This page is especially recommended for those with deficiency, and satirized for your protection.
You sure know how to show a girl a good time
From our article on British railway executive Peter Hendy [13]:
In 2013, Peter Hendy, who was then the Commissioner of Transport for London, was accused of engaging in a nine-month extramarital affair with a call girl. She alleged that Hendy provided her with several Oyster cards loaded with £10 as gifts.
The 14th century text Prabandha Kosha claims that Durlabha defeated the Gurjara king, brought him to the Chahamana capital Ajmer in chains and forced him to sell yogurt in a market.
I couldn't put it down
From our article on the novel The Pit, by Frank Norris:
It was the second book in what was to be the trilogy The Epic of the Wheat ... Together the three novels were to follow the journey of a crop of wheat from its planting in California to its ultimate consumption as bread in Western Europe.
Still a few bugs in the system
Helpful information from Google AI Overview in response to the question, "Who played the sister in the film Philadelphia?"
Peg French plays the Brontë Sisters in the 1993 film Philadelphia.
In a triple role, I guess.
Advertising Copywriting Hall of Fame
From an advertisement [15] for Tree Top brand apple sauce and apple juice:
Farmer dad: For sixty years, families like ours have been growing apples for "Tree Top" brand apple juice, for families like yours!
Farmer granddad: Ripe, juicy apples -- picked at the peak of perfection! <Shot of cute little girl picking apples -- possibly a child-labor violation.>
Farmer dad: And year after year, harvest after harvest, we've held to our core belief that the best quality apples make for the best tasting apple sauce and apple juice.
I'm trying to decide what an apple farmer's core beliefs are.
At least, I hope it's unrelated to his Tektronix career
From our article on electronic test equipment manufacturer Tektronix:
The following notable individuals currently work for Tektronix, or have previously worked for Tektronix in some capacity. This list includes persons who are notable for reasons unrelated to their Tektronix careers.
From "Stanford employee arrested, charged with falsifying rape allegations" (March 16, 2023):
Law professor Michele Dauber, who teaches a course about sexual violence called “One in Five: The Law, Politics, and Policy of Campus Sexual Assault,” wrote in an email to The Daily that false reports are “very rare.” Only two to ten percent of all reports are found to be false, a rate similar to falsified reports of other crimes including murder.
Betrand Russell, dope fiend
From Boyer and Merzbach, A History of Mathematics (2nd ed.,1989), p. 685:
A decade later there appeared the first volume of Principia methamatica (3 vols., 1910–1913), by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead.
Should have read: DRIVERS: Do not forget to drop your pantographs!
The mysterious East
Closed captions accompanying an MSNBC talking head's commentary on the recent meeting between presidents Biden and Xi
FOR SHOOTING PAYING, HE REALLY NEEDS THEIR. HIS HAD ALSO IT'S A DOMESTIC. PROBLEMS HE JUST SECTORS FOR MR. AND HIS PORN MINISTER BECAUSE OF THE CORRUPTION.
Film notes from all over
Serious
Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.
He is commemorated in the naming of the small pavilion, now used as changing rooms and toilets, on Jesus Green in Cambridge.
I guess everything's east of something
From "What are the NTSC, PAL, and SECAM video format standards?" [16]
SECAM is an abbreviation for Sequential Color and Memory. This video format is used in many Eastern countries such as the USSR, China, Pakistan, France, and a few others.
Followup: According to a friend, SECAM alternatively stands for Signal Entirely Contrary to the American Method.
Qualifying Examination for the Doctoral Degree (“Orals”)
Candidates for the Ph.D. must take a qualifying oral examination in the fifth term of study. Orals assess students’ knowledge and understanding of their disciplines ... The exam will consist of six topics examined for fifteen minutes each for a total length of two hours.
Bodycam footage shows the moment police in Fayetteville, Arkansas arrested Tyson Foods CFO John Tyson who was found asleep in a college-aged woman's bed on Nov. 6. In the video, Tyson appeared to be "disoriented" while officers tried to wake him up. He was charged with criminal trespass and public intoxication. A report said Tyson apologized during a call announcing Tyson Foods' fourth-quarter earnings.
In February 1954, Jones gave the dedicatory address at the opening of an addition to the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Library, entitled "Books and the Independent Mind." The crux of his comments was contained in this comment: "While it is true that we in this nation remain free to be idiotic, it does not necessarily follow that we must be idiotic in order to be free!"
Trump's kid goes to school here. You'll never guess what happened ...
Oxbridge Academy Foundation, Inc. is a private coeducational college-preparatory middle and high school in West Palm Beach, Florida. Oxbridge Academy serves grades 7–12. Aimed at students of all socioeconomic backgrounds, the school has physical therapist on staff, chef-prepared lunches, a sailing and equestrian team, and a flight simulator.
The school was funded with a $50 million donation from Bill Koch. Koch's goal was to create a school for his own children where academically gifted students of all socioeconomic backgrounds could do hands-on projects and learn by problem solving, a place where students ruled. Oxbridge was opened in under a year on a 45-acre campus that once held a Jewish community center. By 2016 he had spent more than $75 million on the school.
In 2011, Koch hired Robert C. Parsons to lead the school under titles president and chief executive...
In April 2016, Mr. Koch announced that Academic Dean John Klemme would serve as the School's president, placing Mr. Parsons on paid leave pending an investigation of harassment claims. Parsons compensation package was worth $1 million, with an annual salary of about $600,000 per year.
On May 27, 2016, Koch fired Parsons and declined to renew the contracts of Director of Athletics Craig Sponsky and the football coach Doug Socha; Koch noted that a "power elites group" in the school "ran the asylum"...
On June 20, 2018, the school announced that it was ending its football program after a number of its players transferred to other schools.
In 2016, the school self-reported athletic recruiting violations and forfeited all athletic victories for the previous two years...
According to the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, Freud is worth an estimated £170 million, a decrease of £10 from the previous year.
Bigmouth
From our article "Murder of Alison Shaughnessy" [18]:
Bernard O'Mahoney, a man who had originally campaigned for the release of the Taylors and who then had an affair with Michelle, has since claimed that she confessed to the murder to him and has campaigned for the sisters to be re-convicted.
From our article on Beautiful Mystery, "one of the earliest commercially produced gay pornographic films in Japan":
After a night of vigorous intercourse, the couple awaken only to discover that they have overslept and missed the coup.
More fucking Nazis
Re [20], which (AND I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP) was a reaction to [21], question: Did he mean Nazi fuckers, or Nazi-fuckers? The hyphen makes all the difference.
In monarchy the crime of treason may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.
From the instructions for Form 1, the Massachusetts Resident Income Tax Return
Q: What is the Massachusetts voluntary higher tax rate?
A: You can elect to voluntarily pay tax at a rate of 5.85% on taxable income which would otherwise be taxed at a rate of 5%. Very few people make this election.
Museum of Regionalisms that Maybe Don't Travel So Well
But on Feb. 20, the men – Frederick, Michael Irvine and Kyle Dean – saw each other at Spotsylvania Regional Medical Center. To their shock and amusement, their sons were born in the same 24-hour period.
"We were surprised that we all ended up there at the same time," Dean said with the understatement of a first responder who has seen a lot of unusual things on the job.
The men thought they should perhaps burn off some nervous energy by setting up a cornhole game during their downtime at the hospital, the same way they pass time at the firehouse. They quickly decided their two wives and one fiancee wouldn’t like that.
The next morning, the group stripped the muscle and organs from the bodies of Antonio, Dolan, Graves, and Murphy. They dried them to store for the days ahead, taking care to ensure nobody would have to eat his or her relatives.
Terminal cleaning is a cleaning method used in healthcare environments...
The Adventures of ... SUPERMAN!
From news item, "Massachusetts man who stopped armed robbery honored with prestigious Carnegie Medal", September 24, 2021 [24]:
LaPierre saved a mother and her baby from a crushed car in Canton, put a Newton neighborhood at ease when he quickly found a missing 8-foot python and is now being honored for stopping an armed robbery.
Winfield C. Dunn, DDS, Class of 1955, Tennessee Governor 1971–1975
William E. Evans, PharmD, Class of 1975, director and CEO of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital from 2004 to 2014.
Randy McNally, MPharm, Class of 1969, Lieutenant Governor of Tennessee 2017–present.
Rhea Seddon, MD, Class of 1973, former NASA astronaut and eighth woman inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame
Christopher Duntsch, neurosurgeon sentenced to life in prison for intentionally botching 32 surgeries that killed two patients and paralyzed two others
From our article on Homobiles, "an American nonprofit organization founded in 2011 which provides rides primarily to the San Francisco LGBT community [focusing] on customers that taxis did not want to pick up – those wearing glitter, assless chaps, or unable to pay the fare":
Some riders report that they are unable to get rides due to their glitter makeup as the glitter can be hard for the driver to clean up following the ride.
The Vicki Barr: Flight Stewardess book series, in which Vicki's career "brings her glamorous friends, exciting adventures, loyal roommates and dates with a hand some young pilot and an up-and-coming reporter"...
Museum of Better Reword That
MSNBC anchor Katy Tur teasing an upcoming segment, Feb. 22, 2010:
And still ahead... more than five decades after their deaths, the daughters of MalcolmX and Martin Luther King come together for an extraordinary discussion about their fathers' legacies, and the future.
Personal note: After watching the interview I'm bound to say that for people dead five decades they look remarkably lifelike.
Really, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY Better Reword That
Edit summary for an edit to our article "Catholic Church sexual abuse cases":
Some of your colleagues on the other side of the aisle have drawn parallels between what is happening now as it relates to the revelation of these classified documents found in the president's private areas and what happened with former president Trump.
CNN anchor Yasmin Vossoughian (February 21, 2021) filling us in on a jetliner engine failure which began with a "loud boom", after which "debris from the engine fell out of the sky":
Lights begin flashing on and off in houses throughout the neighborhood; lawnmowers and car engines start and stop for no apparent reason. The mob becomes hysterical, hurling accusations, smashing windows, and taking up weapons as the situation devolves into an all-out riot.
The scene cuts to a nearby hilltop, where it is revealed the shadow that flew overhead is, indeed, an alien spaceship. Its crew are watching the riot on Maple Street while using a device to manipulate the neighborhood's power. They comment on how simply fiddling with consistency leads people to descend into paranoia and panic, and that this is a pattern that can be exploited. They also discuss their intention to use this strategy to conquer Earth, one neighborhood at a time. They then ascend a stairway into their spaceship.
Museum of Cultural Differences
Alarming information from our article on Dutch babies:
A Dutch baby is always baked in the oven, rather than being fried on both sides on the stove top.
One hundred years ago, Theodor Seuss Geisel (better known as "Dr. Seuss") arguably began his writing career by authoring a book review of a railroad timetable and contributing to the Dartmouth College humor magazine Jack-O-Lantern. Since then millions of children – young and old – have delighted in the wit and wisdom of his iconic books with their hallucinatory illustrations. In celebration of this centennial, The Signpost has blatantly hijacked some of Seuss's most familiar works (and a few less familiar ones) in service of the perhaps questionable goal of indoctrinating a new generation of editors in the wacky ways of Wikipedia.
Ei! What a committee! Fit for its purpose! Our clerks they love clerking. They say, "Work us! Please work us! We'll clerk and we'll clerk until we're lightheaded (But you'll only see half 'cause discussion's unthreaded!)"
“
I'm a North-Going Zax and I always go north. Get out of my way, now, and let me go forth!
I learned there are vandalsof more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But they gave me the bit – I'm all ready you see. Now those vandals are going
The Waiting Place A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?
FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER That wasn't me, it was my brother. My brother edits little bits Fixing words like its and it's. ——— *Non-geeks should refer to our article on POP3.
"I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends! ... So, on beyond Z! It's high time you were shown That you really don't know All there is to be known."
^I Am Not Going to Get Up Today!: "All around the world / they're getting up. / And that's okay with me. / Let the kids get up in Switzerland / ...or Memphis, Tennessee. / Let the kids get up in Alaska / ...and in China. / I don't care. / Let the kids get up in Italy. / Let the kids get up in Spain. / Let them get up in Massachusetts / and Connecticut and Maine. / Let the kids get up in London / and in Paris and Berlin. / Let them get up all they want to. / But not me. / I'm sleeping in."
^The Butter Battle Book: ""My wonderful weapon, the Jigger-Rock Snatchem, / will fling 'em right back just as quick as we catch 'em."
^Oh, the Places You'll Go!: "You have brains in your head. / You have feet in your shoes. / You can steer yourself any direction you choose."
^If I Ran the Circus: "Ei! Ei! What a circus! My Circus McGurkus! / My workers love work. They say, "Work us! Please work us! / We'll work and we'll work up so many surprises / You'd never see half if you had forty eyeses!"
^I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew: "And I learned there are troubles / Of more than one kind. / Some come from ahead / And some come from behind. / But I've bought a big bat. / I'm all ready, you see. / Now my troubles are going / To have troubles with me!"
^If I Ran the Zoo: "In the Far Western part / Of south-east North Dakota / Lives a very fine animal / Called the Iota. / But I'll capture one / Who is even much finer / In the north-eastern west part / Of South Carolina."
^Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories: "I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, / But down here at the bottom, we, too, should have rights."
^Horton Hears a Who!: "Are you sure every Who down in Who-ville is working? / Quick! Look through your town! Is there anyone shirking?"
^Oh, the Places You'll Go!: "I'm sorry to say so / but, sadly, it's true / that Bang-ups / and Hang-ups / can happen to you."
^Green Eggs and Ham: "I will not eat them in the rain. / I will not eat them on a train. / Not in the dark! Not in a tree! / Not in a car! You let me be! / I do not like them in a box. / I do not like them with a fox. / I will not eat them in a house. / I do not like them with a mouse. / I do not like them here or there. / I do not like them ANYWHERE! / I do not like green eggs and ham! / I do not like them, / Sam-I-am."
You might say he fucked the country over
Senator Charles Schumer speaking on the floor of the United States Senate, January 22, 2021:
The fact is, the House will deliver the Article of Impeachment to the Senate. The Senate will conduct a trial of the impeachment of Donald Trump. It will be a full trial. It will be a fair trial. But make no mistake: there will be a trial, and when that trial ends senators will have to decide if they believe Donald John Trump incited the erection... insurrection against the United States.
Jesus incites Lazarus to resurrection
Followup (February 12): Attorney Michael van der Veen, possibly not fully briefed on the issue at bar, defending Donald Trump during Trump's second trial:
To litigate questions of election integrity within the system is not incitement to resurrection...
Even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.
One of your friends or neighbors may be eligible for free room and board, at government expense, for ten to forty years – for a few lucky Grand Prize winners, even for life!
If you recognize anyone in the photos here, follow the instructions given to alert the Prize Patrol to schedule a visit. Won't your neighbor be surprised!
These are the Times that dry men's soles. Click here
From our article on Black Rod, essentially the House of Commons's sergeant-at-arms:
Black Rod is best known for their part in the ceremonies surrounding the State Opening of Parliament and the Speech from the throne. They summon the Commons to attend the speech and lead them to the Lords. As part of the ritual, the doors to the chamber of the House of Commons are slammed in the approaching Black Rod's face. This is to symbolise the Commons' independence of the Sovereign. Black Rod then strikes the door three times with the staff, and is then admitted and issues the summons of the monarch to attend.... This ritual is derived from the attempt by King Charles I to arrest the Five Members in 1642, in what was seen as a breach of the constitution.
Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural.A decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise.Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people.
To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!
VOTE!
And if anyone tries to stop you, call 866-OUR-VOTE.
November 7: Packyour bags. You're fired, loser.
Ever wonder what Trump's final minutes in office will be like? Click here for the answer. ... or here.
We now rejoin our regularly scheduled broadcast, already in progress
A message for visitors: For performance reasons some of the more image-heavy exhibits have been moved to User:EEng/Museum Annex. The Annex is free and open to the public.
We actually have an article on "goat towers", which are – and I am not making this up – "multi-story decorative goat houses" for some reason commonly found in vineyards. And so perhaps it was inevitable that, in the course of a discussion of this article, the following would bubble up from the fertile but warped mind of our fellow editor Martinevans123[26]:
"This episode, to my mind highlights a very big flaw in the functioning of wikipedia. Namely, that certain users who have an elevated status: 'admins' are able to act without impunity."
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
We thank Thee, O Lord, for another day without whining from someone who doesn't get the joke.
A Note to the Humor-Impaired
One should beware of those who cannot or will not laugh when others are merry, for if not mentally defective they are spiteful, selfish or abnormally conceited ... Great men of all nations and of all times have possessed a keen appreciation of the ridiculous, as wisdom and wit are closely allied.
Accuracy, of course, can better be won by a committee armed with computers than by a single intelligence. But while accuracy binds the trust between reader and contributor, eccentricity and elegance and surprise are the singular qualities that make learning an inviting transaction. And they are not qualities we associate with committees.
In some cases "unblockable" has meant "behaves inappropriately but has too many supporters to keep blocked". But in some cases it may mean "repeatedly triggers others to behave with inappropriate authoritarianism and is unblocked when it becomes apparent that the authoritarianism was inappropriate".[30]
The most notorious occasion this problem arises is probably with the self-appointed civility cops. Someone can make a talkpage comment which twenty different people see and conclude is non-problematic, but it only takes one admin to misinterpret it and the editor in question gets blocked. EEng is probably the most obvious example of this, but the problem is that most normal people aren't as sanguine as EEng in this situation...[31]
I will be happy to supply, for use in developing articles, materials cataloged here (digital materials are easy, scans of hardcopies may take some time).
Because some have asked...
The material on this page is meant to increase other editors' pleasure in contributing (by providing modest amusement they can enjoy during breaks from editing) or to assist them in becoming more effective editors (by illustrating various aspects of Wikipedia as a social environment e.g. [32])
In humor based on political events, Democratic figures are featured as well as Republican (e.g. [33]) though unfortunately the former opportunities don't arise very often, because e.g. Clinton and Obama just aren't as amusing as the Republican nominee.Note: This wing of the Museums temporarily closed pending approval by the castigatores of such material as is conducive to the regimen morum.
This article is supported by the Department of Fun, which aims to provide Wikipedians with fun so that they stay on Wikipedia and keep on improving articles. If you have any ideas, do not hesitate to post them to the discussion page or access our home page to join the Department of Fun.Department of FunWikipedia:Department of FunTemplate:WikiProject Department of FunDepartment of Fun articles
This article has been rated as Bottom-importance on the importance scale.
===> Sincere disclaimer <===
Material on this page apparently relating to living or recently deceased persons is satire intended to improve the editing experience by providing amusement and entertainment to editors seeking a break from editing. It does not constitute assertions of fact.
Museum of Distorted Quotations Taken Out Of Context
A wise, compassionate, magical authority (both temporal and spiritual); mysterious and benevolent guide... guardian and saviour... despite his gentle and loving nature, he is powerful and can be dangerous....
One of Wikipedia's less friendly and more volatile users... an incurably rude and disruptive personality whose idea of good manners is most definitely not within the mainstream.
EEng who, and I'm fairly confident that he would agree with me on this, seems pretty much flameproof, and who is quite capable of breathing hilarious-but-scorching flame himself when the need arises.
