Category Archives: thoughtcat

Friday office dares

This one is doing the email rounds at work. It’s probably been around
for a while in fact but it’s the first time I’ve seen it and I thought
it was funny. So just read it and shut up.

One-Point Dares
1. Ignore the first five people who say ‘good morning’ to you.
2. To signal the end of a conversation, clamp your hands over your
ears and grimace.
3. Leave your fly open for one hour. If anyone points it out, say,
‘Sorry, I really prefer it this way’.
4. Walk sideways to the photocopier.
5. While going in an elevator, gasp dramatically each time the doors open.
6. When in elevator with one other person, tap them on the shoulder
and pretend it wasn’t you.
7. Finish all your sentences with ‘In accordance with the prophecy…’
8. Don’t use any punctuation.
9. Interrupt your conversation with someone by giving a huge dejected sigh.
10. Use your highlighter pen on the computer screen.

Three-Point Dares

1. Say to your boss, ‘I like your style’, wink, and shoot him with
double-barrelled fingers.
2. Kneel in front of the water cooler and drink directly from the nozzle.
3. Shout random numbers while someone is counting.
4. Every time you get an email, shout ”email”.
5. Put decaf in the coffee maker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has got
over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso.
6. Keep hole punching your finger. Each time you do, shout, ‘dagnamit,
it’s happened again!’. Then do it again.
7. Introduce yourself to a new colleague as ‘the office bicycle’. Then
wink and pout.
8. Call I.T. helpdesk and tell them that you can’t seem to access any
pornography web sites.

Five-Point Dares
1. At the end of a meeting, suggest that, for once, it would be nice
to conclude with the singing of the national anthem (extra points if
you actually launch into it yourself).
2. Walk into a very busy person’s office and while they watch you with
growing irritation, turn the light switch on/off 10 times.
3. For an hour, refer to everyone you speak to as ‘Dave’.
4. Announce to everyone in a meeting that you ‘really have to go do a
number two’.
5. When you’ve picked up a call, before speaking finish off some fake
conversation with the words, ”she can abort it for all I care”.
6. After every sentence, say ‘Mon’ in a really bad Jamaican accent. As
in: ‘The report’s on your desk, Mon.’ Keep this up for one hour.
7. In a meeting or crowded situation, slap your forehead repeatedly
and mutter, ‘Shut up, damn it, all of you just shut up!’
8. At lunchtime, get down on your knees and announce, ‘As God is my
witness,I’ll never go hungry again!’
9. Repeat the following conversation 10 times to the same person: ‘Do
you hear that?’ ‘What?’ ‘Never mind, it’s gone now.’
10. Present meeting attendees with a cup of coffee and biscuit; smash
each biscuit with your fist.
11. During the course of a meeting, slowly edge your chair towards the door.
12. As often as possible, skip rather than walk.
13. Ask people what sex they are. Laugh hysterically after they answer.
14. Sign or p.p. all letters with your initials and a swastika.
15. Dry hump the photocopier. When someone spots you, stop and cough
embarrassingly, then lean in to the machine and whisper loudly, ‘I’ll
see you tonight’.

Excellent spam just in from the New York Hilarious High Society

I received this “comment” on an old blog post (a usually irritating form of spam) a few hours ago. I promise I did not originate it!

“The New York Hilarious High society is a privately owned province that offers the following servics: Book or Hire a stand up comedian / comical / artists comedy / comedy show emissary / agents / agencies: If you are interested in booking or hiring stand up comics / comedians, we take divers hundred on our roster and give birth to access to outstanding 5,000 comedians across the U.S. If you are interested in a uncomplicated corporate wag, a corporate comedy be noticeable, church comedy, comedy enchanter, comedy hypnotist, comedy ventriloquist, college wag, comedy speakers, Nefarious wit, female comedian, Jewish Zany, Christian Comedian, or any other specialty buffoon, this is your unbroken comedy booking surrogate service.”

No wonder my son is confused about Pluto

My five-year-old son is a recent convert to all things space, owing largely to the superb BBC TV series Wonders of the Solar System, presented by the wonderful Brian Cox. It was directly because of that programme that Joe was able to spot Jupiter’s moon Io immediately from a panel of planets and moons during a recent visit to the Science Museum in London.

The other week we bought Joe a couple of Usborne Beginners books, Sun, Moon and Stars and Planet Earth. He reads them with help, and has them read to him, over and over again. He is confused about one thing though: how many planets are there in the Solar System? Or to be more Joe-like, “What have they done with Pluto??

When I were a lad, there were nine planets, but of course recently we had to adjust to the notion that Pluto was no longer technically a planet, at least in the same league as the others. I can’t quite get to grips with this concept myself, so to help Joe understand I asked some Facebook friends. The responses I received were brilliant:

“It’s been dubbed a ‘dwarf planet’, probably by some tall person.”

“They decided there are lots of bits of rock the size of Pluto and that therefore it doesn’t deserve the elevated status of ‘planet’.”

“Maybe it was because Holst didn’t write anything for it?”

“Because Pluto is a dog.”

Perhaps the best though was this, from the fabulous Eli Bishop who runs the formidable Riddley Walker Annotations website: “Pluto happened to be discovered first, but isn’t particularly bigger or more interesting than a bunch of other rocks they’ve found since. It didn’t get demoted to an asteroid because it’s big enough to be rounded by gravity and has its own moons, but it’s not big enough to have swept its orbit clean of floating crud, which is part of the current definition of a planet.”

