It was a bit… gallows humour… for a friend to share this website with me, but it’s pretty funny.
And also: a robot that “schedules a chat” to eject you from your job and then “delivers the news with the emotional depth of a toaster” might still have been preferable to an
after-hours email to my personal address to let me know that I’d just had my last day! Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but there’s some news that
email isn’t the medium for, right?
This bathroom at the holiday home where some fellow volunteers and I are doing some Three Rings work, this week, has a few unusual quirks,
including this surprisingly-shit bathroom:
The door has a lock… but there’s a second door which doesn’t.
Oh, and the first door’s lock doesn’t actually do anything. The door can still be opened from the outside.
Here in the UK, ice cream vans will usually play a tune to let you know they’re set up and selling1.
So when you hear Greensleeves (or, occasionally, Waltzing Matilda), you know it’s time to go and order yourself a ninety-nine.
Imagine my delight, then, when I discover this week that ice cream vans aren’t the only services to play such jaunty tunes! I was sat with work colleagues outside İlter’s Bistro on Meşrutiyet Cd. in Istanbul, enjoying a beer, when a van
carrying water pulled up and… played a little song!
And then, a few minutes later – as if part of the show for a tourist like me – a flatbed truck filled with portable propane tanks pulled up. Y’know, the kind you might use to heat a
static caravan. Or perhaps a gas barbeque if you only wanted to have to buy a refill once every five years. And you know what: it played a happy little jingle, too. Such joy!
In Istanbul, people put out their empty water bottles to be swapped-out for full ones by the water delivery man2.
My buddy Cem, who’s reasonably local to the area, told me that this was pretty common practice. The propane man, the water man, etc. would
all play a song when they arrived in your neighbourhood so that you’d be reminded that, if you hadn’t already put your empties outside for replacement, now was the time!
And then Raja, another member of my team, observed that in his native India, vegetable delivery trucks also play a song so you know they’re arriving. Apparently the tune they
play is as well-standardised as British ice cream vans are. All of the deliveries he’s aware of across his state of Chennai play the same piece of music, so that you know it’s them.
Raja didn’t have a photo to share (and why would he? it’s not like I have a photo of the guy who comes to refill the gas tank behind my
house!3), so I found this stock pic which sounds a bit like what
he described. Photo courtesy Aiden Jones, used under a CC-By-SA license.
It got me thinking: what other delivery services might benefit from a recognisable tune?
Bin men: I’ve failed to put the bins out in time frequently enough, over the course of my life, that a little jingle to remind me to do so would be welcome4!
(My bin men often don’t come until after I’m awake anyway, so as long as they don’t turn the music on until after say 7am they’re unlikely to be a huge inconvenience to anybody,
right?) If nothing else, it’d cue me in to the fact that they were passing so I’d remember to bring the bins back in again afterwards.
Fish & chip van: I’ve never made use of the mobile fish & chip van that tours my village once a week, but I might be more likely to if it announced its arrival with a
recognisable tune.
I’m thinking a chorus of Baby Shark would get everybody’s attention.
Milkman: I’ve a bit of a gripe with our milkman. Despite promising to deliver before 07:00 each morning, they routinely turn up much later. It’s particularly
troublesome when they come at about 08:40 while I’m on the school run, which breaks my routine sufficiently that it often results in the milk sitting unseen on the porch until I think
to check much later in the day. Like the bin men, it’d be a convenience if, on running late, they at least made their presence in my village more-obvious with a happy little ditty!
Emergency services: Sirens are boring. How about if blue light services each had their own song. Perhaps something thematic? Instead of going nee-naw-nee-naw, you’d
hear, say, de-do-do-do-de-dah-dah-dah
and instantly know that you were hearing The Police.
Evri: Perhaps there’s an appropriate piece of music that says “the courier didn’t bother to ring your doorbell, so now your parcel’s hidden in your recycling box”?
Just a thought.
Anyway: the bottom line is that I think there’s an untapped market for jolly little jingles for all kinds of delivery services, and Turkey and India are clearly both way ahead
of the UK. Let’s fix that!
Footnotes
1 It’s not unheard of for cruel clever parents to try to teach their young
children that the ice cream van plays music only to let you know it’s soldout of ice cream. A devious plan, although one I wasn’t smart (or evil?) enough to try for
myself.
