The great and irreplaceable George Carlin died yesterday. His comedy was smart and often cut to the bone. Like all good comedians he realised that the purpose of comedy was not to make people laugh but to make them think. Carlin was a jester, a prophet holding up the mirror and forcing us all to take a good look at ourselves.
Obligatory YouTube clips follow after the fold.
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According to German researchers, absinthe neither is nor ever was a hallucinogen. The hallucinations experienced by bohemian hipsters in 19th-century Paris? Alcohol poisoning and probably more often than not a touch of syphillis.
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The average British teenager, according to researchers at the University of Hertfordshire, has 842 illegally copied music tracks on his or her MP3 player. This is based on an average total of 1,770 tracks per player. In addition, the researchers found that “14 per cent of CDs (one in seven) in a young person’s collection are copied”. But doesn’t that mean that this person legally purchased the six other CDs? If an average CD has 10 tracks, and the MP3 player has 842 illegal tracks on it (or 10 CDs’ worth), this young person would have 60 other legally purchased CDs in his or her collection. At the current price of CDs, surely this is a good result for the music industry?
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Now, let’s be honest. This is a bit silly. Were it not for the comic genius of the Pythons, Holy Grail could so easily have been another Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Yet it’s not. It’s funny. Very, very funny. You don’t think “I fart in your general direction!” is funny? Then you don’t know from funny. Try saying it out loud in a crowded public place, and I’m willing to bet the snickers outweigh the concerned and horrified looks. If you’re feeling eloquent, consider an encore of “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”
Buy Monty Python and the Holy Grail at Amazon
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “polymath scholar of randomness and knowledge”, on the global financial meltdown:
[...] most economists, and almost all bankers, are subhuman and very, very dangerous. They live in a fantasy world in which the future can be controlled by sophisticated mathematical models and elaborate risk-management systems. [...] These guys are dangerous. They’re not qualified in their own field. [Times Online]
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Is the United States government hiding detainees on prison ships, where the Red Cross and human rights campaigners can’t find them? How morally bankrupt does a country need to be to stoop to this level?
According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.
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