Todd Stadler's blog

The pluck of the Irish

Today being St. Patrick's Day, I decided to approach people wearing obvious amounts of green. I would say to them, smiling, "Do you know what day today is?"

And of course they would reply, perhaps with a wink, "Yes I do!"

And then I'd give them a big pinch on the butt! And surprised and dismayed, they'd look at me and ask, "Hey, why'd you do that?"

To which I'd reply, "I'm sorry, I'm color blind."

Or at least, I thought about doing that. Because I'd get to pinch everyone's butt.

Punino

A joke, inspired by last night's excellent dinner cooked by Julia:

Q: What is the president of Russia's favorite dish to eat when he's watching the car race?

A: Pasta Putin-NASCAR!

Okay, I guess calling it "inspired" is a bit of a stretch.

But now that I've come to terms with the olives in my life, I really do like pasta puttanesca. Mmm....

PoMo ho-ho's

I got my latest edition of Highlights for Postmodern Children today, and I'm sad to see that they've cancelled this niche spinoff of the childhood magazine due to low circulation.

But, as always, I turned first to the jokes section, and I thought I'd reproduce some of their gags here, seeing as people will no longer be able to enjoy them in printed form.

Tim: If seagulls fly over the sea, what flies over the bay?

Jim: Pardon me?

Tim: If seagulls fly over the sea, what flies over the bay?

Jim: I suppose it depends on where the bay is, but I've been down to San Francisco a few times, and I'm pretty sure I saw seagulls there, too. Maybe a few terns, plenty of pigeons — although I'm sure they don't go out too far, since their wings are shorter than those of seagulls ... I don't know, I guess I'm not too knowledgeable about sea birds, really.

Tim: Baygulls!

Jim: Pardon?

Tim: Baygulls!

Jim: Are you changing the subject or is this one of those "surrealist" jokes where the punch line is always "fish", except you've changed it up and now it's "bagels"?

Tim: No no! Baygulls fly over the bay!

Jim: Look, it's not your diction that's causing me to not understand, so there's no need to overemphasize things. This isn't an anti-Semitic joke, is it? You know I hate anti-Semitic humor — it demeans the Jews, and I don't like that.

Tim: I really can't believe that you're not getting this — children as young as four can usually find the humor in this joke. Look, it's a simple analogy: "sea" is to "bay" as "seagull" is to "baygull", right? The joke is that there's no such bird as a "baygull", but it sounds like another English word, "bagel", a toroidal foodstuff that is actually incapable of flight, which leads to cognitive dissonance with the stated premise, thus eliciting humor.

Jim: Ah, I see.

And here's another gem.

Wilhelmina: Why was five afraid of six?

Billhelmina: Mm-hm.

Wilhelmina: Because six seven eight.

Billhelmina: Sounds good.

Wilhelmina: Get it?

Billhelmina: I hate your stupid humor.

Wilhelmina: Six seven eight! Ha!

Billhelmina: This is stupid. My name's not really Billhelmina, by the way. I took this job because I was told it was a serious acting part. This is demeaning. I hate postmodernism.

Finally, I was pleasantly surprised to see a few foreign-language jokes, including the one below. I really think that this vein could have been mined a lot more, but I guess now the comedic precious metal will remain in unhumorous ore form.

Alberto: ¡Toc toc!

Malberto: ¿Quién es?

Alberto: Bu.

Malberto: ¿Bu quién?

Alberto: ¡No llores!

Malberto: No estoy llorando.

For the record, I'm not really sure what postmodernism is, but from what I can tell, making heavy allusion to it while being ignorant of its basic premise seems somehow in keeping with its basic premise.

What can I say, I didn't sleep well last night.

An exciting story, blogged

I was threatened to within an inch of my life this morning.

Admittedly, the angry man that yelled at me had a right to be upset, since I was passing him on the left, and I know I know that's wrong.

Still, we were just walking down the sidewalk.

