Not Funny

Professor: I’ve heard from students that have taken my exams that they’re generally considered ‘thinking’ exams.  Rather than just have you recite the law, I try to throw questions in there that will make you examine the policies behind it…yes?
Law student: What would you say the ratio of thinking questions to normal questions is going to be?
Professor: Hmmm… really, I don’t know if I can answer that.  I mean, what to one person would be a thinking-type question, to another might not be, you know?
[Person raises hand again]
Professor: Usually I’m reluctant to let a person who asks a question like that ask another question, so let me ask you first — how many of your questions are thinking-type questions?

Sitting around in the student lounge today, it occurred to me that the word "procrastinate," at first blush, seems to have an inherent contradiction:  its first part, "pro," is generally used with words that have positive, work-related connotations.  "Pro-duce." "Pro-tect." "Pro-create." "Pro-liferate."  What was it doing in a word that meant doing the least possible? 

I spent the next ten minutes discussing it with the random assortment of people around me, who were, as I’d anticipated, no help at all.  I then opened up trusty ol’ Wikipedia (all lies, of course, but convincing lies nonetheless), and discovered the following:

"The word itself comes from the Latin word procrastinatus: pro- (forward) and crastinus (of tomorrow)."

AMAZING!  "Procrastination" literally means "to put off until tomorrow." 
Latin is great.
Procrastination is great.

…you spend half an hour explaining to your friends how Mark-to-Market reporting contributed to the fall of Enron, why stock option reporting is so problematic and that, in order to curb corporate corruption and greed, a change must come from inside, characterized by a shift in corporate culture and driven by the shareholders…

…and literally everything you know about corporations comes from two-thirds of a chapter from a textbook you picked up last week at Barnes & Noble and have been reading during bathroom breaks…

…and you actually manage to sound convincing and knowledgeable.

Deep thought: 
Do birds call bird flu "bird flu" or do they just call it "the flu"? 

On second thought, I think the correct term for it is "human bird flu," which would mean that if a bird got regular flu from a human it would have to be called "bird human flu."

Also, if a human were ever born with feathered wings and somehow managed to take off, the headlines would invariably be "human bird flew," which could easily lend itself to a typo by an overworked editor who didn’t bother to read the whole story.

Actually, strictly speaking, headlines have to be in present tense, so it would be "human bird flies."  Which is, of course, completely humorless.

Too much briefing, sorry.

On another, completely different note, this is why I love living in New York City generally, and a couple blocks away from Union Square particularly:
http://www.newmindspace.com/pillowfightnyc.php
Too bad I missed it.

When I was a kid, about 6 or 7 years old, I used to love "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.  Remember those?  The book would start out like a regular novel, only it would be told in the second person and then, a few pages into the book, you’d be given a choice, and then told which page to turn to based on that choice. 

For example, your character will be travelling through a bazaar in Morocco and it’ll say, "you are approached by a slightly stooped man with shifty eyes.  He looks up at you and says, ‘hello, sir, I know this market very well and would be happy to show you around for a small fee.’  If you choose to follow the man, turn to page 364.  If you choose to turn him down politely, turn to page 135."  Every book had the same beginning and about thirty or forty different endings.  It was as close to interactive as we could come back then, when the most advanced computer game around was Space Invaders. 

Thinking back on my life since then, it seems a lot like one of those books.  It’s basically seemed scripted for the most part, with my playing the role of observer, watching the adventure unfold.  Every once in a while though, I’ll be faced with a choice that would determine where the plot is going to go for the next few days, months, years.  If you choose to stay with dead-end, badly-run company that doesn’t appreciate you but pays pretty well, turn to page 632.  If you choose to take out tens of thousands of dollars in loans in order to go to law school, turn to page 743.

The problem with "Choose Your Own Adventure" books was that a lot of the choices led to pretty random results,
and a lot of the endings weren’t exactly satisfying.  Sometimes the
most counter-intuitive choice led to the best possible outcome.  It got
slightly annoying. 

So I started to cheat.  I would flip the corner of the page over before
turning to the next choice, so I could always backtrack if my character
suddenly suffered some catastrophic mishap, or if I just plain didn’t
like where the story was going. This led, in my mind, to a much more gratifying experience, one that guaranteed a happy ending.

