indie Web class of whenever. There is an abundance of sage advice here.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, coding would be it. The long term benefits of coding websites remains unproved by scientists, however the rest of my advice has a basis in the joy of the indie web community’s experiences. I will dispense this advice now.
There’s so much goodness here, I don’t know where to begin choosing my favourite lines. Enjoy the power and beauty of PHP. Code one thing every day that amuses you. Remember the guestbook entries you receive; forget the spam. And: Some of the most interesting web sites I enjoy just are.
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Baz Luhrmann, humour, IndieWeb
Corporate jargon alternatives by Matt Watson
13 August 2024
American web developer Matt Watson has re-written many latter-day, jarring, corporate-speak terms, with words and phrases from long past times. For instance, instead of “circle back”, say “bring word again”. Or, replace “open communication” with the surely eye-brow raising “regular intercourse”.
In other examples, ASAP becomes “betimes”, change agent (what?) becomes “efficient cause”, while lean in is now “assiduously apply”. There are many more. Now all we need is a substitute to reach out. Hmm. Let me think. Hang on, I think I have it. How about “contact”?
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Who needs LinkedIn when you can network at music festivals?
7 August 2024
Networking tips for music festivals, by Harry Carr:
Don’t make the mistake that most people make and switch off as soon as you reach Paddington. Maximise your train journey by reaching out to your extended network, to see if they are going to Glastonbury Music Festival. If there’s a speaker or business guru you admire on the conference circuit, there’s a good chance he’s being dragged along by his girlfriend, who is half his age. Drop him an email and ask him if he wants to meet up for coffee. You should aim to send between 100-150 emails on the train.
Via Things Magazine.
AND… also seen at Things, London Flipped, said to be the first full-size map of London drawn upside-down. It might seem weird, but there’s nothing strange about it at all: this is what London looks like from Australia, don’t you know…
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humour, music, social networks, technology
Put your Palace Cinema wine glass in the cup-holder carefully
25 June 2024
Whether they are a part of an on-going series of light-hearted clips by Australian cinema group Palace Cinemas, remains to be seen, but the two I’ve caught to date, on their Instagram page, have been pretty witty.
The first is in response to the apparent problem of patrons nicking the cinema’s wine glasses. Why would anyone do that? An Australian chain of discount stores sells six wine glasses for less than five dollars. So why take the cinema’s? It should also be noted the cinema’s glasses have their logo emblazoned upon them. People visiting your house are going to know where they came from.
Fun fact: the wine glass clip cleverly riffs off the old Piracy is a Crime ads, that used to screen, some years ago now, prior to cinema screenings in Australia*.
The second clip is a glimpse of a cinema employee’s work day. Just be careful with the cup-holders…
* Interesting, I tried to click through to the Piracy is a Crime video through a DuckDuckGo search engine result. I was greeted by a “www.youtube.com is blocked” error message. YouTube is of course owned by Google/Alphabet. Are they blocking access to the video platform via competing search engines?
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A book about ferns: the truth of the three-hour Gilligan’s Island cruise
24 June 2024
Gilligan’s Island was a slapstick American TV series that ran from 1964 to 1967. Despite its popularity, the show was cancelled shortly before filming of a fourth series commenced. I first saw reruns of Gilligan’s quite some time later. A number of movies, featuring most of the original cast, were made between 1978 and 1982. For all its goofiness, and ludicrously fanciful storyline, the show’s appeal has not waned, since production ceased over forty years ago.
Much of the allure lay in the way a group of mismatched passengers and crew were forced to get along after being marooned on an unchartered island, somewhere in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands. Among them were the wealthy and the working class, the chic and the collegiate. Most of the laughs were generated by the titular character, Gilligan, the well-meaning though bungling first mate, of the shipwrecked charter vessel, that all had been aboard.
But the premise of Gilligan’s Island, about seven people setting off on what was meant to be three-hour cruise, has been a constant source of speculation. And conspiracy theories. For instance, why was the millionaire, Thurston Howell III, carrying a briefcase full of cash? Further, why did he board the charter vessel with dozens of suitcases of clothing? And what of the professor? Why on earth was he on a fun cruise with a cache of scientific paraphernalia?
I wrote about this topic in 2008, after reading an in-depth exposé by Gilligan’s fan, and writer, Adam-Troy Castro, published on the no longer online SFF Net website. I’m glad I posted a number of excerpts from Castro’s article, in my piece, as they may be all that’s left of the original article.
But, long story short, no one aboard the S.S. Minnow, the shipwrecked charter boat, was out on any three-hour cruise. Howell wanted to cross into international waters, and make a big drug buy. That explains the cash he was carrying. The professor meanwhile, had brought analysis equipment with him, so he could check the contraband was the real deal. Everyone else on the Minnow had their not so wholesome reasons for being there.
