Absolutely the Funniest Item of the Day CCXXXIX
Unless your coworkers can see the subtitles or at a distance understand muffled Aussie-accented swearing, SFW.
16 Responses to “Absolutely the Funniest Item of the Day CCXXXIX”
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Absolutely the Funniest Item of the Day CCXXXVIII
Read the whole thing, but if you’re not gasping for breath by
Germany is also unhappy because it will be holding the rotating presidency when the Rome treaty is celebrated. It plans to produce its own logo.
then there’s something seriously wrong with you.
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Absolutely the Funniest Item of the Day CCXXXVI
Quick update: the full-size version, via LGF. (I hope they don’t get in trouble)
2 Responses to “Absolutely the Funniest Item of the Day CCXXXVI”
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Brett_McS Says:
November 1st, 2006 at 7:24 pmEven one as irony-free as John Kerry will get that.
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Rueful Red Says:
November 2nd, 2006 at 2:01 amThat is very very funny. LOL!
I thought the soldiers were supposed to be the thickoes, not the Ivy-league liberal senator?
November 27th, 2006 at 10:29 am
That is very funny!
November 28th, 2006 at 3:24 am
On reflection, wasn’t the horse a story rather than actual history? Homer first, and then Virgil (Aeneid II). Of course you can’t expect too much knowledge of history from the Aussies - too busy thrashing everyone else at cricket or rugby. Bleedin’ lucky country!
November 28th, 2006 at 9:30 am
It wasn’t real? See, I always thought when I was a kid, when these things were relayed in children’s’ books (they don’t make the under-tens read the original Homer, over here), that there were one or two guys in it, who could sneak out and open the gates for everyone else. This whole 200-foot-high thing with a whole army crouched in it has always seemed a little far-fetched. But I always assumed it was based on a basic idea…
November 28th, 2006 at 9:44 am
Um. Schliemann and all that. There are lots of Troys, some of which were burned. Carl Blagan of U Cincinnati excavated them. Can’t really work out which one would be the Homeric city (though Homer composed the Iliad centuries after the event, and another Homer composed the Oddydssey even later). I’m certainly not going to say there wasn’t a Bronze Age scrap at what we now call Hissarlik. Whether or not it ended in the wooden horse, the admission of which into the city being much advised against by Laocoon and Cassandra, well I can’t prove it. It’s more plausible than Genesis, and, say, John Kerry’s claims on to expertise on foreign policy matters. It’s less plausible than the Australian cricket teams claims to be world champions. On the other hand there’s no doubt that the various Homers and Virgil were in their own ways masters of Intelligent Design.
November 28th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
Brett! Brett! Um…. Geez man, time for the train analogy.
November 29th, 2006 at 1:37 am
Sorry, Half, I wasn’t paying attention. I wouldn’t think Red was one of those silly historians who look to any explanation but that a myth originated in a real event. (I suspect their motivation was to disenchant the ordinary folk). They must have been in vogue in C.S.Lewis’ day, because he had a bit to say about them. But on the other hand, the temptation to be simplistic is still there also.
Probably less plausible than building the highest railway in the world across expanses of tundra and permafrost. I guess they’re banking on Global Warming being a bust. Unfortunately (for those in icy Seattle), they could be right.
November 29th, 2006 at 2:06 am
I was actually very very careful not to discount the possibility of the wooden horse story being true - it’s powerful enough as a story to have survived several centuries before being written down, which would indicate that in the early days at least some people believed it to be true. The bit of Yorkshire I come from has a bit of woodland named after a bloke called Jackie Duffin, who was generally assumed to be of mythical existence, possibly Robin Hood-related. There was no family in the village or for miles around of that name, so he wasn’t local. Perhaps he’d resisted the Norman invasion. He was of that order of myth. Then someone checked the parish diary kept by a succesion of vicars (my village being a pretty dull sort of place it hadn’t been thought riveting reading) and it turned out that the land had been surveyed in the early/mid 18th century, and the woodland caused to be planted, by one John Duffin, Surveyor - who certainly can’t have known he’d have assumed a mythical existence a couple of centuries later. Had I been writing this a hundred years ago I’d have said the Wooden Horse story was vastly more plausible than Brett’s Wonderful Railway. Leaving aside questions of tundra and permafrost, the sheer impossibility of getting a worthwhile head of steam up using conventional boilers would have rendered the very idea of the railway literally fantastic. Seattle sounds like Edinburgh was for a couple of winters 20-odd years ago. The absence of snow chains made for entertaining driving.
November 29th, 2006 at 4:18 am
Even the diesel locomotives have to be de-rated to account for the lack of oxygen when they go over the pass - all done by computerized engine management systems these days. I couldn’t imagine a steam train having much hope - although the Chinese did (do?) still make steam engines, at least until a few years ago - all that coal to burn.
… called Truthfull for he was that above all else, but also Red because of his flaming red locks…
November 29th, 2006 at 4:48 am
So ninme’s to blame the Chinese for her weather? You got me there on that quote. Clue? Can’t find it on Wiki. CS Lewis? The Red handle’s of political origin - commies and all that. Just made it up for Mr Seat’s clerihew competition and it sort of stuck.
November 29th, 2006 at 9:43 am
No not ninme, ALGORE!
And I don’t think I was clear. It didn’t snow that much (I mean, a lot for here, but for crying out loud I’m a bloody Canadian aren’t I). It was more a comment on the steepness of the hills and the ridiculousness of our public transport.
November 29th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
What! You didn’t take your moniker, as I did, from The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine? Containing the immortal lines: Thus are we come, victorious conquerors, Unto the flowing current’s silver streams, Which, in memorial of our victory, S hall be agnominated by our name, And talked of by our posterity: For sure I hope before the golden sun Posteth his horses to fair Thetis’ plains, To see the water turned into blood, And change his bluish hue to rueful red, By reason of the fatal massacre Which shall be made upon the virent plains.
November 29th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
Well he got it from poetry, but not that one, that I know of. I mean, I was there, but who knows what he had in mind.
November 30th, 2006 at 3:53 am
I’d bunged the floowing clerihew into the Arthur’s Seat competition and it needed an appropriate handle:
Brezhnev, when he’d all his powers Told his chums “the future’s ours!” Not having reckoned On John Paul the Second.
“Rueful Red” sprang to mind from somewhere. Whether it had anything to do with a brief side trip round cod-Shakespeares I took at school is moot. I don’t know. The tag stuck in my mind because it was my friendly neighbourhood local estuary, the Humber, that was being turned that colour.
Bluish Hugh’s a terrific handle. Agreeably recondite.
November 30th, 2006 at 9:10 am
Mm, quite.
November 30th, 2006 at 9:16 am
Sorry for going on a bit.
November 30th, 2006 at 9:56 am
What? That’s not what I meant, nut. “Mm, quite,” with reading glasses lowered, in a thoughtful, almost scholarly tone.