Life doesn’t work that way, unfortunately.  There’s no turning the corner of the page over and backtracking if our choice turns out to be wrong.  We can only hope that trusting the man to lead us through the bazaar will lead to a better shopping experience rather than a knife in the back.  It still makes for a great adventure, though.

I’d just opened a kitchen cabinet to take out some coffee (yes, instant) when I happened to notice the nutritional value on a box of granulated sugar.  The first thing I noticed was that a serving size was listed as 30 grams.  In case you Americans don’t know, that’s a lot of sugar — a can of Coke has about 13.  But what was more interesting was that, along with all the zeros under protein, fat, etc. etc., under "sugars" it said 29 grams.  Now remember, we’re talking about a box of sugar.  A 30 gram serving of sugar should contain 30 grams of sugar.  Instead, it contains 29.  And nowhere on the box did it explain what that extra gram is.

Can anyone help solve the mystery of the missing gram?

dark brown
dirt and sand
edges sticky
directed verdict?
one thing I do know:
I hate bananas.

Now that (fucking) winter is rolling in, I thought I’d comment on a couple things I’ve always wondered about. If any of you can shed any light on this, let me know.

On any self-respecting weather station/weather website/random source of meteorological information, right next to the big picture of the sun (or, these days, the big gray cloud with lots of drops coming out of it) it’ll have the actual temperature in big numbers, and usually, right under it or next to it, it’ll have the words "feels like" and another temperature, in much smaller letters.

Here’s what I’m wondering:  shouldn’t the "feels like" temperature be the bigger one? I mean, does anyone really care that it’s actually 45 degrees when it really feels like it’s 12?

And another thing:  how exactly do they ascertain what the "feels like" temperature is?  Do they have a guy whose job it is to stand outside all day and report how cold it feels? (A "reasonable meteorological man," so to speak?  Sorry, law school joke.)  Or do they just interview random people? "Excuse me, sir, how cold does it feel
to you?" "Pretty fucking cold!" "Um, no, sir, I’m going to need a quantitative answer." I will say this: they definitely aren’t consulting with my mom. It could be 75 degrees and sunny and she’ll still say it’s freezing.

Three days ago, in a sudden moment of insanity brought on by an unexpected bout of coughing, I took out the three packs of Marlboro Reds (there was a "buy 2, get 1 free" special) out of my drawer — two sealed, one half-full — and spread them on a heavy wood cutting board (Crate & Barrel outlet special, $5).  I then pulled a big cleaver ($15, IKEA) off the knife magnet ($5, also IKEA) on my kitchen wall and proceeded to chop, or should I say cleave, the three packets into little pieces. Four minutes later I was smiling and sweating and there was tobacco fluttering all around me. 

Israelis hate being suckers.  They hate it more than anything.  What’s
even worse than getting taken by others is getting taken by what they perceive to be their own
stupidity.  I am no exception.  I will force myself to have fun at a club I paid a $20 cover to get into.  This is why I am not surprised at what happened two days later. I was seriously craving a smoke, and almost bought a pack
when I realized I’d just destroyed about a week’s worth of cigarettes
two days ago.  Which meant I had about five days to go in order to
mitigate the damage induced by my attempted quitting.  So I didn’t smoke.  I haven’t yet.  I still have four days to go, at least.  I mean, if I start now, I might as well never have tried to quit.  It’s just plain dumb.  And I don’t mind being an addict, so long as I’m not a sucker of an addict.

Who knows, maybe in four days I’ll buy a pack and chop it to fucking pieces again.  It’s way more satisfying than puffing on a stick, I’ll tell you that much.

A friend of mine recently mentioned that traditional jokes should be "modernized" by giving them realistic endings, the kind that we would actually expect to hear in the real world.

His example:

A man calls a lawyer and asks him, "how much do you charge?" to which the lawyer responds, "five thousand dollars for three questions." So the man asks, "really? That much?" And the lawyer replies [new realistic ending], "yes, now would you like to ask me those three questions?"

My example:

- What’s worse than finding a worm in an apple?
- [new realistic ending] The death of a close friend.

E-mail me with your suggestions, or, if you’re a history buff and you’d like to know the traditional, outdated punchlines to these jokes.