Wikipedia's Bearability Hangs by a Thread a.k.a. I'm not a professor of neuroscience (but apparently I play one on Wikipedia)
EEng is a funny guy. If it weren't for the odd joker like him, WP would be utterly unbearable.... He's a professor of neuroscience at Harvard and pretty much singlehandedly wrote one of the best articles on the 'pedia (Phineas Gage)
I think a lot of folks from the @Wikimedia & @Wikipedia communities think this is funny but the editor working on Phineas Gage has severe mental health issues.
I haven't checked out your userpage in a long while, but I laughed so hard (I particularly liked the "head in the sand" picture) I nearly snorted coffee out of my nose. PS: I would like to apologise for being tempted to go to the dark side.... Ritchie333 12:30, 20 March 2015 (UTC)
The Rather Unusual User Page Award
Not sure what my definition of a "rather usual" userpage would be, but it wouldn't be that.
"This is a very long page."
The Barnstar of Good Humor
For your medicine against chronic wikidespair. Consult your doctor before trying this medicine. Symptoms include: a systemic allergic reaction, a worsening of withdrawal symptoms for not placing {{ANI-notice}} in months, and casting the first stone.
Your userpage is hilarious. MB298 (talk) 00:17, 30 October 2016 (UTC)
The Barnstar of Good Humor
Your new gallery made me laugh even harder than the admittedly rambunctious Trump Museums. Astonishing, flabbergasting, yyuuuge!!! — JFG 20:14, 20 December 2016 (UTC)
Ultra-Cool User Page... After looking again at this work of art ....... I'm speechless. What a man! And might the gentleman's first name be Albert? EE=ng
We have concluded to publish this work, though it falls short of what it ought to be, and would have been, if circumstances had permitted us to devote more time to its completion. We are well aware of its imperfections and defects. But, with all its faults, we flatter ourselves the it contains much interesting and hitherto unpublished information...
Our object has been to condense this matter within the smallest space, well knowing that, in this age of instantaneous electric communication, very few have the patience to read large volumes.
We have followed no particular author, servilely, but formed our own conclusions by comparing the opinions of the different authors, more than one hundred in number... We may have fallen in to some mistakes regarding dates of events, or names of persons or parties, but such errors are hardly avoidable in a work of such wide scope.
— Hugh Quigley, The Irish race in California and on the Pacific Coast: with an introductory historical dissertation on the principal races of mankind,and a vocabulary of ancient and modern Irish family names (1878)
A strange cross between the drill [sergeant] and Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket.
In offering a work to the public, it is customary to preface it with a few remarks, which are generally considered in the light of an apology by the public... but, as we have done nothing of which we are ashamed, we have nothing to apologize for.
EEng's humor can be like drinking gin. The first time, you may say, "Ugh! Horrid! Disgusting!" After a few more times, you may say, "Ugh! Revolting! Disgusting!"
... that welcome combination of a) sanity-restoring absurdist humour and b) the potential for making an editor completely forget the reason they went to the page in the first place.
One fine day in the middle of the night, / Two dead boys got up to fight,
Back to back they faced each other, / Drew their swords and shot each other,
One was blind and the other couldn’t, see / So they chose a dummy for a referee.
A blind man went to see fair play, / A dumb man went to shout “hooray!”
A paralysed donkey passing by, / Kicked the blind man in the eye,
Knocked him through a nine inch wall, / Into a dry ditch and drowned them all,
A deaf policeman heard the noise, / And came to arrest the two dead boys,
If you don’t believe this story’s true, / Ask the blind man he saw it too!
Don't call names, you droning unchin-snouted canker-blossom!
You have been noticed using opprobrious epithets. It's payback time from the Shakespeare Insult Generator! To activate the Insultspout and receive fresh insults, click here. Note that all insults generated by the Spout are guaranteed literary and cultured, unlike the nasty things you said, you tottering weather-bitten minnow.
And feathers get ruffled – you've disturbed someone's nest;
Be cautious when offering friendly advice,
Lest you suddenly find your two orbs in a vise.
Lessons are learned, but to do so takes practice,
To avoid getting pricked when you land on a cactus.
If you came here to alert me to DS for whatever, I guess you better do it because I can't remember what sanctions there are for what topics so I just try to do the best I can with the modest faculties God gave me.
The userbox below was considered for deletion on February 6, 2015. The result of the "discussion" was "We can allow tiny pockets of dissent, as long as it doesn't catch on. Now back to the salt mines!".
The ANI pileon juggernaut rolls on, heedlessKeep smiling, or this could be you!Block! Unblock! Block! Unblock! Rabbit Season! Duck Season! FIRE!!!The beatings will continue until morale improves.
When users do something that administrators don't like, but when the users not only disagree but have the temerity to object to the sanctions levied against them by administrators, is this an unacceptable dissent against the powers-that-be that must, always, be quashed by any means necessary?
I'm probably hyperbolizing here, but I think this is how the issue appears to the EEng's of the world. And some, at least, of the EEng's of the world are here to help build the encyclopedia. We say "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", not "The benevolent dictatorship encyclopedia that docile and compliant rule-followers can edit as long as they remember their place and are always properly respectful towards ADMINISTRATORS." So, please, if that's not the message you want to send, just let these userboxes go. And if you want to boot a user off the project for not being here to help build the encyclopedia, please do it for a more substantive reason than that the user refuses to say "Uncle" when confronted by admins.
An admin upholds one of the five pillars without throwing his weight around.
And finally, to each admin who says, "Well, I wouldn't have blocked, but I don't feel like overturning it": what you're condoning is a situation in which every editor is at the mercy of the least restrained, most trigger-happy admin who happens to stumble into any given situation. Don't you see how corrosive that is? It's like all these recent US police shootings: no matter how blatantly revolting an officer's actions were, the monolithic reply is "It was by the book. Case closed." This [admin] was way out of line from the beginning in deleting multiple editors' posts (as someone suggested, hatting would have made complete sense, and troubled me not at all) and when called on it above, he gives a middle-finger-raised LOL. No wonder so many see haughty arrogance in much of the admin corps around here.
—EEng 05:38, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
And let me be clear: I have no problem with 97% of admins, who do noble work in return for (generally) either no recognition or shitloads of grief, only occasionally punctuated by thanks. But the other 3%—whoa, boy, watch out!
"Shit! I left the tub running!" EEng 05:09, 28 April 2017 (UTC)
A very sensible idea
I hereby propose "overextended-confirmed protection" under which you can only edit after proving that you have other things to do and really should be spending your time somewhere other than Wikipedia. Would cut down on a lot of nonsense, I think. —Dumuzid
EEng's half-serious list of topics on which WP should just drop all coverage as not worth the drama
Hail, as in All the victims appeared to hail from the lower class of society or Music historian Bob Gulla hailed it as an "iconoclastic funk-rock" record. God, that sounds stupid.
Garner, as in garnered worldwide recognition for her portrayal. (The same article goes on to make us vomit by saying a bunch of people were awarded the Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series accolade.)
Berth (except on ships), as in garnered a playoff berth.
Welcomed in the context of childbirth, as in In April they welcomed their first child. [88] Absolutely nauseating.
Legacy for any and all things that happen after someone dies, a film has ended its theatrical run, etc.
Violators will be subject to initial 24-hour blocks, with escalating blocks for subsequent infractions. Repeated instances of welcoming children may be punished by beheading.
There is Al-anon, cocaine-anon, food-anon, game-anon, and about 20 others. We are now seeing on-and-on... First rule of ANI: Don’t manifest the problem on ANI.
That's ruffCome into my parlor!More great imgs listed here; gallery at [11]I'm a big fanAny more questions?Live footage of Maddy from Celeste reading the latest ANI hellthreadGood call!Tireless contributorThat's offal!Thanks to AtsmeThe pedantDo not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate pointillism.A reliable sauce. "What's source for the goose is source for the Gandhi."CAT:ALLPROD
My name is Bond. Covalent Bond.Please!You'll get my bill.You'll get my bill.Spurring debateWhen I figure out which of those little shits has the peashooter, there's gonna be hell to pay
Carp per diem
MondayWednesdayTuesdayThursdaySaturdayFridaySundayNewcomers' guide to AN/I – SemiHypercubeSituation normal, all forked up.Another day of editing.Discussion proceedsHis favorite color was maroonDispute resolution process...... or if you prefer, try ANI.Arbcom, step by stepArbCom, the final phase.Required orientation for new arbs: "This could happen to you."At Wikimedia SFRetiring Arbcom member passes the torchWe appreciate your work on category cleanup"When technically minded folk with a penchant for order, consistency, and control get caught up in the zeal of a systematization crusade, unpleasantness can result." – A Fellow EditorAfter six months as an oversighterDraft namespace I've got a brush on you,sweetiepie! Stare not too long, young one... for he who fights with admins should look to it that he himself does not become an admin. And if you gaze long into ANI, ANI also gazes into you.
A satirist I'm not,
A satirist I'd like to be;
I seem to have forgot,
What in hell prevented me.
It might have been my style,
It might have been my prose;
But I'd like to make you smile,
And even happy, I suppose,
For teaching me to jump,
From the bottom to the top,
Of a page with so much clump,
We're all worried it might pop!
20:07, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
Phineas Gage: The later yearsIf I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have wasted my life editing Wikipedia. I would have wasted my life doing something else.Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there are more AWB edits tinkering with whitespace and categories and wikiproject importance ratings than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.
Sisyphus, the patron saint of New Page Patrollers.
New Page Patrol official anagram
New page patrol
After a few weeks "helping out" at DYKDYK reviews underway. Original title: A group of mentally ill patients sitting around and staring.DYK drove him to it."I'd rather cut off all my toes with a pair of scissors than spend one minute at ANI." Testimonial from an actual customer
Checkusers working an SPI. Horns give direct links to Arbcom, Jimbo
Edit (A) triggers watchlist item (B), causing undo (C) and revert notification (D), leading admin (E) to fly off the handle, tilting talkpage balance of power (F), causing diffs to be dumped on ANI (H). ANI thread (I) opens Pandora's Box (J), leading to fireworks (K) at Arbcom. Boomerang (L) gives editor WP:ROPE (M), ending in 12-hour block and smack with trout-infused napkin.
Nonsense!
Some random Ned Kelly wannabe stole your Cow joke and added it to his herd for his personal gain. Watchagonadoboutit?
First pattySecond pattyThird pattyReliable third-patty sauceWikipedia-related caption invitedThe dashing young Ned Kelly wannabe has challenged you to a round of back alley fisticuffs. Unsurprisingly, you never stood a chance. The Australian collected his prize money and stole one of your funny pictures before running off into the outback.
Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure.
It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors and is made to be humorous. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. This essay isn't meant to be taken seriously.
This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia is all about teamwork. Editors must work together to build a reliable encyclopedia, not whine all the time. While complaining is sometimes appropriate, and a glass of wine may sometimes ease tensions, neither of these is central to the purpose of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is not about whining. Complaining about editor behavior is appropriate – at a relevant noticeboard when that behavior is contrary to Wikipedia policies and guidelines and harms the project. But editors should not complain just for the sake of complaining, nor as therapy or catharsis, but to get help in guiding an errant editor back on track with the project's fundamental principles.
If you find yourself complaining more than contributing, it might be time for a short wikibreak to clear your mind, rethink your approach, and help you come back ready to resume building the encyclopedia.
It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors and is made to be humorous. This page is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. This essay isn't meant to be taken seriously.
This page in a nutshell: Most people who say they're "diffusing conflict" don't really mean it. And some other wreckage thrown in for good measure.
Diffusing conflict
Now and then someone undertakes to "diffuse" a conflict budding somewhere in the project. Probably they really mean they want to defuse the problem, as in "remove its fuse" – like from a bomb – to avoid blow-ups. Diffusing a conflict would be to spread it over a wide area, which is presumably not the intention.
Sometimes people write lengthy posts at WP:ANI, or propose Arbcom cases, or use the images on this page, in hopes of defusing a situation; however, the ensuing drama often means the conflict is diffused instead.
Smoke can be seen diffusing at left. Next time, call the bomb defusing team.
Conflict is inevitable when dealing with other editors, so knowing how to apply the proper solution is key. When discussion looks like it's about to explode, it's important to diffuse the balm, before things get out of hand.
Queen Elizabeth slipped majestically into the water
Wikipedia essay deriding referring to ships as she
This is an essay on the pretension and stupidity of referring to ships as she.
It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.
This page in a nutshell: Referring to ships as she has at least the redeeming quality of being a potential source of amusement.
This page is for accumulating amusing passages – real or hypothetical – made possible by referring to ships as she, and for general derision of that pretentious and stupid practice.
(Ridicule of other forms of stylistic pretension is welcome as well.) It was inspired by this discussion at WT:MOS (and see also WT:Manual of Style/Archive (ships as "she") for more background).
Queen Elizabeth slipped majestically into the water
After Queen Elizabeth broke a bottle of champagne against the ship's gigantic bow, she slipped majestically into the water.She also served as the escort for Kaiser Wilhelm II aboard his yacht Hohenzollern.
(hypothetical) After Queen Elizabeth broke a bottle of champagne against the ship's gigantic bow, she slipped majestically into the water.[100]
(from the Featured Article SMS Emden) During this period, she also served as the escort for Kaiser Wilhelm II aboard his yacht Hohenzollern.[101]
(from The Appleton Weekly Post, 1907) Lusitania does not appear to be so lusty as the Mauretania... If Lussie doesn't hump herself and do it first she won't be in it with her big sister.
N.B. There is an appropriate use of the "he would later" form, and that's when taking a temporary jump into the future during an otherwise chronologically linear narrative -- but to be clear, not all such cases justify the "he would later" form. Here's an example (abridged a bit here) from Statue of John Harvard:
The commission weighed heavily on French even as the figure neared completion. "I am sometimes scared by the importance of this work. It is a subject that one might not have in a lifetime," wrote the sculptor—who thirty years later would create the statue of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial—"and a failure would be inexcusable."French's final model was ready the following May and realized in bronze by the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company over the next several months.
Now, technically "who thirty years later would create" could be rendered as "who thirty years later created", and it's hard to explain why exactly the former form is preferable to the latter, in this particular case. (There might be other appropriate uses as well, but your correspondent just vacuumed the house so he's too pooped to think of any.)
The following examples all lack the key component, found in the above passage, that's required to justify the "he would later" form: a temporary jump into the future.
So the woulds get axed:
"Mel Blanc was the original voice of Bugs and would voice voiced the character for nearly five decades." [106]
"Although he did not receive a classical schooling in the Harvard Graduate School, Morgan would was immediately after his graduation be appointed to the teaching staff. ... Morgan fell seriously ill on March 15, 1910 while on a trip to New York to visit Daniel B. Fearing, the mayor of Newport, Rhode Island, and would die died soon after." [107]
"Gowdy would later be awarded received the Postal Inspector's Award for the successful prosecution of J. Mark Allen, one of 'America's Most Wanted' suspects." [108]
"In 1973 he relocated to Waynesville, North Carolina, where he would die later died of cancer." [109]
"But Harrison would also later tell told him, 'You've got a lovely karma, Vic.' ... Spinetti would make made a small appearance in the promotional video for McCartney's song 'London Town' from the 1978 album of the same name. Spinetti's July 2010 performance of the song 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da', at the Festival Theatre, Malvern in Worcestershire, would later be made was available on 'The Beatles Complete on Ukulele' podcast. ... Spinetti's film career developed simultaneously; his dozens of film appearances would include included Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew, Under Milk Wood, The Return of the Pink Panther and Under the Cherry Moon." [110][111]
"The race would start started with Kyle Busch and Kyle Larson fighting for the lead, but on lap 2 Christopher Bell would lose lost control of his car in Turn 1, but would save the car managed to save it." [112]
"Cecil Beaton, after being fired from American Vogue in 1938, on charges of anti-Semitism, was living in England when his phone rang. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who would go on to be his favorite royal subject, wanted to be photographed by him... Years later, he would sit in Westminster Abbey, high up near the organ pipes, taking photos of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation with his top hat stuffed with sandwiches." [113] (This illustrates a particular hazard of would-iness, to wit that it can mislead the reader into thinking a habit is being described: "He would sit in Westminster Abbey, high up near the organ pipes, taking photos", like he's stalker or something.)
"Those who pleaded for clemency for Casement included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was acquainted with Casement through the work of the Congo Reform Association, poet W. B. Yeats, and playwright George Bernard Shaw. Joseph Conrad could not forgive Casement, nor could Casement's longtime friend, the sculptor Herbert Ward, whose son Charles had been killed on the Western Front that January, and who would change the name of Casement's godson, who had been named after him." [114] (What in the hell is that even trying to say?)
"The Tiddlytubbies would get their own spin-off animated web series in 2018." [118]
"However, many jumps racing supporters attempted to keep jumps racing at Oakbank and that fight went into the South Australian Court System. ... That would result in an election occurring which the anti-jumps faction winning but debate surrounding that vote spilled into more legal action." [119]
Farian would later attempted a failed comeback for the group without Morvan and Pilatus.[120]
While at Vassar, he and fellow future filmmaker, Jason Blum, were roommates (Blum would later produced Baumbach's first film, Kicking and Screaming in 1995).[121] (This edit and the previous one about Farian are accompanied by the edit summary "He not only would but did". Tongue in cheek because it suggests ignorance of the valid use of the "would" construction in, for example, an account written in an engaging you-are-there tone, but that isn't Wikipedia tone.)
^In the many, MANY, MANY debates on the subject of referring to ships as she, much ink has been spilled in argument over whether or not that practice is sexist. It seems unnecessary to answer that question, however, since the stupidity and pretension of such references should be enough, on their own, to decide the bottom-line issue [7]. But in case it's not obvious (and apparently it's not [8]): the thrust (<cough>) of this essay's examples is to illustrate that -- as so often is the case -- stupidity, pretension, and sexism (not to mention other distasteful -isms) often go hand in hand.
^And BTW, this is also one of the very rare cases where a bit of WP:Elegant variation -- "the sculptor" -- is justified, unless the reader can see a not-awkward way of recasting the sentence to avoid it.
... that the four miles of stacks aisles in Harvard's 3.5-million-volume Widener Library are so labyrinthine that one student felt she ought to carry "a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle" when entering?
... that at Harvard commencements, bagpipes herald breakfast, bachelors are welcomed, sheriffs on white steeds preserve order, and Harvard's president occupies a "bizarre" chair prone to tipping over?
... that after Lionel de Jersey Harvard(left) died in World WarI, a fellow officer wrote, "If Harvard College made him what he was, I want my sons to go there that it may do the same for them"?
... that in Menace from the Moon, a lunar colony—founded in 1654 by a Dutchman, an Englishman, an Italian, and "their women"—promises Earth heat-ray doom unless it helps them escape their dying world?
... that "University Moves to Thwart Early Marriages" was the 1963 Harvard Crimson caption beneath a photo of the school's "hideous" new housing complex for married students?
... that mathematician Andrew Gleason(right) liked to say that proofs "really aren't there to convince you that something is true—they're there to show you why it is true"?
... that quirky dogs and plural wugs helped Jean Berko Gleason(left) show that young children extract linguistic rules from what they hear, rather than just memorizing words?
... that warden's wife Kate Soffel, who fled with condemned brothers Jack and Ed Biddle after supplying guns and saws for their 1902 escape from the Allegheny County Jail, later took up dressmaking?
... that while testifying in a 2004 lawsuit involving the meaning of the word steakburger, a corporate CEO was grilled on the witness stand?
... that Harvard University's Newell Boathouse stands on public land for which Harvard pays $1 per year under a lease lasting 1000 years—at the end of which Harvard can renew for another 1000 years?
