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Tag: Humor
Stuff that makes me laugh
Old Joke
This is the French estate of Vaux-le-Vicomte (right-click to embiggen in another tab):
While impressive, the picture doesn’t do it justice: past the top of the pic is a series of man-made waterfalls which sends something like half a million gallons of water a day down the hill, where it ends up in the ponds and eventually in the moat which surrounds the main house. The water is then filtered and pumped back up to the reservoir at the top of the hill, to start its trip back down all over again*.
Anyway, I showed this pic to a friend, who said, “Wow, I’d hate to have to do all the gardening there!”
To which I made the age-old response: “Nah… give me a dozen Mexicans and I’d do it myself.”
I did warn you in the title…
*If you want to know how it all works, Monty Don explains it in his Netflix show, French Gardens.
Monday Funnies
Okay, it’s Monday ergo time to get back to work and solve all those problems you postponed last week:
So to distract you from help you with your calculations, a few chuckles:
And seeing as the schools will all have started this week:
Followed by some wisdom from our elders:
And for those winter coughs and sniffles:
And speaking of being mentally fucked up:
So let’s wrap this up with something to erase that last picture from your brains, i.e. a little bit of Marina Sirtis:
Now get out of that chair and get to work.
News Roundup
All the news that’s fit only for a one-liner response.
1) Iran puts $80-million bounty on Donald Trump; George Lopez offers to have it done for $40 million — and for $20 million, I can get someone to take out George Lopez. (See how that works?)
2) Ilhan Omar claims Trump will start war to protect his hotels’ income — and for another $10 million, I can include this traitorous African bitch in the deal. (Okay, I’ll stop this thread now or we’ll be here all day.)
3) Showbiz phonies upset at being mocked by a chubby Brit — and a nation yawns. And speaking of phonies:
4) Prince Ginger and Duchess Slutwife quit the Royalty junket — and the world (outside Britishland) yawns.
5) (South) Africa sinks — sic semper Africani. (Africa Wins Again, expressed in classical terms.)
6) CNN gets its pee-pee whacked for ruining an innocent kid’s life — I hope the (confidential) settlement amount is a jillion bucks, not so much for spite but to make all the other media asshole organizations a little more circumspect in the future.
7) Girl wonder* AOC claims that everybody hates her — nah; she’s the most despised / mocked / ignored… maybe — but hated? Not worth the effort. Now, as for Hillary Bitch Clinton…
8) Economy continues to grow — Paul Krugman hardest hit. And now, a word from my doctor:
*”wonder” as in, “I wonder how anyone could be that ignorant and stupid?”
Caption Competition #107
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Language Beef
One of my major beefs with European languages is that stupid custom of giving everything a gender — in Latin, a table is feminine but a house is masculine (sometimes, depending on the sense of the sentence); in French a car is feminine but a horse is masculine; and in German, a train is masculine but a railway is feminine, and so on.
No wonder they’ve had to declare war on each other every decade or so.
Basically, it’s Latin’s fault. That Roman nonsense gave every word a gender (with the wonderful addition of a neuter gender which wasn’t very common). Additionally, Latin has no articles (the, a, an etc.) — which I think is why words had to have a gender, so that the listener could determine to which word an adjective was being applied to. Here’s a little summary:
There is a stark difference between English and Latin’s treatment of gender. Only words in English that indicate a biological sex have a masculine or feminine gender. All others are considered neuter. Latin, however, applies gender to many words even when biological sex is not intimated.
No wonder the bloody thing died off.
But that’s not the end of the story, oh no.
As European languages modernized, they added articles — except that with gendered nouns, the articles had to change to continue the form. Hence la roche (rock), le matin (morning) and so on. German went the same way: der Zug (train), die Eisenbahn (railway), etc.
All that, so that this little meme would make sense to everybody who’s not a language dork like I am:
Of course, as can be seen in the above, the Germans took the thing to its logical conclusion and over-complicated their language almost to the point of impossibility, making the article also reflect the nouns’s declension case as well as its gender. Don’t get me started.
At least the Germans are usually too polite to correct you when you screw up, and will sometimes even switch to English if they can. The French, however, have no such scruples and will correct your grammar, loudly and often with a smirk — which makes my already-fragile temper turn homicidal in a millisecond.
Thank goodness English is gradually taking over as the international language of business, and is the backbone of this here Intarwebz thingy.
I still read Le Parisien once a week, though.