Dwarf Planet in Purple

Yesterday was April Fool's Day, but so many people on Facebook were warning that any attempt at pulling online pranks would result in immediate blocking and unfriending, I hesitated to post anything funny. Several friends were celebrating birthdays and wedding anniversaries, though. So that was OK.

My favorite joke about the current crisis came in a meme that was reproduced in Portuguese (I think). But it was really easy to translate it into English.

Doctor: I'm sorry, you have tested positive for coronavirus.
Patient: That's impossible! I have 700 rolls of toilet paper!

Yeah, if any joke sums up the past couple of weeks....

I still don't feel personally scared, but I keep almost obsessively checking the news and Facebook for anything new. I have assignments to do (got offered another one today!) but the money hasn't come in yet for some of the work I have already done, and my brain feels like mush. *sigh*

Last weekend the boy toy and I did some reorganizing of the small storage unit behind my condo (basically, it's an extra, non-climate-controlled closet). That involved opening a bunch of boxes of fragile items that had been sealed since I packed them after Mom's death in 1997. I did a good job back then -- absolutely nothing had broken over the years! And there were some things that I'd totally forgotten I had, like a couple of salt and pepper shakers made of blue and white china. They look like nesting chickens. I think my mother acquired them during her "blue and yellow kitchen" period in the 1970s. Boy toy and I added some of the items to the corner cabinet in the dining room and repacked others with less padding so that they would fit into fewer boxes.

I'm amazed at the amount of stuff my parents had. And the boy toy's grandmother too (who was about my mother's age, and who was close to the boy toy, so he inherited her china). I think it was their generation's culture -- they were the ones who didn't have much money in the Depression, and thus not many material possessions, so once they became young adults with their own homes, they wanted to "catch up." Plus, a lot of the modern kitchen gadgets we take for granted hadn't been invented yet, and add to that the social conventions that everybody wanted to entertain and that brides and grooms needed to receive gifts. No wonder, then, everybody had collections of china and covered candy dishes and aluminum-and-glass fruit "baskets" and pretty vases and hors-d'oeuvres trays and punch bowls and ... well, you get the picture.

I suppose I could try to sell this stuff, but I have no idea if it's worth anything. There's probably already too much of it on the market and not enough buyers. Ah, well. I will keep on enjoying these pieces, and maybe someday people will use them to pay for my funeral.

Tomorrow I'm driving out to the Eastern Shore for another "Revenge of the Stitch" SCA event -- a "garb wars" kind of competition in which six-person teams have 24 hours to sew up a whole medieval outfit from scratch. Should be fun, and I will continue to learn hand-sewing techniques.

I should end on a light note: you've got to see these briefs. Warning: you can't *unsee* them! :-D

Topic: Jayus, "from Indonesian, meaning a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.”

Physics students and physicists tell jokes. I don't know why it took Hollywood and the television industry so many decades to figure this out.

Physics students get a special thrill out of telling preciously esoteric jokes that make no sense to anyone without advanced training in higher mathematics.

For example, take one joke whose author has been lost in the mists of time: How do we know where Cauchy walked his dog? Because he left a residue at every pole. If you don't know that Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a French mathematician who studied complex numbers, that a "line integral" adds up the numerical values along a curved path, that a "pole" is a place on a data field where the values suddenly become infinitely huge and stick out like a telephone pole on a flat plain, then all you see is the scatological side of the double entendre.

So, if you see one half of a double entendre, do you laugh? Or do you hear the sound of one hand clapping?

During the World Year of Physics in 2005, somebody at the local community cafe, the quirky little storefront that functions as a third space for residents of our suburb, organized an open-mike night for "physics comedy." This was not as much of a mental stretch as one might think, since our community has its secret stash of space-telescope hardware and scientific-programming tomes routinely top the local bestseller lists. So, as a good little holder of a B.S. degree in physics, cum laude and all that, I did an Internet search for "physics jokes" and compiled crib notes for my first-ever standup routine.

That night, I had my small but fervent audience chuckling until I came to the saga of e to the power x. Now, e is an irrational number: 2.718281828459 blah blah blah... it goes on forever without repeating. If you raise e to the power x, meaning you multiply e by itself x times, you get a mathematical function that remains the same no matter how many times you integrate and differentiate it. (Think of integration and differentiation as virtual machines that gobble up one equation and spit it out in a different version. Kind of like Google Translate, but for the universal language of science instead of our imperfect human tongues.)

So, with minimal glances down to my crib notes, I recounted the joke, again written originally by someone long forgotten:

There was a patient in a mental hospital who kept scaring all the other patients. He would go up to people and shout at them, "I differentiate you! I differentiate you!"

But there was one patient who wasn't bothered at all. He would just sit there and smile calmly as the guy yelled at him, "I differentiate you! I differentiate you!"