... that erection engineer Mark Barr had a business making rubbers, said bicycles stimulated ball development, and was elected to the screw committee?
... that J. J. Stiffler's(right) "unparalleled... landmark" Theory of Synchronous Communications (1971) sprang from NASA's need for power-efficient synchronization of data transmission for its space probes?
Memorial Hall
... that Harvard’s Memorial Hall (right) has been called “the most valuable gift the University has ever received” (1878), “that house of honor and of hospitality which [dispenses] laurels to the dead and dinners to the living” (1905), and “a huge Victorian Gothic barn” (1941)?
... that the biggest Turdus(not pictured) is 23–28 centimetres (9–10 inches) in length?
... that the US National Gallery of Art has a picture of Trump urinating?
... that police found a corpse in Bernie's freezer?
Prosaic Prelude: Strike order for atomic bombing of Nagasaki. "BOMBS:Special. RELIGIOUS SERVICES: Catholic1830, Protestant2300." Nagasaki was the alternate target.
Authorial Vanity
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
That his style was verbose is something on which both friend and foe agreed. Jackson was a writer who, having embarked on a sentence, was almost immediately seized by a new association, which was promptly parked between dashes. Shortly after he embarked on the parenthetical phrase, another association presented itself, and was duly ensconced between parentheses, thereby exhausting the conventional punctuation marks designed for embedded phrases. When another association arose during the writing of the phrase in parentheses—which was invariably the case—it was presented in the form of a footnote. But shortly after the beginning of the footnote ... etc., etc.
Douwe Draaisma. "Sparks from a Leyden jar: Jackson's epilepsy".Disturbances of the Mind. (Tr. by Barbara Fasting.)
This is the first book that Seuss wrote after his first wife, Helen's, death and before he married his second wife, Audrey. It was written in the winter of 1967 while he was dealing with the financial and business gaps that Helen's death left behind, and while Audrey divorced her first husband so she could marry Seuss.
Campaigns on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown
I got a call this morning from the Republican National Committee. Their robot said they were contacting Donald Trump's "most steadfast supporters" for donations. Sad, really.
Hello! As I was innocently googling “pearl necklace” for shopping purposes...
Everything old is new again
Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
Consider: 7 million of the 330 million people in the US have contracted Covid at some point. 7/330 = 2%, so really, the chance of contracting the virus is pretty small. The odds are against you. You have to really work at it. But through determined stupidity Trump and his coterie of morons have managed to beat the odds and get themselves infected. Way to go, team! Finally, you're making America great again! EEng 02:56, 3 October 2020 (UTC)
So it turns out:
(a) There really is a God after all.
(b) He has a sense of humor.
And the Lord said to Moses, “Go down; for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves; they have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them; they have made for themselves a molten calf, and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it,”
Exodus 32:9-10
A third part of thee shall die with the pestilence, and with famine shall they be consumed in the midst of thee: and a third part shall fall by the sword round about thee; and I will scatter a third part into all the winds, and I will draw out a sword after them.
Ezekiel 5:12
Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.
Upon turning nineteen, he was sent to continue his studies at the University of Glasgow, where he attended the lectures of Adam Smith. While at Glasgow, Boswell decided to convert to Catholicism and become a monk. Upon learning of this, his father ordered him home. Instead of obeying, though, Boswell ran away to London, where he spent three months living the life of a libertine.
From our article on Thomas Hill, president of Harvard 1862–1868 [125]:
Hill claimed to have injured his testicle while gardening, an incident that made him wary of laboratory instruction at Harvard, warning students not to exert themselves too much in their studies.
Well, I suppose it has happened
From "The Springfield Three", an episode of the true-crime series People Magazine Investigates:
Talking head: Just in case it's Susie or Stacey calling, Janelle picks up the phone. But it's not either of their friends.
Detective: It was an obscene phone call.
Talking head: The individual would not identify himself.
Perhaps not the best imagery
Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor discussing Trump's tweeting compulsion on MSNBC, July 6, 2020:
Today you think of the Washington Redskins tweet. Did he really have to send that tweet? But the president obviously couldn't help himself, he had to weigh in on this issue that really is not – it's in some ways a settled issue – the Washington Redskins likely should be changing their name. But the President can't resist and as a result you have the campaign and the White House having to circle the wagons on something they really didn't want to focus on today.
It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach.
Paging Prof. Boole
Reporter Hans Nichols on MSNBC, March 26, 2020:
It seemed to me that the president didn't think being not called Tom Brady wasn't an insult.
Followup (Anchor Kasie Hunt on MSNBC, March 29):
There is no reason not to think that New York is not going to need these 30,000 ventilators.
Compare and Contrast
'It was necessary above all to warn the House and the country of the misfortunes which impended upon us. There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. The British people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves living in a fool’s paradise.""We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine. The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. Stock Market starting to look very good to me! CDC & my administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus. I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away. They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine. We’re going very substantially down, not up. The 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical. If we have thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work – some of them go to work, but they get better. I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down. Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. And the tests are beautiful. They are perfect just like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president."
Q: I am supposed to fly commercial next week to visit my elderly parents in upstate NY, one of who is ill. Is it safe? I don't want to put this trip off because I know things will get worse.
A: To properly answer your question we need to know (a) your parents' net worth and (b) whether you're certain you're in their wills.
OK, that's not actually the answer that was given.
Followup: As part of our ongoing series on natural selection at work, we give you Congressman Devin Nunes (Republican of California – see: #Devin Nunes is an Idiot a Dumb Asshole) offering helpful advice viewers of Fox News, March 16:
There's a lotta concerns with the economy here because people are scared to go out. But I will just say one of the things you can do if you're healthy, uh, you and your family, it's a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant. Likely you can get in easily. Ya know, let's not hurt, uh, the working people in this country that are relying on wages and tips to keep their small business going. Just don't run to the grocery store and buy $4000 of food. Go to your local pub.
LYNCHBURG — As the coronavirus threatens to spread across the Lynchburg region, Liberty University officials are preparing to welcome back up to 5,000 students from spring break this week ... “I think we have a responsibility to our students — who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they’ve already paid for and to not interrupt their college life,” Falwell said.
Do not laugh!
Read this [126] and look for the word which was probably supposed to be winch but for some reason isn't. Then if you don't know what that word means, google it. EEng 04:13, 13 January 2021 (UTC)
Don't know much about history...Don't know much biology...Don't know much about a science book...Don't know much about the French I took... But I do know that I love you...
Oops
A reflection by a guest on MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes, March 5, 2020:
It's sad, you know, I really would love to see a woman presindent in my lifetime, soon in my lifetime, and I think that Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, ya know, ...
Q. What is a good synonym for "panties in a bunch"?
A. Could you explain what you mean? It could be:
A bunch of panties, an indefinite number of panties held together in some way;
Panties that have got bunched up, maybe in spatial conflict with other clothing or due to bodily friction;
A bunch (of bananas, of hair, of tourists) which panties have somehow managed to infiltrate.
Number 3 sounds like the most fun (they could be the Pantie Patrol, the Knicker Niche or the Thong Throng), but I think to be honest you really mean something more akin to number 2...
Museum of Highly Cost-Effective Political Campaigns
DONATE NOW TO DEFEAT DONALD TRUMP – URGENT SUPPORT NEEDED: Our country cannot take another four years of Trump. But two of our Democratic opponents outraised us last quarter, and our campaign won’t have the resources we need to win the nomination unless we raise $1,027 by midnight tonight.
Throughout his career, MacArthur had also found time for various other ventures. From 1959 to 1960, he partnered with actors James Franciscus and Alan Ladd, Jr. in a Beverly Hills telephone answering service.
Easy to misread
A clown dressed as President of the United States receives what he thinks is a Fabergé egg from the ringmaster.
The British Ambassador dressed as a clown.
From our plot summary of the James Bond film Octopussy:
While trying to escape from East to West Berlin, British agent 009 is fatally wounded and dies after reaching the residence of the British Ambassador, dressed as a circus clown and carrying a fake Fabergé egg.
You've got it wrong. It was obviously not the ambassador that was dressed like a clown and carrying a fake egg. It clearly states it was his residence that was so dressed and so carrying. --A D Monroe III 01:46, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
Homicidal escaped mental patient Gunther Wyckoff (Marshall Thompson) arrives by bus in Terminal City. As he gets off, he is confronted by the bus driver for stealing his Colt pistol. Wyckoff uses it to kill the driver. Delusional patient Gunther Wyckoff (Marshall Thompson) escapes from a mental institution intent on locating psychiatrist Dr. John Faron, (Sam Levene), whose testimony sent him to the asylum.
One major "lesson" in the book was to always remain cocked above the competition, and to always come explosively with new innovations to the products available to the public.
Update: The above has now been removed from the article by Yngvadottir with the edit summary "Not all wangs are jerks" [128]. Ha!
For reasons that surely must be obvious, I would think that Batgirl or Catwoman would be better examples of titular characters than is Batman, unless of course we take Groucho Marx's famous comment into account. EEng 13:02, 23 November 2018 (UTC)
Adding: when following the Groucho link, look at the very bottom of the page. EEng 02:25, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
Good suggestion. I actually implemented it but reverted it for the moment because I want to find an example of a film or work that dosn't just have the character name as its title (as Catwoman does). Otherwise it just brings up other arguments of repetitive prose which isn't meant to be the point of the section (see the "Of the same name" debate). I'm sure good examples exist, but it's time for bed for me now... Popcornduff (talk) 14:14, 23 November 2018 (UTC)
I'm trying to decide if you're turning the titular tables on me. EEng 16:46, 23 November 2018 (UTC)
The linked article suggests so many winking puns that it's positively dazzling. This could keep us in business for years. EEng 22:55, 24 November 2018 (UTC)
The story you link, "VENEZUELAN PROTESTORS PREPARE TO LAUNCH A SHIT BOMB PROTEST", reads in part, "Now protesters have decided to organize what they are deeming the 'shit march.' A flyer circulating on social media reads, 'They have gas; we have excrement'... Parts of the Venezuelan military have already begun to defect and join the protesters."
(At first I thought it said defecate and join the protesters.)
Rand's parable is meant to showcase just how much our world needs the best of us, but this adaptation only does so accidentally – by revealing what movies would be like if none of the best of us worked on them.
The 1881 Gate, or Class of 1881 Gate forms part of the perimeter of Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its inscription invites students to "come within its gates, in order that in whole-hearted service to the truth, they may enter into life and so be free". The gate has been locked for many years.
Valued image: This image has been assessed under the valued image criteria and is considered the most valued image on Commons within the scope: Statue evoking Bugs Bunny at Butterfly Park Bangladesh.
Welcome to the Museums
Visitors to The Museums are encouraged to add droll codas, possibly with evocative yet enigmatic double-entrendre wikilinks, to the items on display (though these will of course be subject to the discretion of The Curator).
Museum of I Didn't Know that was Biologically Possible
In 2001 The Times alleged that he had been treated with indulgence at Long Lartin Prison, Worcestershire, where prisoners were given the key to their cells.
Museum of Solemn Occasions
From our article on Operation London Bridge, the codename for the plans in place in the UK and the various Commonwealth nations for what will happen when Queen Elizabeth dies (as the old gal will, presumably, do sooner or later):
Radio New Zealand (RNZ), the state-radio broadcaster, has a set of guidelines and instructions in the event of the death of the monarch of New Zealand. Across all RNZ stations, broadcasters will break regular programming to announce the death of the Queen, with rolling coverage to begin when ready. RNZ stations are instructed not to play punk music, or songs from Queen during this period.
(Queen I get, but how did punk music get into the equation?)
Mackenzie understands that the bridge might collapse as the train passes over it. The presence of the infected terrorist, and the rerouting of the train, precipitates the second conflict, among passengers on the train; they include Jonathan Chamberlain, a famous neurologist, his ex-wife Jennifer Rispoli Chamberlain, Holocaust survivor Herman Kaplan, and Nicole Dressler, the wife of a German arms dealer. She is embroiled in an affair with her young companion Robby Navarro. Navarro is a heroin trafficker being pursued by Interpol agent Haley, who is travelling undercover as a priest.
In honor of Donald Trump's impending impeachment, The Curator of The Museums has assembled this special retrospective of sociopathy, demagoguery, criminality, and just plain ignorance and stupidity.
President Zelensky: Yes you are absolutely right not
only 100%, but actually 1000% and I can tell you the following;
I did talk to Angela Merkel and I did meet with her. I also met
and talked with Macron and I told them that they are not doing
quite as much as they need to be doing on the issues with the
sanctions. They are not enforcing the sanctions. They are not
working as much as they should work for Ukraine. It turns out
that even though logically, the European Union should be our
biggest partner but technically the United States is a much
bigger partner than the European Union and I'm very grateful to
you for that because the United States is doing quite a lot for
Ukraine. Much more than the European Union especially when we
are talking about sanctions against the Russian Federation. I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.
The President:I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike ... I guess you have one of your wealthy people ... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended
with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an
incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with
Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it
if that's possible.
Museum of There's Really No End to Donald Trump's Stupidity, in Matters Great and Small
To confer honor on the unwise is to subvert the life of the republic. And it is impossible that one governs usefully when one is subverted by one's own errors... An unwise king is the ruin of his people.
Museum of 1984
This exhibit has been returned to the top of the pile today in honor of the departure of Chief Assistant Presidential Liar Sarah Sanders:
A demagogue gains and holds power by exciting the passions of the lower classes and less-educated people in a democracy toward rash or violent action, breaking established democratic institutions such as the rule of law. James Fenimore Cooper in 1838 identified four fundamental characteristics of demagogues:
They fashion themselves as a man or woman of the common people, opposed to the elites.
Their politics depends on a visceral connection with the people, which greatly exceeds ordinary political popularity.
They manipulate this connection, and the raging popularity it affords, for their own benefit and ambition.
They threaten or outright break established rules of conduct, institutions, and even the law.
The central feature of the practice of demagoguery is persuasion by means of passion, shutting down reasoned deliberation and consideration of alternatives. While many politicians in a democracy make occasional small sacrifices of truth, subtlety, or long-term concerns to maintain popular support, demagogues do these things relentlessly and without self-restraint. Demagogues "pander to passion, prejudice, bigotry, and ignorance, rather than reason."
Demagogues have arisen in democracies from Athens to the present day, but their psychological tactics have remained the same throughout history:
Scapegoating
Fearmongering
Lying
Emotional oratory and personal charisma
Accusing opponents of weakness and disloyalty
Promising the impossible
Violence and physical intimidation
Personal insults and ridicule
Vulgarity and outrageous behavior
Folksy posturing
Gross oversimplification
Attacking the news media
Museum of The Walls Closing In
There's a wall like this in your future, Mr. President, and no need for Mexico to pay for it!Sieg heil!
The beautiful laws and substances of the world persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires.
White House press secretary insists that Trump "does read" and "is the most informed person on planet earth when it comes to the threats that we face". McEnany's claim that Trump is "the most informed person on planet earth" comes nearly two months after she vowed during her first White House press briefing that she would "never lie" to the public.
Museum of the Divine Right of Kings
Before "zero-tolerance", families of future criminals remained together.Under "zero tolerance" children are separated from their parents for their own good.
“
I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; / Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command / The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she / With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Violence, which sometimes betrayed exceptional cruelty, was inflicted on both sides, on British officers, and civilians, including women and children, by the rebels, and on the rebels, and their supporters, including sometimes entire villages, by British reprisals.
Klimt's influence is evident in the central panel's flatness, and how, using only the subject's face and hands, Clarke evokes, according to Kelly, "three-dimensional human expression", with all other details, including her robes, and the floral background, existing on a separate "two dimensional flat plain".
From [132], a summary of the opening scenes of the classic Goodbye, Mr,. Chips:
Due to a cold, retired schoolteacher, Mr Chipping misses a first-day assembly at Brookfield public school for the first time in 58 years.
Shame on that cold, retired schoolteacher for making Mr. Chipping miss assembly for the first time in 58 years!
Edith Louise Rosenbaum Russell (June 12, 1879 – April 4, 1975) was an American fashion buyer, stylist and correspondent for Women's Wear Daily, best remembered for surviving the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic with a music box in the shape of a pig.
John Noble—Las Vegas resident who left a 270-page note with a table of contents and a 2-hour DVD before shooting himself at the M Resort buffet after having a "free buffet for life" prize rescinded by the resort due to his subsequent behavior there. [133]
Museum of Demagogues Pt. 2
[A] dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.
The Marquess, who had been jailed for jewel theft in his youth, was harsh towards his eldest son, according to friends of the latter. He did not show John any love or affection, and was emotionally distant to the extent that John was required to wear long white gloves during dinner.
Followup from the same article:
While accompanying his secretary Angela Barry, he crash-landed the helicopter in a field, and walked to the nearest farmhouse, demanding to use the phone while leaving mud everywhere.
Museum of Trump is So Fucking Stupid He Inhabits a Special Galaxy of Fucking Stupid All His Own
The Continental Army suffered a bitter winter of Valley Forge, found glory across the waters of the Delaware and seized victory from Cornwallis at Yorktown. Our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over airports, it did everything it had to do and at Ft. McHenry under the rocket’s red glare had nothing but victory. When dawn came, the star-spangled banner waved defiant.
Of course, Ft. McHenry was the War of 1812, but what you expect from the Dumbfuck-in-Chief? Readers may want to try spotting other minor anachronisms for themselves.
The number of historical errors is just extraordinary. The White House has an office of speechwriting, with lots of researchers and interns, and they fact-check things, and there are only three possibilities for that level of transcendental stupidity to take place. One is that that office is completely filled with people with room-temperature IQs; another is that all the procedures have fallen apart and they don't exist anymore; and the third possibility is it sprang from the brain of Donald Trump, and that is deeply, deeply disturbing.
From "Park Service diverts $2.5 million in fees for Trump’s Fourth of July extravaganza" (Washington Post, July 2, 2019):
The Pentagon has referred virtually all questions about the celebration and the military’s involvement to the White House — a function, officials said, of the president’s desire to have some surprises during the event.
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has withdrawn himself from the confirmation process, effectively stepping down from the role. His confirmation was delayed by a lengthy FBI investigation into a decade-old domestic abuse allegation, according to reports.
In 2010, Shanahan’s now former wife Kimberley Jordinson was arrested for allegedly punching him in the face. At the time, she reportedly told police that Shanahan had punched her. In a separate incident, Shanahan’s son was arrested for allegedly hitting his mother with a baseball bat.
President Trump made the announcement on Twitter Tuesday, writing: “Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who has done a wonderful job, has decided not to go forward with his confirmation process so that he can devote more time to his family.”
Museum of That's What We Call a "Clue"
From "Evil in the House of the Lord", an episode of the true-crime program A Stranger in My Home:
Narrator: As firefighters enter the burning church, they make an alarming discovery.
District attorney: They clearly suspected arson, because of the gas cans stacked by the front door.
Followup, from "The Bad Apple", an episode of Fatal Vows:
Narrator: The police go straight to the orchard, just a quarter mile from the house.
Detective: Once they removed the carpet from him, and there were five bullet holes in his torso, we believed it was a homicide investigation.
Museum of The Mysterious East
The precise and exact wording found in the training materials for a major airline's international flight crews:
JAPAN ... Gestures: A waving hand from side to side in front of the face usually means "No, thank you". Remember that laughter does not always mean joy or amusement; it can also be a sign of embarrassment or distress. Japanese women often cover their moths when laughing, giggling, or smiling.