Whoops, there's a typo in the preceding paragraphs. He didn't actually threaten me. And he wasn't angry. But I was thinking that it would be funny if he had threatened me, or at least shook his fist and yelled nonsensical gibberish in my general direction. And it's the thought that counts.

To be fair, we did share a few (potentially) tense seconds as we were both walking next to each other at similar speeds. For all I know, he was angry at having to share the sidewalk with me, but if so, he apparently bottled up his frustration.

You see, this is the level of conjectural storytelling (i.e. fibbing) I'm reduced to in order to keep my blog "fresh" and "def".

I swear, if I ever have a kid who comes home one day and says, "Kadizzle, Dad, today in class I made a blog," I'm going to sit him down and have a serious talk.

"Son," I'll say, "You know I don't like that new-fangled slang that you kids use these days," for I assume that "kadizzle" will be a new word that kids will start using in five to ten years. It will be a form of greeting that, although colloquial, is used to greet elders and respected people. I'm conjecturing.

Anyhow, I'll say, "Son, schladazzle," using the slang term I presume will exist for elders to refer endearingly to the young, thereby gaining my son's trust, "I think you need to know that blogs are not to be trifled with. With potentially infinite readership comes potentially infinite responsibility."

I'll continue, "I know that blogs seem like fun — and they can be — but I don't want to see you neglecting your other work because you have a blog now. For instance, just because you're a mature blog-man now, don't think that you're getting out of your trip to Disneyland."

For, you see, I assume that by that time, Disneyland will have evolved into a soulless, corporate environment that is more tedious than fun.

Anyhow, the real point of this story, other than to concretize my predictions for future neologisms, is that having a blog and being stuck indoors in an SQL class on a beautiful day is a dangerous combination. Gads, it's so nice outside.

I got your e-mail

One of the groups at work recently requested that we set up an autoresponder for e-mails sent to a generic e-mail address for their group. You know, the kind of thing that, when you send an e-mail to info@example.com, says "We received your e-mail and will reply as soon as possible."

For all the useful information such fake e-mail contains, it might as well say, "Beep * Transmission complete * Status=14908". I loathe these kinds of e-mails, and I can't understand why anyone thinks they're useful.

I mean, try to imagine an analagous situation with phone calls. You call a company and they don't answer, so you leave a message. As soon as you hang up the phone, you get a call back. It's a computerized voice, telling you that "This is DynoCorp's message system, and I just received your voice mail. Someone will get back to you soon about that." Well, duh. Did you really doubt that your message was recorded? Did that computerized call back reassure you?

Sure, back in the Wild West days of the Internet, I guess you were never sure that any e-mail you'd sent had actually gotten through — maybe e-Indians had ambushed the e-Pony-Express or whatever. But I don't think that happens a lot these days.

Instead, with the ubiquity of internet connections and e-mail usage, it's now less a question of "did they get my e-mail" as "will they actually bother reading it and responding", which of course is entirely up to the potentially capricious human behind the e-mail address, and not at all a technical question.

And yet the autoresponder is not capable of sentience, much less capriciousness, so it blithely replies to everything, from gibberish medical spam to the world's most beautiful poetry, with "We received your e-mail and will reply as soon as possible."

And it's not even necessarily true! The only entity who you can be certain has received your e-mail is the autoresponder, and clearly it's not going to do much useful with your message. Will a human read your message? Maybe. Will they reply? It depends. Will it be as soon as possible? Do I even need to ask?

I guess I have a special place in my gall bladder for such e-mails because, as the person who sends out our company's e-mail newsletter (or rather, oversees the automated sending of the same), I have to scroll through screens of informationless e-mails every time we send out a newsletter. I don't mind the many "out of office" messages we also receive, because that actually tells me something I didn't know (not that I particularly care in this case), but scanning through hundreds of e-mails written by computers can get a fellow down.

I bring all this up because today, something went wrong. I'm not sure why it didn't happen before — I guess we hadn't sent out an e-mail newsletter since we'd set up the autoresponder. Anyhow, I noticed that the generic e-mail inbox for the newsletter was filling up with dozens and dozens of e-mails, all from the same place and with the same subject line.

