When asked if he can repair the blades, the owner replied “I can-can.”
Category: Knowledge and News
My favorite among this group:
“Go away! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”
— Karl Marx
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Here are some others, both real and apocryphal, not in the article. None of these are 100% legitimate, but some are close. As it often turns out, everything we believe is wrong.
“Either this wallpaper goes or I do.”
(This is a shortened version of a Wilde quote which was certainly not uttered on his deathbed, and may not have been uttered at all.)
Some say that Wilde actually said “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go” to a visiting friend a few weeks before his death in Paris in 1854. Others say that the quote is completely fabricated.
“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
(Legend.)
This one is attributed to Edmund Gwenn, or Edmund Kean or Edwin Booth. People obviously think it must have been some notable actor named Ed, but not Asner. It’s most likely that none of them ever said it.
“Thomas Jefferson survives.”
(This one may be a legitimate deathbed quote from John Adams, but it has been partially debunked and in any case did not represent his last words.)
They are the words supposedly uttered by John Adams as he was dying on America’s 50th birthday (July 4, 1826), the day when the second and third presidents both died. Historian Andrew Burstein, in “America’s Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence,” examined the evidence and found: (1) that the quote had been embellished; (2) that it was actually said on the 3rd of July; (3) that it was actually Adams’s second-last utterance; and (4) that Jefferson was alive when Adams allegedly said it, but dead before Adams actually passed.
It is firmly established only that Adams said “Thomas Jefferson …” on the evening of the 3rd, but what followed was indistinct. His actual last words were uttered after midnight, when he asked a simple, pedestrian question, “Is it the 4th?” He would hang on in silence until the evening of the 4th, while Jefferson passed away about noontime.
“I see that you have made 3 spelling errors.”
(Somewhat legitimate – with caveats.)
Just before his execution in 1790, French aristocrat Marquis de Favras supposedly read his death warrant and said something very similar to the quote above, but these precise words actually come from a play by Victor Hugo (“Marion de Lorme”), written in 1828 and performed in 1831. That doesn’t mean the quotation is totally debunked. Four years before Hugo’s play was performed, Louis Marie Prudhomme wrote a book called “Histoire impartiale des révolutions de France depuis la mort de Louis XV,” in which he noted, “Favras then quietly corrects the spelling and punctuation errors made by the clerk in his statement.” It is therefore likely that Hugo was inspired to write his line by what he had read in Prudhomme’s book. In time, Hugo’s scripted line was assumed to represent the actual words of Favras.
“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”
(Possibly legitimate. These seem to have been among the speaker’s last words.)
These were allegedly the last words of Major General John Sedgwick, a Union Army commander, before he was shot and killed by a Confederate sniper in 1864. Some say Sedgwick’s actual quote was “Why are you dodging like this? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” It would be a great, highly cinematic story if he had been shot just as he finished that sentence, but that’s probably not how it happened. Others say that while the words are often portrayed as if they were his absolute last statement, this is unlikely to be true.
Yup. That should do it, except they will have to retain a few students because they need to keep the sports teams. I first thought they might need a few musicians, but upon reflection I realized there’s no reason why they can’t substitute recorded music for the band. They will need one student techie to operate the controls for the sound board.
The author is, of course, making an ironic suggestion in the model of Jonathan Swift’s famous essay, “A Modest Proposal.” (Swift suggested that poverty could be eliminated by eating the children of poor people.) Like Swift, the author has a serious point to make: colleges actually have too many administrators (the ones he really wants to get rid of). In the college where he teaches, there were ten professors for every three administrators in 1990. Today there are two professors for every three administrators, meaning that relative to the professor base, there are now five times as many administrators.
You may not be able to read this article at the WaPo without a subscription. If that is true, it’s repeated below.
Continue reading ““How to fix college finances? Eliminate faculty, then students.””
Before you start correcting the mistakes in the post, let me stipulate that number three and the Uncle Sam poster are from WW1. That noted, this is a fun collection.
That road in Norway (#9) is probably well engineered and maintained. The route won the title “Norwegian Construction of the 20th Century.”
But it looks scary AF, so scary that you would think it is Photoshopped, but it is real.
These stats expose some reasons why the world is fucked-up.
- Last year alone, 92 billion videos were watched on Pornhub. That’s more than 11 videos for every person on the planet. And that’s just on that one site!
- According to the facts presented on this link, 90% of kids are exposed to pornography, and the greatest consumers of pornography are boys aged 12-17.
I know that “back in my day” stories are boring, but that is a revolutionary change from the baby boomer childhood. The closest we ever got to porn was when we found dad’s Playboy collection. My dad wasn’t into Playboy, so the only nudity I saw was in my mom’s National Geographic magazines, which means (1) I never saw a naked woman of European heritage, and (2) I never saw naked women presented in any sexual context. The closest I got to sexy stories was when I visited the barber, where I could scan through the “manly” pulp magazines while waiting for my turn. And I knew those magazines weren’t really all that manly, because my prim and proper aunt, an operatic soprano with a Masters degree from the Eastman School of Music, made a nice supplemental income by submitting fiction to those magazines. She just studied each magazine’s content and prose style, then mimicked it and submitted articles under a male pseudonym. She could churn out those stories as if they were produced on an assembly line, which in a sense, they were.
