• When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone he had three missed calls from Chuck Norris.
• Chuck Norris went skydiving and his parachute failed to open, so he took it back the next day for a refund.
• Chuck Norris has a grizzly bear carpet in his room — the bear isn’t dead it is just afraid to move.
• Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice.
• There has never been a hurricane named Chuck because it would have destroyed everything.
• The Great Wall of China was originally created to keep Chuck Norris out. It didn’t work.
• Chuck built the hospital he was born in.
• Chuck was once bitten by a cobra, and after five days of intense pain, the cobra died.
• Chuck Norris has a diary. It’s called the Guiness Book of World Records.
• Chuck is the only person who can actually kill time.
• When Chuck looks in a mirror, even his reflection is scared to look him in the eye.
• Chuck once killed fifty men with one grenade, and five seconds later, the grenade exploded.
• Chuck can hit 11 out of 10 targets, using 9 bullets.

This is a head scratcher. Well, not really, but one wonders who is paying whom, or who is threatening whom, in order to keep this particular circus stocked with monkeys.

The Goon Show
Radio 4 Extra
Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers star in BBC radio's groundbreaking classic comedy.

EPISODES (104 AVAILABLE)

In the film, Clark proclaims the house is decked out with”25,000 imported Italian twinkle lights.” At 7W per bulb, that works out to 175,000 watts (175 kW). Putting aside, for a moment, the secondary concerns like whether or not his home could handle that load, let’s just deal with the raw numbers.

At 1989 electricity prices, that means Clark’s display uses $12.25 per hour. Run from, say, 6 PM to midnight every day, it would cost $73.50 per day. If run for the month of December, it would cost $2,205. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around $5,294. //

You can read the analog dials on an old power meter to determine how much energy your home uses. It’s an old trick we shared in our guide to measuring your home’s energy use. A 2014 blog post from an equally curious person used that very trick to calculate how much energy the Griswold home is using while the lights are on based on how long the meter is visible and how many times the various dials rotate in that time frame.

We have to assume that the clip was sped up for theatrical effect because if the meter was spinning in real time, ol’ Clark’s house was sucking down 529 MW—or about as much power a quarter of the greater Chicago region. So whatever the activation of auxiliary power did in the film, we can safely assume it delivered that much extra power to the grid.

His insane takes were fun to watch because Keith Olbermann became Keith Olbermann playing Ben Affleck playing Keith Olbermann. A parody inside a joke wrapped in a clown.

Welcome to explain xkcd, the site that explains many of the obscure references in Randall Munroe's amazing xkcd webcomic!

On November 04, 1965, CDR Clarence W. Stoddard, Jr., Executive Officer of VA-25 "Fist of the Fleet," flying A-1H Skyraider Bu. No. 135297, NE/572, from Carrier Air Wing Two aboard USS Midway, carried a special bomb to the North Vietnamese in commemoration of the 6-millionth pound of ordnance dropped. This bomb was unique because of the type..... it was a toilet!

Also unique to this mission is the fact this aircraft was named "Paper Tiger II" (a temporary name used for just this one flight).

The following is an account of this event, courtesy of Clint Johnson, Captain, USNR Ret. Captain Johnson was one of the two VA-25 A-1 Skyraider pilots credited with shooting down a MiG-17 on June 20, 1965.

"I was a pilot in VA-25 on the 1965 Vietnam cruise.

572 was flown by CDR C. W. "Bill" Stoddard. His wingman in 577 (which was my assigned airplane) was LCDR Robin Bacon, who had a wing station mounted movie camera (the only one remaining in the fleet from WWII).

The flight was a Dixie Station strike (South Vietnam) going to the Delta. When they arrived in the target area and CDR Stoddard was reading the ordnance list to the FAC [Forward Air Controller], he ended with "and one code name Sani-Flush." The FAC couldn't believe it and joined up to see it. It was dropped in a dive with LCDR Bacon flying tight wing position to film the drop. When it came off, it turned hole to the wind and almost struck his airplane. It made a great ready room movie.

The FAC said that it whistled all the way down.

The toilet was a damaged toilet, which was going to be thrown overboard. One of our plane captains rescued it and the ordnance crew made a rack, tailfins and nose fuse for it. Our checkers maintained a position to block the view of the air boss and the Captain while the aircraft was taxiing forward. Just as it was being shot off we got a 1MC message from the bridge, "What the hell was on 572's right wing?"

There were a lot of jokes with air intelligence about germ warfare. I wish that we had saved the movie film. CDR Stoddard was later killed while flying 572 in Oct 1966. He was hit by three SAMs over Vinh."

Taxpayer | August 28, 2022 at 9:43 pm

Journalism is about covering important stories.. with a pillow, until they stop moving

amwick in reply to Taxpayer. | August 29, 2022 at 7:19 am

The guy whose pic is to the right (@RonColeman) has a twitter hashtag… he just says #journalism. I call it #carpetjournalism because they cover things up, and they lie…

Dear Sir:

I am writing in response to your request for additional information in Block #3 of the accident reporting form. I put “Poor Planning” as the cause of my accident. You asked for a fuller explanation and I trust the following details will be sufficient.

I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, I was working alone on the roof of a new six-story building. When I completed my work, I found I had some bricks left over which when weighed later were found to weigh 240 lbs. Rather than carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which was attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the bricks into it. Then I went down and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 240 lbs of bricks. You will note on the accident reporting form that my weight is 135 lbs.

Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope.

The object oriented toaster

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"

One advisor, an Electrical Engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The advisor: "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantifies its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."

The second advisor, a software developer, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."

"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelette classes."

"The ham and cheese omelette class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."

"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."

