#humour (57 quotes)
When you read a book, the story definitely happens inside your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes.
— , Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore As a friend likes to say, there’s often something in a good translation that can’t quite be captured in the original.
— , Distrust that Particular Flavor He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.
— , Pattern Recognition I have always found that there’s an inverse relationship between the number of people in a room and the amount of useful work that can be done.
— , The End of All Things Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.
— , Spook Country Now you can relive the thrill of the time you went from your house to a coffee shop to your job to a sandwich place to the grocery store to your house to a friend’s house to a bar and then back to your house.
— , Foursquare Time Machine Feature Lets You Retrace Your Steps All Laser-Like Here comes the Royal Family now. The automobile has now stopped….
Oh, there’s the King – he’s stepping out, followed by her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, nattily attired in a silver coat. Mr. King is now shaking hands with the King and introducing Mr. Queen to the King and Queen and then Mrs. Queen to the Queen and King. They are now proceeding up the steps to the well-decorated City Hall, the King and Mr. King together with the Queen being escorted by Mrs. Queen. The King has now stopped and said something to Mrs. Queen and goes to Mrs. Queen and the Queen and Mr. King and the Queen laughed jovially. The King leaves Mr. King and goes to Mrs. Queen, and the Queen and Mr. King follow behind…
— , Report of the 1939 visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to Winnipeg, where they were greeted by Prime Minister Mackenzie King and Winnipeg Mayor John Queen and Mrs. Queen. Top Cat! Do you remember it? Top Cat! Well, they’ve dismembered it. Cartoon cats who’re breaking the law — we loved it on TV, but the film version’s poor. Top Cat! The indisputable worst film of the year! The animation’s bad, and the script is just sad, I think we’ve all been had by – Top Cat!
— , Top Cat: The Movie – review I am a sperm whale. I carry up to 2.5 tonnes of an oil-like balm in my huge, coffin-shaped head. I have a brain the size of a basketball, and on that basis alone am entitled to my opinions. I am a sperm whale. When I breathe in, the fluid in my head cools to a dense wax and I nosedive into the depths. My song, available on audiocassette and compact disc is a comfort to divorcees, astrologists and those who have ‘pitched the quavering canvas tent of their thoughts on the rim of the dark crater’. The oil in my head is of huge commercial value and has been used by NASA, for even in the galactic emptiness of deep space it does not freeze. I am attracted to the policies of the Green Party on paper but once inside the voting booth my hand is guided by an unseen force. Sometimes I vomit large chunks of ambergris. My brother, Jeff, owns a camping and outdoor clothing shop in the Lake District and is a recreational user of cannabis. Customers who bought books about me also bought Do Whales Have Belly Buttons? by Melvin Berger and street maps of Cardiff. In many ways I have seen it all. I keep no pets. Lying motionless on the surface I am said to be ‘logging’, and ‘lobtailing’ when I turn and offer my great slow fluke to the horizon. Don’t be taken in by the dolphins and their winning smiles, they are the pickpockets of the ocean, the gypsy children of the open waters and they are laughing all the way to Atlantis. On the basis of ‘finders keepers’ I believe the Elgin Marbles should remain the property of the British Crown. I am my own God – why shouldn’t I be? The first people to open me up thought my head was full of sperm, but they were men, and had lived without women for many weeks, and were far from home. Stuff comes blurting out.
— , The Christening The idiots are self-regarding consumer slaves, oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality. They sculpt their hair to casual perfection. They wear their waistbands below their balls. They babble into handheld twit machines about that cool email of the woman being bummed by a wolf. Their cool friend made it. He’s an idiot too. Welcome to the age of stupidity. Hail The Rise of the Idiots.
— , Sugar Ape Magazine Coding is the Socratic method as an extreme sport.
— , Gunpoint: AI The question “what’s the point?” has been asked about Berney Arms station ever since its creation in the 1840s. One might assume the pub was the reason for putting it there, but that isn’t the case. It is there because Thomas Trench Berney, who owned the land, was ready to sell to the railway company only on the condition that a station be put there “in perpetuity”.
— , The rail to nowhere The lesson to be learned here is that when something screws with your careful plans, you take control of that thing, warp it to your every demand, and channel it into a concentrated stream of Awesome. That is how you do PR.
