Suggestions from The Common Reader:
A. Gregor Samsa’s sister from The Metamorphosis. What was her name again? Ah, yes, Grete. Thank you internet. I don’t really know what that would look like, but I think it’d be brilliant.
…
C. You could be A Film Adaptation of Your Favorite Book. So: shorter, dumber, but also sexier, with more kicks to the face, more explosions, and maybe a happier ending. (Don’t take the “more explosions” bit too literally, eh?)
Hat tip to Bookslut
My wife and I were trying to think of funny stories, and this is my funniest story ever, from a visit to Uganda back in 2006.
Over the last few days, I’ve written a couple of letters to my wonderful wife D, but I haven’t had the chance to send them, so they’ve been sitting on the table in my hotel. This evening when I returned to my room after work, I went to get out my computer and found – together with the two letters I had written – another letter, written in an unfamiliar script! Here are excerpts:
Dear Sweetie,How are you and your life generaly? From my side things are so fine the way you always see me through we don’t meet each other sometimes.As far as your letter is concerned from yesterday, I read but I didn’t understand because…I thought you had written to someone else…So sweetie, I also love you too much and if you are realy serious, I welcome you with my two hands in my arms. Also I am a born-again christian… [ME: One of my letters mentioned attending church.] Even I would feel good to be in your country if you could arrange and take me there to tour because I love the place….BE SPECIFIC AND SERIOUS I VOW TO BE YOURS FOR GOOD AND EVER![and a bit more]
When I awoke this morning, the note was gone, and when I returned home from work, I found another letter in the drawer by my bed:
Thank you very much. I appreciate the way you have told me through the letter because to be with two wives is committing adultery which is a very big sin. I wish you well and if you go back greet everybody and I encourage you next time to come back to [the hotel I'm staying at].
She also wished me blessings and safety in my endeavors and travels.
I was amused by this caricature of academic debates and the fascination they engender. I also wondered if I’m not attending the wrong conferences.
Intellectual controversies tend to be like dog fights without the teeth, in which the barking not the biting does the damage. In the case of Rotkopf and Urquiza, however, according to the report in The Gold-Bug, they had very nearly come to bites. So much so that Oliver Johnson had to break off his discussion of Poe’s influence on Lovecraft…and leave the stage, with Rotkopf congratulating him, saying that every time an imbecile stopped talking, the intellectual climate on Earth improved slightly. Oliver Johnson had sworn to kill Joachim Rotkopf one day, and Rotkopf and Urquiza had continued their argument in the pages of The Gold-Bug, in a series of increasingly vitriolic articles, which I had followed with fascination, never dreaming that I would one day hear those magnificent, erudite dogs trading insults for real. (from Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, by Luís Fernando Veríssimo, tr by Margaret Jull Costa, p16-17)
The other day I encountered this quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, excerpted in Angrist & Pischke’s Mostly Harmless Econometrics:
On the planet earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons. (MHE, p11)
which is funny and clever. Then I read this quote in Luís Fernando Veríssimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans:
Rotkopf…said that he did not understand the modern lament that the conquest of Latin America had been a cultural violation. There had been no conquest, the natives had won, and the indolent, fatalistic culture still dominated the continent. They merely allowed the whites to think they were in charge in order to expose them to constant frustration and ridicule. (B&EO, tr from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, p15)
which reminded me of the HGG quote except for the massive body count of indigenous persons (as well as the racism of Rotkopf’s initial evaluation of native culture).
Of course, the dolphins have had a pretty massive body count at the hands of humans as well, so maybe Adams was wrong after all.
Gmail keeps coming out with cool additions: an “undo” button that lets you change your mind for a few seconds after sending an email; the drunk test, that makes you answer a couple of arithmetic problems before letting you send a stupid email at 2am.
I admit that every time I open my work email, I am in fear that I’ll have some email that a survey has gone badly or that a budget has disappeared or that I’ve insulted some international official (but the latter happens too often to really worry).
Can someone develop a gmail add-on that warns you whether you are likely to have bad news emails? Right after you log in, it plays a peaceful tune and says, Just Relax, There’s Some Bad News Coming, but You Can Handle It. Everything’s Going to Be Fine. Breathe Deeply.
Please?
This had my wife and I laughing very, very hard. There are a few other “literal videos” but this was by far the funniest we saw. Oh my goodness, yes.
The star admits to dabbling with witchcraft. … She says, “I have this group of friends and we get together and we call ourselves The Goddesses and we wish for things and then a lot of amazing things have happened to all of us. …
“We did this thing where we were calling on the wind and the air and this whole storm started on my roof… It was amazing… It’s empowering.
“One of my friends, she didn’t have a lot of money and she was like, ‘I want a better apartment,’ and we were doing these spells for her and then her dad just bought her an apartment.”
And Graham feels U.S. President Barack Obama owes her and her friends a huge debt of gratitude for helping him win last year’s election. … She adds, “My friends really wanted Obama to be elected so we all did a spell… and then he got elected… It worked out good.”
from imdb.com
I love that I’ve gotten 5 visits to my blog today from people putting “how to switch bodies” into a search engine. Unfortunately, I suspect my post wouldn’t help them, unless they want to turn their own body into a coach potato body.
I just saw a funny, silly Brazilian film, Se Eu Fosse Você, in which an alienated husband and wife switch bodies and learn to appreciate each other, yada yada yada. I was thinking of how many movies have had this premise or a closely related. This is what a friend and I came up with. What are we missing?
Strict body switches
Someone takes over someone else’s body – mayhem ensues
Wow! Suddenly I’m in a big / little person’s body
