Sunday Funnies

Sunday Funnies, Comin' Atcha! Like an IFD! (improvised flying drink).(From Picture is Unrelated) Or maybe that guy has amazing powers of pyschokinesis... nah. I think he's just really thrilled that he's about to lose his front teeth.

Now, I should probably explain, since I don't think I have before, just how I go about compiling these posts. Over the course of the 30 days, GoogleReader tells me I have "read" 18,746 items. That works out to roughly 4300-4400 per week. Now I haven't actually read all of those; many are repeats, many are uninteresting, many are basically copy-n-paste posts whose texts are 90% or more simply pulled from elsewhere (that I have often already read), with very little effort to add anything. But of those 600+ posts that I skim over each day, maybe 125 of those are comedy, humor, silly, pop culture, and the ilk. Each day I star and share a few that made me crack up. "Shared" items can be seen any time by clicking the "Lockwood's Shared Items" button under "Stuff I haven't blogged yet" or the linked quote. Fair warning- it's all sorts of stuff that I've found interesting, not just amusement. It's the kind of stuff I consider blogging on or discussing with friends here at my favorite coffee shop: a very disjointed, eclectic mix of topics and writings that have particularly engaged me.

Then each Sunday, when I've finished all my reading, I go through that list and paste what I think are the funniest of the humorous items that have accumulated there since the last Sunday, and, if I think about it, whatever cosmic debris has landed in my e-mail or other browsing sources. I don't know how to stick those latter links in my shared items, so at some point I have to remember that there's other stuff I want to mix in with the funnies, and go track it down either on the web or hard drive. I feel pretty strongly that I should give attribution when I can, so I try to paste a source link with each image.

Finally, I try to come up with some narrative to give the whole mass of "borrowed" pictures some kind of coherence. I'm not necessarily looking hard for a theme, but somtimes one emerges. And sometimes it's just incoherent, but folks seem to enjoy it anyway.

Well, the theme that seemed to pop out at me today is science and science fiction.I was thinking about doing this as a post on its own when it came out in the NYT on Tuesday, but my initial reaction to the picture above was so funny I decided to save it for this post: the thought that went through my mind was "Is that a pencil for scale?" So at a cost of $3.5 billion, we have managed to shrink a team of caffeine-overdosed technicians (I didn't perceive the guy on the platform at first), equiped them with pocket knives, and created the world's largest pencil sharpener- most expensive one, too. A dual Win.

Now all comedy aside, this is actually a very interesting and amazing article, especially if you're interested in fusion power. And you should be. And in fairness, at the same time the NYT was posting an op-ed suggesting we should just write off fusion power as an expensive lost cause, a number of European papers were covering much of the same ground as the above article, and more (See details here). Nearly six months ago. See why I like foreign papers? From Tuesday's article:

The project’s director, Ed Moses, said that getting to the cusp of ignition(defined as the successful achievement of fusion) had taken some 7,000 workers and 3,000 contractors a dozen years, their labors creating a precision colossus of millions of parts and 60,000 points of control, 30 times as many as on the space shuttle.

In other "architectual wonders" news, there's this faucet:

see more Fail Blog. Now here's the thing with failblog: I have little problem with them swiping other's photos without attribution (...well maybe a little...), but plastering the word FAIL on it does not make it funnier. On the contrary, it's gratuitous, repetitve and after a while, downright grating. Still funny, but failblog, you're in danger of FAIL.

This in itself is not so much funny as very cool and inspiring... a seven-year old sent NASA an idea for getting the Spirit Rover out of its Martian sandtrap. Apparently, the technicians hadn't thought of this, are very excited, and are busy running tests to see if it's feasible.
The rover drivers were so pleased, in fact, that they promised to send Julian a reward! If they can find him, that is. Their proposed reward (this is the funny part)? "18 tonnes of KSC-1 mars simulant, and the mobility test bed rover." (KSC-1 is a material designed to mimic the properties of Martian soil, and the mtbr is a functional replica of the rover to use here on Earth to try to solve mobility problems)
Savage Chickens points out another technical achievement with unintended consequences...

...and Neat Gemstones finds a nice lesson in physics, a crucial disciplinary component of the above four accomplishments, in her post "A Sign You May Be Driving Too Fast:"(or at least accelerating too quickly)

Shifting over to the bio-sciences, we see here a marvelous evolutionary adaptation in camoflage. This allows the organism to elude the senses of his primary food source, chess pieces and checkers, until it's much, much too late for them.From Tattoo Disaters, an irregular, but often funny (and sometimes horrifying, and possibly mildly NSFW) Tat photos.

Cougars are all the buzz this spring, here in my cozy little burg: there was one out in the northern part of town that was scared off from taking a cat, frighteningly close to a school. Now we have word from Philomath, a small town about 5 miles west, that "Chiquita the Chihuahua and Rosie the border terrier chased off a cougar that strayed into this small town near the Oregon State University campus." (From OregonLive) Within a couple of hours, blogger buddy Tengrain posted this picture. I don't know if it was the actual event, but I think it might plausibly explain how a chihuahua and a border terrier might chase off a cougar.
And on the subject of "What's for dinner?" that fish shows a surprising perspicacity regarding both the food chain and pop culture...

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Archie, likewise, is pondering the imperatives of biology, as it was announced that he was finally going to propose to Veronica. My guess? I'm betting Veronica turns him down and he runs back to Betty, and does right by her. Medium Large has a different take: (front page here)For whatever reason, one search topic that brings a disproportionate number of folks to my favorite coffee shop is squirrels. I don't totally understand why, but yes, I have posted a few. And I don't particularly care for the fact that this sign wouldn't have been edited unless someone had actually tried the action in question:

see more Fail Blog

OK, let's take a bit of a break, and go have a drink...

see more Lolcats and funny pictures. Well, maybe not. How about a snack over at the pizza place?
(Domino’s Three Cheese Mac-N-Cheese Pasta Bread Bowl) Urp... definitely not! BTW, This Is Why You're Fat, Congrats! on what may be your first bacon-free post ever. (not really, but it is a rare event) For a real celebration, see if you can find something that my vegan friends would have to think over carefully.

OK, after that, I've lost most of my appetite. Maybe just a bagel? Or a piece of toast?
No. No, no, no, no. No refreshment break today. I'm starting to look at those goldfish. (From Criggo, of course)

After all that nutritional science, I'm ready for some fictional science. Much safer, that. Must. Not. Think about. Cheesy mac and cheese. Cheesy bread cheese Bowl. With Cheesy box. And Cheese.

see more Lol Celebs

Pills are not generally considered nutritional, are they?

see more Lol Celebs

There are Dragons! And we would not want our wake-up call to be a nucular-armed dragon blowing a mushroom cloud out of the receiver, frying what little brains we had left!

see more Political Pictures

No! Do! Do Look! Uhhh... Bin Laden's in there! You could catch him! You'd be a hero! Loooook!

see more Political Pictures

Well have a good week out there in the work line...
(From Criggo, of course)

Don't believe everything they tell you, and absolutely don't believe it's as important as they tell you... you need to figure that one out for yourself: (from The Quotations Page)

The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were. David Brinkley
US television newscaster (1920 - 2003)

Well, that was fun, but here's the thing: I like science. I hope I don't have to do this to it again. Maybe horror? No, wait, I like that too:
From Weather Moose, a meteorologist's blog, but mostly about the travails of a young family, with some science and funny thrown in the mix.