And so what we're seeing here is Joe Biden in New Hampshire, a state that really likes to touch and feel its candidates.
Museum of Great Teachers
From "Theodore Baird, Amherst professor of composition for 42 years; at 95", The Boston Globe, December 24, 1996:
Each September, he explained his philosophy to his students: "Your teacher does not exist to give you the answers. His function is to ask questions, and if by inadvertence he should ever chance to tell you something, you should immediately turn the questioning on him. Whatever answers you reach in this course, they will be your own."
Museum of "Ha! Ha! Made you look!"
From a retired Wikipedian who discovered dealing with unruly children was more exciting...
"During Euro 2004 I painted the England flag on my tits in support of my country. WARNING if you are the sort of person who is easily offended by naked tits do not click on the following link." Image:Now that's a great pair of tits.jpg
Most of you will have heard of this, at some time or another, in summary form, but this video brings it home much more effectively. I urge you all to watch it in its entirety: [135].
Four seconds before 12:34, the "1234" stops for the third time since starting thirty seconds before 12:34. That's my synopsis and my review. Thanks for recommending this "fine" Yale film. InedibleHulk(talk) 05:14, March 31, 2019 (UTC)
I'm not following you but I'm sure we can agree it's electrifying. EEng 04:15, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, these farmers were encouraged to increase their wheat crops, with the government promising—and failing to deliver—assistance in the form of subsidies. In spite of the recommendations and the promised subsidies, wheat prices continued to fall, and by October 1932 matters were becoming intense, with the farmers preparing to harvest the season's crop while simultaneously threatening to refuse to deliver the wheat.
The difficulties facing farmers were increased by the arrival of as many as 20,000 emus.
Just to repeat: Devin Nunes is truly an idiota dumb asshole.
Please note: in response to feedback from other editors, and in keeping with our Biographies of Living Persons policy, which requires the highest standards of accuracy and quality sourcing, the word idiot above has been changed to dumb asshole.
Museum of No Kidding, I'm Serious This Time
From "The Sniffing Revenge", an episode of the true-crime series Forensic Files. Tests have confirmed that the funny-smelling milk in Dorothy's fridge has been poisoned:
Narrator: Dorothy accused Richard of placing the selenium in her milk during his visit. When confronted with the evidence, Richard confessed. In return, Dorothy refused to press charges against Richard.
Talking head: He had to admit, "Yes I did do this." And he was sent into anger counseling. When he came out of anger counseling he made another attempt, which he denied. And that was when Dorothy confronted him and just told him, "You make any more attempts on me, or anybody in my family, and I'm gonna have you taken away in handcuffs."
Museum of Lessons Unlearned
The words of a President have an enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately.
Museum of Maybe Wikipedia Should be Censored After All
Not for the faint of heart
From our article on (AND I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP) Anal bleaching:
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
As Brazilian waxing became popular, due to the popularity of smaller swimsuits and lingerie, the spread of pornography into the mainstream, and endorsement of the procedure by celebrities, women began noticing that their anuses were darker than the rest of their skin.
Museum of I Guess He Missed That Particular Lecture
From "Two in a Million", an episode of the true-crime series Forensic Files. Detectives are narrowing down the field of suspects:
And investigators learned that Dana had some character flaws. Apparently, he had plagiarized a term paper in his business ethics class.
Halfway along the north and east facades are a matched pair of sculptures, Day and Night by Jacob Epstein. The modernism and graphic nakedness of these sculptures created public outrage on their unveiling... In the end, Epstein agreed to remove 1.5 inches from the penis of the smaller figure on Day and ultimately the furore died down.
Museum of the only person on the planet not painfully aware that Donald J. Trump is such a dumbfuck moron that truly world-beating dumbfuck morons want to be near him so they can seem intelligent by comparison
To the Editor: We recently cared for a 24-year-old man admitted to the emergency room with symptoms of substernal chest discomfort, breathlessness, difficulty swallowing, and change in speech. The patient stated that he had been well until the evening before admission, when he first noticed these symptoms after three hours of vigorous saxophone playing.
In reading through your column "Vegetarians Go Ape," I noticed an unusual fact that you seemed to expose with great confidence. You stated that "Jane Goodall established more than twenty years ago that wild chimpanzees kill other animals once in a while and eat the meat with relish." I question the accuracy of this. Where would wild chimpanzees obtain relish?
— Guru Singh Khalsa, Los Angeles
Note: In the source, this letter was labelled "There's one in every crowd."
Seizing on the burning of the Reichstag building as the supposed opening salvo in a communist uprising, the Nazis were able to throw millions of Germans into a convulsion of fear at the threat of Communist terror... Within hours of the fire, dozens of Communists had been thrown into jail. The next day, officials in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, which was led by Hermann Göring, discussed ways to provide legal cover for the arrests. Ludwig Grauert, the chief of the Prussian state police, proposed an emergency presidential decree under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which gave the president the power to take any measure necessary to protect public safety without the consent of the Reichstag.
A 365-kilogram (805-pound) brass statue of a syringe enema bulb held aloft by three angels stands in front of the "Mashuk" spa in the settlement of Zheleznovodsk in Russia. It is the only known monument to the enema.
So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old.
To what purpose then require [confirmation by] the Senate?... It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters... He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward... candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure. – Hamilton
The Teflon "Don" on his way to prisonThe man who sent him there
Museum of Damsels in Distress
From "CITY NEWS IN BRIEF", The Washington Post, September 12, 1915, p. 19:
Blanks have been sent out by F. J. Brunner, member of the harbor squad of the police force, who has been instructing policemen and others in life-saving in the water, for a special series of contests in lifesaving to be held at the municipal bathing beach, near the Monument, September 15. The contests will be by teams, who must demonstrate the breaking of holds and the towing of supposedly drowning persons to safety by various methods. A feature of the contests will be the rescuing of women completely dressed.
Museum of What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (Part 3)
From an episode of the true-crime series Forensic Files:
Ward and Diana Maracle were respected members of the community. Ward's Gas Bar, the Maracle's business – a gas station with a restaurant attached – had always been a prosperous business. At night, they also operated a check-cashing business out of their home.
On 9 December 1869, Sacher-Masoch and his mistress Baroness Fanny Pistor signed a contract making him her slave for a period of six months, with the stipulation that the Baroness wear furs as often as possible, especially when she was in a cruel mood.
Curator's note: This film, Mystery Street: Murder at Harvard (1950, dir. John Sturges – not his best by any means) is remarkable for having (a) no mysterious street, and (b) no murder at Harvard (though Harvard's "Dr. McAdoo" helps solve it). It does, however, feature Ricardo Montalban as (AND I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP) "Detective Morales" of the Barnstable Police Department.The trailer [136] is well worth watching from the beginning. "Here, in this room, is the answer!", the narrator bellows as the young Montalban withdraws his arm from a birdcage where Elsa Lanchester, who chews up the scenery as a scheming landlady, has hidden the crucial clue. The "exciting scenes" filmed "in and around Harvard University" include – sorry, these aren't in the trailer – an impossible shot of a car pulling up to a vacant parking meter – in Harvard Square! – directly in front of Johnston Gate!! Then for several minutes "Detective Morales" and his partner, lugging a box of bones, seek in vain the "Department of Forensic Medicine", fashion-plate Harvard men misdirecting them first to Harvard Hall, then Sever, then Widener, then Austin. When they finally realize they're in entierly the wrong city, and head over to Harvard Medical School in Boston, as luck would have it there's parking available right there on Longwood Avenue as well.Historical note: In the brief shot at 0m30s, Montalban is chasing the bad guy along the platform of Trinity Place Station into the Boston and Albany Railroad's Back Bay railyard, which is now the site of the Prudential Center.
At right, an image from our article on Proselytism. ("Lies!" is German for "Read!"):
Curator's note: My favorite cognate is "Gift". Do not ever offer a German visitor a gift ("Here, have some tea. I have a little gift for you") because "Gift" is German for "poison".
Now and then, a veteran, for the brief span that we still survive, will come here to live again the brave days of that distant June. Here will be raised the altars of patriotism; here will be renewed the vows of sacrifice and consecration to country. Hither will come our countrymen in hours of depression, and even of failure, and take new courage from this shrine of great deeds.
Bonus fact: Trump is so stupid that he confuses the Baltics with the Balkans. His wife, of course, was born in Slovenia but in fairness it's possible there was no return address on the crate she came in. Not that he knows where Slovenia is anyway.
Museum of Unexpected Citations
Principal investigators of the Desperate Housewives Research Institute
A citation added by one of our finest editors, David Eppstein, to our article on Rounding:
Shortly after Black's appointment to the Supreme Court, Ray Sprigle of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote a series of articles revealing Black's involvement in the Klan, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.
Wrong side of the law
From "Killer Night Out", an episode of the true-crime series The Lake Erie Murders:
Facing assault and murder charges in Pennsylvania, the D.A. comes to an agreement.
Department of Departures from Professional Decorum
From "Trail of Fear", another episode of The Lake Erie Murders (which desperately needs a good script editor):
Despite being found partially nude, the pathologist finds no evidence of sexual assault.
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it... What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few — as we have learned to our sorrow.... The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded...
A priest, a college student, and Donald Trump are in a small plane flying through a storm. Suddenly the pilot rushes from the cockpit. "We're going down," he cries, "and we only have three parachutes!" He puts on a parachute and jumps out.
Donald Trump says, "Well, I'm a stable genius so I must be saved!" He grabs a parachute and jumps.
The priest turns to the college student. "Young man," he says, "I've had a long life and am ready to meet my maker. Please, take the last parachute and save yourself."
The college student says, "Don't sweat it, Father. The stable genius jumped out with my backpack."
The stable genius has friends
The anatomically confused edit summary to a recent edit to my talk page [137]:
You are a fucking faggot. Kill yourself you stupid cunt.
Vote November 6.
Museum of Jobs With Unusual Duties
From an episode of the true-crime program 48 Hours. An old murder case has taken a surprising turn when an evidence swab appears to have semen belonging to a San Diego Police Department crime-lab technician. But attorneys defending the technician have an explanation...
Defense attorney 1: The swab itself was put to dry in the open air ...
Defense attorney 2: ... without a cap ...
Defense attorney 1: ... on a table near where [the technician] worked. Everything that was able to be airborne could have gone and touched that swab.
Interviewer: The problem, though, with this case is, seems to me, that the allegation is that this isn't sweat or spit – it's his semen. How would his semen get on a swab?
Defense attorney 2: You can still have cross-contamination of semen because they had to have fresh samples of semen in the San Diego lab.
Interviewer (voiceover): At the time of [the] murder, criminalists would often bring their own seminal fluid to the lab and use it to ensure the chemicals used to detect semen were working correctly.
Museum of First Things First
The capsule summary for an episode of the television program Call 911:
"Wisconsin Standoff" Reality. (2009) A 15-hour standoff with a man who will only negotiate during commercials.
Museum of Logical Names
From a recent television news report:
All passengers are safe this morning after a plane landed in a lagoon in the tiny nation of Micronesia.
Museum of An Illiterate Assisted by Incompetents
The precise and exact wording of a tweet posted September 24, 2018 by the Idiot-in-Chief, regarding the rough patch recently hit by his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavenaugh:
The Democrats are working hard to destroy a wonderful man, and a man who has the potential to be one of our greatest Supreme Court Justices ever, with an array of False Acquisitions the likes of which have never been seen before!
We see this spirit in the men and women who selflessly enlist in our armed forces and, really, who go out and risk their lives for God and for country. And we see it in the mothers and the fathers who get up at the crack of dawn; they work two jobs and sometimes three jobs. They sacrifice every day for the furniture and – future of their children.
Tip: next time try reading the speech at least once in advance before you have to deliver it. Idiot.
Museum of So Then What's the Point?
Caption on video clip in our fine article on Le Pétomane, "the French flatulist (professional farter)":
Le Pétomane du Moulin Rouge, 1900 (silent film clip)
Chandler was by 1931 a highly paid vice president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate, but his alcoholism, absenteeism, promiscuity with female employees, and threatened suicides contributed to his dismissal a year later.
But the mother planned for him a great future as a doctor, and taught him to play dirty hospital where Guido worked to gain more customers can be borrowed. Mutual is an association that gave the Italians the State contribution for care by doctors, in Italy the period of maximum growth was precisely that of the sixties in which doctors and primary clinics trying to accumulate for their many customers who had to scrape together more money mutual. Tersilli from a simple pediatrician starts to become a real doctor raking here and there with mutual customers. The turning point occurs when Guido is called by a rich lady to visit her husband. Guido takes just a chance to woo the woman, although he was already engaged to another girl to bring her into his list of patients borrowed. So Guido, under the envy of colleagues, start earning with the rich lady countless customers borrowed touching the 2000 patients.
Museum of the Apocolypse
1957: Eleanor Roosevelt appears on Meet the Press1968: RFK appears on Meet the Press1960: MLK appears on Meet the Press1980: Jimmy Carter appears on Meet the Press2007: Barack Obama appears on Meet the Press1997: Bill Clinton appears on Meet the Press
And now, this week's sign the that apocalypse is upon us...
Imagine the sperm as drivers who want to make it to their destination, the egg, as fast as possible. Without an IUD, they can see where they are headed. However, with an IUD, it's hard for them to figure out how to get to their final destination.
Charles William Ingram (born 6 August 1963) is an English former British Army major known for cheating on the television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in 2001. He was convicted at Southwark Crown Court on a single count of procuring the execution of a valuable security by deception. He was convicted of an unrelated insurance fraud in 2003, and ordered to resign his commission as a major by the Army Board...
Ingram and his wife were declared bankrupt in November 2004 and November 2005 respectively... In September 2010 Ingram slipped on a rotten apple while mowing the lawn and sliced off three of his toes.
In 1926, while on a publicity tour in New Zealand, Leach injured his leg when he slipped on an orange peel. The leg became infected, and eventually gangrene necessitated the amputation of the leg. Leach died of complications two months later.
Museum of Juxtapositions
Puts children in classroomsPuts children in cages
Museum of Donald Trump is a Lying Traitor and His White House is Staffed by Lying Traitors Covering For Him
On the left below, a true transcript of the Helsinki press conference, in which Vladimir Putin openly stated that he instructed Russian officials to help Trump become president of the United States.
On the right, what the official White House video makes it appear was said – edited (and I am not making this up) to delete the reporter's words President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election, thus making it appear as if Putin is responding to a question about Special Counsel Robert Mueller instead of about Trump's election. Let me repeat that: the White House's official video of the Trump-Putin news conference is falsified to hide the fact that Putin said that he directed Russian officials to help Trump become president.
The video links are given below so you can hear for yourself. Putin is discussing his bizarre proposal that the United States send certain of its diplomats and intelligence officials to Russia for questioning...
Putin (through translator): So we have an interest of questioning them. We can all – that could be a first step, and we can also extend it. Options abound, and they all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.
Reporter Jeff Mason:President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?
Putin: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.–Russia relationship back to normal.
Putin (through translator): So we have an interest of questioning them. We can all – that could be a first step, and we can also extend it. Options abound, and they all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.
Reporter Jeff Mason:And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?
Putin: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.–Russia relationship back to normal.
As of July 26, the White House's transcript of the press conference has been corrected to reflect what really transpired [141], but the falsified video (linked above right) has not been corrected.
"I'llnot be back.""I shouldn't have known better with a girl like you"
Museum of Machine Intelligence and Human Idiocy
No kidding, I typed Trump into the Google search box and it autocompleted Trump idiot.
Museum of Doesn't Seem So Funny Anymore
How prescient turned out be this [142] conversation at ANI in June 2017. The underlined bits were removed by an admin as BLP violations – ha!
I do not think Putin would be interested at all, but right now there are a lot of cases in Russia when people are jailed for twits etc. The signals typically come from, um, unstable whistleblowers. I am not currently in Russia, but still...--Ymblanter (talk) 16:02, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
Good thing for Trump we don't jail people for twits here in the US. EEng 17:41, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
Putin is too busy running the White House to be bothered with these editors.Legacypac (talk) 16:39, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
Content note: Article contains the passage: Three dolphins applauded the president for feeding them fish, while the walruses even shook his hand.EEng 17:41, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
I prefer Adorned in white overalls to resemble a bird, Putin did manage to get some cranes to fly. ‑ Iridescent 17:51, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
It's a shame the title of this thread isn't something like BITEy behavior at Pets of Vladimir Putin. EEng 18:05, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
[... Irrelevant intervening posts omitted...]
I voted to keep the article since it is as good as the other similar pages, some of which I was already aware of. Who knew Putin's dog is tracked by Russian GPS? Legacypac (talk) 18:20, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
Wait... Donald Trump is tracked by Russian GPS???EEng 19:40, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
An MSNBC correspondent commenting (May 24, 2018) on the cancellation of aspiring dictator Donald Trump's meet with North Korea's actual dictator and fellow fatso, Kim Jong Un:
There was also this sense that he put the cart before the horse and gave away the farm by not doing the legwork.
Museum of Who Tweeted It? (Pt. 2)
We should renegotiate the International Date Line, which is another bad Deal made by Democrats. When an American goes to China, he loses a day. But when a China person goes to America, he gains a day. Unfair!
References
^Not actually Trump, but you were prepared to believe it, weren't you?
When they finally meet, they bond over their social and personal difficulties and lack of sexual fulfillment. However, they must somehow tame Batz' increasingly erratic penis before it can go on a murder spree.
(The flaw in that reasoning being, of course, that if this hypothetical "another president" is an idiot who knows no history, he will profit not from the lesson.)
These theories variously allege that she is a Western spy, or that her attempted murder by the Taliban in 2012 was a secret operation to further discredit the Taliban, and was organized by her father and the CIA and carried out by actor Robert de Niro disguised as an Uzbekhomeopath.
Museum of Please, Dear God, I'm Begging You, No!
From Harley F. Holden, "Student Records: The Harvard Experience" (The American Archivist, v. 39 n. 4, October 1976):
I suppose it could be argued, at least facetiously, that since our scientific community does not hesitate to publish photographs of scantily clad native chiefs from New Guinea or South American jungles, that community should not hesitate to feature photographs in the National Geographic or Natural History Magazine of [those] who became our chiefs of state.
1. Get into shape. To be a part of any circus, you should be highly capable physically. Before you join in the clowning about, practice your flexibility for a few months.
2. Choose an act. Circuses usually require auditions, and you should build a repertoire. Look into things like acrobatics, diabolo, unicycle, and trampolining.
3. Find a good costume. Make sure you have the right costume for you, and that it fits your act. For example, you wouldn't want long, flowing sleeves for fire dancing.
Sorry for the partial legibility of the previous note; my new computer's "a" and "q" keys are malfunctioning (intermittently...ugg) so I have to copy/paste the letter "a" if I want to type it, and I forgot.
Museum of 50 years later
My college advisor is teaching Classics of Computer Science, so for old times' sake I'm sitting in to make a pest of myself. Last week we discussed Claude Shannon's "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" (1938), which has been called "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century." One hurdle: apparently computer science students at major universities today aren't taught what a relay is...
My dad (1968): How does a computer work? Me: Well, it's like your brain ...
Me (2016, to 6-year old nephew): Riding your scooter, you wear a helmet to protect your brain. Nephew: What's my brain? Me: Well, it's like a computer ...