— , Everyone At Valve Has Been Fired Art bollocks has become institutionalised, normalised and is now practically the default way of writing about art and culture for seasoned journalists and a-level students alike. Like Orwell’s Newspeak, art bollocks is variously used in a knowing way, as an in-joke, a private language, a posture, or maybe out of fear – to maintain some questionable status among equally questionable peers.
— , Agenda: Artspeak For the record, I Cursor Miner have predicted many of the trends in music and culture over the past decade. I predicted the rise of the synthpop/electroclash stuff. I predicted the move towards lower tempos of dubstep, I predicted neo-rave and acid revival. I predicted the fantasy/glam/costumed up 70s bands that we seem to be seeing now. I predicted everyone making more stickers. I predicted the return of aviator shades, beards and hats. I predicted the credit crunch. I predicted the move away from quantisation that I think is ‘wonky’. I predicted helicopters. In fact I know exactly whats going on but do the masses listen and herald my albums as the workings of an inspired prophet? Do they shit. OK, so now I’m going to set it down in timestamped bits and bytes 10 things you’re going to hear about soon, so that I can blog here again in a few years and say HA.
— , The future I don’t want to “explore the interface”. I want to get in, do my shit and get out again. If you think forcing users to explore the interface is such a good idea, try ripping the labels off all the cans of food in your cupboard. A couple of meals of cat-food, chilli and peaches should demonstrate exactly how “fun” this is.
— , If you're a web designer working alongside print designers with little to no web design/dev knowledge, how is your experience? SEO is using deodorant instead of washing. SEO is masking bad coffee with sugar. SEO is cramming instead of studying. SEO is using pain killers instead of going to the dentist. SEO is taking weight loss pills instead of exercising. SEO is a comb-over. SEO is Scientology. SEO is Paris Hilton. SEO is the Zune. SEO is the morning-after pill. SEO is astroturf. SEO is not the real thing. SEO is cutting corners. SEO is not the solution. SEO is bullshit.
— , SEO is bullshit Freelancers are unlike normal people and will automatically know where the printer is. Though, of course, your computer won’t be networked to it. It will take IT three days to attach you to a printer named after a celebrity.
— , Tuesday Tip No.59 - How To Freelance I didn’t RTFA, but I for one welcome our new, naked Natalie Portman and grits overlords, to which CmdrTaco replied, “you must be new here.” He’s a Twitter sock-puppet, but so am I, you insensitive clod! In Soviet Russia, the only way to be sure is for orbit to nuke you with a beowulf cluster (yes, it runs Linux!). ??? Profit!
I am trying to condense Slashdot down to a fine extract. Anyone else want to see if they can perfect it?
— , Let's get this out of the way... I killed a man. No, too modest. On every continent and in all countries, across centuries, worlds and dimensions, in times of war and times of peace, my trail of dead is one frag short of endless.
— , The Gamer’s Confession “Hulk. Smash!” Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars. Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk not just smash. Hulk also go rarrr! Then smash again. Smash important, obviously. Smash Hulk’s USP. What Hulk smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it. Hulk crush all hopes of entertainment. Hulk in boring film.
— , The Incredible Hulk review Could you crib me some notes for my work-related robots vs. zombie debate later today? Why would robots defeat zombies in a knock-out, drag-out apocalypse?
— , No! Really! This is for work. Misdoing anything opens up a breach in ethics that can never be closed. It removes culpability from any distortion and makes anything, no matter how heinous, a complete accident. A drunk driver who crashes a car into someone can now apologise for miscounting his alcohol intake before going on to misdrive into someone he mistook for a road. I can happily write back to my bank and explain that I’ve merely mis-defaulted, a thug can explain in court that he simply misstabbed, British Airways can smile at the goings-on at the opening of Terminal 5 and explain that all that’s happened is that they’ve momentarily misrun a national airline, and, five years after the event, George Bush can look at the resounding inconclusiveness of his entry into Iraq and explain to the American people that it now appears he may have misinvaded.
— , I’m guilty, but I’m not to blame In the land of cutting out people in Photoshop, the bald man is king.
— Jess and Nick I was just about to spread the butter when I noticed a fairly typical small hole in the bread surrounded by a burnt black ring. however the direction and splatter patterns of the crumbs as well as the changing shades emanating outwards from this black hole were very clearly similar to the chaotic-dynamic non-linear patterns that one would expect following the big bang.
— , ACPA