Sunday Funnies: LOL March 14
Cidu Bill on Mar 14th 2010
Whole bunch of people sent me this one:
Morris Keesan: The answer for me is usually, “very carefully, so you don’t slice open a major artery when the knife slips.”
Filed in Arlo and Janis, Bill Bickel, Brewster Rockit, Cyanide and Happiness, F-Minus, Jimmy Johnson, Pearls Before Swine, Snuffy Smith, Tony Carrillo, comic strips, comics, comics that made us laugh out loud, humor, lol | 33 responses so far
Kamino Neko Mar 14th 2010 at 12:11 am 1
And that last guy wonders why the Uranians are taking their moon and going home.
Marshal Mar 14th 2010 at 12:26 am 2
I use scissors to open most of those plastic packages. They don’t
allow knives at work so I have gotten out of the habit of carrying one.
.
Charlene Mar 14th 2010 at 12:40 am 3
You don’t need a knife to slice an artery - the clamshell package itself will do it.
What I love is when the only way to get the thing out of the clamshell is to cut through the documentation. Good thinking!
Beckanva Mar 14th 2010 at 12:57 am 4
What drives me nuts is when you need scissors to open a package of scissors! Really??? Does that make sense to anyone?!?
Kimra Mar 14th 2010 at 01:31 am 5
Oh god, I thought the Arlo one and the Ant evacuation plan where the same comic… it really really didn’t make any sense.
Individually though, the sense is much easier to find.
furrykef Mar 14th 2010 at 02:00 am 6
Kimra — oddly enough, I had the same thought at first.
Kamino Neko Mar 14th 2010 at 02:00 am 7
LOL, Kimra. Me, too.
The time it took for it to click actually made both funnier. >_>
chuckers Mar 14th 2010 at 04:09 am 8
I am number 4 on the list for a connected Arlo/Ant evacuation thinker. Needs a bit of a spacer.
mkilby Mar 14th 2010 at 04:43 am 9
A spacer would not only keep Arlo safe from the ants, it would also help to indicate whether Elyrest was laughing at the mild “evacuation plan”, or at the retreaded “Uranus” pun (sometimes the submission captions appear above, sometimes they are below the comic), in this case I’m betting on the latter.
As it happens, I recall being in a 7th or 8th grade science class that bubbled uncontrollably for 10 to 15 minutes over that bit of planetary “wit”. The final blow came when someone tried to draw the (horizontally) inclined axis on the board, but accidentally drew a vertical line, separating the planet into two “cheeks”. The room exploded in laughter, whereupon the teacher unloaded an amazing apoplectic fit.
Keera Mar 14th 2010 at 05:41 am 10
And all I can think of when I read Uranus jokes (or hear them) is Isaac Asimov’s explanation on the correct way to pronounce Uranus. Which just brings to mind the other, er, bodily opening. Still, I’ve chosen to adopt Asimov’s pronunciation.
And what Kimra et al said.
Detcord Mar 14th 2010 at 07:53 am 11
William Herschel, the planet’s discoverer, wanted to name it “Georgium Sidus”, as a suck-up – okay in honour of – his patron King George III. However, the international astronomy community wasn’t keen and they wanted to keep the Greek/Roman gods theme. Since Uranus was the father of Saturn (Kronos in Greek), the name must have seemed obvious to them. Scientist, who are trained to observe, can sometime be incredibly blind.
There’s a website, by a British fellow, that gives English (and sometimes American) verbal pronunciations for various words. Here’s his take on Uranus.
http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=uranus&submit=Submit
Tom T. Mar 14th 2010 at 08:36 am 12
Uranus does rotate vertically, unlike other planets.
Ben Carlsen Mar 14th 2010 at 09:25 am 13
Snuffy just won’t die, even with a cat arrow right through him…
mitch4 Mar 14th 2010 at 11:12 am 14
So the PBS shot lands in “(Barney Google and) Snuffy Smith”. On the way, are those identifiable other strips the shot critter (izzat a cat?) is crossing? Maybe “Peanuts”?