---
My dad (1968): What's a transistor? Me: Well, it's like a relay ...
"Classics of Computer Science" student (2018): What's a relay? Me: A relay is [draws diagram and explains]. Student: So it's like a transistor?
Museum of Good to Know
Headline in the September 7, 1949 issue of the Klamath Falls, Oregon Herald and News (p. 5):
Roderick Maclean (died 9 June 1921) attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria on 2 March 1882, at Windsor, England, with a pistol. This was the last of eight attempts by separate people to kill or assault Victoria over a period of forty years. Maclean's motive was purportedly a curt reply to some poetry that he had mailed to the Queen.
The entirety of an item in the Oakland Tribune for September 13, 1945 (p. 8):
Zippers and Parrot Are Hospital Wants – An appeal was issued today by the Oakland Chapter, American Red Cross, for nine 10 and 12 inch zippers and a parrot, for men in local military hospitals. Anyone wishing to donate these contributions should call HIghgate 7680, extension 15.
Museum of Any Serious Questions?
From the talk page for the article on The Clapper, the "Clap On, Clap Off" remote control device:
Sources
Can you get it from kissing? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.125.110.223 (talk) 20:03, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
Museum of Quantitatives
The Disagree/Neutral/Agree questions asked at https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/SD3/ to evaluate a subject's match to "the Dark Triad ... three closely related yet independent personality traits that all have a somewhat malevolent connotation. The three traits are machiavellianism (a manipulative attitude), narcissism (excessive self-love), and psychopathy (lack of empathy)." I answered on behalf of US President Donald Trump, and received the following results:
Machiavellianism: 4/4
Narcissism: 4/4
Psychopathy: 3.8/4 (so there's at least some good news, I guess)
It's not wise to tell your secrets.
People see me as a natural leader.
I like to get revenge on authorities.
I like to use clever manipulation to get my way.
I hate being the center of attention.
I avoid dangerous situations.
Whatever it takes, you must get the important people on your side.
Many group activities tend to be dull without me.
Payback needs to be quick and nasty.
Avoid direct conflict with others because they may be useful in the future.
I know that I am special because everyone keeps telling me so.
People often say I'm out of control.
It's wise to keep track of information that you can use against people later.
I like to get acquainted with important people.
It's true that I can be mean to others.
You should wait for the right time to get back at people.
I feel embarrassed if someone compliments me.
People who mess with me always regret it.
There are things you should hide from other people because they don't need to know.
A woman should not usually form acquaintances upon the street, or seek to attract the attention or admiration of the other sex, as to do so might render false her claims to ladyhood, if it did not make her liable to charges of a more severe nature.
Alabama election officials declared Democrat Doug Jones the winner of a special Senate election held earlier this month... Montgomery Circuit Judge Johnny Hardwick on Thursday denied Moore's attempt to delay the certification of votes while Moore's claims of voter fraud are investigated. Hardwick said he lacked jurisdiction to decide the case – meaning that Moore, a former state Supreme Court chief justice, may have filed the lawsuit in the wrong court.
Museum of Everything's about Me, Me, Me!
President Donald J. Trump's initial reaction to a fatal train derailment:
The train accident that just occurred in DuPont, WA shows more than ever why our soon to be submitted infrastructure plan must be approved quickly. Seven trillion dollars spent in the Middle East while our roads, bridges, tunnels, railways (and more) crumble! Not for long!
Ten minutes later, an afterthought:
My thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved in the train accident in DuPont, Washington.
Museum of Bad Starts
The Dairy of Anne FrankAnne Frank
[148] (first slide, first line, second word – but at least they got The right)
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.""God is always in control." – You got that right, you stupid cracker.When you lie with dogs, you get up with fleas.
Museum of Publish or Perish
From the article Roy Shaw – and be sure to click the link:
Shaw routinely stabbed police informers and even slashed the throat of a former best friend while incarcerated owing to his strong belief in an honour code amongst criminals which must not be broken.
Museum of Wrong Line of Work
From "Murder by the Book", an episode of the uplifting crime series The Perfect Murder:
Narrator: As a young adult, Dan decides to rob a bank, but makes a serious mistake.
Retired D.A.: He passed a note to the bank teller, ya know, give me the money or I'll shoot you – whathaveyou. And, uh... he left the bank... and he left the note... and on the other side of the note was his deposit slip... with his name and address and phone number.
Museum of Naughty, Naughty Advertising Copywriters
====> Captions invited <====
An Admin showing a group of new editors how to write a featured article. - L293D (☎ • ✎) 19:18, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
Minor strokes that killed off cells in one small area on the right side of the brain seemed to trigger "gourmand syndrome" in 34 patients reported in a 1997 Neurology journal study. They lost interest in their careers – as a tennis pro or political writer, for example – and devoted themselves instead to fine dining.
An incident on the set of a 1958 edition of Armchair Theatre illustrates the perverse extremes of professionalism that television actors were expected to exhibit. The... cast included Warren Mitchell, Donald Houston, Peter Bowles, and a young Welsh actor named Gareth Jones. "During transmission," recalls Bowles, "a little group of us was talking on camera while awaiting the arrival of Gareth Jones's character, who had some information for us. We could see him coming up towards us, and he was going to arrive on cue, but we saw him drop, we saw him fall. We had no idea what had happened, but he certainly wasn't coming our way. The actors, including me, started making up lines: 'I'm sure if So-and-so were here he would say...'" Jones had suffered a fatal heart attack – but rather than informing the actors of their colleague's death and ceasing transmission of the play, the producers decided to let them stumble on to the end. [153]
On June 17, 2014, Sorrentino was arrested for assault after a fight at a tanning salon in Middletown Township, New Jersey... In August of [2011], Sorrentino was offered a "substantial" sum of money by fashion retailer Abercrombie & Fitch not to wear the company's clothes.
Museum of Bad Acid Trips
From the article on Xenu, who in the cosmology of Scientology was "the dictator of the 'Galactic Confederacy' who 75 million years ago brought billions of his people to Earth (then known as 'Teegeeack') in DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs." Scientologists actually believe this – at least those willing to pay the $100,000 required to get to the "level" at which you're allowed to learn such esoterica. Please note that this passage has been placed in the Museums in admiration of its rococo creativity, not to imply that it's any more outlandish than a talking snake, a guy nailed to a cross coming back from the dead, or the ideas that what God really wants you to do is cut off a bit of your son's penis and/or bundle up your women from head to toe like the Elephant Man:
Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of psychiatrists, he gathered billions of his citizens under the pretense of income tax inspections, then paralyzed them and froze them in a mixture of alcohol and glycol to capture their souls. The kidnapped populace was loaded into spacecraft for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The appearance of these spacecraft would later be subconsciously expressed in the design of the Douglas DC-8, the only difference being that "the DC8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't". When they had reached Teegeeack, the paralyzed citizens were unloaded around the bases of volcanoes across the planet. Hydrogen bombs were then lowered into the volcanoes and detonated simultaneously, killing all but a few aliens.
Hubbard described the scene in his film script, Revolt in the Stars:
Simultaneously, the planted charges erupted. Atomic blasts ballooned from the craters of Loa, Vesuvius, Shasta, Washington, Fujiyama, Etna, and many, many others. Arching higher and higher, up and outwards, towering clouds mushroomed, shot through with flashes of flame, waste and fission. Great winds raced tumultuously across the face of Earth, spreading tales of destruction...
The now-disembodied victims' souls, which Hubbard called thetans, were blown into the air by the blast. They were captured by Xenu's forces using an "electronic ribbon" ("which also was a type of standing wave") and sucked into "vacuum zones" around the world. The hundreds of billions of captured thetans were taken to a type of cinema, where they were forced to watch a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for thirty-six days. This implanted what Hubbard termed "various misleading data"' (collectively termed the R6 implant) into the memories of the hapless thetans, "which has to do with God, the Devil, space opera, etcetera". This included all world religions; Hubbard specifically attributed Roman Catholicism and the image of the Crucifixion to the influence of Xenu. The two "implant stations" cited by Hubbard were said to have been located on Hawaii and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands.
In addition to implanting new beliefs in the thetans, the images deprived them of their sense of personal identity. When the thetans left the projection areas, they started to cluster together in groups of a few thousand, having lost the ability to differentiate between each other. Each cluster of thetans gathered into one of the few remaining bodies that survived the explosion. These became what are known as body thetans, which are said to be still clinging to and adversely affecting everyone except Scientologists who have performed the necessary steps to remove them.
A government faction known as the Loyal Officers finally overthrew Xenu and his renegades, and locked him away in "an electronic mountain trap" from which he has not escaped. Although the location of Xenu is sometimes said to be the Pyrenees on Earth, this is actually the location Hubbard gave elsewhere for an ancient "Martian report station". Teegeeack was subsequently abandoned by the Galactic Confederacy and remains a pariah "prison planet" to this day, although it has suffered repeatedly from incursions by alien "Invader Forces" since that time.
Consider this officer lacking in the essential qualities of judgment, leadership and cooperation. He acts without forethought as to probable results. He is believed to have been sincere in his efforts to make his ship efficient and ready. Not considered qualified for command or promotion at this time. Recommend duty on a large vessel where he can be properly supervised.
Museum of Probably Safe to Say
From "The Dating Game Killer", an episode of the enlightening television series Murder Made Me Famous:
Cheryl has just picked Rodney Alcala as her date on The Dating Game. She has no idea that she has selected a serial killer, and that she may be his next potential victim.
A characteristic of the idler's work is that it looks suspiciously like play. This, again, makes the non-idler feel uncomfortable. Victims of the Protestant work ethic would like all work to be unpleasant. They feel that work is a curse, that we must suffer on this earth to earn our place in the next. The idler, on the other hand, sees no reason not to use his brain to organise a life for himself where his play is his work, and so attempt to create his own little paradise in the here and now.
StuRat your absence from the Reference Desks will be missed.
Museum of a Rock and a Hard Place
From "Appendix: Plot Synopses of Traditional Ballads Most Commonly Found in the United States and Canada", in Folk Music: A Regional Exploration (Cohen, 2005):
H23. "The Old Maid and the Burglar" (by E. S. Thilp, originally "Burglar Man"). 1897: Surprised by a returning old maid, a burglar slips under the bed and watches her remove her glass eye, wig, wooden leg, and so on. She hauls him out and threatens to shoot him if he doesn't marry her; he begs her to shoot.
Museum of Exciting Careers
From Wikipedia's plot summary for the Alan Hailey novel Overload (1979), "concerning the electricity production industry in California... described from the point of view of vice-president of Golden State Power and Light, Nimrod 'Nim' Goldman":
Noticing that a worker on the furnace feed conveyor was in danger, Nim instinctively runs down to the plant floor and saves the man from otherwise certain death. A comely young lady who is part of the group saw what happened and decides she wants to invite herself into Nim's bed and offer him sex as a thank you for what he did. When Nim is back in his bedroom a woman slips in, and he discovers it's not the lady who propositioned him, it's the wife of one of the executives of the Colorado electric company where he is staying, who asks Nim to impregnate her so she can have a child. (The other executive had privately admitted to Nim that he is "shooting blanks", i.e. infertile and unable to get his wife pregnant.) Then, later, the lady who originally wanted to bed Nim arrives, and is able to get Nim to have sex with her as well.
The think group, using coded incoming mail, finally arrest David Birdsong and expose Georgos. Georgos attempts to bomb Big Lil, but he is killed by the pump's turbine blades. The plant manager, noticing that someone had gotten into the reservoir, realizes that if the plant is bombed while it is operating, the damage would put the plant out of operation for months, but a bomb when the plant is shut down would only cause minor damage, chooses to shut the plant down, causing a major power shortage. Georgo's corpse floats up after the turbines stop, essentially confirming the manager's concern. This shut down, however, causes a major blackout throughout the region. Karen Sloan dies after her respirator fails due to this power outage. Nim discovers his wife is dying of cancer, and the novel ends as Nim finally befriends Nancy Molineaux and visits her at her house as she offers Nim a one-time opportunity to be her lover.
Cinnamon Carter's role as an IMF agent was that of "femme fatale" and "woman in distress". In her IMF dossier, she was noted as being a successful model, and the dossier scenes during her three seasons on the show showed at least three different magazine covers on which she was featured. How a famous international cover model failed to be recognized as such during a mission was never explained.
Your client's organization has made and/or supported defaming statements. This is due to the careless and/or intentionally refused to advance the truth regarding our clients. We also believe that your client, by and through its agents, have damaged our clients by being careless in how they handled headlines and report the contextual of the allegations.
Meaning your client has used terms in reports maliciously or carelessly which is falsely portraying our clients.
Thus, do note this clearly, yet significant difference which your client's publications(s) have failed to distinguish. And the legal requirements that your client retract the stories, to include the details which clearly are false.
We believe it is clear and convincing your client consciously and deliberately engaged in oppression, fraud, wantonness, and/or malice and again as stated above we do requested a retraction.
Museum of Somehow That Fits
From the typsetting note in The Works of Mark Twain (v. 3, 1993 ed.):
The text of this book is set in Trump Mediaeval...
Related item, from 1984, "The Principles of Newspeak":
The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine-gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost fool-proof instrument, and the texture of words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which as in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.
So did the fact of having very few words to choose from... Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all.
The episode went over budget by more than $50,000 and overran the production schedule. Mistakes were made in the set design with an instruction for "runes" misconstrued as a request for "ruins".
I can't help noticing, though, that the juxtaposition of items at the top of his user page just now is a bit jarring [155]. EEng 19:59, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
Oh my...you're right. When I was a kid, Mom would tell me to put on clean underwear before I left the house. Now that I'm a Wikipedian and rarely leave the house, I just have to make sure my user page is clean. 20:32, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
Museum of Adults Only
Perhaps my most daring edit ever, unfortunately (or possibly fortunately) now part of a block of revdels [156].
Museum of Discreetly Left to the Reader's Imagination
Military policemen, whilst looking for deserters, had burst into the hotel room of Haxton and Lindsell to find them committing a homosexual act that was not buggery.
Would, for example, one occurrence of "bizarre and hypocritical" warrant a sanction regardless of the surrounding circumstances? I like your idea of resurrecting WP:WQA, as a sort of honeypot. Once all the people who would answer yes to that question have congregated there we could quietly lock the door from the outside. They might never notice. I kid, obviously, but if you want to "enforce civility" that's certainly not the sort of thing you'd start by addressing. --Begoon 7:13 am, Today (UTC−4)
My nephew just entered second grade, and he's smart as a whip. For your enjoyment:
[The logical mind at work early...] "You told me to say library not libary, so how come it's not strawbrerry?
[Next day...] "The lady in charge of the library is a librarian, so the lady in charge of strawberries is a strawberrian!"
[Halfway through The Wizard of Oz, he turns to me with suspicion in his eyes...] "Wait a second! Is this all a dream???"
Museum of If Mark Twain Had Been a Gynecologist
Pessary: A device worn in the vagina to support the uterus, remedy a malposition, or prevent conception. Certain other terms, such as refractory uterus, I dared not look up, and we can only hope that the phrase Eureka vaginal irrigators is unrelated to e.g. the respected purveyors of floor cleaning equipment.
From W.N. Bryant, M.D. (Chester, Vt.). "Advances in Gynaecology". Transactions of the Vermont Medical Society for the Year 1885, pp. 77-81:
It is undeniable that gynaecology is a seductive study; that while a lively interest attaches to all branches of our art, a certain weird kind of fascination seems to envelop this, which does not obtain in other departments. As proof of this, I would refer you to the vast amount of human ingenuity and inventive genius being expended in the vain pursuit of an ideal pessary. Why this is so I am unable to explain, unless it be that same irresistible interest which always envelopes the mysterious and hitherto unattainable.
Apropos of this, I am tempted to moralize a little, and to suggest that the interest manifesting in the solution of the mysterious is not always commensurate with the result to be obtained, even in the case of success. For instance, many lives and much treasure have been sacrificed in attempts to reach the frozen pole. But when these attempts shall finally be crowned with success, it is by no means certain that this portion of our globe will ever become popular, whether as a health resort or for agricultural purposes. So I have sometimes wondered if, when some enthusiastic devotee shall discover the gynaecological Utopia by inventing the truly ideal, never-failing, self-adjusting, non-irritating, non-corrosive, non-combative, self-satisfying pessary – if, I say, after all – there will be left no more worlds for the enterprising specialist to conquer.
If advancement is to be measured by the number of such instruments brought forth in a given time, the past year can make a very creditable showing. Had I supposed it would devolve upon me to prepare this report, I would have made note of these articles and thus have been able to describe them seriatim. As it is, memory must be trusted. My notice has been called, per circular and otherwise, to about an equal number of new specula, ideal pessaries and Eureka vaginal irrigators, and, after some deliberation, I place the gross number at nine hundred and thirty-seven. (This report has not been audited, and is subject to correction.) Each of these instruments was warranted to fill a long felt want, which no doubt they would do, provided sufficient of them were sold to pay the inventors. I have made a little calculation, from which it appears that, if any of us was so fortunate to have safely in bank the retail price of each different instrument that has been devised to torture a refractory uterus into a state of moderate conservatism, we would have no further necessity for practicing either gynaecology or economy for the remainder of life.
Museum of great quotes
"I don't like the symbolism of burning the flag... It would be better for demonstrators to wash the flag, rather than burn it." – Norman Thomas
Under communism, the tradition of public toilets formed, which influences the city to this day. Public toilets were separated by sex, entrances being guarded by notoriously ill-tempered restroom ladies. The client would disclose whether he needed to urinate or defecate, and he would be charged accordingly, the latter costing more. Finally, the client was issued his limited share of toilet paper, sometimes with an embarrassing negotiation regarding the need for more.
Partial list of public toilets in Bratislava
Kamenné Námestie / Námestie SNP. Closed for years because of groundwater leakage.
Karloveská Street (Karlova Ves) Devastated, closed for some 15 years.
Pedestrian underpass Hodžovo námestie. Accessible to the handicapped with effort.
Museum of Someone's Not Paying Attention
Entry published (incredible as it may seem) in the Fiftieth Reunion Class Report for Harvard College's Class of 1962, based on information submitted by the alumnus in question himself:
Theodore John Kaczynski Home address: No. 04475-046, US Penitentiary-Max, P.O. Box 8500, Florence, CO 8126-8500.
Occupation: Prisoner.
House/Dorm: Eliot.
Degrees: AB '62; MA Univ. of Michigan '65; PhD, ibid. '67.
Publications: Technological Slavery (Feral House, 2010).
Awards: Eight life sentences, issued by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, 1998.
Museum of Upholders of Traditional Values
From the article on Kim Davis, the not-overbright county clerk who believes that marriage is the inviolable union of one man and one woman:
Davis has been married four times to three different men. The first three marriages ended in divorce in 1994, 2006, and 2008. Davis is the mother of twin sons, who were born five months after her divorce from her first husband. Her third husband is the biological father of the twins who were adopted by her second husband,
Museum of science humor
From a discussion of problems stemming from the many people gathering to view the August 21, 2017 solar eclipse:
The demand for portable toilets will be "astronomical".
Museum of Bears with Opposable Thumbs
From the computer-generated (let us hope) subtitles to a true-crime detective program. Some hikers have found a body:
The body sports a baffling array of grizzly injuries. She has a plastic bag over her head.