"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v.8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."

"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel Pentium with 48MB of memory, a 1.2GB hard disk, and a SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap."

The king wisely had the software developer beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.

Over the years I’ve created a collection of new terms for old things—things that are common to traveling and living overseas but that haven’t had common labels. Most of them have come to me while I’m in the air, looking out the window or thumbing through an inflight magazine.

• bait and glitch
• direct flight to the dog house
• metapacking
• eurekathing
• tetrisness
• TSAT
• fortnightlies
• vontrappish
• flotsam and jetsam and thensam
• disafearance
• duffling
• terminal fowliage
• flaggle
• making a this-line’s-not-for-you-turn
• glizing
• preseating
• passenger of imminent domain
• single-entré seating
• seatemic (pronounced see-uh-tehm-ic)
• post-ping che-klatches
• visatrig

Security Sam • June 28, 2022 11:25 AM

For safety the security abhors
With a mutually exclusive rule
Just like the set of double doors
Located in every bank vestibule.

Elon Musk
@elonmusk
·
May 30, 2022
Replying to @HardDriveMag
Less funny than SNL on a bad day. This could make a drunk person sober. Try harder!
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
The reason you’re not that funny is because you’re woke.

Humor relies on an intuitive & often awkward truth being recognized by the audience, but wokism is a lie, which is why nobody laughs.
2:10 PM · May 30, 2022

The Colonel Rides the Buffer.

Back in 2004, having come back from the desert twenty pounds and one wife lighter, I bought a small little place over in Largo, Florida where I had found post deployment work in the private sector. It was a pretty decent little house. With no spouse and an all-of-the-sudden bit of extra time on my hands, I decided to fix up the place. The first thing that had to go, was that nasty, puke colored carpet. Tearing it out and having it replaced was going to be time consuming and fairly expensive. However, once again I was reminded that God takes care of fools and drunks, and as all my friends, acquaintances and Class-B Dependents know, I am well qualified in both categories. //

cmdr_burr
6 hours ago
Ha ha! Great story, Colonel! Takes me back to my enlisted days, when, as an E-3, I was assigned to buff a passageway (with no prior instruction). I got whacked in the 'nads right off the bat (but only once).

Nos Nevets

Only once! Castrated, huh?

Pointy Haired boss: I hear we need more eunuch programmers.
Dilbert: That's "UNIX".
PHB: Oh. If the company nurse comes by, tell her nevermind.

Emily Zanotti @emzanotti
What are the other problems

Cocaine in the River Thames is 'another problem weeks eels don't need', says expert

Emily Zanotti @emzanotti
·
Feb 3
Replying to @emzanotti
WAIT IS THIS WHY PEOPLE EAT JELLIED EEL
@ighaworth @jdskyles

Unlike other companies that are taking a moral stand against Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, CNN’s reason for no longer broadcasting Russia is, well … kind of hilarious. According to a report from Reuters, CNN decided to pull out of Russia after a new law was passed there, threatening jail for anyone who intentionally spreads “fake” news. //

This is probably as close as we’ll get to CNN admitting that they are fake news.

As much as I love the idea of honoring my favorite presidents, it’s time that we acknowledge what today really is: the observation day of George Washington’s birthday. Ok, so his actual birthday is Feb. 22, but we celebrate it on that catch-all day known as Presidents’ Day — or Washington’s Birthday. //

You can read plenty of books, essays, and encyclopedia entries about George Washington’s life and accomplishments. He truly was a man of greatness.

But today I want to focus on a not-so-true story about our first president. //

Today, on the eve of George Washington’s 290th birthday, I’d like to introduce you to a history of America’s founding that you’ve probably never heard. We’ll go ahead and put it out there that 1861’s Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi (童絵解万国噺) probably has absolutely no basis in fact, but this Japanese history of the founding of the U.S. is a heck of a lot of fun.

For starters, the book portrays George Washington fighting with a bow and arrow alongside the “Goddess of America.” //

Lest you look at this book and think that the Japanese really screwed up our history, Billy Moncure writes at War History Online that Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi wasn’t meant to be entirely serious.

“Nozaki Bunzō, also known by his pen name of Kanagaki Robun, was known for amusing historical fiction,” Moncure notes. “His pen name roughly translates as ‘Scribbler of Foolish Words.’”

“Although the text was supposed to give the reader a general idea of American history and significant figures, much of it is intended to be symbolic of America’s struggle rather than a true history,” he continues.

So if you take time out today to remember our first and greatest president, or maybe tomorrow on Washington’s actual birthday, don’t forget the time that a Japanese author gave the Father of Our Country the most badass treatment imaginable.

Since winning her election back in November and then being sworn into office last month, Winsome Sears has been making her mark as Virginia’s first black female Lieutenant Governor, and Monday was no exception.

Whether it was via a prankster or it legitimately went missing, the gavel that is normally used to bring the State Senate in order was nowhere to be found. So Lt. Gov. Sears decided to improvise – courtesy of a high-heeled shoe.

As she did so, Sears uttered a quote which, like the shoe itself, is the stuff of legends.

“One shoe can change your life. Just ask Cinderella,” she stated, according to Washington Post reporter Laura Vozzella, who tweeted out the below image of the now-famous shoe:

Emily Zanotti@emzanottiForget those fake union negotiations they make you do in law school to learn conflict resolution tactics. They should make students mediate a pre-bedtime multi-vehicle monster truck trade between two tired toddlers.

Damn, they drive hard bargains. Brutal.8:52 PM · Feb 12, 2022

When an eel bites your toe
‘Cause he’s hopped up on blow
That’s a moray //

"Cocaine in the river Thames is another problem eels funny need"