3 My gas delivery man should also have his own song, of course. Perhaps an instrumental
cover of Burn Baby Burn?
4 Perhaps bin men could play Garbage Truck by Sex Bob-Omb/Beck? That seems kinda
fitting. Although definitely not what you want to be woken up with if they turn the speakers on too early…
Hanging with my team at our meetup in Istanbul, this lunchtime I needed to do some accessibility testing…
(with apologies to anybody who doesn’t know that in user interface design, a “kebab menu” is one of those menu icons with a vertical line of three dots: a vertical
ellipsis)
It’s possible I don’t understand social media any more. To be fair, it’s possible that I never did.
This is something between absurd and hilarious. Aside from the 100 year plan (which is fascinating, and I keep meaning to share my thoughts
on), I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be advertising. Maybe it’s trying to showcase how cool it is to work with Automattic? (It’s
not… exactly like it’s depicted in the video. But I’d be lying if I said that fewer than 50% of my meetings this week have included a discussion on snack foods, so maybe we are
I guess at least a little eccentric.)
I think I understand what it’s parodying. And that’s fun. But… wow. You don’t see many videos like this attached to a corporate YouTube account, do you? Kudos for keeping the Internet
fun and weird, WordPress.com.
Have you come across Monday Punday? I only discovered it last year, sadly, after it had been on hiatus for like 4 years, following a near
decade-long run, but I figured that if you like wordplay and webcomics as much as I do (e.g. if you enjoyed my Movie Title Mash-Ups, back
in the day), then perhaps you’ll dig it too.
Each comic is an abstract, wordplay-based description of a concept. This one’s a two-word phrase that I can guarantee you’ve heard or used, but it might take a minute’s thought before
you guess it.
I’ve been gradually making my way through the back catalogue, guessing the answers (there’s a form that’ll tell you if you’re right!). I’ve successfully guessed almost half of all of
them, now, and it’s been a great journey. It sort-of fills the void that I’d hoped Crimson Herring was going to before it
vanished so suddenly.
So if you’re looking for a fresh, probably-finished webcomic that’ll sometimes make you laugh, sometimes make you groan, and often make you think, start by skimming the rules of Monday Punday and then begin the long journey through the ~500 published episodes. You’re welcome!
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, I had a collection of 5¼” and later 3½” floppy disks1 on which were stored a variety of games and utilities that I’d
collected over the years2.
I had lots of floppy disks that looked almost-exactly like this: a scrawled label of their contents and notes on how to make use of them that would perhaps only make sense to me.
I remember that at some point I acquired a program called INSULTS.COM. When executed, this tool would spoof a basic terminal prompt and then, when the user pressed any key,
output a randomly-generated assortment of crude insults.
Do you feel thoroughly insulted yet?
As far as prank programs go, it was far from sophisticated. I strongly suspect that the software, which was released for free in 1983, was intended to be primarily a vehicle to promote
sales of a more-complex set of tools called PRANKS, which was advertised within.
In any case: as a pre-pubescent programmer I remember being very interested in the mechanism by which INSULTS.COM was generating its output.
I partially-reverse-engineered the permutations by polling the output and looking for parts I hadn’t seen before, and tallying them up. Mostly in an effort to validate the program’s
claim that it’s capable of generating “more than 22 million insults”3.
Of course, nowadays I understand reverse-engineering better than I did as a child. So I downloaded a copy of INSULTS.COM from this Internet Archive image, ran it through Strings, and pulled out the data.
Easy!
Wait for it, and you can be be insulted all over again!
Why did I do this? Why do I do anything? Reimplementing a 42-year-old piece of DOS software that nobody remembers is even stranger than that time I reimplemented a 16-year old Flash advertisement! But I hope it gave you a moment’s joy to be told that you’re… an annoying load of
festering parrot droppings, or whatever.
Footnotes
1 Also some 3″ floppy disks – a weird and rare format – but that’s another story.
2 My family’s Amstrad PC1512
had two 5¼” disk drives, which made disk-to-disk copying much easier than it was on computers with a single disk drive, on which you’d have to copy as much data as possible
to RAM, swap disks to write what had been copied so far, swap disks back again, and repeat. This made it less-laborious for me to clone media than it was for most other folks I knew.
