George Budd @Gbudd@qoto.org

Look, all I’m saying is really angry mediocre white guys strapped with AR-15s and enough magazines to survive an Uvalde classroom stormed statehouses all over the US in 2020 to protest masks, vaccines, and whatever other insult to their freedom they could find, and nobody opened fire, so I don’t really think the riot cops need to be guns out on college campuses.

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.

A teacher friend of mine posted this on FB, and I haven't been able to stop laughing since I read it:

OMG - a few weeks ago someone posted an idea for outsmarting ChatGPT. Imbed weird instructions in white font color in the assignment. If they’re just popping the instructions into AI the weirdness will be included. So guess who just got a paper about Zora Neale Hurston that has references to ostriches and labradoodles?!

Maggie: You're welcome, miss nothing-in-the-toaster

Over on the bird site people are sharing a piece of advice that really struck them. There have been many for me, but the most recent came from a man on YouTube teaching his daughter to snowboard. At one point, she says “daddy I’m a little scared“ and he replies back “ that’s OK! What do we do when we’re scared?“ And she says with the most chin-up-eyes-forward-fire-in-my-veins tone: “We do it scared.”

I know it isn’t #Caturday yet, but this.

The correct way to eat a cupcake with too big icing.

I'm working with some younger EMTs and I'm trying to impress on them one of the most useful pieces of advice I got which is that the first thing you should do with a patient is take a manual radial pulse.

You get:
1. the temperature of their skin
2. the moisture of their skin
3. the rate of their pulse
4. the regularity of their pulse
5. the strength of their pulse

I wonder if I count as a crabby old medic now because there are multiple people I want to throw the pulse ox at.

Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !

I'm still not onto Black history. I'm still on white US history.

Q: Why were Black folk so happy when OJ was acquitted? To be honest, it feels disgusting. Why does it seem like you're happy he got away with murderer?

A: Racism. Black folk did not like OJ that much. In fact, many Black people think he did it. Black folk didn't "celebrate OJ." Black folk celebrated the hope that a brutally unjust, evil, and racist system, could be defeated at all.

#BlackMastodon

#cats #gifs

The Attack Turkey

this morning on the run i got to the top of the hill and was resting, bc i'm out of shape, and off in the distance i see a bird trotting my way

as it gets closer i realize it's a turkey. it had a big red gobbler and its neck was iridescent. It was actually really pretty, so i just watched as it approached

I wonder who will be giving the mass at Peter Higgs' funeral?

Because they bring me such joy, I will share with you all the software testing videos I share with my Software Design and Development students.

Video 1/3: “We don’t need user testing! We already know our users”

“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand.”

Last week we learned that part of a cargo pallet of depleted batteries that was jettisoned from the ISS in 2021 not only did not fully burn up on reentry, but also crashed through the roof and two stories of a private civilian’s home in Florida. (Read the Ars Technica article here: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/trash-from-the-international-space-station-may-have-hit-a-house-in-florida/)

1/

Ecologists: We should try to find a way to convince people to stop or at least reduce flying.

Boeing:

This video from Corridor Crew is pretty amazing. They re-create the nearly perfect compositing from the penguin dance sequence in Mary Poppins, which was achieved using high intensity sodium vapor lights and a very custom beam splitter, instead of a blue or green screen. It truly feels like a lost art rediscovered. When the matted footage just perfectly drops in I gasped haha https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk