Could there be anything sillier?
Honestly.
This is one of those internet sillinesses that has been around for a while. It’s always fun, however.
So, check it out. Or revisit it.
Turn your sound on.
Click a horse or four.
And have fun.
Singing Horses — who’d have thought?
The silliest age
Could be the Age of Reason.
No. Strike that. I’m just being silly.
After all, it is Silly Saturday.
The question is, really, how does one learn to be silly? Is it a natural talent, or a learned behavior?
Today, we find some enlightenment from Guy Browning at The Guardian.
We’ll let him speak for himself in his aptly titled article:
I do think he’s got a point, though—if not several.
Don’t you?
Is there anything better than a bad joke?
Except it has to be a good bad joke. Like this one from a website purporting to have 86 of the World’s Best Jokes:
Which day of the week do fish hate?
Fry-day
Imagine rimshot here…and a groan.
Totally G-Rated, but Not Safe For Work!
Mostly because it’s silly—and there’s sound.
But, it’s Silly Saturday, you know. And this is in honor of my nephew, Wynn.
What you need to know about this is that my nephew, Wynn, acquired a tricorn hat on a trip to Williamsburg three years ago. He was six. Williamsburg is an educational opportunity, of course, and Wynn’s father told him he was now a Colonial boy.
Wynn’s uncle—the MotH*—had no such educational obligations, and he told Wynn that he, Wynn, was a pirate. The MotH and Wynn had a high old time stomping around, growling “Arrrrr” at all and sundry for the remainder of the week.
Now, surprisingly, this pirate business took an odd educational turn the following year. Wynn’s class was studying pirates, and the teacher mentioned how pirates used to make people walk the plank. The class was then asked to write down something a pirate would say.
Apparently, every other kid but Wynn wrote, “Walk the plank.”
What did Wynn write?
You guessed it!
“Arrrrr!”
The teacher was most impressed.
And the MotH’s shenanigans turn out not to be so uneducational, after all.
Therefore, in honor of Wynn, turn your sound on (but maybe not full blast) and watch this little Flash clip. (But, beware. It loops. And that way madness lies.)
http://cristgaming.com/pirate.swf
* MotH = Man of the House
A little communication would kill you, WordPress?
Totally silly, and not in a good way—what I am about to tell you.
I try to schedule blog posts in advance. The main reason for this is I was not enjoying the jolt at 11 pm when I would suddenly think, “OMG! I forgot to do my blog post for tomorrow!” Life—and blogging—has been much more pleasant since I have mastered the “Schedule” function of WordPress. (Always remembering that when I say “mastered,” I really mean “figured out how to make it work more than half the time.”)
But here’s what happened as I tried to schedule yesterday’s post.
I admit it was not my finest hour. (It was actually only a minute, for one thing.) But that minute could have gone so much better if only WordPress had decided to communicate more clearly.
I had been happily galumphing along scheduling posts for February 26th and 27th. I didn’t have an idea yet for the 28th, so I skipped that. There would be time. (I’m ahead! Yay!) Two days after the 27th comes the 29th, right?
Except not, of course, in February—unless it’s Leap Year—which, you know, still confuses me. What, exactly, is the necessity? I can never remember. Something about clocks, and losing seconds every hundred years, so that if we didn’t have Leap Year, along about 2250, it would be dark at 10:30 in the morning and December 25th would be in August. Or something.)
Anyway, there’s no 29th of February this year.
But does WordPress tell me that?
Oh, no.
It just freezes.
(But not in August, at least.)
It freezes, and apparently nothing can be done.
Horror! Dismay! Will I lose the post? (Admittedly, it’s probably not one of my better ones, but still—I spent time on it.)
Fortunately, and to my surprise, the Save Draft button still worked. So, good. I wasn’t going to lose the post. However, the Publish date now read Feb 1st. Already rattled by the freezing of my PC, I tried again to schedule the post for February 29th.
Another round of freezing.
This time, however, I paid attention to the tiny little red border around all the date boxes.
Is that…? Could it mean…? Oh! Of course! There is no February 29th!
Reset to March 1st, and problem solved.
Or so you would think. But, no. Now, it appears the post will be scheduled for March 1st, 1970. Really? 1970?
Did somebody invent a time tunnel and forget to tell me?
So, I fixed it, of course, and the post will appear as intended and scheduled on March 1st of this year. In fact, it already has. (Maybe it’s me who invented the time tunnel?)
But would it have killed you, WordPress, to display an alert that said, I don’t know, something like “Invalid Date?” You know, like almost every other software package in the world.
And maybe I’m being overly demanding, but I think you might just have mentioned that 1970 was a date in the past. I didn’t need you to scream, “That’s forty-two years ago, you dummie!”—but a little nudge would not have come amiss. “This date is in the past. Are you sure?” could have been murmured in a little pop-up box.
I just mention it, you know. Because communication is the key to any successful relationship.
And I’m still mad about it.
This is a bit of silliness that is not fun at all—or, probably, even of much interest to most of you—so, please forgive me if you were looking forward to an ordinary Silly Saturday. This nonsense happened a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still steamed about it.
A little background: I was working on adapting a little open source Javascript program for an online event on which I help out. We had a little game that involved pictures. We wanted it to change to a different set of pictures each day of the event.
I’m kind of a Javascript newbie, but I had managed to create some code that would change picture sets depending on the date. It wasn’t elegant code (since I am a Javascript newbie) and was somewhat constricted to the actual dates of the event.
This meant that prior to the event, no pictures would display. This made it kind of hard to test, and it also made it impossible to demonstrate it to the rest of the committee.
So, I had to figure out a way to change its behavior prior to the start date of the event. And I thought I did. I entered some code that said, basically, if today’s date is before the start date, do these things, and if today’s date is after the start date, do these other things.
I proceeded to test this new code by manually changing the system date on my PC to each day up to and including the start date to see what would happen.
Everything went fine until I hit the start date. At that point, the set of things the program did continued to be the original set of things and not the new set of things that were supposed to start with the event.
I double-checked all my code. Commas, parentheses, brackets, etc. I double-checked my system date. I went back to the Javascript tutorials and references online. I re-thought my logic.
Nothing!
Hours of frustration!
Eventually (shamefully late, actually), I figured out a way for the program to display what it thought the start date I had entered was.
Suddenly, I see that it thought the date entered as (2013, 2, 2) was March 2nd!
March!
Now, I ask you! In all the entirety of the Western World, is there a person alive who would read month 2 as March? Maybe, in those countries where they follow a lunar calendar, and sometimes have thirteen months, someone might have thought of this. Maybe.
But, in my entire life, in every classroom in which I’ve ever sat, January is month 1 and we proceed to count February, March, April, etc. as months 2, 3, 4 and so on.
But not in Javascript.
No!
In Javascript, for no good reason that I have been able to discover, you count months starting from 0. January is month 0 and December is month 11.
If that isn’t the epitome of silliness, I don’t know what is! And, what, I want to know, prevented any of the tutorials I was studying from mentioning that little fact somewhere in the vicinity of their explanations for how to use dates in Javascript?
This whole thing was not only silly, it was damn silly!
On the other hand, I’ll probably never make that mistake again, so I guess there’s that.
No names, no pack-drill
This is a challenge without consequences. No prizes, either. But it’s Silly Saturday, so…..
Take a look at this Monty Python sketch
The challenge, of course, is to develop your own silly walk. Start small. Try not to trip over your own feet or fall downstairs or pull a muscle or anything. I also suggest that, unless you live in a houseful of kids, you work on this project in the privacy of your own room—and, unless you are feeling very brave and devil-may-care—that you leave the results there.
But silliness and the exaggeration that comes with it carries in it somewhere the seed of creativity. And it’s probably only when we are willing to be silly in public that we, as artists, begin to succeed.
But it’s okay to start small. And only fair. After all, you don’t think I’m going to show you my silly walk, do you?
Today–just weird.
As a writer, I think one of my weaknesses is plot. I’m good with words. I’m good with characters. I just don’t always have any ideas for what those characters should actually do.
So, I try to pay attention to real life news stories—in hopes that, like many other writers, some obscure tale will provide a spark of inspiration.
I have to admit, so far, it hasn’t happened. Sigh. But, one place I’ve looked that seems to have potential (although now, of course, you will all rush out and use any possible plots lurking here) is the News of the Weird column.
Now, beware. Some of these items are…well…less than appetizing. It all depends on what’s happening in the world that can be classified as weird that week.
The column was originally—and still is, probably—a newspaper feature edited by Chuck Shepard. At some point, however, it began to appear online. Mr. Shepard himself does not vouch for the authenticity of all the stories, so I imagine some of them are true and some of them aren’t. All of them are weird, however, and many of them qualify for me linking to the column here on Silly Saturday. (Criminals especially seem to have a high “silly” quotient.”)
An interesting feature of the website is an interactive map. You can click on your state and get localized News of the Weird.
Have fun!
The Inimitable Danny Kaye.
In honor of it being SAG Awards time, and me having to watch ten movies before yesterday, I bring you this bit of silliness from Danny Kaye.
(By the end of my ten movies, they may be carrying me out by the elbows just like Danny.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoEUxTTobZ0
And, as a special bonus, one of his most famous bits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CetQrxFp4XI
Just remember: Eschew all vessels, pestles, palaces and chalices, and you’ll be fine!
ROFL!
My series of posts about the lizard shenanigans have, inevitably, brought to mind one of my all-time favorite commercials.
Every time I see this commercial, I laugh like that baby in last week’s post—the one that was inexplicably amused by tearing paper. My reaction to this ad is nearly as inexplicable. And attempting to explain it will likely ruin it, but I’ll try.
First of all, it’s the Taco Bell chihuahua. A chihuaha. And it’s calling Godzilla. “Here, lizard, lizard, lizard.” The sheer effrontery tickles me.
That tiny little thing.
Godzilla footsteps.
Boom, boom, boom!
Giant shadow.
I’m rolling on the floor right then. I don’t even need the rest of the spot.
But, then, does the chihuahua panic? Does it flee? Does it drop dead of a heart attack?
No.
The reaction isn’t total terror. It isn’t to give up. The reaction is purely practical.
“Uh-oh. I think I need a bigger box.”
I wish I could react to all crises in the same way.
Big problem. BIG. Get a bigger box.
I’m going to work toward that kind of sangfroid. When I get done laughing, that is.
