I kept forgetting to put this up, but here’s a snippet of conversation from last weekend in Cambridge (a weekend full of amusing conversations)
X is talking about how he’s moving to America soon
Y: America’s alright. I was there this morning.
X (taken aback): Really? What were you doing in America?
Y: This morning? Getting on a plane mostly.
[The Pied Piper of Hamelin] has also appeared in the writings of, among others, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, Robert Browning and Megadeth.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin&oldid=427227881)
Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson.
I loved the other Bryson books I’ve read (A Short History… and Notes From a Small Island), so had high hopes for this one. To be honest I found it a little disappointing. There are still some hilarious moments (the first encounter of Bryson’s head with a football comes to mind), and witty observations. But I hadn’t realised this book was a compilation of newspaper columns, and they do become a bit formulaic after reading many of them. Still worthwhile, but I’d recommend Notes From a Small Island over this.
3/5 stars.
So Encyclopædia Dramatica is no more, replaced by the rather anodyne http://ohinternet.com/. At first glance I hated Oh Internet, it just seems so bland and corporate, but on a closer look some of the articles are fairly interesting. If it wasn’t for its predecessor I’d probably consider it a rather good site. I expect the creators will do fairly well out of it at least.
But there are plenty of blogs about internet culture, and we already have KnowYourMeme. ED was different. Sure, parts of its content were hateful and it had a nasty habit of harassing Wikipedia editors. Yet its “take no prisoners” style of humour and critique could be laugh-till-you-puke funny. And not just puke because someone stuck a Goatse pic in the middle of the article, but because its incisive style was just what some of the more self-important parts of the Internet needed.
I doubt we’ll see the like of ED again. Many might say that’s a good thing, but I’m not so sure.
Also: I wonder how long it will be until someone tries to delete ED’s Wikipedia article. Again.
Update: Here’s one of the mirrors that has sprung up http://encyclopediadramatica.ch (nsfw, obviously!) It looks to have a strong “campaignAnon” contingent. According to AnonNews the owners of Oh Internet have threatened to sue anyone who tries to replicate, mirror or redistribute the old ED. That should go down well. *grabs popcorn*
Update 2: I forgot to mention my favourite thing about ED. In amongst all the hate and bile was the article on b3ta (nsfw). It even said “the people on b3ta actually are pretty nice”. There was some discussion on the talk page (now lost) about making the article nastier, but no one ever did anything.
b3ta – so fluffy even ED can’t say anything bad about it
I think I’ll start copying my short reviews of what I’ve been reading here from Goodreads. This is the first:
Yes!: 50 secrets from the science of persuasion by Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin, Robert B. Cialdini
I did think that Cialdini’s famous “Influence” was more valuable for studying the underlying principles in depth, and would highly recommend that book to anyone. “Yes!” covers much of the same material more briefly. However this is still a quick and interesting read, with some great examples. One of the chapters in this book helped us boost response rates by around 20% with a simple change to our marketing!
4/5 stars.
One of the best Retsupraes yet, and certainly one of the weirdest.
“Do you think we’ll see a level in this video?” “Y’know I kinda hope not.”
“You don’t remember the part of Whomp’s Fortress where there were cannons shooting you out of the sky, and your Nintendo 64 would blow up?”
Dear Mr Coombe,
You recently let us know that you don’t need a TV Licence. Our records have been updated and you won’t receive any more letters from us for almost two years.
That’s exactly what you said 6 months ago!
Just testing some of the features of WordPress.com’s Jetpack. Ooh, shortcodes for embedding videos. Hey look, LaTeX!
*geeks out*
I just stumbled across The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Oddly I was searching for “The Golf War”, an weird little TV show with Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher, but Google insisted on correcting it to the above. It was intriguing so I clicked.)
Now Baudrillard, the author of the articles, seems very much like the stereotypical French “philosopher”. However they do make a fascinating statistical claim: “fewer US soldiers were killed in this ‘war’ than would have died in traffic accidents had they stayed at home”. For no reason I decided to investigate.
Looking into it further, there were a total of 294 US casualties in the Gulf War. However only 114 were due to enemy fire (35 were killed by friendly fire, 145 in accidents).
According to nationmaster.com, the total number of US troops deployed in Gulf War I was about 697,000. And thankfully Wikipedia has an article for everything, including “List of motor vehicle deaths in U.S. by year” (note to self – clean this article up!). That even helpfully gives deaths as a fraction of the population per year; for 1990 it was 0.000178779. So that gives an estimated 125 deaths among the troops, had they all remained at home for a whole year.
Obviously there are a whole host of confusing factors here: different lengths and timings of deployment, soldiers being an age/sex skewed section of the U.S. population and so probably having higher traffic death rates. But although the precise statistics may be debatable, the overall point is a valid one: the Gulf War had a remarkably low fatality rate for the U.S.
Of course this is only deaths, it doesn’t count injuries, PTSD or the mysterious “Gulf War syndrome”. Ironically whilst Googling for analysis of this claim, I found a study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16484030) apparently showing that in the years after the war, veterans suffered significantly more traffic fatalities than non-veterans.
Anyway, I should do some real work now.
I’m a sad lonely single and haven’t had a Valentine’s card in years.
So I was mildly excited on receiving a plain envelope through my letterbox today, and even more excited when it turned out to indeed be a Valentine’s card!
“Who could it be from?” I thought. “Could it really be possible that someone out there actually LIKES me?” For a brief moment I actually felt a rare burst of self-esteem. With trepidation I opened the card.
Inside it said “from Jesus”.
I feel like I have been trolled by Christianity.