Wikipedia has a summary of the official explanation, but I do prefer Eli’s “floating crud” criterion.

Whatever the truth, technically now there are eight planets. This might not be so bad but for the fact that one of the (identically-packaged) Usborne books that Joe received on the same day says there are nine, while the other says eight. Here are images of the contradictory pages in question:

Of course just because the books look the same, and we ordered them both from Amazon and they arrived at the same time, doesn’t mean they were published at the same time: Sun, Moon and Stars was first published in 2003, while Planet Earth was first published in 2007, after the whole Pluto demotion debacle in 2006. The copyright notice in Sun, Moon and Stars however has been updated (presumably along with the book’s packaging) to say 2003-2007, so you might have thought Usborne would have reviewed the content  in 2007 as well. Clearly not.

I think a short letter about this to Usborne is in order…

Gordon Brown in unlikely cash payout spam/phishing attack

I have (honestly) just received the following email. I can’t decide if
it’s an ironic interpretation of a million similar phishing emails or
if someone out there genuinely thinks that it makes the email look
like it’s come from a “reputable source”… which is questionable in
itself even before this week’s dissolution of parliament.

I reiterate that I did not originate this content!! The email came
from d2ncuties@students.itb.ac.id Readers are warned not to send any
personal details to these people!

OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER
TREASURY AND MINISTER FOR CIVIL SERVICE,
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM.

Our ref: ATM/13470/IDR
Your ref:…Date: 07/04/2010

IMMEDIATE PAYMENT NOTIFICATION

I am The Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP,Prime Minister British Government. This letter
is to officially inform you that (ATM Card Number 0480001017755502) has been
accredited with your favor. Your Personal Identification Number is 477.The
VISA Card Value is £2,000,000.00(Two Million, Great British Pounds Sterling).

This office will send to you an Visa/ATM CARD that you will use to withdraw
your funds in any ATM MACHINE CENTER or Visa card outlet in the world with a
maximum of £5000 GBP daily.Further more,You will be required to re-confirm the
following information to enable;The Rt Hon David Miliband MP Secretary of
State for British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. begin in processing of your
VISA CARD.

(1)Full names: (2)Address: (3)Country: (4)Nationality: (5)Phone #: (6)Age:
(7)Occupation: (8) Post Codes

Forward Reply To: ssfcaffairs@feynet.cn

TAKE NOTICE: That you are warned to stop further communications with any other
person(s) or office(s) different from the staff of the State for Foreign and
Commonwealth Affairs to avoid hitches in receiving your payment.

Regards,

The Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP
Prime Minister

Posted via email from Thoughtcat’s Posterous

A timeless classic

If you like you can play the above video and listen while reading the blog post. Note though some links below go to other YouTube music vids, so you might want to listen to them one at a time. Or just read. Whatever.

Heading home via Leicester Square tube station the other day, on the concourse at the bottom of the escalators a busker was laying down some cool jazz licks on a keyboard. The synthesized beat was fast but otherwise nothing special, straight four-four, disco-ish. As I descended he was soloing over a nondescript chord change, or it might have been only one chord. His soloing was fluid and imaginative, but – as, it must be said, with many jazz tunes during the improvisatory section – it wasn’t clear what the piece actually was at this point. Not that it mattered – it needn’t have been anything in particular. I wasn’t even wondering what the tune was, just following the solo as I headed round the corner towards the platform for Euston. And right then, he stopped soloing and returned to the theme. I didn’t quite catch it at first, but it was tip-of-my-tongue familiar; a standard, but was it Moanin’? Blue Train? So What?

No. It was… Take Five. I’ve heard it all now, I thought.

Take Five is a Paul Desmond/Dave Brubeck classic that was, I believe, written especially for an album of tunes in unusual time signatures. For the uninitiated, four-four or 4/4 or “common time” is, as its name suggests, the beat behind 95% of modern musical compositions from a heavy rock number to a nondescript pop song; probably only 3/4 (waltz time) comes close in terms of popularity. Take Five though was written in 5/4, or five beats to the bar rather than four. You don’t even really need to know this – it’s such a great piece of music that it simply sounds funky, not weird.

What sounds weird is if you try and chop out that extra beat and squeeze the melody into a normal 4/4 signature. I wish I’d had a tape-recorder on me at the time, as it’s hard to explain exactly what it sounded like, but the whole effect was a bit like the most recent version of the (appropriately enough, as we’re talking time) Doctor Who theme tune or something, with some glossing-over of that extraneous fifth beat to make it work. I still can’t decide whether the busker was a genius or an idiot, but I sure wish he hadn’t stopped soloing…

If you’re still not clear what I’m on about, or do but can’t imagine what Take Five sounds like with a beat-o-dectomy, musical comedian Bill Bailey does a useful (and very funny) demonstration of different time signatures in this clip from an old episode of Room 101. Enjoy.

Leonard Cohen on Mount Baldy


This is a classic 1996 documentary of The Lenmeister in his LA Zen retreat. This video is the first of six showing the whole film – the other instalments should all come up in the related videos bar when watched on YouTube, otherwise they are all embedded in this post about the documentary on the ace Cohen site 1heckofaguy.com.

This post came to my attention incidentally via Marie Mazur, who has recently joined Facebook and regularly posts updates there from her longstanding and excellent Len site Speaking Cohen , and can also now be followed on Twitter.