Category: Nonsense

10 Most Badass Last Words Ever Uttered

UncleScoopy

My favorite among this group:

“Go away! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough!”

— Karl Marx

Some others, both real and apocryphal, not in the article:

“Either this wallpaper goes or I do.” They are not really deathbed words, though they would have been brilliant ones! They were either spoken weeks before Oscar Wilde’s death or not 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.” 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.” Words uttered by John Adams as he was dying on America’s 50th birthday, when the second and third presidents were the last surviving Founding Fathers. He didn’t know that Jefferson had died a few hours earlier.

“I see that you have made 3 spelling errors.” Just before hanging, French aristocrat Marquis de Favras read his death warrant and made this comment.

“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” These allegedly were the last words of Major General John Sedgwick, a Union Army commander, before he was shot and killed by a Confederate sniper in 1864. (Probably apocryphal.)

“How to fix college finances? Eliminate faculty, then students.”

UncleScoopy

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.”” →

Most Florida headline o’ the day

UncleScoopy

“Alligator Leaps Out The Water To Try To Bite Woman On Zipline” (In Gatorland Park, Orlando)

I’m not convinced that the gator is attacking, but whatever it’s doing would certainly scare the shit out of me.



Here’s another one on the same topic. This gator climbed up nearly onto the zipline landing area, but did not actually attack.

Despite the fact that these gators didn’t actually strike, you have to think that a Darwin Award is in the future of somebody who ziplines over a gator-infested marsh. (And it also works for a future detective story. Creating a break in the zipline over the gators could be the Florida version of the old murder cliche where they tamper with the brakes in the Alps.)

Today is National Talk Like Shakespeare Day

UncleScoopy

And so too is tomorrow. And tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time.

“Forsooth, and possibly even even fivesooth” 1, this is a proper holiday for me to celebrate, for like life itself, Other Crap is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

———

1. A quote from the immortal Snagglepuss, who is making a comeback. If you’re not familiar with Mark Russell, he may be somebody to read about. His dark takes on the Bible, the Flintstones and Snagglepuss are well worth a quick look to see if they are to your taste.

No, it’s not the same Mark Russell who was the cut-rate Tom Lehrer 2. That was a guy you would see on PBS singing ditties about crap like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Uruguay Round. You had to love a song that rhymes “gave Uruguay” with Dave Garroway 3.

2. Tom Lehrer, on the other hand, was one of the true geniuses of the 20th century.

3. Dave Garroway was a mellow, bowtie-wearin’ mofo who was the first host of the Today show. He was so laid back that he made Perry Como seem like a coked-out lounge lizard. He often “co-hosted” with a chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs. To this day, nobody knows exactly why Mr. Muggs was hired. Cynics say it was for ratings.

“SYDNEY SWEENEY’S OFFENSIVE PIRATE CULTURAL APPROPRIATION OF THE DAY”

UncleScoopy

The Inebriated One opined:

“What Sydney Sweeney doesn’t realize is that dressing up as a pirate is pretty offensive to a lot of Somalis out there.”

True enough. According to the stats, piracy represents 99% of Somalia’s economy. The other 1% is divided between tourism and their one gas station, but since the tourism is pirate-oriented and the gas station sells pirate-based souvenirs, we can say it is virtually 100%, excluding only the occasional Coca-Cola.

(I know there are also a few quarters earned by the gas station’s outside pay phones, but they are only used by pirates to make anonymous ransom calls, so I lumped that in with the piracy economy.)

Clickbait headline o’ the day: “Jaw-dropping penis mystery finally solved”

UncleScoopy

“It’s an X-rated question many of us have pondered at some point when wandering around a museum: why do men in Greek statues all have a small penis?”

An old Michael O’Donoghue joke:

Abraham Lincoln was once asked how long a man’s legs should be. Honest Abe responded, “Long enough to reach the ground.” The interviewer then asked how long a man’s penis should be. The wise old rail-splitter responded, “The same logic applies. It should be long enough to reach the ground.”

14 ‘SNL’ Parody Sketches That Really Skewered the Source Material

UncleScoopy

This article kind of reiterates a point I have frequently made about SNL: while the live sketches frequently seem to be utterly lame and unfunny, the short films can be terrific. I suppose there’s some irony there, given that “Live” is their unique selling proposition.

These are some of the funniest of the films (and a couple of famous live sketches).

10 Famous Movies With Crazy Behind the Scenes Stories

UncleScoopy

Some interesting yarns. This is one I had not heard before:

“While looking for a tattered coat for the character playing The Wizard in the Wizard of Oz, a costume assistant bought one from a second hand store. When the actor put the coat on he turned the pocket inside out – written in the pocket was the name L. Frank Baum who is the author of The Wizard of Oz books. Baum’s widow later identified the coat as actually having belonged to her husband.”

Nigel Farage’s new party fired an election candidate for being ‘inactive’. Turns out he was dead.

UncleScoopy

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.”