Tue 9 Mar 2010
Posted by anaglyph under Simple Graphics Man
[9] Comments
The Continuing Misfortunes of Simple Graphics Man ~
#40: The Wayward Whoopsie.
In which Simple Graphics Man appears to have encountered two embarrassments simultaneously. Poor, poor, SGM.
___________________________________________________________________________
SGM comes to you today courtesy of Leon of Canterbury and Taupo Thermal Springs Reserve
___________________________________________________________________________
Sun 7 Mar 2010
Posted by anaglyph under Competition!, Idiots, In The News, Signs, True Fiction, Words
[14] Comments
Well now Acowlytes! After the biggest commenting frenzy in Cow history it behooves (!) me at last to announce the winner of the inaugural TCA Rupert Murdoch Encouragement Award For the Preservation of Meretricious Journalism.
Let me say from the outset that this was the most difficult of all the Cow contests I’ve had to judge so far. There was mirth galore here at Cow Central, and so many worthy entries that I’ve decided to award two prizes – an outright winner, and a ‘Best Laugh’ award.
The challenge in this competition was to create a headline that was so inherently non-informational that its banality was unparalleled. At the same time, I felt the winner needed to have an appropriate ‘newspaper reality’. In other words, I was looking for something that might have conceivably found its way onto the front page, but that would have provoked a ‘Huh?’ response about three steps after you passed the news stand. I am also impressed by economy of wit, and a certain Bee Joke je ne sais quo, so I kept all these things in mind when making my final choice.
Out of around 430-something actual headlines, there were many contenders.
The very first Sir Joey Polanski entry was smack on the money:
IMAGE ON WINDOW NOT THE VIRGIN, EXPERTS SAY.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that headline has actually appeared in all seriousness, somewhere in the world. King Willy was not far behind with a proclamation so convincing that I doubt many would have even noticed the threadbare content:
CERN FUTURE UNCERTAIN
Particles May or May Not Be Found!
Not to be outdone, and winner of the Sheer Volume Award (if there was one) was Atlas, throwing into the ring:
THIS HEADLINE IS BOLD
But the Subheading is Not, Typographer States.
It got a big laugh. As did:
NET OUTAGE CAUSE IDENTIFIED
“Not the Blinking Light,†Telstra Admits
… from Sir Joey. It’s a bit of an in-joke though, so despite its inherent truthiness, not the winner.
Of course it would have been a disappointing competition indeed if Billy hadn’t appeared and Cissy Strutt got a big laugh with:
TEATS OF CLOTH
Billy Struggles To Keep Place In Herd
Joey, who surely has a keen understanding of how I judge these humorous escapades, made a (not so) subtle play for the adjudicators’s attention with:
BEEKEEPER CONVICTED OF ABUSE
Cramped hive conditions were intolerable, prosecutor says
Funny, I’ll grant you, but he’s going for the gag, so no cigar. It became contagious for a while. Queen Willy tried:
SHOE IS ON THE OTHER FOOT!
Dyslexic amputee tells all.
Also hugely mirthful, but far too clever for any of Rupert’s mob.
Around the 150 mark we saw Colonel Colonel enter the fray with a barrage of hits. He got a bunch of laughs, but his most apposite was the pithy:
MURDER VICTIM DIES
Again, quite tragically, I speculate that this one has actually appeared at some time or other in recent history.
Another of Joey’s was right on the mark:
JAZZ MUSICIANS LOOSELY INTERPRET COMPOSER’S SCORE
A headline worthy of Jazz Club. Nice.
Atlas was consistently funny, if wildly errant, but this one pleased me a lot:
MOON COMPLETELY COVERED WITH LUNAR SURFACE, NASA SOURCES CLAIM
And this from Queen Willy was a right on the money:
SWEATERS WARMER THAN T-SHIRTS, UNIVERSITY TESTS SHOW
University tests are always showing something-or-other, and I’m glad someone included them. Leaping up into the high 200’s Atlas made a witty play with:
ALEX TREBEK’S CAREER SAID TO BE IN JEOPARDY
One of the cleverest entries, I’m sure you’ll agree. After another strong run from King Willy in the mid 300’s we had a solitary entry from Casey:
SCIENTOLOGISTS: ‘BLOGGERS HAVE NO EFFECT’
…which was more a statement of irony than anything else, but got a laugh. As did:
Godwin’s Law proves self-fulfilling: long thread DOES mention NAZIs eventually!