3 Assuming the random number generator is capable of generating a sufficient diversity of
seed values, the claim is correct: by my calculation, INSULTS.COM can generate 22,491,833 permutations of insults.
Step aside, George Carlin! Sam Easterby-Smith – who works at The Co-Operative Bank – wants to share with the world the 55 words you can’t say
in a UK faster payments reference (assuming your bank follows the regulator‘s recommendations):
…
So you know, this list is provided by Pay.uk the uk’s payment systems regulator. This is their idea of how to protect people from abusive content sent via the payment system.
Of course (a) all abusive messages must contain one of these English words, spelled correctly and (b) people are not in any way creative.
We’ve called it out and they are making us do it anyway.
bastard
beef curtains
bellend
clunge
cunt
dickhead
fuck
minge
motherfucker
prick
punani
pussy
shit
twat
bukkake
cocksucker
nonce
rapey
skank
slag
slut
wanker
whore
fenian
kufaar
kafir
kike
yid
batty boy
bum boy
faggot
fudge-packer
gender bender
homo
lesbo
lezza
muff diver
retard
spastic
spakka
spaz
window licker
gippo
gyppo
golliwog
nigger
nigaa
nig-nog
paki
raghead
sambo
wog
blow Job
clit
wank
Excellent.
The big takeaway here, for me, is that it’s okay to send you money and call you a “dick head” (so long as I put a space between the words), “fuckface”, or “shitbag”, or talk about a
“blowjob” (so long as I don’t put a space between the words).
But if I send you money to pay “for the bastard sword” that you’re selling then that’s a problem.
What do you reckon? Is he trying to go for a domination victory without ever saying “MY THREATS ARE BACKED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS!”? His track record shows that he’s arrogant enough to
think that the strategy of simply renaming things until they’re yours is actually viable!
After I saw Mexico’s response to Google following Trump’s lead in renaming the Gulf of Mexico, this stupid comic literally
came to me in a dream.
Adapts screenshots from Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991 DOS version), public domain assets from
OpenGameArt.org, and AI-assisted images of world leaders on account of the fact that if I drew pixel-art world leaders without assistance then
you’d be even less-likely to be able to recognise them.
Obviously all of the 118 executive orders President Trump
signed into effect on 20 January fall somewhere on the spectrum between fucking ridiculous and tragically fascist. But there’s a moment of joy to be taken in the fact that now, by
Presidential executive order, one could argue that all Americans are legally female:
…
One of Trump’s order is titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” In the definition, the order claims,
“‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” It then says, “’Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex
that produces the small reproductive cell.”
What critics point out is the crucial phrase “at conception.” According to the Associated
Press, the second “order declares that the federal government would recognize only two immutable sexes: male and female. And they’re to be defined based on whether people are
born with eggs or sperm, rather than on their chromosomes, according to details of the upcoming order.”
…
So yeah, here’s the skinny: Trump and team wanted to pass an executive order that declared that (a) there are only two genders, and (b) it’s determined biologically and can be
ascertained at birth. Obviously both of those things are categorically false, but that’s not something that’s always stopped lawmakers in the past (I’m looking at you, Indiana’s 1897 bill to declare Pi to be 3.2 exactly…).
But the executive order is not well thought-out (well duh). Firstly, it makes the unusual and somewhat-complicated choice of declaring that a person’s gender is determined by whether or
not it carries sperm or egg cells. And secondly – and this is the kicker – it insists that the point at which the final and absolute point at which gender becomes fixed is… conception
(which again, isn’t quite true, but in this particular legal definition it’s especially problematic…).
At conception, you consisted of exactly one cell. An egg cell. Therefore, under US law, all Americans ever conceived were – at the point at which their gender became
concrete – comprised only of egg cells, and thus are legally female. Every American is female. Well done, Trump.
Obviously I’m aware that this is not what Mrs. Trump intended when she signed this new law into effect. But as much as I hate her policies I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t respect her
expressed gender identity, which is both legally-enforceable and, more-importantly, self-declared. As a result, you’ll note that I’ve been using appropriate feminine pronouns for her in
this post. She’s welcome to get in touch with me if she uses different pronouns and I’ll respect those, too.
(I’m laughing on the outside, but of course I’m crying on the inside. I’m sorry for what your President is doing to you, America. It really sucks.)
RSS
Spotify
Pocket Casts
Apple Podcasts
YouTube
