jests japes jokes jollies

They Made Me Tap the Sign

By in editorial vigilantism, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

I warned them:

I’m sorry; I’ve tried to be lenient, but since you all can’t be trusted with responsibility, I will hereby be confiscating the Internet license of anyone caught conflating “tenet” with “tenant.” If this trend continues, I will add a whole new wing onto the correctional facility where I currently keep all those who misuse “begs the question.”

Well, I wouldn’t have guessed that my first big bust would be a kingpin like the Chronicle of Higher Education, but I can’t ignore this blatant challenge to my authority:

What a shame. I’ve browsed that website for years, but the law is the law.

Eviction Notice

By in editorial vigilantism, jests japes jokes jollies, language 2 Comments

From today’s Daily Scroll:

I graciously ignored this last week, but since standards are falling at an alarming rate, I return to note:

I’m sorry; I’ve tried to be lenient, but since you all can’t be trusted with responsibility, I will hereby be confiscating the Internet license of anyone caught conflating “tenet” with “tenant.” If this trend continues, I will add a whole new wing onto the correctional facility where I currently keep all those who misuse “begs the question.”

Praeteritio

By in jests japes jokes jollies, work No Comments

In the past ten days, I have unloaded five shipping containers (not single-handedly, of course, though rumors have begun to spread). Close to 100 tons of merchandise. I wish it to be known that I disavow any and all attempts to paint me as a modern-day Alexey Stakhanov. I hate to even dignify such careless talk with a response, but unfortunately, some have said that this sort of heroic labor, combined with my prodigious intellectual output, suggests that I may be an übermensch, a stud, or even a “chad,” as the youth say these days. I give no credence to such idle chatter. In no way do I deserve to be seen as the natural successor to Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, let alone mentioned in the same breath as him. I would remind you that it is no blot on Hercules’s accomplishments that even he didn’t unload five shipping containers, nor is there any significance to the fact that, unlike John Henry, I live to work another day. My only desire is to return to my humble day-to-day life with no thought of recognition, not to live on in legend like Cincinnatus as some would have me do.

Smells Like Victory?

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

There was an older oriental man who lived in town. Perhaps due to race or other factors unstated this man had been singled out to receive a large portion of the attention of the boys of the neighborhood. It was, for example, tradition that his outhouse be tipped year after year on Halloween eve — to trick is better than to treat. This Hallows Eve my father and two of his friends had taken it upon themselves to do this dirty deed and were gliding like shadows across the darkened field that guarded the approach to their target. Caution was essential and every nerve was taut, for a shotgun with a load of rock-salt oft awaited the unwary trickster.

As the skirmish line of three closed the last yards to the outhouse the taste of victory was already on the tongue. Then my father’s friend, to his left and middle in the line, vanished. Moments later followed a throaty, muted cry for help. The tables had been turned, the outhouse moved in anticipation leaving waiting the gaping hole, and this year the old man had won.

— Malan D. Rampton, cited in Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life

Cheerfulness Was Always Breaking In

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies, juxtapositions, lin yutang No Comments

Humorists handle thoughts and ideas as golf or billiard champions handle their balls, or as cowboy champions handle their lariats. There is an ease, a sureness, a lightness of touch, that comes from mastery. After all, only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them. Seriousness, after all, is only a sign of effort, and effort is a sign of imperfect mastery. A serious writer is awkward and ill at ease in the realm of ideas as a nouveau riche is awkward, ill at ease and self-conscious in society. He is serious because he has not come to feel at home with his ideas.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

****

Actually, seriousness is not incompatible with joking. It’s a common mistake to confuse “serious” with “solemn,” and to assume that seriousness of purpose can only be conveyed by solemnity of tone. It’s an understandable error; we do have a marked tendency, we Anglo-Saxons, to answer the big questions with furrowed brow and down-turned mouth. An acquaintance of Dr. Johnson, on hearing of his reputation as a philosopher, remarked, “I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher, but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” But cheerfulness and thoughtfulness aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s simply wrong to assume that everyone who jokes about serious matters like death and pain is somehow failing to deal with them, that laughter is a childish, evasive response and that the only mature reactions are solemn, somber and po-faced.

