Humor Species is a hard concept 17 Jul 2008 Stealing this one from Moselio Schachter: A guy walks at night on a beach in California and stubs his toe against an old bottle, which breaks and releases a genie. “I’ll grant you one wish, oh Master,” says the genie. The man replies, “Well, I’d dearly love to go to… Read More
Evolution Some fun 11 Jun 2008 This guy is brilliant, both as a guitarist and a lyricist. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpNoQaB2LT0&hl=en] Oh, his name’s Chris Smither, if you want to Google him. Read More
Administrative Five-fiftysix meme 1 Dec 2008 New: Solutions listed Mike Dunford, who is still trying to get me to pay for that time he put me up in Hawaii when his wife was on active service in Iraq (if I knew what I’d have to pay, both in climbing horrific rainforested slopes to release wallabies, and… Read More
That joke was old when done there. The best ones are really old. I think that goes back to “1066 and all that”.
I’m reminded of a panel in the comic “The wizard of Id” where the king, on being informed that the peasants are revolting retorts “You can say that again”
It’s that old, is it? I first encountered it in Robert Manson Myers’s From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf (1951), in which we learn “…when Wycliff [of Dover] translated the Old Testament into the New, he was condemned as hereditary and burned as a steak. Following his death several “University Wits” instigated the so-called Pedant’s Revolt, upon which occasion Henry VI Part III made his astute observation: “The pedants are revolting.” An excellent book if you like that sort of thing. Still in print the last time I looked. Oh, BTW: “Chief among medevil dramatists was Mahatma Dante, whose Divine Comedy has become the favorite farce of all time. … He stood with one foot in the Muddle Ages, while with the other he hailed the dawn of a new day.”
Where were all these excellent texts when I was an undergraduate? Or are they the texts that undergraduate essayists write?