friday fun
jdupuis | May 20, 2011One of the reason I love the Cronk News so much is that sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry at one of their stories.
This is definitely one of those cases.
Oh, higher ed, you poor, poor deluded little dear.
Take a gander and read the whole article: SUNC Appoints Twelve Efficiency Czars to Streamline Bureaucracy.
"Our organizational chart is currently 70 layers deep, which is why I'm recommending we trim down to something the legislature will view as more reasonable, like 65 or 66," Brescia offered. "Unless the legislature continues to provide 40 percent of our funding SUNC won't…
jdupuis | May 13, 2011This past Saturday I spent the afternoon at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival at the Toronto Reference Library. It was a blast, I met a ton of great comics people, spent way too much money and supported a lot of great artists and writers.
The highlight was discovering the new collection We Are the Engineers by former University of British Columbia engineering student Angela Melick. The book is an expanded collection of strips from her webcomic Wasted Talent.
Here's a bit from the Info page:
Welcome to the site! Basically, this is all you need to know: JamJAM, or Angela, is a mechanical…
jdupuis | April 29, 2011On Tor.com over the last couple of years, Kate Nepveu has been taking us through a chapter-by-chapter re-read of The Lord of the Rings. In each post she would give a brief summary of the action as well as some commentary.
It's been a great project and it's just come to an end in the last week or so. I've really enjoyed following along with the posts, although I have to admit not with the re-read. Last time I re-read the books was timed with the release of each of the films.
There's an index of all the relevant posts here.
And a little bit from the very first post, way back in December 2008…
jdupuis | April 22, 2011And perhaps student tweets complaining about professor tweets also reaches an all-time high!
Anyways, here it is, 11am on a holiday Friday morning and all I really want to do is relax and read a book. But what do I have to do? Write a Friday Fun post! What a drag.
So, if I want to get the dreary chore of trying to be funny over with as quickly as possible, where do I turn? The Cronk News of course!
Professor Tweets Complaining about Student Tweets Reaches All-Time High
Twitter has become a popular way for faculty and staff to complain about the students with immediate gratification by "…
jdupuis | April 15, 2011Ok, not quite.
But I take my little title image from a post by Eric D. Snider on Arianna Huffington's "hostile takeover" of the "pay people fairly for the work they do" culture at AOL. (Yeah, scare quotes are relevant here, read the post.)
Anyways, the post is called, Leaving in a Huff.
And this is what inspired me to use it for a Friday Fun:
Did you know that when she had her first meetings with the AOL staff, she brought them Greek cookies and regaled them with amusing personal anecdotes?? It's true! Then she taught them traditional Greek folk songs! Then they all danced a tsamiko, drank…
jdupuis | April 8, 2011This seems to be the trajectory for absolutely everything now, from music, to film, to internet memes, everything.
That doesn't mean it's not funny, of course.
From The Onion, Time Between Thing Being Amusing, Extremely Irritating Down To 4 Minutes
PROVIDENCE, RI--According to a study released this week by Brown University's Department of Modern Culture and Media, it now takes only four minutes for a new cultural touchstone to transform from an amusing novelty into an intensely annoying thing people never want to see or hear again.
*snip*
"The results are the same for everything from TV news…
jdupuis | April 1, 2011A fun one from the Scholarly Kitchen's Phil Davis to celebrate April 1st. I've seen quite a few amusing bits out there this year but nothing that really slays me. Any suggestions for good ones that you've seen this year?
Anyways: Librarian Caught in Bed with Book
Readers of the UK Guardian and Post awoke Friday to the scandalous photo of a university librarian embracing a copy of "Eat, Pray, Love." Authorities are still investigating whether it was a personal copy.
The photo came to the attention of the press via WikiLeaks. Authorities in the UK and the US are working around the clock to…
jdupuis | March 25, 2011The world sometimes seems like it's becoming a stranger and stranger place on an almost daily basis. Yep we're talking about Cloud Girlfriend.
From Christopher Mims at Technology Review Blogs: Facebook Virtual Girlfriend Violates Terms of Service:
Some startups don't make it past the phase where they build a mailing list of users for their service, and if Cloud Girlfriend isn't one of them, I will gladly eat my hat.
*snip*
American males are experiencing a mancession, after all, which has made them less desirable as mates and more likely to remain in a state of indefinite adultescence. A…
jdupuis | March 18, 2011Yeah, we've all had this kind of week.
Thanks to The Cronk for humourously saving my soul this week: University Performs Fastest Soulectomy on Record.
Doctors have finally verified claims that the College of Madison performed the fastest soulectomy in higher education history.
"We couldn't believe the soulectomy could be completed in less than two days," said Dr. Rachel O'Quinn. "But all evidence points to verification."
*snip*
"The department was far more dysfunctional than Dr. Mecum anticipated and she had to act fast," explained the medical examiners. "The women professors in her…
jdupuis | March 11, 2011Please, can we just move on.
From The Onion, Responsible, Thoughtful Nation Decides To Ignore Ch**lie Sh**n Situation.
Calling the situation "none of our business" and "not worth a second of our time, quite frankly," a responsible and thoughtful U.S. populace uniformly decided this week to ignore Ch**lie Sh**n's recent outbursts, saying they had far more important things to focus on than a sitcom actor's personal troubles..."Not only have I chosen to ignore Mr. Sheen, but thankfully so has the American media, which has once again shown journalistic decency by only reporting the news that…
jdupuis | March 4, 2011Over on the Tor.com blog, mysterious librarian blogger RuthX tells us the story of how she created a free ebook (downloaded!) with all the public domain stories that were published by noted horror author H.P. Lovecraft.