Morris Keesan Mar 14th 2010 at 12:20 pm 15
The top strip, of which we’re seeing the bottom half, is clearly “Peanuts”, with the bottom halves of Lucy’s body and Snoopy’s doghouse visible. I think the bottom strip is “Snuffy Smith”, as evidenced by the “[M]ITH”.
Cyanide and Happiness is definitely a LOL for me, with a bit of Eeewww.
Fred Mar 14th 2010 at 12:45 pm 16
@ Marshal #2
“I use scissors to open most of those plastic packages. They don’t allow knives at work”
Where do you work? More importantly, what events led up to management instating such a rule? Sounds like a pretty dodgy place to work if the employees have to be specifically told not to bring knives.
John Small Berries Mar 14th 2010 at 12:47 pm 17
And all I can think of when I read Uranus jokes (or hear them) is Isaac Asimov’s explanation on the correct way to pronounce Uranus. Which just brings to mind the other, er, bodily opening.
I presume you’re speaking of “YUR-ǝ-nǝs”… but since it’s a Latinized form of the Greek name Οὐρανός, that doesn’t make sense either; initial ‘u’ is never pronounced as “yoo” in Latin. From what I know of Latin pronunciation, it should more properly be “OOR-ǝ-nǝs”, which would avoid making it sound like either “your anus” or “urine us”.
Then again, we don’t pronounce “vice versa”, “et cetera” or “bona fide” properly, so why make an exception for “Uranus”?
Keera Mar 14th 2010 at 12:50 pm 18
I’ve always wondered how anybody can know what a dead language like Latin is supposed to sound like.
Cidu Bill Mar 14th 2010 at 01:59 pm 19
Kimra and others: WordPress doesn’t always respect the “leave a space in between these two graphics” thing. I fact the software’s tendency to override various spacing commends is an ongoing annoyance.
mkilby Mar 14th 2010 at 03:31 pm 20
On the assumption that you are allowed (or forced) to use HTML, I have found that placing a non-breaking space between the double line breaks (-&-n-b-s-p-;-) to be more reliable, the same is true for the blank paragraph strategy (-&-n-b-s-p-;-). (Remove the hyphens before use, of course.)
mkilby Mar 14th 2010 at 03:36 pm 21
Nuts, Wordpress absconded with everything between the “angle brackets” - that was supposed to be [-b-r-]-&-n-b-s-p-;-[-b-r-] and [-p-]-&-n-b-s-p-;-[-/-p-], respectively. (Remove the hyphens and change the square brackets to less than/greater than pairs before use.)
Marshal Mar 14th 2010 at 05:52 pm 22
Fred #16,
To be honest I no longer work for the company and I won’t give the name
of the company.
But I will say that they have made Fortunes 100 Best Companies to Work
For list several times. (usually in the top 50) That said they were very serious
about accident prevention. There were only about 3 maybe 4 people authorized
to use a knife at the plant I worked at and that was a safety knife with Kevlar
glove on the other hand. Now they did not go through people’s pockets or tool boxes looking for knives but it was listed as a safety absolute that could get you
fired if you were caught. Most production personnel used scissors with the
pointed ends rounded off for safety. Knives were really not needed that often.
Sigh, I miss that working at that place. If you ever need to know what a
redneck was that manufacturing company had a lot of them. And yeah,
the current economy is hitting them hard and they have had to do a lot of
laying off.
.
Mark in Boston Mar 14th 2010 at 07:43 pm 23
Yep, scissors come in those plastic packages. But light bulbs? They come in flimsy little cardboard things.
John Small Berries Mar 14th 2010 at 08:13 pm 24
Keera: Roman grammarians did write upon the correct pronunciation of the Latin tongue (which became important as the Empire spread, to keep the spoken language understandable from Rome to the far reaches). While their personal interpretations were sometimes contradictory, and not set forth in anything as elegant or well-defined as the International Phonetic Alphabet, we do have a “best guess” interpretation of classical Latin pronunciation (which differs in a number of respects from modern liturgical pronunciation).