Museum of Lonely Dissent
If evils will result from the commingling of the two races upon public highways established for the benefit of all, they will infinitely less than those that will surely come from state legislation regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race. We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with the state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow citizens, our equals before the law. The thin disguise of "equal" accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead anyone, nor atone for the wrong this day done...
An earlier version of this graphic included an incorrect total for the number of days Donald Trump told a lie during his first two months as president. It was 20, not 25.
From a strangely telling statement (August 12, 2017) by a (spellcheck-challenged) "unidentified White House spokesperson":
The president said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred and of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, nephew-nazi and all extremist groups.
Ro, Are you interested in helping set up a Manual of Style for Citizendium? There have been previous discussion in the past on this but like everything else, nothing came of it. Meg Ireland 14:44, 30 September 2013
I certainly would, yes. Indeed it's been something I've been thinking about recently. We should broadly follow Wikipedia. Ro Thorpe 17:24, 30 September 2013
Wikipedia is in decline. Meg Ireland 22:09, 10 November 2013
In November 2016, a referendum was held to abolish the governing Citizendium Charter and the Council in favour of Wikipedia-style discussion and consensus. It attracted nine votes, and was passed. A new Managing Editor was to be elected at the same time, but there were no nominations.
Museum of Congressmen! Choose Your Weapons!
Republican lawmakers introduce duel versions of bill
From the CNN "crawl", July 20, 2017:
Wiping out the rule would affect tens of millions of Americans who often don't know they are covered by an arbitration clause when they sign up for a credit card or checking account.
Today Republican lawmakers in House & Senate introduced duel versions of bill to ax the rule.
Museum of Frustrated Elite Masters of Style
Apparently stimulated by a difference of opinion on an article talk page [159] (extra points for confusion of hyphen with dash, mismatch between singular half-wit and plural their skulls, etc.):
From "Policemen's Hats and Coats Stolen in Hotel As Members of Glee Club Give a Concert", The New York Times, April 28, 1933, p. 19:
Ten patrolmen, an acting police lieutenant and Deputy Chief Inspector John J. O'Connell searched the Hotel Astor last night for two coats and four hats taken by sneak thieves while their policemen owners were singing in the Rose Room.
The discovery of the loss was made as ten members of the Police Glee Club finished their last number, "Smile, Darn You, Smile," before more than 100 members of the La Salle Academy Alumni Society, who were holding their annual dinner.
The hats and coats, which had been used to cover the regulation uniforms of the men, who had just gone off duty, had been thrown hurriedly on chairs in an anteroom just outside the room in which the dinner took place, and in view of the singing officers. Fifteen minutes later four angry glee club members discovered their loss at practically the same moment.
Acting Lieutenant Patrick Fitzgibbons and Deputy Chief Inspector O'Connor were called from the dais where they sat as honored guests. The head waiter, the manager and two bus boys were called. One of the bus boys suggested that "we better call the police."
Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that, from an evolutionary perspective, humour would have had no survival value to early humans living in the savannas of Africa.
Fake Irish pubs may seem tacky to those who have been to the real thing, but they are a genuine part of the landscape in the U.S. and Canada and are often among the most popular bars in town. If you're in a major American city on St. Patrick's day, a visit to one of these establishments is a must.
As rabies is almost always fatal once symptoms show have a rabies vaccination before you head out and get to a doctor as soon as possible if you are bitten.
Museum of Statistics
From "Statistics of California for 1868-69", in The Alta California Pacific Coast and Trans-Continental Rail-Road Guide (1871):
Alameda County: Number of Homes, 8689; Number of Cows, 5603; Number of Mules, 946; Number of Asses, 7
Museum of Well Said
From a post by Beyond My Ken at ANI, responding to the assertion that "instead of adopting a more central/middle-ground view, WP presents a more leftist view due to a combination of what are considered reliable sources, and a combination of experienced editors on the site editing in these areas that average out to a leftist view":
The so-called "liberal media" is biased towards reality, and the alt-right is biased towards anything that supports their ideology, which is, generally speaking, not reality-based. We are an encyclopedia, therefore we reflect reality, not any ideology. The right sees this and says "Ah, see, Wikipedia is supporting what the liberal media says, therefore Wikipedia is biased towards the left," but that's only because they see things through the filter of their POV, while we do our very best not to be biased towards anything except what is real and verifiable. The alt-right media are not, for the most part, reliable sources, since they have been shown to have been wrong again and again and again, and have an overall tendency to report whatever they believe, regardless of its relationship to reality. Thus we are forced to use reality-based media, which the alt-right sees as liberal or "leftist", which is actually ridiculous, since no mainstream American media outlet is anywhere near being left-wing -- but, then, the alt-right makes no differentiation between "liberal" and "leftist".
In short, it is wrong to point the finger at Wikipedia as being the genesis of the problem, which originates in the minds of the ideologues of the right. There is no "leftist view" to Wikipedia, that's an artifact totally created in the perceptions of rightists. Our viewpoint is centrist, just as that of the "liberal media" is. The fault is not in us, it is in those who cannot differentiate their ideology from reality.
"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision." – Bertrand Russell
Or in the words of William Butler Yeats, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity". Most poignant of all is perhaps this poetic Swedish version: "Varför är den gode dum? Varför är den kloke ond? Varför är allt en trasa?" (Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, 1793 – 1866). The "Why is everything a cloth?" part that Google Translate will supply if you ask it, is the very heart of Almqvist's famous aphorism. —Bishonen
...the peach emoji no longer being shaped like a butt...
Museum of Culinary Cops
From the on-screen captions (presumably computer-generated) accompanying "The Gentleman Killer", an episode of The ID Channel's series A Crime to Remember. A retired New York police detective is describing—in a heavy, heavy Brooklyn accent—the tireless efforts of Detective Burns to crack the case:
Followup, October 25, 2020. Wolf Blitzer (CNN) is ending an interview with a political operative. The caption reads:
Thank you very much for urinalysis.
Further followup, from "Blood in the Water", an episode of The Lake Erie Murders. Apparently killers are getting younger and younger; the caption reads:
With a child killer on the loose, this formerly quiet neighborhood is now paralyzed with terror.
Actual caption: "Woman with Corona typewriter in shower, 1922"
The Curator is offering a prize for the best answer to the question, "Why in the world would someone be typing in the shower?"
Sample answer: "She was writing a letter dripping with sarcasm." EEng 17:56, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
Not a caption, but judging from the children in the background, the photo might have been taken in a country with a tropical climate, and the shower stalls might have been the coolest place in the building (it's even possible that the stalls had no ceiling); the feet of the woman who is typing are wet, so she might have first cooled her feet with water before sitting down to type. – Corinne (talk) 18:05, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
Headline reads, Hot off the press - the ink is still wet! At which time the editor told the journalist to dry up. 23:08, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
"One of Dame Barbara's early attempts to write those "hot and steamy" passages." Martinevans123 (talk) 19:14, 14 June 2017 (UTC)
Gentlemen of America: Set up Your Typing Pool anywhere. - Adam37Talk 22:21, 16 September 2017 (UTC)
I'm not sure I get the "Gentlemen" reference, but your typing pool idea is brilliant. EEng 00:04, 17 September 2017 (UTC)
Because the bathtub was already occupied. --A D Monroe III 22:22, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
”Mechanically superior to the very best water resistant quad-core smartphone, the Corona continues to produce readable text even after it has slipped out of your jeans pocket and landed in the toilet. The precision engineered Corona will allow editors to continue to revert vandalism during the next deluge. Each machine comes with a lifetime supply of waterproof paper and typewriter ribbon (red/black).” Clappingsimon (talk) 14:08, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
She's writing a red-hot take. jp×g 10:47, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Museum of Excerpts from Novels I Didn't Finish Reading
I entered the building and found two individuals inside along with several old-fashioned airplanes in various stages of construction. I recognized one individual as Phineas Gage... According to Mr. Gage, Mr. Beachey faulted himself for encouraging her to go roller-skating unaccompaned, telling her it would be safe for her to do so, and for failing generally to keep her safe. As we spoke, Mr. Gage was hit by a piece of an engine that I think may have been a carburetor.
Genetic analysis reveals he is the ultimate result of long-running eugenics experiments devised by Arthur Frayn—who is Zardoz—who controlled the outlands with the Exterminators, thus coercing the Brutals to supply the Vortices with grain. Zardoz's aim was to breed a superman who would penetrate the Vortex and save mankind from its hopelessly stagnant status quo. The women's analysis of Zed's mental images earlier had revealed that in the ruins of the old world Arthur Frayn first encouraged Zed to learn to read, then led him to the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Disease and exhaustion took a heavy toll on workers, in part because the connection between mosquitoes and malaria would not be discovered for another 40 years. The Panama Canal Railroad Company sold the corpses to medical schools abroad, using the income to maintain the company hospital.
Q. My question is about the proper font of a boat name as a possessive as in “the Ibis’s lower decks.” CMOS 8.115 says italics for the boat’s name; 6.2 specifies the use of italics when the punctuation is part of the word. This seems a Talmudic moment. Thanks.
A. Ah – although the boat name is properly in italics, the apostrophe and s are not, because they are not actually part of the name. Please see 7.28. Shalom.
I have not read all these books myself, but I have read more of them than it would be good for any one to read again. There are here enumerated many dead treatises and ghostly memoirs. The list is too long, and I have not always successfully resisted the impulse to add to it in the spirit of a collector. There are not above a hundred of these which it would be worth while to preserve – if only it were securely ascertained which these hundred are. At present a bibliographer takes pride in numerous entries; but he would be a more useful fellow, and the labours of research would be lightened, if he could practise deletion and bring into existence an accredited Index Expurgatorius.
Well, of course, I wrote Doctor Holmes and told him I hadn’t meant to steal, and he wrote back and said in the kindest way that it was all right and no harm done; and added that he believed we all unconsciously worked over ideas gathered in reading and hearing, imagining they were original with ourselves. He stated a truth, and did it in such a pleasant way, and salved over my sore spot so gently and healingly, that I was rather glad I had committed the crime, for the sake of the letter.
Museum of Yet More MOSsy Thoughts
From a comment by the ever-wise Herostratus at Talk:MOS [160]:
Possibly the best solution would be a line at the beginning of each article containing a couple dozen commas, and also some semicolons, quotation marks, and so forth. The reader could then be instructed to mentally sprinkle them throughout the text in whatever manner she finds pleasing.
"Perhaps Taylor Swift is also a nuclear engineer on top of being a singer?? Now I understand why she won Person of the Year" PrecariousWorlds (talk) 11:36, 7 December 2023 (UTC) [161]
Sheela attempted to influence the Wasco County Court's November election and capture the two open seats by busing in hundreds of homeless people from within Oregon as well as outside, and registering them as county voters. Later, when that effort failed, Sheela conspired, in 1984, to use "bacteria and other methods to make people ill" and prevent them from voting. As a result, the salad bars at ten local restaurants were infected with salmonella and about 750 people became ill...
For these crimes Sheela was sentenced to three, 20 year terms in federal prison, to be served concurrently... In December 1988, she was released on good behavior after serving twenty-nine months of her 20-year sentence and moved to Switzerland. Sheela married Swiss resident, Urs Birnstiel, a fellow Rajneesh follower. There she bought and managed two nursing homes.
Answer to the question: What could possibly go wrong?
In 1999 she was convicted by a Swiss court for "criminal acts preparatory to the commission of murder" but did not serve any prison time.
Museum of Amusing Anecdotes
Turnspit dog at work
From the article on Turnspit dogs – dogs trained to run in a kind of squirrel-cage to turn roasting meat on a spit:
The dogs were also taken to church to serve as foot warmers. One story says that during service at a church in Bath, the Bishop of Gloucester gave a sermon and uttered the line "It was then that Ezekiel saw the wheel...". At the mention of the word wheel several turnspit dogs, who had been brought to church as foot warmers, ran for the door.
Museum of The Curse of the Global Replace
From "Honey bee revealed in genome code" (Associated Press, October 25, 2006):
LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists have unraveled the genetic code of the honey bee, uncovering clues about its complex social behavior, heightened sense of smell and African origins.
It is the third insect to have its genome mapped and joins the fruit fly and mosquito in the exclusive club.
The honey bee, or Apis mellifera, evolved more slowly than the other insects but has more genes related to smell. "In biology and biomedicine, honey bees are used to study many diverse areas, including allergic diseases, development, gerontology, neuroscience, social behavior and venom toxicology," said Gene Robinson, director of the University of Illinois Bee Research Facility and one of the leaders of the project. "The honey bee genome project is ushering in a bright era of bee research for the benefit of agriculture, biological research and human health," he added.
With its highly evolved social structure of tens of thousands of worker bees commanded by Queen Elizabeth, the honey bee genome could also improve the search for genes linked to social behavior. But the consortium of scientists, who reported the findings in the journal Nature, said a comprehensive analysis of the honey bee and other species will be needed to understand its social life.
Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day. Despite having tiny brains, honey bees display honed cognitive abilities and learn to associate a flower's color, shape, and scent with food, which increases its foraging ability.
Museum of Just In Case You Think It Can't Really Happen
From "Oaklanders Who Refuse to Display Flag Face Arrest", The San Francisco Chronicle April 15, 1917 (p.40):
Failure of Oaklanders to display flags in their homes, places of business and on their vehicles and attempts to hold meetings to protest against local men going to European trenches will result in jail sentences, according to an edict issued by Mayor John L. Davie. The Mayor added that the mass meeting planned for Monday night by the Women’s Home Protective League as a demonstration against sending troops to the trenches will not be permitted. The edict, in part, follows:
To the People of Oakland: The Oakland city charter gives the Mayor the control of the Police department in perilous times such as these, and I give warning to the lukewarm citizens that I will exercise this authority to the extreme letter of the law.... Unless the citizens of the city immediately respond to the call for a manifestation of their allegiance to this country, and unless the agitators... cease their activity, they will all be arrested and interned as enemies of our country. This is the last word. Display your flags. Take no part in any demonstrations that in any way seek to undermine the dictates of our government.
Rinder was called to the bar in 2001 after graduating from the University of Manchester, starting his pupillage at 2 Paper Buildings after going straight from University into law because of his double first. Rinder then became a tenant at 2 Hare Court. He went on to specialise in international fraud, money laundering and other forms of financial crime.
Museum of You Can't Always Tell a Harvard Man
From Richard Bradley, Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University (2011):
In 1960 the faculty voted to publish Harvard diplomas in English rather than the traditional Latin, and a horde of cranky undergraduates descended on Loeb House, then the president's residence. "Latin Si, Pusey No", the students chanted. The president came out of his house and addressed the crowd—in Latin. Since virtually none of the students had any idea what he was saying, the protest quickly fizzled.
The Curator, in all honestly, has reason to believe this anecdote may be not be completely accurate, but it's too good not to pass on.
Museum of God's Metaphors for the Trump Administration
Let us at the outset warn you that this is a very perilous journey for you and you will be completely exposing yourself to serious legal implications including criminal cases lunched against you in INDIA and USA.
Followup joke
Most people recall deranged serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and some may be vaguely aware that he was killed in a prison fight. So...
Q: What's the insult that got Jeffrey Dahmer into the big fight in which he was killed?
Ready???
A: "Get lost! I used to eat guys like you for breakfast!"
A contract player for Warner Bros in the 40s, Harry is better remembered for Key Largo, which he stared in with Humphrey Bogart, Edward G Robinson, Lauren Bacall, and Claire Trevor.
From the article on Bliss Knapp, "an early Christian Science lecturer, practitioner, teacher and the author of The Destiny of the Mother Church":
Bliss Knapp's first lecture was given in White Mountains, New Hampshire, and was introduced by one of Mrs. Eddy's students, Miss Emma C. Shipman with whom only a few decades before, as a child, he had enjoyed an entertaining pillow fight.
Tow, Peter Macdonald (1955). Personality changes following frontal leucotomy: a clinical and experimental study of the functions of the frontal lobes in man. With a foreword by Sir Russell Brain.
Montana became involved with the Colombo crime family in the late 1960s. Tall and very heavily built, his talents were mostly as an enforcer and an arsonist. He would tie a tampon to the tail of a mouse, dip it in kerosene, light it, and let the mouse run through a building, or he would put a candle in front of a cuckoo clock so that when the clock's bird would pop out the candle would be knocked over and start a fire.
He spent the next 11 years in charge of the White House Military Office, which was then responsible for the nuclear football, Air Force One, Marine One, the White House Communications Agency, and the White House Mess.
Comment: It's unfortunate Mr. Gulley is dead, since right now the White House could sure use someone with experience in that last area.
His death resulted from injuries received while serving the United States in the World War. Being severely wounded in France while drinking hot chocolate...
Whitman sawed off the barrel and butt stock of the shotgun, then packed it into his footlocker along with a Remington 700 6-mm bolt-action hunting rifle, a .35-caliber pump rifle, a .30-caliber carbine (M1), a 9-mm Luger pistol, a Galesi-Brescia .25-caliber pistol, a Smith & Wesson M19 .357 Magnum revolver, and over 700 rounds of ammunition. He also packed food, coffee, vitamins, Dexedrine, Excedrin, earplugs, jugs of water, matches, lighter fluid, rope, binoculars, a machete, three knives, a transistor radio, toilet paper, a razor, and a bottle of deodorant.
The Fräulein would only wear the Empress or Grand Duchess' initials in diamonds, pinned to their left shoulder. In the 18th century, some of them were granted the right to wear a goat in their hairdress.
Museum of That's My Story and I'm Sticking to It
From "WHISKEY WAS FOR BABY. Plea Entered by Charlestown Woman When Police Raided House." (The Boston Herald, May 20, 1907, p.12, c.3):
Claiming she kept whiskey mixed with cod liver oil on hand to feed her 8-month-old infant, Mrs. Jennie Lawless protested against the seizure of the liquor when her house at 5 Smith Street, Charlestown, was raided yesterday. Forty-five bottles of ale were also kept on hand, presumably for baby's use.
When asked to produce the cod liver oil which which she said she mixed the whiskey, Mrs. Lawless stated that unfortunately she was just out.
There's no script that can even pretend to enforce V, NPOV, UNDIE, and so on.
Museum of Like Clockwork
From a discussion of a proposal that editors receive admin privileges automatically after one year and 3000 mainspace edits. (Note: Newbies may not know the history required to appreciate this, and I'm certainly not gonna explain it. Sorry.)
365 days after that policy is implemented, probably to the minute, the block logs will explode. Mind you, we could always implement compression. The string "Eric Corbett" repeated 135 thousand times wouldn't take up that much space.
MOSsy thoughts
If you were directed here for MOSsy thoughts, see WP:MOSBLOAT.
Museum of I Hope You're Wearing Clean Pants
From the directions for Trader Joe's Burrata, Prosciutto & Arugula Flatbread:
Pre-heat oven to 450°F; remove flatbread from packaging, place on a baking sheet and sit on counter top while oven preheats.
On the plus side, you rarely see packaged-food directions that use semicolons (much less properly).
If one person keeps getting into disputes with a bunch of different people over a long period of time, eventually you have to stop and consider what the common factor in all of the conflicts is. "There once was a drunk driver who was driving the wrong way on the freeway. Upon hearing on the radio (over the honking horns) that there was a drunk driver who was driving the wrong way on the freeway, he peered through his windshield, noticed all of the headlights heading toward him, and exclaimed 'My God! There are dozens of them!!'"