… from JR, which was a massive self-referential cheat.
And on we went, well into the 400’s. Guys and gals, Acowlytes all, I loved every one of them. But I’m only awarding two prizes today, as I mentioned. My commiserations go to those who aren’t taking home a trophy, but I’m afraid that the inimitable Joey Polanski (Sir) has done it again with his precise and far too believable:
CHILD ACTOR ENDS 18-YEAR CAREER
It was an early entry, but it really captured the idea. Joey, another trophy for the cupboard, I guess. Congratulations.
And the award for the biggest laugh (although that was mighty hard to get down to just one) was for Cissy Strutt’s:
CULT MEMBERS ADDICTED TO STATING THE OBVIOUS
We literally can’t stop, they claim
I dunno. Even now it makes me laugh.
Thank you all for your stirling efforts, and for contributing to the ever-escalating heights of Cow Humour.
The Cow Salutes You!
Tue 2 Mar 2010
Posted by anaglyph under Competition!, Idiots, In The News
[446] Comments
One of the things we hear time and time again from the purveyors of what I shall term Old Media, is how awful things will be if we continue let the hoi polloi, you know, just do stuff without any ‘proper’ supervision. As I pointed out in my long philosophical post The King is Dead! Long Live the King!, it’s not just those with a commercial interest in the dying paradigm who fall for this spurious illusion, either. The lamenting of our ‘loss of standards and the disintegration of our culture’ is becoming a bit of an annoying whine throughout the media in general. So, as we endure all the moaning and the hand-wringing from Rupert Murdoch and other forecasters of cultural doom, I think the question we really need to consider is one that they haven’t cared to air: Just how good is this Old Media anyway? When the Wall falls, what kinds of carefully honed and insightful commentary will we be missing from the Fourth Estate’s cloisters of Quality Journalism?
Perhaps we’d lose masterpieces of perspicacity such as this one, by the accomplished and obviously highly credentialled Stephen Cauchi, ((I’m not picking on Mr Cauchi per se – he’s just one of about, oh, a billion people who would make very average bloggers but get paid as journalists.)) that appeared this week in the Melbourne Age:
Victoria Spared the Summer That Could Have Been Hell
The fact that the headline didn’t have exclamation marks is testament to the restraint of the sub editor, but one can feel the effort of will staying his hand – if he’d been at The Sun I’m sure he’d have caved.
In case you need some interpretation here, this is a story about something that didn’t happen. This is ‘news’ about something that isn’t actually news! Thank God we have journalists from the Melbourne Age on cases like this – I’d hate to think of what might happen if the (non) information got into the hands of someone less experienced!
I’m sure you’ve seen similar things, like the one implied in my headline in the picture at top:
Earth Escapes Asteroid Collision!
No it didn’t. It wasn’t in the way of the asteroid in the first place, so where’s the ‘escape’? Escape is when you dodge out of the way at the last moment and thank your lucky stars for your quick thinking.
So, fellow bloggers and blog enthusiasts. I propose that we are equally as good as Rupert’s cadre of sharpened pencil-heads, if not better. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to create a headline for something that might have happened if not for the Grace of God. A prize will be awarded (it will most likely be something from the Tetherd Cow Ahead Gift Shoppe, so I suggest you might like to pay a visit and browse to give you some incentive).
To get you started, here are a few ideas I prepared earlier:
•Thousands Not On Breadline As Banking Crisis Averted
•No Planes Grounded as Storm Fizzles Out!
•Killer Whale Fails to Mutilate Trainer – Family Oblivious
•Paris Hilton Not a Business Genius – Share Market Trades as Usual.
(It strikes me you could have an entire newspaper of such guff. The Non-News of the World, perhaps).
OK. Off you go. I want some laughs with my breakfast tomorrow.
Sun 28 Feb 2010
Posted by anaglyph under Blogging, Competition!, Laughs, Robots, Space
[12] Comments
Kevin over at Bearskin Rug has invited all & sundry to draw their own Thrilling Space Adventure – and quite impetuously I think – has given away the secrets of his trade to show you how to do it! If you click on the panel above you will see the full extent one of my own personal attempts at being a humorous illustrator/cartoonist type person. I’m nowhere near as clever as Kevin, but I made myself laugh and that’s all that counts. Surely.
