Category Archives: Ha Ha

Miscellaneous humor

Digestion of Potter

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Digestive Biscuits

By way of The New York Times came a link to The Guardian Unlimited and their Digested Read of the latest Harry Potter (excerpted here):

Harry knew he was up against it this time. A favourite character from an earlier book had been killed off within the first 80 pages. That Rowling woman meant business. “OK,” said Harry, grimly, as Ron and Hermione embraced. “There might have been time for that kind of adolescent awakening in books five and six. Now, it’s time to get serious.”…It was the morning of Fleur’s wedding to Bill Weasley and Harry, Ron and Hermione were examining the strange bequests they had been left in Dumbledore’s will.

“Why have we been given this effing rubbish?” Ron laughed. “I’ve told you before that book seven is not the place for jokes and swearing,” Harry answered sternly. Just then he saw Ginny passing. He didn’t know why – though he suspected it was something to
do with letting the reader know that although he was a goody-goody on the outside, he was a rampant horny hetty on the inside – but he kissed her passionately. “Stay safe for me,” he whispered knowingly…

“I’m leaving you two,” Ron declared one day. “I need to create some narrative tension.” …
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling | The digested read | Guardian Unlimited Books

Large Capacity Machines

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We at Fortune Land like a good visual pun.  So do the Eskimo, we are told.  Hmm.

Here is one  Pawn himself found one day in Westby, Wisconsin.  Not far from the Westby House Inn, was this signage on the side of a buildingLarge Capacity Machines

Now Wisconsinites may be a bit towards the plus sizes, but isn’t this going to far?

Indignation, Righteous or Wrongteous

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Keith Olbermann
Anderson Cooper

Don’t tell me you don’t want to talk about personal life when you wrote a book about your father’s death and your brother’s death. You can’t move this big mass of personal stuff out for public display, then people ask questions and you say, “Oh, no, I didn’t say there was going to be any questions.” It’s the same thing as the Bush administration saying, “We’re going to war, but you really aren’t allowed to know why.”

Don’t tell me you can’t talk about your personal life and then, when they send you overseas and you do a report that consists of your voice-over and pictures of you in a custom-made, blue-to-match-your-eyes bulletproof vest, looking somberly at these scenes of human devastation — like a tourist — and that’s your report. Your shtick is your personal life
Keith Olbermann, on Anderson Cooper, in New York magazine

Whiteboard Web Design

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No One Belongs Here More Than You

A wordsmith friend of Pawn sent this link to a delightful piece of self-promotion by author Miranda July. It is well worth the time to step through the entire slide show.

Follow up: New York magazine, April 23, 2007 issue, The Approval Matrix had this entry:
“Nonebelongsheremorethanyou.com, quite possibly the most endearing Website ever.”
http://nymag.com/arts/all/approvalmatrix/30604/index.html

Only the mad go carless in LA

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Alexei Sayle, writing in The Independent made this observation. He then goes on to add:

So, in a town where car status is everything, walking throws everybody into confusion because you can’t easily rank somebody who’s walking. I remember on our first night at the Chateau Marmont we went out for a walk along a deserted Sunset Boulevard and up ahead of us was a single pedestrian. “I bet they’re British,” I said and when we got up to them, they turned out not only to be British but also to be Billy Bragg.

One never reads of people walking about LA, the only instance that comes to mind is Steve Martin’s book The Pleasure of My Company. The narrator of that book is decidedly abnormal in so many other ways that this seems just a minor glitch.

Love those dancing robots

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Um, Shouldn’t We Find Some Girls to Talk To?
Hipster #1 with thick-framed glasses: Yeah, he could do the robot [does crappy robot dance].
Hipster #2: You are so lame.
Hipster #1: No, it’s funny.
Hipster #2: It’s not realistic.
Hipster #1: It’s supposed to be how a robot would dance. What’s not realistic about it?
Hipster #2: Yeah, so a robot programmed well enough to have a dance function would do what you just did…
Hipster #1: Probably.
Hipster #2: If they were to program a robot human enough to have a dance function it would have to be incredibly advanced and I don’t think an incredibly advanced life-like robot would be programed with such stiff moves. They would almost certainly give him at least slightly groovier moves.
Hipster #1: I think you’re thinking of a super advanced robot. I mean, we’re just talking about, like, a robot that appears in the next decade.

–Hipster dance bar
Overheard by: Brian D. Adams
via Overheard in New York, Mar 3, 2007

The Mouse that Roared

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Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein

Published: March 2, 2007The Mouse that Roared
Filed at 8:43 a.m. ET

ZURICH, Switzerland (AP) — What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

”We’ve spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it’s not a problem,” Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident.

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. ”It’s not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something,” he said.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn’t have an army.