Jimmy Carr & Lucy Greeves, The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes

I Started a Joke Which Started the Whole World Crying

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

For the past four days, several journalists at The Washington Post Montessori School have been doing the Twitter equivalent of hair-pulling, biting, kicking and scratching one another, which started when one of them did the Twitter equivalent of chuckling at a “problematic” joke. By way of comparison, on that same day, several of us at work were telling offensive and profane jokes about a guy we know who stands roughly three feet tall, and somehow we all got on with our lives. Forget education, income, and all those sociological markers; the real divide in the workplace is over humor.

Memes Test

By in jests japes jokes jollies, the geist of the zeit No Comments

So, Elon Musk, proud new owner of the world’s largest open sewer-slash-lunatic asylum, a man who I am increasingly coming to believe is the earthly avatar of LOL, the trickster deity who loves us and wants us to be amused, tweeted out a cartoon the other day:

This was the signal for the newspaper owned by the world’s second-richest man, which has become deeply concerned over the threat to “democracy” posed by the world’s richest man owning a major communication channel, to cry “ACKSHUALLY” and let slip the dogs of fact-checking. I guess we’re not doing that “lived experience” thing anymore? How perfect. How “on-brand,” as the kids say these days, especially as a Democrat administration launches a “Disinformation Governance Board” (I assume because “Ministry of Truth” and “Committee of Public Safety” were already trademarked). Well, I guess I’m glad to see that journalists and political obsessives have finally found something to fill that Trump-sized hole in their hearts.

One Day There Will Be Associated With My Name the Recollection of Something Frightful

By in fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, nietzsche No Comments

Imagine my horror, as I looked upon the name “Evan Selinger” and thought, “Wait a minute; I’m pretty sure I have taken issue with this dimwit before,” only to find an uncanny calendrical regularity to my issue-taking.

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, “This post as you now write it and have written it, you will have to write once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence…”

I Am Strong, I Am Invincible, I Am Birthing Person

By in atheism, jests japes jokes jollies, the cult of multi, the great awokening 1 Comment

Ed West:

Back in the 2000s New Atheists used to have a good old laugh at Christians, fighting and killing over the minutiae of doctrine. And then many of those same people evolved into social justice activists, and are now having their own tortured theological debates about the meaning of ‘woman’. In contrast to the bravery with which people attack sacred doctrine and dogma from centuries past, they find themselves powerless when it is staring them in the face.

I chortled, I did. If I may be so immodest as to quote myself:

The tragedies and dilemmas we encounter, individually and collectively, are not necessarily errors which can be fixed with more knowledge. Increased knowledge will only be used in service to the same old unenlightened desires, possibly even creating new dilemmas in the process. And even when we know how little we know, we find a way to convince ourselves that we’ve learned our lesson and become smarter for the experience.

Atheists are, it must be admitted, particularly prone to this. Despite their pretensions to rational objectivity, a disinterested observer might be forgiven for suspecting that atheists are just another group of tribesmen who slew a rival desert god and ate his brains, believing they were ingesting his powers of omniscience.

I see it was almost a decade ago that I wrote that. Despite a notable decline in my writing ability in the interval, I haven’t changed. I’m still an unbeliever; in fact, as the Official Atheists used to say before they caught the brain virus, we’re all unbelievers to some degree; I just happen to disbelieve in one more God than they do; namely the God of Social Justice, or RGHTSDFHSTRY, as the Book of Intersectionality calls him. But I digress. I didn’t call you all here to wrangle over theological disputes. No, this is a celebratory occasion! I raise my glass tonight to all my erstwhile progressive friends who used to treat my email address as a confessional booth, shamefully disclosing their heretical doubts over the revealed truth of transgenderism, even as they felt compelled to pretend in public that the real danger to the body politic came from rural theocrats in Indiana. As we watch Supreme Court nominees profess to be utterly stumped over the meaning of such abstruse legal concepts as “woman;” as we watch the various party commissars and commentators tie themselves in intellectual knots to justify this feigned ignorance while praying fervently that the gastric distress resulting from swallowing so many necessary lies doesn’t cause any thoughtcrime to squeak loose onto their permanent record like an inadvertently loud fart in public, we should remember, my friends, that these are indeed the best of times. In fact, I can’t even deny the evidence any longer. I can no longer in good conscience claim to be an unbeliever when it is abundantly clear that there is a trickster god who loves us and wants us all to be amused. I, for one, am quite amused.

1 2 3 4›»