(A handful of sixteenth-century English linguists did the same, so we have a pretty good idea of how Shakespeare’s plays should be performed - lo and behold, his rhymed couplets did actually rhyme, which is often not the case when performed with modern pronunciation…)
mitch4 Mar 14th 2010 at 08:35 pm 25
If you were reciting Blake’s “The Tyger” would you force-rhyme “hand or eye” and “symmetry”? If so, on which sound? I tend to stick to modern pronunciation and thus not quite rhyme; but I imagine a case could be made for an -ee sound …
Keera Mar 15th 2010 at 12:03 pm 26
John #24, thanks! The things I learn here.
Rammy M Mar 15th 2010 at 12:25 pm 27
@19 & @21
In similar case I sometimes use “hr”
There are, of course, many “solutions”, including tables and “the reader can figure it out well enough”
R
Pirk Mar 15th 2010 at 12:41 pm 28
@11 detcord -
I was at work and clicked your link to have my computer say “your anus” just as my boss walked by
John Small Berries Mar 15th 2010 at 04:18 pm 29
WARNING: linguistic geekery ahead. You have been warned.
mitch4: If you were reciting Blake’s “The Tyger” would you force-rhyme “hand or eye” and “symmetry”?
Well, Blake flourished after the Great Vowel Shift had completed, so the pronunciation should have been pretty similar to modern. It’s very possible, though, that he was emulating a rhyme from an earlier period - in the sixteenth century, “eye” and “symmetry” did rhyme, though neither was pronounced in the same way that they are today.
As I mentioned above, there was a handful of authors in the latter half of the sixteenth century who attempted (in vain, obviously) to reform English spelling to comport with its pronunciation; while their attempts failed, their treatises provide us with an invaluable insight into how the language was pronounced at the time. Of these authors, John Hart1, in his An Orthographie (1569), came closest to the idea of the IPA - each of the letters in his reformed orthography stood for one sound alone2; and individual phonemes represented in normal English by digraphs (th, ch, voiced th, etc.) were given invented symbols to adhere to his one letter-one sound rule.
Anyway, Hart fairly consistently renders a final y as “ei”, a diphthong of “eh” and “ee” sounds (probably /eɪ/ in IPA, or thereabouts); and both “eye” and the pronoun “I” were rendered that way too (whereas today, they’re a diphthong of “ah” and “ee”, or /ɑɪ/ in IPA).
_____
1. Relationship to B.C. cartoonist Johnny Hart currently unknown.
2. He was somewhat less than consistent when it came to unstressed vowels (ə), however.
John Small Berries Mar 15th 2010 at 04:19 pm 30
Hmph, it stripped out the superscripts. I knew I should have gone with asterisk/dagger instead.
Mark in Boston Mar 15th 2010 at 07:50 pm 31
W. S. Gilbert loved to force rhymes. For instance “or perhaps Eye - tal - eye - ann” (Italian) to rhyme with “He remains an Englishman.”
mitch4 Mar 15th 2010 at 08:26 pm 32
John, was this Hart one of the characters in the historical section of “The Sound Pattern of English”? I remember being floored by the idea that the underlying representations were being related to these outdated orthographic practices. But we didn’t really work through that whole section.
John Small Berries Mar 15th 2010 at 09:39 pm 33
Probably, mitch4. Sir Thomas Smith, John Hart and William Bullokar were the three most important spelling reformers of the 16th century. Smith’s book was written in Latin, so it’s a little less accessible these days now that Latin has fallen out of fashion; and Bullokar took great pains to try and preserve as much of the existing orthography as possible (so that future generations could still read the writing of the past). Hart is my favorite, since his orthography was far less ambiguous than Bullokar’s… and my Latin is atrocious.