Category: Funny

And I bet you thought there was nothing groovy or cutting-edge about Iowa

See this boing-boing TV interview with Ames’ native Leslie “ceWEBrity/gem sweater diva” Hall. Check out all the links on the entry here, too. Tell me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the oh-so-perfect interviewer/uber-cool boing-boing woman with the funny name, Xeni Jardin, seem a little weirded out by Hall?

Ten commandments to politicians and sex scandals

You may have heard something about this whole Elliot Spitzer thing out there. The thing that occurs to me is that it probably would be pretty easy to go to a contemporary translation of Oedipus Rex and change it into Spitzer Rex. I don’t have time to try my hand it myself, so you can have that idea for free. If someone makes such a version and/or finds one out there, let me know.

Anyway, besides good posts from Deb Hawhee here (I would never cheat on my wife, but beyond that, I too wonder why all these political spouses, including our own local Mrs. Kirkpatrick, so willingly stand by their man) and here from Alex Halavais, I also found myself somewhat amused with this piece by Erica Jong I found on Huffington, “Morals to Be Drawn From Spitzer’s ‘Case’.” It is far from the best piece of writing I’ve seen on the Internets– actually, it reads more like Jong dictating thoughts off the top of her head than anything resembling coherent paragraphs– but she does have some good/amusing points, especially in the ten rules/commandments that start the piece. For example: “If you are famous for closing prostitution “rings,” don’t frequent them;” “Pay hookers in cash;” “Don’t yell at investment bankers on the phone;” and, one that I’ve cleaned up slightly for this space, while in office, don’t sleep with someone other than your spouse, “unless you are in French politics.”

Can I get a napkin, please?

Tip o’ the hat to my friend Chris for this, though I would have come across it sooner than later since I have an RSS Feed set up to the fantastic site Improv Everywhere. Here’s video (and a link) to their latest, Food Court Musical:

The entry on the blog about this is interesting because it talks about some of the unusual steps they had to take to make this stunt happen. Funny stuff; reminded me of everyone’s favorite Buffy episode….

The “Monty Hall Problem” explained on video

From my long-time/college friend Chris comes this video that explains the “Monty Hall Problem:”

Now, just to give you an idea about what kind of geek, arguer, and non-science/non-math kind of guy I was: I recall having long and even heated arguments about this topic among the seven other similarly inspired geeky folks I lived with on Davenport in Iowa City as an undergrad. And I even remember this carrying on into my MFA program. One night, a friend of mine and I tried to test this theory in the only way a couple English/creative writing types could have managed: we acted it in little table-top game of “Let’s Make a Deal,” playing it out 100 times. And damned if switching didn’t win 66 times.

Ah, memories.