Categories
Entertainment

Rupert And Rock & Roll Numbers

I love humor with depth. I’ve lately been enjoying some metahumor—humor that alludes to a detail related to the work, not the story of the work itself:

In Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, Professor Slughorn never can quite remember the name of Harry’s friend Ron Weasley. Slughorn tells Harry that he has “a house-elf taste every bottle after what happened to your poor friend Rupert.”

Rowling is clearly nodding to the fact that the actor who portrays Ron in the movies is a fellow by the name of Rupert Grint. [chuckle]

In a recent episode of Phineas & Ferb, Lawrence (Ferb’s father) is watching television. (We don’t see what he’s watching, just the flickering of light on his face.) Finally he pipes, “This isn’t much of a horror movie! Where are all the rock & roll numbers?”

Now that’s pretty funny by itself in a Monty Python-esque non sequitur sort of way. But it’s bloomin’ hilarious if you realize that the guy who voices Lawrence Fletcher is Richard O’Brien, the man behind The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a musical “horror” film. Brilliant! (Rocky Horror is not exactly a film I recommend, by the way, but I must confess that I have seen it.)

Also in a recent Phineas & Ferb (perhaps the same episode), they did a takeoff of one of the Twilight movies (which they called something like “Almost Dark”—heh, heh). The werewolf character is voiced by none other than Michael J. Fox, the original ’80s Teen Wolf. Genius!

Categories
Tech

African Or European Swallows?

I’m thinking they must be African swallows.

Eight birds (which I hypothesize must be African swallows) attempting to lift a whale with a net
The Notorious Twitter Fail Whale
Categories
Politics

How Do You Know You’re In Hell?

When you die, if in the place you go after you die, you see anything like the Bill of Rights, you know you’re in Hell. Because a Bill of Rights in Heaven would be an affront to God; it would imply that He is untrustworthy. —Dr. Walter E. Williams, Rush Limbaugh Program, September 4, 2009

Categories
Tech

Fortran Programming II

Programming in Fortran is like being human: You can do it right, but most of the time you don’t.

Categories
Tech

Sugar Scrub

I am reading Andy Clarke’s Transcending CSS, and in it he encourages looking for Web design inspiration in places other than the Web: cereal boxes, newspapers, magazines, buildings, to name a few. (This is something I’ve done for some time now, but I’ve been making a more conscious effort of late, given his advice.)

This morning I picked up a tube of my wife’s facial scrub. I looked for anything interesting in the design on the front. Then I looked at the back, which contains, among other things, an ingredient list. I wasn’t scanning the ingredient list as much as my eyes just happened to fall on one word:

Saliva.

Saliva! They put saliva in facial scrub? I looked again.

Salvia.

Salvia officinalis (sage) leaf extract. Ah, helps to keep reading past the line break.

Categories
General

Arden, Hannah, Whatever

Our two-year-old has finally begun to talk and build a vocabulary. Folks who know about this kind of thing tell me that the American English R is one of the most difficult sounds for kids to learn to enunciate.

As you can imagine then, Whitby has a difficult time pronouncing his older sister’s name, Arden. So he pronounces it “Hannah.” A natural and logical approximation, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Categories
General

A Good Thing

He who finds a wife finds a good thing, And obtains favor from the Lord. —Proverbs 18:22 (NKJV)

Hmm. Never says that about husbands. Coincidence?

Categories
Religion

Blood Of The New Covenant For Your Refreshment

Around the house, our nearly-two-year-old will sip from a cup and follow it with a gratified, “Ahhh.” Sunday during the fruit of the vine portion of the Lord’s Supper, after I sipped the juice from my cup, Whitby followed up with a quite audible, “Ahhh.”

I guess we need to work on that reverence thing.

Categories
Tech

Fortran Programming

Programming in Fortran is like a monarchy: With the right guy, it’s not so bad, but there’s just too much potential for abuse.

Categories
General

Madoff With(out) The Cash

Am I the only one who finds it humorous that the guy who ran a 25-year, $50 billion Ponzi scheme pronounces his last name “made off?”