Bill Bailey, a couple of years ago, though some of his comments are rather poignant today:
Category Archives: Humour
W. Heath Robinson
We have some Heath Robinson cartoons which we still very much enjoy, but for which no longer have the wall space, and so have given them away.
I thought, though, that other Status-Q readers might enjoy them too. (Click for larger versions.)
Christmas Classics
The oral tradition has long been an important part of preserving human culture, and it is perhaps especially at this time of year that we’re conscious of works of music and literature that have been handed down through the ages.
While I was showering this morning, for example, I found myself singing a cheerful seasonal song which my brain had kindly preserved for me, almost intact, for more than half a century, but I just couldn’t remember the first line. It was only as I was towelling myself down, that it came back to me.
“Christmas, Christmas, in Smurfing Land“
Anyone else grow up in the 70s?
Cross-format poetry
Continuing the theme of Good Stuff Spotted on Mastodon, this comes from Natasha Jay:
There was a young man
From Cork who got limericks
And Haikus confused.
The Geek’s Prayer
From Phil Giammattei‘s Mastodon feed…
Lord, grant me the acumen to automate the tasks that do not require my personal attention,
the strength to avoid automating the tasks that do,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
(Thanks to Rupert Curwen for reposting.)
The opposite of pudding?
This cafe in Zutphen, Netherlands, is of my way of thinking…
All the world’s a garden centre
All the world’s a garden centre
And all the men and women merely customers.
They have their checkouts and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His visits being seven ages.
First, the infant,
Yelling and crying in his all-terrain stroller.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his gameboy
And scowling morning face, bored by all he sees,
Until the animatronic reindeer arrive in mid-September.
And then the lover, sighing like a furnace,
With a woeful text to his girlfriend about
How his mother had to stop on the way.
Next, the influencer, seeking a sausage roll
And a power tool for his next ‘unboxing’.
Then the PR consultant, now behind the stroller,
Feigning an interest in his wife’s roses;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
To the retiree, whose rose garden is his pride and joy,
His wife mostly absent at the golf course. Last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and such oblivion
That you take the bus to the garden centre to shop for clothes.
Meta-Schrodinger
Spotted on Mastodon, by Michael Marshall:
Schrodinger’s cat is now so ubiquitous a reference that it’s often used by people who don’t actually understand it or what it even means.
And you can only tell if they really do understand by waiting to see what they say next about it, to see if that demonstrates any further understanding.
But until that next thing is said, it’s impossible to tell. So they essentially exist in a superposition of both getting and not getting the reference.
I before E, except after C
Spotted online:
The AI Ballad Of John Henry
Friends this side of the Atlantic may not be familar with the story of John Henry, but you can read about him on Wikipedia. John Henry, the story goes, was a ‘steel-driving man’ whose prowess with the hammer was formidable.
At one point, he took on a steam hammer, side-by-side, and won… but the effort also killed him.
It’s not quite clear whether John Henry was ever anything more than a legend, but he has inspired statues, books, animations, compositions by Aaron Copland… and almost everybody seems to have recorded musical versions of the story, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Bruce Springsteen, Lonnie Denegan, Harry Belafonte, Woodie Guthrie… to name but a few. For a brief version, here’s Tennessee Ernie Ford, or I rather like the slightly longer story as recorded by Johnny Cash.
My friend Keshav, of course, asked ChatGPT to write a version, which also covers the threat posed to traditional skills by the coming of machines.
In case you were wondering…
I’ve been trying to get ChatGPT to do some recursion, using prompts like “Write a letter explaining how to use ChatGPT to write letters about how to use ChatGPT to write letters”, but the results, though coherent, are not very satisfying.
So instead I tried confusing it with, “Give an example of the kind of question you would be unable to answer, and then answer it.” It did well on the first bit… but ignored the second.
OK, I thought, I’d better stick to something simple, like the question that all hyperintelligent machines should be able to answer.
Incommunicado
Not being well up on Italian hits of the early 70s, I only learned about this today, but I think it’s great.
In 1972, the singer Adriano Celentano released a single called ‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’. The words are gibberish, but intended to sound like someone singing in English with an American accent – or at least, how such a song sounds to a non-English speaker.
“Ever since I started singing”, he once said, “I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang — which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian — I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.”
(Here’s a direct link – your browser may give you a better viewer than the player above.)
According to Wikipedia, the song was very popular, reaching the top 10 in several European countries, and, if you search, you can find a couple of other versions featuring Celentano, and tributes by numerous groups since. But this is my favourite; I certainly found my foot tapping to its beat… and I thought the choreography with mirrors was great!
All of this reminded me of a trip to Indonesia in my youth, where I ended up playing guitar with a group of guys who thought that Eric Clapton sang about “Snog, Snog, Snogging on Seventh Floor”. (I wrote a post about this and about ‘Mondegreens’ a little while ago… let’s see… gosh! – even that post was more than 16 years ago!)
Anyway, today I started down this particular rabbit-hole thanks to Charles Arthur pointing me at a Twitter thread containing some other linguistic gems, including this clip of Sid Caesar’s performance at one of Bob Hope’s birthday parties sometime in the 80s. A five-minute comedic performance with almost no words that can be understood by anybody:
(Link)
Wonderful stuff.
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