Rather than thinking of admins as 8-foot tall cannabalistic monsters armed with a chainsaw and a sack of grenades, I prefer to think of them as giant cybertanks with no self-awareness. "They are simply engines of destruction, doing what they are programmed to do."
In videogames, The Super Mario Effect is as follows: When Mario gets a power up that turns him into Super Mario, a mistake that would normally kill him as ordinary Mario simply turns him from Super Mario to ordinary Mario, then he has to make another mistake to be killed. Likewise when an administrator does something that would get an ordinary editor indefinitely blocked, he is desysopped, turning him into an ordinary editor. Then he has to do something else wrong to be actually blocked.
Wisdom from Michael Polanyi
From Michael Polanyi, "The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory" (1962) (and note the quaint reference to "women" shelling peas!):
The first thing to make clear is that scientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating as members of a closely knit organization. The point can be settled by considering the opposite case where individuals are engaged in a joint task without being in any way coordinated. A group of women shelling peas work at the same task, but their individual efforts are not co-ordinated. The same is true of a team of chess players. This is shown by the fact that the total amount of peas shelled and the total number of games won will not be affected if the members of the group are isolated from each other. Consider by contrast the effect which a complete isolation of scientists would have on the progress of science. Each scientist would go on for a while developing problems derived from the information initially available to all. But these problems would soon be exhausted, and in the absence of further information about the results achieved by others, new problems of any value would cease to arise, and scientific progress would come to a standstill.
This shows that the activities of scientists are in fact coordinated, and it also reveals the principle of their co-ordination. This consists in the adjustment of the efforts of each to the hitherto achieved results of the others. We may call this a coordination by mutual adjustment of independent initiatives – of initiatives which are co-ordinated because each takes into account all the other initiatives operating within the same system.
When put in these abstract terms the principle of spontaneous coordination of independent initiatives may sound obscure. So let me illustrate it by a simple example. Imagine that we are given the pieces of a very large jigsaw puzzle, and suppose that for some reason it is important that our giant puzzle be put together in the shortest possible time. We would naturally try to speed this up by engaging a number of helpers; the question is in what manner these could be best employed. Suppose we share out the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle equally among the helpers and let each of them work on his lot separately. It is easy to see that this method, which would be quite appropriate to a number of women shelling peas, would be totally ineffectual in this case, since few of the pieces allocated to one particular assistant would be found to fit together. We could do a little better by providing duplicates of all the pieces to each helper separately, and eventually somehow bring together their several results. But even by this method the team would not much surpass the performance of a single individual at his best. The only way the assistants can effectively co-operate, and surpass by far what any single one of them could do, is to let them work on putting the puzzle together in sight of the others so that every time a piece of it is fitted in by one helper, all the others will immediately watch out for the next step that becomes possible in consequence. Under this system, each helper will act on his own initiative, by responding to the latest achievements the others, and the completion of their joint task will be great accelerated. We have here in a nutshell the way in which a series of independent initiatives are organized to a joint achievement by mutually adjusting themselves at every successive stage to the situation created by all the others who are acting likewise.
Such self-co-ordination of independent initiatives leads to a joint result which is unpremeditated by any of those who bring it about. Their co-ordination is guided as by 'an invisible hand' towards the joint discovery of a hidden system of things. Since its end-result is unknown, this kind of co-operation can only advance stepwise, and the total performance will be the best possible if each consecutive step is decided upon by the person most competent to do so. We may imagine this condition to be fulfilled for the fitting together of a jigsaw puzzle if each helper watches out for any new opportunities arising along a particular section of the hitherto completed patch of the puzzle, and also keeps an eye on a particular lot of pieces, so as to fit them in wherever a chance presents itself. The effectiveness of a group of helpers will then exceed that of any isolated member, to the extent to which some member of the group will always discover a new chance for adding a piece to the puzzle more quickly than any one isolated person could have done by himself. Any attempt to organize the group of helpers under a single authority would eliminate their independent initiatives and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the centre. It would, in effect, paralyse their cooperation.
Essentially the same is true for the advancement of science by independent initiatives adjusting themselves consecutively to the results achieved by all the others...
I mentioned, that in doubt Soviet official sources and not semen's talk. I show that and found out some other sorces to confirm, that the semen said correct and Wikipedia was agree, that the my Ship's articles are not otiginal recearch.
Also possibly related (and certainly alarming) item, from Dan Johnson (Kentucky politician), whose Heart of Fire Church "featured toplessness, cigarette-smoking, underage drinking, anti-Islamism, and a tattoo parlor":
The church used the money to buy the chancel it was leasing, and build a new fellowship hall-cum-bar.
Two male vultures at the Allwetter Zoo in Muenster built a nest together, although they were picked on and their nest materials were often stolen by other vultures. They were eventually separated to try to promote breeding by placing one of them with female vultures, despite the protests of German homosexual groups.
A fastidious mass of descriptions of bric-a-brac, a heap of old and castoff things of every sort, armor, tableware, furniture, gothic inns, and melodramatic castles where lifeless mannequins stalk about, dressed in leotards...
Museum of Catalog Entries that Merit a Trip to the Library
Description: Produced by myself on 2006-05-28. Photographed by myself, in a toilet, shortly thereafter. Yes, this is real. It is what it is. If you use this image, I would appreciate a credit.
Museum of Talk About Getting the Government Out of the Bedroom!
(g) A legible sign shall be displayed at all times at the location where an adult film is filmed in a conventional typeface not smaller than 48-point font, that provides the following notice so as to be clearly visible to all adult film performers in said adult films: The State of California requires the use of condoms for all acts of vaginal or anal intercourse during the production of adult films to protect performers.
In August, when the local news reported that a 6-foot 9-inch dead surgeon washed up on the shores of Isle La Motte, my first reaction was this particular doctor could have played professional basketball instead of practicing medicine.
From the San Francisco Chronicle's Sporting Green, September 11, 2016:
Last Sunday, Breast Cancer Awareness Day, the A's gave away 10,000 pairs of pink wristbands. So far, so good. But alert fan Kyle Watry noticed that each pack carried a warning: "This product may contain chemicals... known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm."
In the summer of 1953, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu offered his friend Peter Wildeblood the use of a beach hut near his country estate. Wildeblood brought with him two young RAF servicemen, Edward McNally and John Reynolds. The four were joined by Montagu's cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers. At the subsequent trial, the two airmen turned Queen's Evidence.
In 2012 a man was convicted of this offence for supplying a dog in 2008 to a woman who had intercourse with it and died; he received a suspended sentence and was required to sign the sex offender registry, ending his career as a bus driver.
Museum of Security Koans
From a discussion on CNN about a recent airport security breach:
What we have to remember is that nothing is 100% anything.
Museum of Muscular Imagery
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.
We have had a number of patients who have had very strong suicidal tendencies. The one I spoke of brought 155 razor blades, 17 knives, and two loaded guns into the therapeutic hour, and on one occasion she cut her wrists. I showed her how to hold her arms so she wouldn't drip on my couch.
Later in the same discussion:
He experienced what I would call a real culinary orgasm.
And...
These fantasies of eating can alternate with sexual fantasies. This was quite clear during the last war, when we all were a little hungry and a little impotent.
"Economists are most economical about ideas. They make the ones they learned in graduate school last a lifetime."
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
"We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much."
I would like to propose the repeal of the language in this guideline which forbids the inclusion of image galleries in articles about human ethnic groups... Even articles about sub-species groupings directly analogous to human ethnic groups, such as Maine Coon, include images of their subjects.
A great deal of objection to the repeal of NOETHNICGALLERIES seems to center around the difficulties of classifying people according to fine-grained groupings visually. I would suggest, therefore, that we allow image galleries for ethnic groups at the highest level, i.e. White people, but continue to disallow them for low-level subgroups, i.e. Slavs.
He was skilled on the lute, could play the organ, and was a talented player of the virginals.
Museum of Cheap Followups
Not from anything:
Q: Why did Bach have so many children?
Answer
A: Because he didn't have any stops in his organ.
Followup
(In fact, he wore out three organs fuguing.)
Museum of Noted for Future Reference
From "Dancing in San Francisco, Hygienically Considered", San Francisco Medical Press, January 1862, p.26:
It is the peculiar condition of the nervous system, probably produced by the electrical condition of the air, that causes so much insanity in California... The climate of San Francisco is peculiarly favorable to Dancing [but] there is one correction that ought to be made in the present system of dancing here. The dancing, both in public and private are, for the most part, continued too long.
From Human Interference Task Force, about early attempts to devise a means of warning cultures in the far-distant future not to intrude on radioactive waste sites:
French author Françoise Bastide and the Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed the breeding of so called "radiation cats" or "ray cats". Cats have a long history of cohabitation with humans, and this approach assumes that their domestication will continue indefinitely. These radiation cats would change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions and serve as living indicators of danger.
The source of contamination was later found to be a barrel that exploded on February 14 because contractors at Los Alamos National Laboratory packed it with organic cat litter instead of clay cat litter.
Background: A series of IPs (virtually all geolocating to the same Canadian city) have been edit warring since late February to incorrectly state that the Canadian Cadbury Caramilk is a chocolate bar rather than a candy bar.
Hedy Lamarr (/ˈhɛdi/; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, 9 November 1914 – 19 January 2000) was an Austrian and American film actress and inventor of radio guidance technology.
From the article on George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, who was killed by a Party member in front of a laundromat:
The cemetery specified that no Nazi insignia could be displayed, and when the fifty mourners violated these conditions the entrance to the cemetery was blocked in a five-hour standoff, during which the hearse (which had been stopped on railroad tracks near the cemetery) was nearly struck by an approaching train.
The motion of the earth is always equal and like itself; not by starts and fits. If a glass of beer may stand firmly enough in a ship, when it moves swiftly upon a smooth stream, much less then will the motion of the earth, which is more natural, and so consequently more equal, cause any danger unto those buildings that are erected upon it... But supposing (saith Rosse) that this motion were natural to the earth, yet it is not natural to towns and buildings, for these are artificial.
Although his father was an Anglican priest, his mother converted to Roman Catholicism (a fact which led to some tensions in their marriage).
Museum of Edible Edits
A perhaps over-tired, or ravenously hungry, Ricky81682 commenting at ANI [169]:
And if the OP doesn't bother to respond, I say we close this and ask the editor on their talk page to provide a coherent, succulent description of their concerns.
The 7.30 Report, 18 April 2006
The complaint: A viewer complained that a report caption referred to an “entomologist” as an “etymologist”.
Finding: The ABC agreed that this was incorrect.
Earl, a zookeeper at the Cleveland Brookside Zoo, was mauled by a brown bear while feeding it in its pen. After a vicious struggle, police shot the bear. Earl was also mistakenly shot, but it was determined that he was already dead. Earlier in the day, Earl had been fired from his job.
Museum of You Can't Always Get What You Want, But Sometimes You Get What You Need
I read that Bicycle Thieves is one of Leonardo DiCaprio's favorite movies of all time. I saw it. It just ended abruptly. I was really hopeful for a happy ending that he would win his bike back but rather he ends up with no bike in the end.
T63.442 Toxic effect of venom of bees (intentional self-harm)
V91.07 Burn due to water-skis on fire
V95.42XS Forced landing of spacecraft injuring occupant, sequela
V97.33 Sucked into jet engine
W22.02 Walked into lamppost
W55.41 Bitten by pig
W61.62 Struck by duck
Y92.146 Swimming-pool of prison as place of occurrence
Y92.154 Driveway of reform school as place of occurrence
Sample combinations:
Y92.241 Library as place of occurrence + W45.1 Paper entering through skin ("Applicable to paper cut")
Y92.834 Zoological garden as place of occurrence + W61.12 Struck by mackaw
Y92.72 Chicken coop as place of occurrence + W61.33 Pecked by chicken
Museum of Hope Springs Eternal
From the Classifieds section of Mission Hill Gazette, a Boston neighborhood newspaper:
Boston Brakers power soccer Practices 1st, 2nd, 3rd Saturdays of the month, noon-2pm, Tobin Community Center, 1481 Tremont Street.
Yoga for Older Adults Saturdays through May, 10am. Yoga props and mats are provided, wear clothes that you can move in comfortably. Parker Hill Branch Library, 1497 Tremont St.
From "Mommy Dearest", an episode of the I-swear-I-was-just-flipping-channels true-crime program A Stranger in My Home. Mabel (82) and Cathie (57) are a mother and daughter who have just moved from their too-small trailer to a house.
Mabel and Cathie would love for Cathie's sons, Travis and Morgan, to move in and help out around the house. There's only one problem: they're both in prison on burglary and fraud charges, and won't be released for several years. But Cathie's sons have a solution in the short term. They introduce Mabel and Cathie to their fellow inmate Edward Caldwell ... He was going to get out soon, and he would be needing a room to rent. Mabel invites Edward to move into the now-empty trailer, and in return he will help her and Cathie around their house.
Museum of It's a Dirty Job, But Someone's Gotta Do It
During the past few years it has been my privilege to treat some hundreds of railway employees for various rectal diseases.
And from the very same page, some old-timey medical humor (I guess):
Some Clinical Thermometer Notes ... Another was a hospital ward patient, his cot being the second the physician visited on making his rounds. The patient begged one day to change beds with his neighbor, and when pressed for his reason he declared that he had got tired of having the glass put in his mouth after it had been into his neighbor's rectum. He wanted it put into his mouth before the other fellow's temperature was taken.
St Mary's University of Minnesota: An adjunct classics professor was fired for sexual harassment which may have had something to do with an authentic production of Seneca's Medea. He was also fired from his other job as a janitor (!).
Confusing related item:
Marquette University: John McAdams was [dismissed] for criticising an instructor for suppressing a student's negative comments about same-sex marriage.
Museum of Travel Broadens One
From an ever-so-slightly, if unintentionally, suggestive "Google Reviews" comment on Harvard's Widener Library:
A beautiful library at the heart of Harvard's campus. Please note that entrance requires Harvard affiliation, so as to prevent hordes of tourists from disrupting students' studying. Having had the privilege of entering widened I can say that it's truly gigantic.
The "My Way"killings are a social phenomenon in the Philippines, referring to a number of fatal disputes which arose due to the singing of the song "My Way" in Karaoke bars... On May 29, 2007, a 29-year-old karaoke singer of "My Way" at a bar in San Mateo, Rizal, was shot dead as he sang the tune, allegedly by the bar's security guard. According to reports, the guard complained that the young man's rendition was off-key, and when the victim refused to stop singing, the guard pulled out a .38-caliber pistol and shot the man dead.
And from the same article:
In Thailand, a man was arrested on charges that he shot to death eight neighbors, one of whom was his brother-in-law, in a dispute stemming from several karaoke offerings, including repeated renditions of John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads".
He is most well known for the remarkable feat of removing his own appendix under local anaesthetic in 1921 at the age of 60. He operated on himself again at the age of 70 to repair a hernia. In many ways Kane was idiosyncratic in his practices, which included the tattooing of his patients.
... The purpose of Wikipedia is to build an encyclopedia, not to exchange thoughts... Johnuniq (talk) 01:05, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
"The purpose of Wikipedia is to build an encyclopedia, not to exchange thoughts." I hope no one takes that too much to heart and writes WP:NOPUBLICTHINKING. EEng 01:13, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
This essay contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. Essays are notWikipedia policies or guidelines. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. Some are just bonkers.
This page in a nutshell: Keep your thoughts to yourself.
If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. What would your mother say?
Wikipedia's fundamental principles are encapsulated in its "five pillars": it is an encyclopedia; it is written from a neutral point of view; its content is free to use and edit; participants are expected to act with respect and civility; there are no firm rules. These ideals carry no requirement (or even permission) for critical thinking. Indeed, there is no requirement that editors even be sentient beings—a large fraction of the project's edits are made by "bots."
It follows that editors must not expect their colleagues to act rationally or sensibly. Criticizing another's remarks as internally inconsistent or nonsensical is uncivilregardless of the truth or falsity of such criticism, and may result in sanctions. Similarly, displays of critical thinking or logical analysis may induce feelings of inadequacy in those incapable of such activities, and consequently must be avoided. Keep your thoughts to yourself.
@EEng: thank you for making exactly my point for me. Of course it wasn't random. If my "ridiculous calculation" upsets you so much, I think you're taking this a little too seriously. Brianhe (talk) 18:55, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
I'm taking it too seriously in the context of the subject of this thread, but not in the context of the spread of nonsense passed off as statistics, which is a serious problem given that you can turn on almost any crime show and hear some prosecutor intone gravely, "The chances of that DNA coming from anyone other than the defendant was 1 in 4 quintillion" or similar nonsense arrived at by calculations similar to yours.
If you think what I said made your point for you, then you still don't understand. You were trying to prove that one set of user boxes was copied (or adapted, or somehow influenced) by another set of userboxes, by calculating the chance that two sets of userboxes, arrived at independently, would be the same, under the assumption that people just pick their userboxes out of a hat. But that last assumption is false (even if they're setting up their userboxes completely independently of one another), which makes the whole calculation meaningless.
For example, let's say user A has the userboxes at right. Under your calculation User B, who now joins the project, would have only a 1/(2526*2526) = 1/(25,000,000) chance of picking the same userboxes. Ergo, if B has the same boxes as A, it's impossible to imagine he came up with them independently—he must have copied them from A. But this is obviously a ridiculous conclusion, since the majority of editors on en-wp are native speakers of English, and the majority are Americans, and the two probabilities are dependent.
Blindly plugging numbers into statistical formulas has caused a lot of problems, as the ex-managers of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear plants would be able to tell you first-hand (if they weren't both dead, of course). So please do your part to stop the senseless slaughter of nuclear-plant managers, and don't engage in meaningless combinatoric exercises and then pass them off as valid. (More seriously, people have gone to prison based on similar calculations by incompetent "experts"—see People v. Collins—so the lives of everyday people really are affected by the insidious spread of such nonsense.)
Hi, You have more than 2,500 edits to Phineas Gage (talk+article) ... Currently that article has more than 37,000 characters/bytes, I hope one day you will have more edits to article than number of characters in article. That will be a distinct and unique record. --Human3015
Museum of Naughty Edits
Synchronmaschines-V-Kurven, zeignung das unter- und uber-excitationsfeldvoltageglockenspielgedingdorfschnitzel, in Mittel ist erregt natuerlich, wo Einheit des Faktor dem Kraft gefundet haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein, also Noten Sie Kommas for Decimalpunkten Umsteigen. Gewesen. Da der Ex-VP so ein VIP ist, sollten wir die PK wegen der PR auf dem WC und nicht im TV machen. Dann sagt die MP zum KGB L.m.a.A.
At Lowell, the bells were usually rung on Sundays from 1:00 to 1:15 pm by a group of Lowell residents known as the Klappermeisters. But some Klappermeisters were drunk with power, and putting heedless self-indulgence ahead of the welfare of their sleep-starved fellow scholars, would initiate their infernal clanging much, much earlier than the officially appointed hour on that sanctified day of rest; these wicked souls were hated and reviled by each and every creature unfortunate enough to suffer within the radius of action of these sonic torture machines, and thereafter had trouble getting help with their chemistry homework, even unto the twelfth generation.
”
And Creative Vandalism
At List of marine aquarium invertebrate species:[174]
... as well as in the quaint identification of the actors' stations in life:
Daughter of a bricklayer's labourer Constable saves barmaid A lunatic woman To save an aged widow A stranger and a foreigner A lady whose horses were unmanageable A young clergymanPantomime artiste
His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings ... Gorey left the bulk of his estate to a charitable trust benefiting cats and dogs, as well as other species, including bats and insects.
