Jesus and Moses

I received this one via email recently:

A burglar broke into a house one night. He shined his flashlight around, looking for valuables when a voice in the dark said,

'Jesus knows you're here.'

He nearly jumped out of his skin, clicked his flashlight off, and froze.

When he heard nothing more , after a bit, he shook his head and continued.

Just as he pulled the stereo out so he could disconnect the wires, clear as a bell he heard

'Jesus is watching you.'

Freaked out, he shined his light around frantically, looking for the source of the voice.

Finally, in the corner of the room, his flashlight beam came to rest on a parrot.

Did you say that?' he hissed at the parrot.

'Yep', the parrot confessed, then squawked, 'I'm just trying to warn you that he is watching you.'

The burglar relaxed. 'Warn me, huh? Who in the world are you?'

'Moses,' replied the bird.

'Moses?' the burglar laughed. 'What kind of people would name a bird Moses?'

'The kind of people that would name a Rottweiler Jesus.'

Best Daily Mail headline

... is at Boing boing.

On a less sensational note, if you haven't seen the Daily Mail headline generator, check it out here.

Mrs Voldemort?

This post from Dizzy Thinks observes that of all the influential women in politics over the past century (according to a Government list publish recently), only one is listed without her name.

Check out 1979 by clicking on the picture to make it bigger.

Healthcare Myths and Facts

I was on McSweeney's and I quite enjoyed this piece of analysis within commentary on the American healthcare debate... Can't help but feel he might just have hit the nail on the head there!

MYTH:

People in Britain are deeply unhappy with their socialized medicine system, which ours will become.

FACT:

People in Britain are deeply unhappy with everything. It is their only source of happiness.

Poptarts and debating

Debating tip #56: Use your POPTART.

Debating tip on IR

...Courtesy of The Onion, here is an example of the easiest way to win an international relations round.

More unintended consequences

Cracked has an article on 5 laws with unintended consequences - Freakonomics style and worth the read.

Hat tip: Prometheus Titan (his blog here)

Does this apply to pupillage applications?

Coupling

Just spent most of the weekend watching coupling.

I'd seen the first series before, but not seen any of the others and had forgotten how funny it was.

I do recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it.

My only problem is how much sense Jeff makes. Ahem.

It's a panacea!

An Indian Court has been petitioned to ban Google Earth because it allegedly helped the Mumbai terrorists plan their attacks.

Yes, well, so did the map makers of paper maps. And the airlines/train companies who transported them. Don't forget the markets that fed them.

Ahem, for a far moer articulate rebuttal ofa silly idea, click here.

The funniest man in the world has a blog....

I have just discovered, to my joy, that the funniest man in the world (or at least the 2007 and 2009 debating world championships) has a blog.

For those dear blog watchers out there who don't know who Willard Foxton is, I can tell you that words cannot possibly do him justice and you just MUST go over and have a read.

He will be added to the blog roll straight away.

(ps: the rule with Willard, by the way, is that the more outragous a story seems, the more truth there is in it. A story about him being kidnapped by pirates whilst shopping for milk is likely to be true*, a slightly humourous story about who said what to whom is less so).

* to understand Willard's relationship with the truth, try imagining the truth as a person. Now imagine their relationship is as functional as a play boy bunny's relationship and about as long lasting. Then you're about 6.5% of the way there.

Moral quote of the day

"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

-Jingo, Terry Pratchett

Double Trouble

This story about an Italian judge with an identical twin is quite amusing...

How babies are made: the 6 year old view

This is quite sweet.

5 Children were asked how they thought babies were made.

To be fair to them, they are quite accurate on the whole and even where wrong, it's the result of a wrong logical leap rather than anything their parents seem to have told them.

Admittedly, though, most of them ge a little lost after 'an egg hatches in Mummy's tummy' analysis....

Obama in the West Wing

I very much like this conversation by Aaron Sorkin where Obama goes and chats to Jed Bartlet

Stating the obvious

Dale Winton complains that no one ever asked if he was gay.

Yes, right, well no one ever asked me if I was female*. Some facts are so obvious that they don't bear questioning....


*comments along the lines of 'yes, but you're not a real girl' aside

Awkwardly, true

(http://xkcd.com/386/)

Muphry's Law

Muphry’s Law (no, not Murphy’s). Muphry’s law states that “if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.”

Hartman’s Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: “any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror”.

“McKean’s Law” (after Verbatim editor Erin McKean):
Call it McKean’s Law: Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.

“Skitt’s Law” (after alt.usage.english contributor “Skitt”):
Skitt’s Law, a corollary of Murphy’s Law, variously expressed as “any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself” or “the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster.”

Courtesy of posters from the Freakonomics blog

Underwear in videogames

This article is an interesting look at the sheer (ha ha) ridiculousness of female underwear in video games

Indexed - BVC style

In a homage to indexed


And because I am very much at the point where the 'days' axis is running out of numbers...