Although my post is sixteen-years old, it still comes up in search engines results, which says a lot about the enduring popularity of Gilligan’s Island, together with the intrigue of the show’s peculiar premise. And then the other day, during my weekly login to Facebook (FB), an article about the professor, posted on the Classic Stars FB page, popped up in my feed. If you’re a fan, it’s well worth a read (and I don’t think you need to be a FB member), but this is possibly the most salient sentence:
The Professor’s backstory identifies him as Roy Hinkley (though his actual name is rarely mentioned during the series), a high-school science teacher who was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His principal expertise was as a botanist, whose purpose in joining the ill-fated voyage that stranded the castaways was to write a book to be titled “Fun With Ferns”.
So there we have it. The professor was not on board the charter vessel so he could test the authenticity of goods Howell was allegedly buying, somewhere on the open sea. The great big mystery can finally be laid to rest. The professor was there researching a book about ferns. Plants, not illicit drugs. Nor was anyone else, therefore, up to no good.
Maybe.
How though does going on a three-hour cruise, where nary a fern is to be seen, with an excess of laboratory equipment no less, help in the writing of such a book? Oh no: we’re by no means anywhere near getting to the bottom of what was really happening on this “three-hour cruise”…
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entertainment, humour, television
An extremely simple way to detect potential late bloomers
5 June 2024
Colonel Sanders founded KFC at age sixty-two. Anna Mary Robertson Moses AKA Grandma Moses, started painting when she was seventy-six, and had an illustrious career spanning twenty-five years. American actor Kathryn Joosten began her Hollywood career aged fifty-six.
These are just a few examples of people who are considered to be late bloomers. Those who found their calling in life at around the same time their contemporaries were either retired, or gearing up to cease working. That potentially means if you’re of a certain age, someone in your peer group may be about to step into the starting blocks.
But who might that be? According to London based writer and speaker Henry E. Oliver, there a few tell-tale signs:
- Look for people who have been successful in the past
- Look for people with secret lives
- Look for the people who don’t fit in
- Look for loners and those who are happy to change their context
- Put up a beacon
Yah, put up a beacon is an obvious one (actually, I have no idea what that means). But forget the beacon. If you’re looking to find a would-be late bloomer among your friends and acquaintances, look-out for the ones with secret lives. Shouldn’t be too hard. Oh wait.
If someone has a secret life, that means — or is supposed to mean — no one else knows about it. While that may sound like a problem, it’s in fact only a detail. All we need do now is work backwards to identify the late bloomers in our lives. Start with the beacon. I assume that’ll stand out. Then pick out the loners, and those who don’t fit in. After that, anyone who has been successful previously.
Once you have four out of five, it’s just a case of finding out if they have a secret life. And that’s a simple matter of posing a discreetly worded question. You could say something like, “Oh hey, did I tell about an old friend of mine, [insert name of fake friend here]? Turns out they’ve been living a secret double life for a couple of decades.”
If your acquaintance seems startled, it might mean you’re onto something. Then you could follow-up, by saying “But that’s nothing you’d know anything about, right?” If their immediate response is a hasty successions of no’s, that it’s as good confirmed: your friend has a secret life, and could well be a late bloomer in the making.
Spotting potential late bloomers is easy when you know what you’re doing…
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The maybe immortal photon, the key to everlasting life?
25 April 2024
Light may have an infinite lifetime. Who’d have thought? Even after the eventual, possible, heat death of the universe, photons may live on as beacons of light in an impossibly dark cosmos… maybe:
One such candidate for a truly stable entity is the photon: the quantum of light. All of the electromagnetic radiation that exists in the Universe is made up of photons, and photons, as far as we can tell, have an infinite lifetime. Does that mean that light will truly live forever?
Sounds like life everlasting to me. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? If we could, somehow, infuse our consciousness, our living essence, into photons, could we — to lift a line from the Space Odyssey novels written by Arthur C. Clarke — preserve our “thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light?”
If so, we could then dispense with the botox regimens, followed by cryonics. This is an idea totally worth looking into.
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Is the Sun conscious? Can a great ball of fire think for itself?
5 April 2024
Maybe I’ve been watching too much of Universe, the Brian Cox made documentary about, well, the universe, and am way too willing to take in all manner of ideas, no matter how outlandish they may seem. So when this article (PDF), exploring the possibility the Sun is a conscious entity (of some sort), written in 2020 by Rupert Sheldrake, appeared on my news feed recently, my curiosity was piqued.
Meanwhile, field theories of consciousness propose that some electromagnetic fields actually are conscious, and that these fields are by their very nature integrative. When applied to the sun, such field theories suggest a possible physical basis for the solar mind, both within the body of the sun itself and also throughout the solar system. If the sun is conscious, it may be concerned with the regulation of its own body and the entire solar system through its electromagnetic activity, including solar flares and coronal mass ejections. It may also communicate with other star systems within the galaxy.
If the Sun could talk, what might it say to us? Maybe, “do something about climate change before it’s too late.” Or, “always wear sunscreen when in my presence.”
It’s a fun idea, solar consciousness, but I’m not sure we’d ever hear Brian Cox going along with the notion. I’ll defer to Star Trekin’! in the meantime: it’s consciousness; but not as we know it…
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