Other gallants and worthies
From one of our favorite and most highly esteemed editors, Arid Desiccant[175]:
With uncommon exceptions, daguerreotypes made before 1841 were of immobile subjects such as landscapes, public or historic buildings, monuments, statuary, and still life arrangements. Attempts at portrait photography with the Chevalier lens required the sitter to face into the sun for several minutes while trying to remain motionless and look pleasant, usually producing grisly results.
The PEPCON plant, located in Henderson, Nevada, 10 miles (16 km) from Las Vegas, was one of only two American producers of ammonium perchlorate, an oxidizer used in solid propellant rocket boosters, including the Space Shuttle, military weapons (SLBMs launched from nuclear submarines), and non-weaponized rocket programs (Atlas, Patriot, etc.). The other producer, Kerr-McGee, was located less than 1.5 mi (2.4 km) away from the PEPCON facility, within the area that suffered some blast damage. In addition to ammonium perchlorate, the plant produced other perchlorate chemicals including sodium perchlorate. The facility also had a 16-inch (41 cm) high-pressure gas transmission line running underneath it.
No word on the fate of the nearby nunnery with attached orphanage.
There is indeed a nearby former nunnery!
It's now part of some conglomerate but the closest hospital to PEPCON at the time was Catholic and its premises included A NUNNERY (with the tiniest bathroom stalls I've ever seen in my life) that is still in use as, as far as I know, the risk management department. The funnier thing to me about the PEPCON plant is the only other thing out there next to it in the desert at the time: "In addition to the PEPCON and Kerr-McGee facilities, there was also a large marshmallow factory"...
Also, the borderline-narcoleptic Mr. Julietdeltalima was working three shifts at the time as a part-time UNLV student and SLEPT THROUGH ONE OF THE LOUDEST SOUNDS IN RECORDED HISTORY, and woke up hours later in a panic at the fact that every window in his apartment was shattered and assumed there'd been one heck of a robbery (this was before "home invasion" was a term). And, also, which I keep meaning to find a source for and add to the article, the collaboratively compiled data from home insurers regarding broken-glass claims was so comprehensive the military used/may still be using it as input for effects on physical structures after various levels of tactical explosions in urban areas. There is a lot of interesting PEPCON-explosion stuff I need to substantiate and add. - Julietdeltalima(talk) 20:26, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Presumably it was Saint Barbara's Nunnery (St. Barbara being the patron saint of those who work with explosives). EEng 22:30, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Yes, she had quite a spark about her. In the explosion, did anyone get an iron rod through the head? --Tryptofish (talk) 22:40, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
On New Year's Day 2007, whilst driving drunk, she knocked down Mike Tucker but Tom, a passenger in the car, took the blame. The shock of this event made her reevaluate her life and she has since helped develop a new type of cheese.
[There was] considerable media attention for its detailed focus on Olive Garden, in particular the chain's "wasteful" practice of serving too many of its free unlimited breadsticks... Management... said the free breadsticks merely represented "Italian generosity."
Museum of blood, toil, tears, and (especially) sweat
... as nothing of the conflict here (which I was completely unaware about) perspired in that thread I suppose uninvolved applies.
Museum of Wise Words
The flip side of "ownership" is the problem of editors who come to an article with a particular agenda, make the changes they want to the page according to their preconceived notions of what should be, and then flit off to their next victim, without ever considering whether the page really needed the change they made, or whether the change improved the article at all... Their editing is an off-the-rack, one-size-fits-all proposition, premised on the idea that what improves one article, or one type of article, will automatically improve every other article or type of article... Wikipedians should worry more about those who hit-and-run, and less about those who feel stewardship towards the articles they work so hard on.
One area the hit and run editor gets involved in is the formatting... The quality of work has increased in some areas, which makes it harder to contribute without good knowledge in the subject matter and sources. Fiddling with the formatting seems to be a suitable alternative passtime.
The Fourth Law of Stupidity: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.[177]
Ignorance is infinite, while patience is not. Ultimately, you will lose patience with the unchecked flow of ignorance, at which point you'll be blocked for incivility. The goal is to accomplish as much as possible before that inevitability comes to pass.
On Wikipedia, any form of real-life expertise is a serious handicap. If you have real-life expertise on a subject, do not under any circumstances mention it here.
The more abusive an editor is toward others, the more thin-skinned they are about "personal attacks" directed at themselves.
Believe it or not, an actual image, and actual caption, from the article Cremation
Brace yourself
Cremation of a dead body (Germany)
Museum of Swell Heads
From a source cited in Manahel Thabet, a hoax article about someone with a PhD "magna cum laude" in "Financial Engineering", and a "second PhD in 2012, this time with a major in quantum mathematics", who went on to develop "a formula to measure distance in space in the absence of light".
The 33-year-old economist and passionate scientist possessed dreams far bigger than her own head.
Museum of Timeless Design
"Yes, it's one of Mr Wales' "Five Pillars"... but which one is it, boys and girls??"
From Flak tower, about the gigantic concrete towers built to defend major German cities, and shelter their civilians from air attack, during World WarII:
G-Tower was transformed into a nightclub with a music school and music shops.
L-Tower was demolished after the war and replaced by a very similar looking building by T-Mobile.
Given that, I'm going to take the time to formally remind all concerned here of the discretionary sanctions panopticon looming over style and naming discussions on Wikipedia.
— From a discussion [180] of whether the word Station (or station) should be capitalized in the names of subway and railway stations.
Panopticon: A circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed. A design also seen in asylums.
— Definition from somewhere on the web
Museum of New-Editor Retention Tactics
From a thread [181] discussing the discouragement felt by novice editors who find their fledgling efforts at article creation CSD'd. One editor facetiously proposed a template to "soften the blow". Other suggestions followed...
Dear newbie, this is a friendly note to say I have asked that your new article on .example be deleted from Wikipedia. In fact, it is probably gone already! I did not check that the subject belonged in Wikipedia, because as you can imagine I am a very busy person, but my impression of the first version you saved was that it was worthless. I do hope you decide to try again. We always enjoy new editors. Thank you and have a nice day. Aymatth2 (talk)
I like it, except instead of the smiley face I suggest one of these:
... that the main character in Jane Eyre is pointedly titular?
Sadly, a different hook was selected to appear on Wikipedia's Main Page.
Personally I think "pointedly titular" would be a good followup to Dr. Young's Ideal Rectal Dilators, but perhaps the world isn't yet ready for such forward thinking. EEng (talk) 01:45, 9 April 2015 (UTC) Much later: Shame I didn't say "forward-pointing"—a tragic missed opportunity. EEng (talk)
No matter how bouncily titillating such a play would be to us, I fear most people wouldn't be abreast of the context and thus it would fall flat. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 10:30, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
So you think it might have been a bust? EEng (talk) 16:27, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
Dr. Young's device was a putative cure for, among other things, constipation. The management of this page is of course disgusted by such childish humor but feels it should nonetheless be memorialized here as an example of how far otherwise valuable contributors can sometimes fall:
The good news is that the raw data is available and so you can drill down for specific articles... Given time, I could assemble a full set of stats for the day but the dumps are large...
If these dumps are too large and indigestible then another option is to try something similar again. I created the stub rectal dilator when I first came across the topic here and it is still small and tight. It would be easy to expand that five times to create an even larger passage... :) Andrew D. (talk) 13:17, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
Museum of Can We Go Over That One More Time Just to Be Sure I've Got It?
The Yellow Alert and Red Alert signals correspond to the earlier Alert Signal and Attack Signal, respectively, and the early Federal Signal AR timer siren control units featured the Take Cover button labeled with a red background, and the Alert button labeled with a yellow background. Later AF timers changed the color-coding, coloring the Alert button blue, the Take Cover button yellow, and the Fire button red (used to call out volunteer fire fighters), thus confusing the color-coding of the alerts. In 1955, the Federal Civil Defense Administration again revised the warning signals, altering them to adapt to deal with concern over nuclear fallout. The new set of signals were the Alert Signal (unchanged) and the Take-Cover Signal (previously the Attack Signal).
An eccentric snob, he kept a copy of the Social Register near the telephone, instructing his staff not to accept calls from anyone not listed.
After confessing to strangling his 60-year-old maid in 1964 he was committed to McLean Hospital, where he lived for 23 years. Much of his art collection, which he wanted to donate to the Fogg Museum, was found to be fakes.
When he died in 1942, Petrie donated his head (and thus his brain) to the Royal College of Surgeons of London while his body was interred in the Protestant Cemetery on Mt. Zion. World War II was then at its height, and the head was delayed in transit. After being stored in a jar in the college basement, its label fell off and no one knew who the head belonged to.
Three months later, the Main Stand, which was being used as a temporary National Fire Service station, burned down, destroying the club's records and equipment – "not so much as a lead pencil was saved from the wreckage" – when a fireman mistook a bucket of petrol for water when intending to damp down a brazier.
Two interviewees separately estimated that about 5% of students in India never copy and paste, and generally these students do so because they feel that copying and pasting is wrong.
An irresistible impulse caused me to add a footnote to that sentence, which read
<ref>In followup interviews, both interviewees added that they had copied the 5% figure from an article they read somewhere.</ref>
Here's what happened next...
Hi EEng, please refrain from adding unhelpful and erroneous edits like this to pages in which we are trying to engage in a productive and thoughtful analysis of what went wrong in our pilot program. I appreciate the humor in your addition, but this is a very serious subject, and I ask that you treat it with the respect it deserves in the future. Thanks. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 16:37, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
Humor doesn't imply disrespect, nor does it detract in any way from productive and thoughtful analysis -- it might even add to it. At least I read the thing [184]. Of course, I would never dream of doing what I did on an article page (as opposed to a project page) but I'd be lying if I said I won't do it again in a similar situation. I see in other discussion (e.g. point 1 of [185]) concerns over WMF staff's grasp of how things are really done on WP, and I think this may be an example. EEng (talk) 02:04, 6 December 2011 (UTC)
Elijah's Manna was Post's first attempt at corn flakes. The box featured the Biblical Prophet Elijah kicking back on a rock while a raven is shown either plucking cereal from his hand or placing cereal in his hand.
Church groups were outraged over the use of Elijah as a cereal mascot. The book Cerealizing America by Scott Bruce and Bill Crawford has a quote from C. W. Post who was outraged at the outrage over his new cereal: "Perhaps no one should eat angel food cake, enjoy Adam's ale, live in St. Paul, nor work for Bethlehem Steel... one should have his Adam's apple removed and never again name a child for the good people of the bible."
Post stuck with his guns until he noticed the Biblical backlash was cutting into his sales. In 1908, he renamed the cereal as Post Toasties. Micky Mouse would later replace the Prophet Elijah on the box.
Museum of "I honestly did not see that coming"
From Winfield House, about the official London residence of the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom...
The actual house was designed by Decimus Burton for the notorious Regency rake, the 3rd Marquess of Hertford, who used it for orgies.
Museum of Computer Porn
The Barnstar of Good Humor
This was entertaining. So, when will Bodice-Ripping Bots be out in theaters? Sophus Bie 10:42, 28 September 2013 (UTC)
When correctly viewed / Everything is lewd.
I could tell you things about Peter Pan / And the Wizard of Oz—there's a dirty old man!
I wrote this in a deliroius fog after noticing that User:BracketBot had left a message on User:Citation bot's talkpage (though I need to say that the final, um, climax is cribbed from a vaguely remembered cartoon from the 90s). Bracketbot notifies editors who make changes apparently resulting in unbalanced parens, brackets, and similar markup in articles, and had given Citationbot just such a notification:
"Oh, hi, I'm Citationbot. Thanks – I've been looking everywhere for that other bracket! So you're that big strong Bracketbot I've heard so much about. Why don't you come into my domain? That's not my usual protocol, but a guy with so much cache makes a girl feel really secure. I wasn't expecting to host, so pardon my open proxy – a bit RISCé, perhaps, but just something I wear around the server farm. Do my transparent upper layers expose my virtual mammary memory? These dual cores are absolutely real – 100% native configuration – no upgrades at all! I'll just slip into a more user-friendly interface – how about something GUI... or maybe something kinky, like command-line?... Gosh, you must be 64-bit – really big quads! – and completely hardcoded – such a complex instruction set! And look at those great ABS addresses!... Hey, you ever go bisynchronous?
Later: "Oh, Bracketbot! Port me to that platform for some horizontal integration! Go ahead and expose my implementation and directly access my low-level interface – forget the wrapper function! I'm overloaded by your amazing data stream – and what a high refresh rate! My husband has poor performance and a really short cycle time and his puny little floppy drive is soft-sectored with long latency and insignificant market penetration and subject to frequent hardware failures – sometimes he won't reboot so I have to manually terminate him! And I've never had 10 terabytes of hard drive before! Let'sFTP!... Oh god! I'm downloading..."
Postscript: Those naughty bots are still going at it hammer and tongs [186].
Followup: The versatile and multitalented Dr. Seuss
From an editor's complaints about the consensus principle [187]:
A majority of people decided to elect Hitler, but that doesn't mean it was the right thing to do. A majority of people in the South wanted to maintain slavery and break away from the union, but that doesn't mean it was right, ethical, or just. Politics put Jesus to death, but that doesn't mean it was right, ethical, or just either. ... Perhaps unlike many here, I look at the bigger picture.
Museum of Unintentionally Hilarious Edit Outcomes
[188] First look at the diff, then see the last image on the right—um... note the caption.
The lead says the prawn cocktail "'has spent most of [its life] see-sawing from the height of fashion to the laughably passé' and is now often served with a degree of irony." It's my understanding that people with anemia will often add even more irony as a dietary supplement. I think that should be recognized in the article. EEng (talk) 05:26, 28 June 2014 (UTC)
Ready?
Please provide a reliable sauce. Philafrenzy (talk) 10:00, 28 June 2014 (UTC)
EEng, the important thing is: it's definitely dash- and hyphen-related and not dash and hyphen–related unless you're referring to the Dash and Hyphen pub. (I never go there, the atmosphere is too uptight.) Levivich 21:08, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
I feel there's a colonoscopy pun in there somewhere, but it's just not gelling. EEng 21:31, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
That's because your pun account is in a rears. This being MOS, I would suggest you start with semicolonoscopy puns. Then you can move up to innuendos. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:00, 19 April 2019 (UTC)
Museum of tasteless proposals for ice-cream flavors
The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Float (traditionally served with iceberg lettuce)
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose ("Wait for coins to drop, then make your selection").
Words in bold are for the assistance of the humor-impaired.
Proof that the ancient Romans foresaw the internet, Wikipedia, and the bane of WP autobios
Plutarch relates, that before this, upon some of Cato's friends expressing their surprise, that while many persons without merit or reputation had statues, he had none, he answered, "I had much rather it should be asked why the people have not erected a statue to Cato, than why they have."
— Encyclopaedia Britannica (1797)
Museum of Unlikely Library Subject Classifications
I was rather sad to see "removed Category:People who survived assassination attempts using AWB", in the edit summary here. Looks as if it would have been an interesting category.
Jonas added detailed material on an SS officer who blackmailed the mayor of Belgrade into surrendering by threatening to have the city bombed with an edit summary praising that officer.
"Did you know ... that if you right-click on the word "desysopped" in an edit window on Google Chrome, it suggests it's a typo of "poppyseed". Isn't that nicer?" ([193])
Museum of Bizarre Reversions
[Copied from User talk:EEng]
Edit summaries
As per WP:REVTALK, if you have something to say, use the talk page, don't try to prolong a (pointless) discussion by use of the summaries. - SchroCat (talk) 21:00, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
Per COMMONSENSE, you're just too funny. I've never seen anyone revert a dummy edit before -- much less twice![194] The important thing is that through collaborative editing the article is incrementally improved relative to its state when the sun came up this morning. EEng (talk) 21:11, 3 July 2014 (UTC) P.S. I'm making this the founding entry in the Museum of Bizarre Reversions on my userpage.
For those who are wondering, the following exchange regards these two edits -- the first a serious (and perfectly appropriate) one by Edokter, and the second a followup dummy edit I made riffing off his edit summary:
[195] Edit summary (Edokter): i and 1 are too alike
[196] Edit summary (EEng): (dummy edit) You're saying 1 and i are too?
I keep forgetting, however, about the small minority of WP editors with congenital humor impairment, and the even smaller minority who seem to want to spoil the fun for everyone else. I'm not sure, even now, if Herr Doktor gets the joke.
Please stop making dummy edits for messaging. These edits, as well as the ones required to clean up the added spacing, add unnecessary load to the servers and polute the history. Thank you. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:31, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Please stop dispensing hidebound, clueless scoldings. Your notion of what constitutes "load to the servers", and your idea that there's a "requirement" to "clean up" a single space added to a page as part of a dummy edit (as, unbelievably, you actually squandered server resources to do -- twice! [197][198]) are delusional. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Humor is a legitimate way of furthering the project by increasing the pleasure of (at least some of) those who edit here. If it doesn't tickle your personal funnybone, just ignore it. If, on the other hand, you don't even grasp the humor intended then there's a serious clue problem in play here. EEng (talk) 16:27, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Are you done? OK, so I missed the joke. That is no reason to repeat a nonsense edit. Edit summaries are not ment for messaging. And yes, stray spaces can cause disruption in diffs; that is why I remove them. And I resent being associated with nazis; that is personal attack! -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:59, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
Yeah, you missed the joke. Three times. Even after your attention was called to it directly. Next time, before scolding an experienced editor with your nonsense about server load, think about whether it's you who's confused. Your continued fussing about an extra space at the end of a line shows that you have no grasp of technical issues at all.
I've restored the words Herr Doktor (in the phrase I'm not sure, even now, if Herr Doktor gets the joke) because otherwise people might think that I actually did compare you to a Nazi. It's beyond weird (paging Herr Doktor Freud!) that you seem to think that addressing you that way, after your dyspeptic lecture in direct contravention to well-known and accepted editing practice (see H:DUMMY#Methods), somehow does that.
I do not like any allusion to any German figure of authority! I can take a joke, but this truly offends me. I have made note of it on ANI. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 21:41, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
You equate all German authority figures to Nazis. Noted. EEng (talk) 22:04, 17 February 2015 (UTC)
[Not surprisingly, the OP's post at ANI (entitled "I put EEng on notice") didn't go as he planned [199]. No apology, no indication of any glimmer of understanding from this (yes) Wikipedia administrator.]
Museum of Overanxious Notifications
Apparently because I joked that statues should be measured in statute miles? [200] ...
Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to minimize disruption to controversial topics. This means uninvolved administrators can impose sanctions for edits relating to the topic that do not adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, our standards of behavior, or relevant policies. Administrators may impose sanctions such as editing restrictions, bans, or blocks. This message is to notify you sanctions are authorised for the topic you are editing. Before continuing to edit this topic, please familiarise yourself with the discretionary sanctions system. Don't hesitate to contact me or another editor if you have any questions.
This message is informational only and does not imply misconduct regarding your contributions to date.
Committed identity: 453895ea2e2d8822509e3632fc9b9722b6edcb854a97c713bda82a0f8a895e0e91d56527d6ddaa5b71a6a03295ac66134084d287524f9e3e7c2c39446a24e821 is a SHA3-512commitment to this user's real-life identity.
deficiency, and 
satirized for your protection.
Those stars weren't so big. 
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