Back to the point …
Scientists and media experts claim that each new form of technology alters our culture, not just because of the content it delivers, but also because it re-wires our brains. It is difficult to make a good argument that the world is better now than it was before the internet re-wired us. Contrary to what pundits say, World War III is not coming. It’s already here. There is a great information war taking place across the globe, and the forces of light are losing. The unlimited access of children to pornography is part of that, but only part. In my opinion, access to misinformation and disinformation is even more important. Sure, children are gullible and easily fooled, but we even have adults quoting completely fabricated Russian propaganda on the floors of our Congress as if it were factual.
Oh, well. That’s a story for another day.
Firing him just because he’s dead? What a bunch of wusses! In the USA he’d be one of our livelier candidates. Their demise never slowed Mitch McConnell or Bernie Sanders in the least. Hell, it just made ’em angry.
The Reform Party spokesperson had an absolutely brilliant, oh-so-teddibly British comment. He said he was “mortified.”
“Uranus has something unexpected deep inside it”
“The idea that Uranus is full of gas may not come as much of a surprise to many.”
OJ was a great running back. His college coach said, “Simpson was not only the greatest player I ever had – he was the greatest player anyone ever had.”
He was loved as a public figure, good-natured pitchman, and movie/TV star.
And then the dark side emerged.
When the glove didn’t fit
He was full of shit
“Minister of Culture Musa Dadayev announced the decision to limit all musical, vocal and choreographic compositions to a tempo ranging from 80 to 116 beats per minute“
Example:
(I never thought of this, although I suppose I should have)
The word “oxymoron” is an oxymoron. The original Greek root words are “Oxy” and “Moros” which mean sharp and stupid respectively.
The comments on that site include a few corrections to the 20 “facts.”
I’m guessing that’s their budget for monster trucks.
That could be:
- The opening act for Air Supply
- A grade-B softcore film about the Women’s Army Corps. As Mr. Skin might say, “You’ll WAC off.”
- How Big Guy got the idea for the Turkey Drop.
It is none of the above. It is literally aquatic rodents in parachutes, and it’s a surprisingly interesting story – recorded on video.
“Strategic Maple Syrup Reserves” at a 16-year low.
Many countries keep strategic reserves of essential commodities: petroleum, seeds, grain, uranium, medical supplies, etc. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Canada is the only country that considers maple syrup an essential commodity.
I can’t rate this any higher than fifth for total Canadianess since I’ve been collecting these. My picks for the top four are as follows:
Number 4: “Authorities seize 12 tons of beaver penises” with a street value of $24 million. This one turned out to be fake news.
Number 3: “Try not to let moose lick your car”
Number 2: “Man uses hockey stick to herd beaver out of traffic”
At number 1, and very hard to topple from the summit: “Woman hits moose on way to visit sister who hit moose”
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In case you never noticed, we have a dedicated tag for Canadiana.
Astounding and dramatic.
In the world of ubiquitous camera phones there’s almost always somebody recording every major event. This video shows the ship ramming the bridge, then the entire bridge collapsing in real time.
That’s hyperbole, of course, but it contains a core of truth.
“Professor Cerquiglini makes the point that some words have come full circle – they started off as French, were borrowed and adapted by the English, and the English versions have since reentered the French lexicon, albeit in their new, English form. “
I thought we had some major hefties in Wisconsin and the U.P., but we didn’t even come close. We couldn’t manage to place one in the top 50.
The winner:
McAllen, TX, ranks as the most overweight city in the country, because it has the largest percentage of adults who are obese, at 45%, with an additional 31% overweight but not obese. McAllen also has the second-highest share of obese teenagers and the second-highest share of obese children.
In addition to the general obesity statistics, McAllen residents are also very affected by diseases related to being an unhealthy weight. For example, the city has the fourth-highest share of people with diabetes and the third-highest heart-disease rate.
One reason why many people in McAllen are overweight is because they don’t exercise very much, as the city has the highest share of physically inactive adults. That may not be entirely their fault, considering McAllen has the lowest percentage of residents who live close to parks or recreational facilities.
You may remember that she was the head of one chapter of the NAACP, but was fired when she was found to have misrepresented herself as a black woman. (Her parents are white and her ancestors are various central Europeans and Scandinavians. She was born as a blue-eyed blonde with straight hair, so she’s not just white. She’s VERY white. She’s Mike Pence white.)
Story here
Her OnlyFans account is not a tame one. Sample picture here. (Reminder: Absent the technology of Eternal Sunshine, you can never un-see that pic.)