Sat 27 Feb 2010
Posted by anaglyph under Science, Signs
[9] Comments
At great risk to my personal safety ((You see how committed I am to The Cow, dear Acowlytes. That’s surely worth a penny in the plate – or even a t-shirt purchase!)) I snapped the above shot on the freeway the other day. It occurs to me that the use of the word ‘quantum’ in product names has become rather like the word ‘atom’ or ‘atomic’ in the 1950s.
At least I hope this is so in this case, otherwise one really does have to reflect on exactly how Quantum Concreting operates. Is the concrete spread in a very thin layer, perhaps? Or does it exhibit some kind of temporal ‘uncertainty’… (“Sorry mate – I think we laid it, but until we go look, we can’t be sure…”) Maybe the concrete is applied in small packets whose precise speed and location is not known?
Or, perhaps, as with all tradesmen, the day they will turn up to do the work can only be statistically determined within certain vague boundaries and the end result is not what you actually thought it would be…
Fri 26 Feb 2010
Posted by anaglyph under Love, Sad, Sound
[6] Comments
It has been a sad, sad week around Cow Central, good Acowlytes. This end part of February, being the anniversary of the death of my much loved Kate, is always melancholy for me, but this year it has been even more so. My great friend Simon – who you all know better as hewhohears – has been extremely ill in recent months, and late in the evening on Wednesday, the disease that he had fought for so many years overwhelmed him at last.
I have so very many memories of Simon – we had been friends for over twenty years. He has been to me a pal, a confidant, a mentor, a partner in plotting & scheming, a drinking buddy, a co-solver of mysteries, a fellow bunny-boomer, a staunch skeptical companion and much more besides. His cancer has been slowly taking him away from me these last few months, and, as he has slipped from my world, the void he has left is profound. He was a big part of my life and my happiness. Even though I moved away from him physically when I came to Melbourne, we still saw each other often, and we were also wired together through the net. A day rarely went by without us talking on the phone or on iChat.
I want to tell a story that I think sums up a lot about Simon’s character; his sense of wonder, his love of science, his sharp mind and his cheeky wit.
We were at the Treehouse in late 1998 – he was a regular visitor, and a fellow researcher in my experiments to uncover the mystery behind accelerated whisky evaporation rates. ((Single malt whisky seems to evaporate faster than any other substance known to humankind. I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of this phenomenon)) As the evening drew in, Simon, who had been glancing at his watch for the last thirty minutes, quite excitedly proclaimed:
“I looked online for the orbit times of the International Space Station and it should be coming over us just about now!”
It was so much a part of Simon’s character to proclaim such geeky things that no-one really questioned that he would not only know the timetable of the newly launched ISS, but have worked out roughly where it would appear in the Australian sky. We went out onto the verandah and turned our gaze upward into the clear and spectacularly starry heavens. Almost immediately we picked out a bright light moving purposefully across the Milky Way.
“That could be it!” said I, “But it might be a plane I guess – it’s very bright.”
“Well, we should know pretty soon,” he said.
“How so?”
“Well, if it is the ISS, then it should fade out when it goes into the shadow of the Earth. About… now!” he said, and snapped his fingers.
And just like that, the little bright light winked out of existence.
It was one of the best magic tricks I’d ever seen. I laughed out loud.
“Simon, you would have to be the biggest geek I’ve ever met,” I said, impressed beyond belief.
I imagined him figuring out the height of the orbit and the angle of the sun on the other side of the planet and doing some kind of calculation to work out the arc of the sky where the ISS would no longer catch the light of the sun.
“How the hell did you calculate exactly where the shadow of the Earth would be?”
He looked at me with his cheeky smile and said:
“It was just a lucky guess!”
The humour in the story may not translate if you didn’t know Simon, but you can probably tell that it comes from the fact that it was more likely that he’d worked out the problem than just made a wild guess (Simon was also the person who introduced me to The Bee Joke and I think you can see that two people who find such things humorous share a very special bond indeed)
Tragically, the bright light that was Simon has now been snuffed out far too soon by the Great Shadow that must in time eclipse us all. Farewell my very dear friend. My life was much the richer for your company and is much the poorer for your passing.
Rest in peace.
Tetherd Cow RSS
Tetherd Cow Ahead
is powered by WordPress 6.2.8
and delivered to you in 0.120 seconds using 29 queries.
Theme: A highly modified version of Connections Reloaded