Finally the calm guy replied: "You can differentiate me all you want, and it won't change anything. I'm e to the power x."

Most folks in the audience tittered, but one guy with a face weathered as the granite of New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain angrily rose to his feet. He shouted, "This is not funny! It's wrong to make fun of people in mental hospitals!" The laughter faded, and my face felt hot. I hastened to finish up my set and sit down again.

The weathered-skin guy didn't say anything else to me that evening, but I later learned that he was the town "weirdo," so to speak. Eventually the cafe banned him because he would disrupt performances. Occasionally I saw him on the subway, yelling random thoughts against both ends of the political spectrum. Once I was sitting at an outdoor cafe with a date, and we were deep into a speculative conversation about alternate histories, and started shouting that we were unpatriotic. I wish I knew what to say, but sometimes there isn't anything to say.

A few months after the open-mike night, I dared to tell the joke again, this time to a few friends from my church. One of them screamed with laughter until the tears ran down his face. "I don't even know what it means and I think it's funny!" he howled. He no longer goes to my church, but I wonder whether he watches The Big Bang Theory.

Are you a dweeb, dork, geek, or nerd??

(I need a *snerk* after reading a dozen revisions of an open letter to the congregation about our budgetary issues.)

The other day I was standing second in line at the credit union. The woman in front of me was maybe in her 40s, probably on her way home from work, definitely more stylishly dressed than I. In front of her, at the teller window, was a young, skinny guy. It definitely did not take a detailed knowledge of male anatomy to deduce that his belt was about the same level as his butt crack.

While looking at him, the woman leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Am I just old, or am I the only one who doesn't want to see someone else's underwear?"

I smiled and whispered back, "No, we are just classy and have taste!"

And we both chuckled.

Ooo nooo! Facebook is down for the second time in as many days.

Already there are fabulous tweets going around:

Facebook Down, Like Buttons Vanish, Internet Implodes

BREAKING NEWS: Facebook is down. Worker productivity rises. U.S. climbs out of recession.

Facebook is down. We can't tell who's hungry or tired.

Facebook users are roaming the streets in tears, shoving photos of themselves in people's faces and screaming 'DO YOU LIKE THIS? DO YOU??'

Since Facebook is down, I decided to write what I'm doing on an ACTUAL WALL

Facebook shut down so they had to use Twitter to notify everyone.

#Facebook down; over 230 million acres of Farmville crops and special animals die from inattention.

(Note: I didn't make any of these up. I'm just cutting and pasting.)

And my personal favorite:

Lord_Voldemort7 I shut down facebook. That'll teach The Social Network for trying to steal attention from the Deathly Hallows Trailer. Take that, Zuckerberg

And then there are comments on the Faster Forward blog:

I can see The Onion headline:
FACEBOOK DOWN, MILLIONS FRIENDLESS

The GOP forgot to include Facebook in its Pledge to America. Priorities, people, priorities!! Fix Facebook first, then we'll deal with health care.

Facebook went down because alien beings from a far away world intercepted a frequency asking the aliens if they would like to "accept Earth's friend request" One by one, the aliens added Earth as their friend and the sheer number of new ,alien, users trying to play farmville and win a ninja/pirate war caused the Facebook system to crash. Sooo, It was all Earth's fault, go figure.
...and, yes, that is how bored I am without Facebook haha

I can't wait to see the "Facebook-down baby boom" 9 months from now...

Anyhow, since cz_unit doesn't use FB, I just wanted to let him know, in case he was wondering why everyone else was getting so much work done today. :-)

I found this "death-ray baby" image (obviously Photoshopped) here and just had to make it into an icon. I have no idea of the provenance of this photo beyond that website.

Stumbled upon: It's "John Hopkins" now.

(Baltimore, April 1, 2010) The Johns Hopkins University announced today that it is bowing to the inevitable and officially changing its name to "John Hopkins."

"We give up," university President Ronald J. Daniel said. "We're fighting a losing battle here. And we strongly suspect the extra 's' was a typo in the first place."

Since its establishment in 1876 as America's first research university, Daniel said, anyone and everyone has stumbled over "Johns Hopkins," omitting the seemingly superfluous "s" altogether or dropping it randomly into the name anywhere but where it belonged.

"It's not just 'John Hopkins,'" Daniel said. "We've heard 'John Hopskins.' We've heard 'John Shopskins.' One flustered high school kid in an admissions interview the other day actually called us 'Bob Hoskins.'"

... Squads of staff members fanned out early today over the university's campuses throughout the Baltimore-Washington area; in Bologna, Italy; and in Nanjing, China. They employed screwdrivers, chisels, spackle, spray paint - whatever it took to remove the annoying surplus sibilant from residence halls, lab buildings, buses and trucks.