Better Erections

Back when they were building the pulp mill we had an "Erection Manager".

- YD.

...

Hear, hear!

Well, it made me laugh. :-)

Here's one I made up - I don't know if it's gotten old yet:

Q: How many white guys does it take to change a light bulb? A: One.

Cheers! Rich

I do, but you can't distinguish intentionally comic circuit diagrams from mistakes ...

Some personality defects appear to be incurable ...

Contrived.

Bill,

I work with Japanese customers often. Older japanese (say > 40 yrs old) think phonetically and manually translate from the katakana phonetics into english and they do make mistakes. younger japanese people learn(ed) the roman alphabet at a much younger age and you don't see this anymore. However, I have an email from a senior manager at a company I visited and he sent me a nice note where he says he 'erects' to use our new product. I'll send you the email from work if you want.

-Solid Gai-jin Suleyman

Did you ever see the movie, "Gung Ho"? It's about some Japanese car manufacturer with a plant somewhere in Detroit or Podunk or something, and there's some kind of labor dispute or something, but at the climax, Michael Keaton is cleaning a nonexistent windshield as the owner comes through, and Keaton knows he's screwed, but the company owner says, "I rrrike you! You make me rrraff!"

I thought it was cute. :-)

Cheers! Rich

I'm not in the business of looking out for comic lines and polishing them up into jokes. There was a period in the mid-1960's when I did do roughly that, creating revue scripts rather than one-liners, but it took time and effort. Once that university revue had had its run, I went back to getting my Ph.D.

I still look out for comic material, but I don't keep a notebook of every comic idea that goes by. Here's one I posted earlier - Fri, Apr

">No, I agree with Tony, you cheeky X%$%^&#@*& .....

It is with a certain measure of schadenfreude that we in Nijmegen note that Harvard's semi-automatous expert help system "Winfield Hill" based on Paul Horowitz's electronics textbook "The Art of Electronics" has failed its extended Turing test.

The defect that lead its vituperation routine to assume that other entities on the net were also silicon based may be regarded as a feature rather than a bug, since it argues for a higher level of self-awareness than exhibited by most primate-based agents, but it clearly betrays the agent as silicon based, and allows its immediate identification as non-human within the constraints of the Turing test.

We note that a system that was aware that it was taking part in a Turing test would not make such an error, and would hope that the Harvard system can be elaborated to the current state of the art. "

The inclusion of the word "schadenfreude" made it relatively easy to find.

Here's another - more recent - example, from Thurs, Jan 12 2006 4:57 am

"You've been listening to too much Jan Pieter Balkenende

not only Prime Minister of the Netherlands. but also the winner of the Dutch Harry-Potter look-alike competition. Pity he doesn't command the magic that might make him look like the leader he desperately wants to be. "

--- That's not funny, it's a cheap shot and it's designed to be denigrating and elicit a laugh by ridiculing the Prime Minister of the Netherlands.

Kind of like, "Watch this, guys, I'm ever so much more clever and important than he is that I can bring him down with one shot..." And then the "joke" follows.

_Real_ humor relies on the bringing together of players in situations which are normally contradictory, mutually exclusive, and not likely to collide, in a way which reveals each of the players' foibles in a delicious dance of futility for the win of the bit.

Most, if not all, of the English comedies aired over here have that quality about them, and I don't know if you've ever watched our "Seinfeld", but I think it also has that going for it.

-- John Fields Professional Circuit Designer

The Harry-Potter-look-alike comment is and has been common currency since Balkender came to prominence as the leader of the Christian Democrats, long before he got to be prime minister - it's an observation of fact, like commenting on Dubya's intellectual development. There's no pretension to cleverness in observing the obvious ...

Your opinion on the subject would carry more weight if your jokes were reliably funny. It wouldn't carry much weight even then, because the prolonged debate about what consititutes real humour long since came down to a concensus that it is undefinable.

Seinfield has its moments - not enough of them for me to bother watching it regularly, but if I come across it when channelhopping I'll keep looking at it for a bit, until one of the cardboard cut-out stereotypes comes on.

The last English comedy series that I really liked was "A very peculiar practice" which probably didn't make it to the U.S.A. More recently, there was a Scottish detective series, set in the Hihglands and Islands which was extremely funny every now and then but downright weird in between. Sadly, I can't remember the name. It seems to be years since the BBC did a good comedy.

This morning while driving my wife to a medical appointment I noticed a bumper sticker on the back of a vehicle owned by a well known West Australian home building company.

"Dale Alcock Homes - I made a career out of erections"

You missed the implication that I was Nijmegen's fully automated help-desk ....