It was the sort of thing that strikes fear into my heart because something was clearly going very wrong, it didn't seem like it was going to stop, and it there was a good chance it was my fault. Webmasters rarely get to use their "fight or flight" responses in their jobs, but this one certainly set my adrenaline pumping. If I were starring in a show called "Web Master!", a military fanfare would have started playing at that moment.

My mind raced — was there something wrong with the e-mail sending mechanism? No, I hadn't changed anything there, and it had been working fine for dozens of previous newsletters. But why, my mind yelled a little loudly in my ear, are a handful of e-mail addresses continually sending us these e-mails?

Your being the clever type, you've probably figured out by now what was going on. Included in our list of newsletter recipients were a few e-mail addresses that also were set up with autoresponders.

And while most "out of office" functions are clever enough to send only one e-mail saying "I'm not here" per day, all the autoresponders in this scenario were stone-cold stupid (in our case, it's because Microsoft designed it that way — "Who needs an autoresponder that keeps track of the people it's already autoresponded to?", someone said in a meeting in Redmond).

The upshot of this all being that, for several minutes (before I finally just turned off our autoresponder), our server was having a conversation with other servers that went something like this: "I got your message." "I got your message." "Great! I also got your message." "And I got your message." "Okay. Oh, and also, I got your message." And so on.

Just two computers, carrying on their own highly repetitive — if annoyingly polite — conversation, and willing to carry it on into eternity, barring the intervention of any meddling webmasters.

But before I killed our autoresponder, leaving the other servers' autoresponders to wonder what had happened to their new, garrulous friend, I thought for a second about all the meaningless, perfunctory chatter going back and forth and I realized, "You know, that reminds me a lot of blogs".

Math parties

The other day Julia was talking to a girl from church who's in high school. The girl was complaining about things in school at the end of the semester.

Julia, a high school teacher, was interested in how other schools operate, and asked the girl for specifics of what was annoying her. The girl replied with a roll of the eyes, "Well, for instance, tomorrow we're having a math party."

While school parties can indeed be quite lame, Julia was surprised at how annoyed the girl was at this event — she wasn't normally one to complain that things weren't cool enough. "That doesn't sound so bad," said Julia.

"I don't think you understand," said the girl, "What they call 'math parties' are actually tests — they call them parties because they think it's fun for us to be able to demonstrate our math competence."

Well, Julia couldn't help but agree that that was pretty lame.

But I for one welcome this newspeak trend in our schools. What better way for our children to learn that "black" is often white, "up" is often down, and "saving Social Security" is actually a plan to divert funds to a eugenics program that will create a so-called master race?

I look forward to more children talking about, for instance, "donating an organ" when they have to get their appendix removed, or "encouraging life" when they have a bacterial infection. It's the dawning of a beautiful new day.

Pope Rooney

I don't know why I never noticed this before, but when I was reading an article about the pope today, I looked at a picture of him and thought, "By golly, that's Andy Rooney!"

This, of course, goes a long way towards explaining the Pope's recent encyclicals which, usually written in formal Latin, have of late been written in a rambling English voice that some have described as "whiny".

In particular, many thought peculiar the encyclical "What's up with the movies", which contains the following passage:

You ever notice how the movies are showing more and more violence and sex than before? Whatever happened to the days when people could view entertainment that didn't embrace a culture of death, or glorify adultery? I call on Catholics worldwide to embrace a new culture, such as found in more wholesome fare like National Velvet. Do you remember that movie? No breasts jiggling, nobody getting dismembered, just a simple story about a girl and a horse. I guess things have changed since then.

It goes without saying that I've never seen the pope and Andy Rooney in the same room together.

Consistigoblins

A rather unusual confluence of indie rock and butchered platitudes occurred yesterday, and I found myself singing, to the tune of The Shins' "Kissing the Lipless" the following phrase: "and secretly, consistigoblins in the yard".

Consistigoblins, of course, being the small things that live in hobminds. Sure, it makes no sense, but have you read the lyrics to that song?