Hal O'Brien

I was driving home on Friday and heard this piece on NPR, all about the "Kilkenomics" festival.

"Mr. DAVID McWILLIAMS (Economist): What we've done is we've taken together Ireland's finest standup comedians and some of the world's finest economists. And we've come together for the first of its kind, which is an economics festival where the comedians ask the questions of the economists."

Sounds good, doesn't it? Economics, the neverending recesssion, comedy... What's not to like?

Well... Why isn't Yoram Bauman involved? Ph.D from the University of Washington, author of The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, Volume 1: Microeconomics, and, oh yeah, a comedic translation of Mankiw's principles so sharp and pointed Mankiw himself linked to a video interview of Bauman?

Why, indeed? It's not like Bauman is obscure in this field. If you google "economics comedy", the results are full of references to Bauman.

So... What happened? You wuz robbed, Yoram!

{originally posted at my journal.}

Is it for helping Asians? Is it to help you when cooking Asians? Hm. Is great puzzlement.

"Marge, if you're going to get mad every time I do something stupid, then I guess I just have to stop doing stupid things!"

This also works in reverse, to wit:

"If you're going to get upset every time we call something you did stupid, then I guess you'll just have to stop doing stupid things!"

Penn & Teller have an interview in the Telegraph, where Penn quotes Jerry Seinfeld this way:

"(Penn) couldn’t care less what (magicians) think. “I have always hated magic,” he says. “I have always hated the basic undercurrent of magic which Jerry Seinfeld put best when he said: 'All magic is “Here’s a quarter, now it’s gone. You’re a jerk. Now it’s back. You’re an idiot. Show’s over”.’ I never wanted to grow up to be a magician. It was never my goal.”"

The lesson from this, fannishly, is that obviously Seinfeld knows D. West.

Seriously. That quote sums up D's career comprehensively. It's why I regard D so boring as to be a, "He puts whole nations to sleep," kind of writer (originally Harlan talking about Wagner) -- because you always know what the punchline is going to be.

“Here’s a quarter, now it’s gone. You’re a jerk. Now it’s back. You’re an idiot. Show’s over.”

Yup. Seinfeld has saved all of fandom from ever having to read a D. West cartoon or article ever again. It'll only be repetition from here on out.

I said something similar to Victor Gonzalez at this past Potlatch. Victor took great umbrage -- mostly, I suspect, because he read D at an impressionable time, before he knew better. Heck, I was there when Victor met D, during a jaunt to outer Yorkshire especially for the purpose right after the Leeds Corflu.

At Potlatch, though, Victor stiffened and said, "He's a better writer than you!"

Which has no bearing whatsoever on D's merits, but as I told Victor at the time, "Victor, everyone in this room is a better writer than I am. If that's your standard, it's very low."

Malcolm Tucker is apparently alive, well, and giving interviews to Australians. Perhaps the best bit:

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Why did Labour lose the recent British election? Everyone lost the election. The Tories just lost less badly than we did. Don’t let these fuckers fool you – this is a coalition of people who weren’t quite good enough to win.

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{hat tip to gfrancie's Twitter feed}

Jon Stewart is American.

John Oliver is from England.

In the knockout round of the World Cup, England will be playing Germany.

Stewart graciously made an offer to Oliver: If, during the game, England gets into trouble with Germany, and needs someone to, um, bail them out... England can call us anytime!

Chatroulette is a game of chance involving cats, yes?

Craig Venter and his team have apparently created a synthetic life form. That is, they constructed a DNA sequence from scratch, rather than splicing ones found in nature, and grew it up from there.

That's fairly epochal just by itself, but this section of the story had me giggling:

"Dr Venter's team developed a new code based on the four letters of the genetic code, G, T, C and A, that allowed them to draw on the whole alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks to write the watermarks. Anyone who cracks the code is invited to email an address written into the DNA." {emph. added}

Why is that so funny, you ask?

Well, long ago and far away, I read, "We'll Return, After This Message," a science fiction story written in 1989 by John Walker, one of the co-founders of Autodesk.

I leave it to you to read Walker's story, and see the similarity in the premises.

...as opposed to those assembly line, robotically mixed cocktails you might see in a lower class joint.

From this CDW commercial, which first ran in the late 1990s when I was at Barbeques Galore, and ordering a lot from CDW. They actually sent me a CD-ROM with this as an .AVI file.

"I'm taking User Error to a whole new level!"

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