Category: Funny

Two Nations Divided by a Common Language

Dara Ó Briain recently posted this video on Twitter to show just how different the Irish and British are in spite of a couple of centuries of speaking the same language.

In the early days of living together, I asked Ang to put the messages in the press. While simultaneously trying to figure out when I’d installed a device for receiving emails into an iron and dialling NHS Direct to get an ambulance sent out she didn’t realise that her first forays into Hiberno-English were occurring. Nowadays things are regularly grand in our house – to be sure things are rarely things any more, but yokes – and the expletive of choice is feck.

In return I’ve started saying “Ta ra!” and Tidy, which sound quite daft in a Dublin accent.

At least I didn’t mention the Immersion.

Ranger, Barbarian, Magician, Thief, Cavalier, Acrobat… and Dick

Have you noticed everyone on Facebook changing their profile pictures into cartoon characters from their childhood. You may have done this yourself. You may have been guilted into doing so by random appeals on behalf of the NSPCC or other child protection agencies. You might even have changed your profile picture into a character from Dungeons and Dragons, maybe Dungeon Master himself.

Remember Dungeons and Dragons? Kind, friendly Dungeon Master leads our youthful protagonists through a series of trials and adventures always ending in IMPORTANT LESSONS on FRIENDSHIP and SHARING. What a nice chap.

Wrong.

Dungeon Master was an asshat. He abducted six kids and an endangered animal, tortured them for fourteen hours, and left them to die in unresolved peril. Want to raise awareness about child abuse? There’s your child abuse right there.

Dungeon Master – the Joseph Fritzl of cartoon land.

Update: We have received an injunction from the Unicorn Anti-defamation League and therefore are obliged to say that Uni was hella cute, if a little bit whiny. We offer our apologies and no offence towards any magical creature was intended.

Except to Dungeon Master. He’s a dick.

“I’ll plant a mango tree in your mother’s posterior and copulate with your sister in the shade”

Untranslatable Pun
Image by stallkerl via Flickr

Awesome Reddit thread on untranslatable phrases from languages other than English. The Afrikaans ones are particularly great:

soutpiel

Which translates to “Saltcock”, implying that they have one leg in England, one leg in South Africa, and their dick is dangling in the ocean.

Some Irish Gaelic ones:

  • Scaoil amach do bhoibilín – Go for it (literally: set your glans free).
  • Is dócha nach bhfuil seans ar bith ann – Would sir/madam like to engage in a copulatory ritual (literally: I suppose there’s no chance of it?)
  • Ag deanamh neamhshuim – To engage in the act of excretion (literally: making bad jam)

Sidenote: Scaoil Amach an Bobailín was an Irish language youth show that ran from 1990 to 1993. Someone at RTÉ missed out on the literal translation.

(via Waxy Links)

A Brief History of Dagenham

Ang and I recently attended a showing of “Made in Dagenham” at the Arts Cinema and were captivated by a movie that both immersed us in the feel of late-sixties London and managed to portray an important historical event without being stuffy.

However, during the climactic scene we started to hear a low but constant beeping. Ang, being much more generous than I am, only glared accusingly at the smoke alarm but I turned around to shush what I thought was a rampaging horde of huge thumbed happy-slappers. Cue a retreat of almost Gallic proportions when it turned out the source of the beeping was none other than Professor Hawking.

Obviously the erstwhile professor likes working class period drama – we’d already been graced with his presence during a showing of Kinky Boots.

My own contribution to the Wittertainment Code of Conduct for cinema patrons: No random beeping unless you’re a former holder of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics.

Giving the Schafernaker

Ben and Tom had the idea of getting the phrase giving the Schafernaker into common usage, just like the Santorum (NSFW) and lifting your luggage (NSFHypocrites).

Next time you’re cut up on the motorway, pushed about on the Tube, or just plain fed up with the world consider giving the Schafernaker.

When nine hundred years old you reach…

Oreo in his Yoda costume for Halloween
Image by SheepGuardingLlama via Flickr

Based on a thread from Stack Overflow, Joey deVilla gives us a new dictionary of technical jargon. Sadly, definitions for Heisenbug and Bohrbug were missed off:

Heisenbug (n.) A computer bug that disappears or alters its characteristics when an attempt is made to study it. (named after the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle)

Bohrbug (n.) A bug that manifests itself consistently under a well-defined (but possibly unknown) set of conditions. (named after the Bohr Atom Model)

(Wikipedia, 2010)

Apparantly, Yoda Conditions are considered best practice.

A tear heals faster than a cut

Even though the terrible acoustics in the Corn Exchange forced him to slow down his trademark fast delivery but Dára Ó Briain managed to squeeze his entire show into two of the funniest hours I’ve ever spent in the company of a fellow countryman.

The set pieces ranged from our obsessions with keeping up with “stuff” to being stalked by the lonliest man in the world (Will Smith in the abominable I am Legend, coming soon to every format imaginable) and managed to keep the laughs going through the uneven audience participation section.

The tour is selling out quickly but it’s definitely worth traveling to get to a show if only to see there’s certainly more to Ó Briain than being the token Paddy on the BBC.

“The part about the Hookers was a lie.”

The Men Who Stare at Goats, based on Jon Ronson‘s account of one of the US military’s strangest black ops project, looks to be much funnier and absurd than the source material would suggest.

Based on research into the First Earth Battalion (and various other projects involving belief in magical thinking) the book is a trip down the rabbit hole of the American military-industrial complex at its weirdest.

The cast alone makes it worth checking out.