In the course of compiling the book, she was able to analyze the word usage patterns of the famously overwrought and verbose Lovecraft. And it's hysterically predictable what she came up with.
The post on the Tor blog is here: H.P. Lovecraft's 10 Favorite Words and a Free Lovecraft eBook.
A more complete analysis is here: Free Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft for Nook and…
jdupuis | February 25, 2011I have to admit, opening a used bookstore has always been one of my romantic, "what if I won the lottery" idle musings. Communing with books and book people has always been one of my favourite pastimes.
Of course, I've always known that the reality of owning and operating a used bookstore is a far cry from my idle fantasy, especially in the Internet age.
This post more-or-less hits the nail on the head: This Is Why Your Used Bookstore Clerk Hates You.
You Stole All Our Bukowski
It's hard to keep Bukowski on the shelf when he keeps getting stuffed in the pants of street punks when no one is…
jdupuis | February 18, 2011Twitter brings us some truly wonderful and, yes, bizarre things. I saw this one a few days ago via Vitor Pamplona and thought it was too good to pass up.
Anyways, here's the story from the original Listverse post, Top 10 truly bizarre programming languages:
This is a list of some of the most bizarre programming languages you will ever see. These types of languages are usually called "Esoteric Programming Languages". An esoteric programming language (sometimes shortened to esolang) is a computer programming language designed either as a test of the boundaries of programming language design,…
jdupuis | February 11, 2011Sometimes we collect stuff that we think no one else wants. Sometimes, maybe we should be anti-librarians and erase from all human memory things that should never have existed.
Kind of like that scene in The Ten Commandments where The Pharaoh orders all mention of Moses be obliterated from monuments and records.
I kind of like The Onion's take on it, Library of Congress Adds 3 Titles To List Of Films That Should Be Destroyed Forever:
The Library of Congress announced this year's selections for the National Film Incineration Project on Tuesday, naming three titles it had chosen to permanently…
jdupuis | February 4, 2011Out of Context Science is the latest and greatest amusing shiny shiny new thing on the sciencey web these days.
Basically, the idea is to take a line or short quote out of context from a larger piece -- a paper or blog post, say -- and see how ridiculous such a thing can be.
Here's a few:
One: We then observed the male's sexual behaviour for 15 min... such contacts were immediately recognizable from the females' 'startle' response
Two: they immersed 11 women up to their necks in chilly water, monitored their rectal temperatures, and compared the results
Three: But the alpha males in the…
jdupuis | January 28, 2011Er, right, I think I'm going to have to tread carefully on this one. *looks over shoulder*
Polls prior to the event showed that only 1.7 percent of DelMonte students knew that Marsh Chaumbers was the CEO of Chaumbers Linoleum Solutions and a generous donor to the College. Following the quarterly board meeting, 2.4 percent could identify the Trustee.
"We used assessment and showed almost a 50 percent increase in Trustee-related learning outcomes," said Burrows. "It's tremendous. Even better, we still have over 900 Chaumbers bobbleheads left over, so we can keep the event going for months to…
jdupuis | January 21, 2011Two recent developments that I think are connected in a strange way.
Starbucks just came out with a new drink size, the Trenta, where the volume of coffee is bigger than the human stomach. Wow, that's a lot of caffeine.
In the same vein, there a company out there that's come up with a 12 oz "Whisky in a Can" product. Yeah, that's 8 full shots of whisky. In a non-resealable can.
Ok, so my idea is this. Buy the coffee, empty out a little of it and dump in all booze from the can. Instant Scotch coffee. Or Irish coffee. Or rotgut coffee, more likely, given what they're probably putting in…
jdupuis | January 14, 2011As you read this, I'm on a plane winging my way to the ScienceOnline 2011 conference. It's a great learning, sharing and networking opportunity for anyone interested in the way science happens online. It's highlight of the conference year for me.
It's also a serious hoot. A blast, a party, off the chain.
And it's reflected in the Twitter traffic. Here's a sampling from the last little while.
avflox A.V. Flox
Research indicates you can basically think yourself to orgasm. I didn't believe it either until I started to follow the #scio11 hashtag.
BoraZ Bora Zivkovic
I set up my #scio11…
jdupuis | January 7, 2011A nice tutorial for all those Born Digital Natives out there who only know how to use the dagnabbit newfangled flibbergibbet iPadnicks and Kindlemawhoosits and Kobots.
HOW TO OPERATE THE NEW PAPER BOOK YOU RECEIVED FOR CHRISTMAS:
1) Pick up book. Place in lap.
2) Open book.
3) Read the words.
Voila! Just three easy steps for you to enjoy that brand new paper book you received from Santa.
Put that in your manual typewriter and smoke it, you whippersnappers!
And get off my lawn!
jdupuis | December 31, 2010Ok, this is just plain hysterical. And insightful. And both insightfully hysterical and hysterically insightful.
Enjoy.
Here's a taste, read the whole thing for yourself.
50. "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning."
- Rick Cook
38. "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense."
- E.W. Dijkstra
17. "If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred…