Humor – Page 8 – Maverick Philosopher

Friday Cat Blogging: The Existentialist

Video here.

Medieval Philosophy versus Modern Philosophy

Which is worse? Well, which is worse: substance abuse or self abuse?

Tax Advice for Philosophers

Philosophers should be sure to avail themselves of the Transcendental Deduction this year as it has been substantially increased, the truculent opposition of the NRA (National Realist Association) notwithstanding. But to take the deduction philosophers will need the Platonic Form. Be advised that attempts to copy the Platonic Form have been known to cause the dreaded glitch commonly referred to as the Third (Tax) Man.

A Local Call

George Bush, Queen Elizabeth, and Putin all die and go to hell.

While there, they spy a red phone and ask what the phone is for. The devil tells them it is for calling back to Earth. Putin asks to call Russia and talks for 5 minutes. When he is finished the devil informs him that the cost is a million dollars, so Putin writes him a check.

Next Queen Elizabeth calls England and talks for 30 minutes. When she is finished the devil informs her that the cost is 6 million dollars, so she writes him a check.

Finally George Bush gets his turn and talks for 4 hours. When he is finished the devil informs him that the cost is $5.00. When Putin hears this he goes ballistic and asks the devil why Bush got to call the USA so cheaply. The devil smiles and replies, "Since Obama took over, the country has gone to hell, so it's a local call."

(HT: Bill Keezer, source unknown, but see below.)

How Cold Is It?

I recall something like this from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:

Colder than a witch's tit,
Colder than a bucket of penguin shit,
Colder than a hair on a polar bear's ass
Colder than the frost on a champagne glass.

The possibilities are endless:

Colder than the frozen heart of a leftist who loves Humanity but hates his neighbor. (MavPhil original!)

Colder'n a fairy's fanny in Fargo in February. (MavPhil original!)

Colder'n a witch's tit in a cast-iron bra.

Colder'n a ticket taker's smile at the Ivar Theater on a Saturday night. (Tom Waits, Diamonds on My Windshield)

Colder than a mother-in-law's kiss.

Cold enough to freeze the balls off a pool table.

Colder than moonlight on a tombstone.

Colder than a polar bear's PJs.

Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.

There's 15 feet of snow in the East and its's colder'n a well digger's ass, colder'n a well digger's ass . . . . (Tom Waits)

Spare Not the ‘Scare’ ‘Quotation’ Marks

Here is part of a sentence I encountered in an article on mid-life suicide: "When Liz Strand’s 53-year-old friend killed herself two years ago in California, her house was underwater and needed repairs, she had a painful ankle that was exacerbated by being overweight . . ."

But if one's house were underwater, one could just swim from room to room. How then could being overweight exacerbate ankle pain?

A house fit for normal human habitation cannot be literally underwater. But it can be 'underwater,' i.e., such that the mortgagee owes more to the mortgager than the house is worth.

The omission of necessary 'quotation' marks is the opposite of that sure-fire indicator of low social class, namely, the addition of unnecessary 'quotation' marks. See The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks.

Some of my conventions:

1. When I am quoting someone I employ double quotation marks.

2. When I am mentioning an expression, I never use double quotation marks, I use single 'quotation' marks, e.g., I write:

'Boston' is disyllabic.

Suppose Ed Koch (1924-2013) had said,

Boston is a 'city.'

The marks signify a semantic stretch unto a sneer. This is not a case of mentioning the word 'city,' but of using it, but in a extended sense. Had old Koch said that, he would have been suggesting that Boston is a city in a merely analogical or even equivocal sense of the term as compared to the city, New York City.

3. So the third use of single 'quotation' marks is the semantically stretching use. The sentence I just wrote illustrates it inasmuch as this use of 'quotation' marks does not involve quotation, nor does it involve mentioning a word as opposed to using it.

This is a much trickier topic than you might think, and I can go on. You hope I won't, and in any case I don't feel like it. But I can't resist a bit of commentary on this example from the blog cited above:

This might just be an example of a misuse of 'quotation' marks. But it could be a legitimate use, an example of #3 above. They want your excrement.

If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, italicize, or bold, or underline it. Don't surround it with 'quotation' marks. Or, like Achmed the Dead Terrorist, I kill you!

The Four G’s Revisited

Conservative: God, guns, grub, gold

Libertarian: Guns, grub, gold, grass

Liberal: Government, government, government, government.

More specifically:

Why are the Corners of Buddha’s Apartment so Dirty?

The Tathagata has no attachments.

(He has no theories about the nirvanic Vacuum either.)

(I got the idea from this guy.)

Pun of the Day

MSNBC = MSLSD (Mark Levin).

Obama Under Fire after Wielding Imaginary Guns

A great new post by Rick Marole over at Bill Loney's place.

Jewish Epistemology

If chess is Jewish athletics, what is Jewish epistemology? "Your mother has privileged access," quipped Peter over Sunday breakfast.

Is There Anything About this Blog You Don’t LIke?

And don't forget my ironclad guarantee. Double your money back if not completely satisfied.

Another Zimmerman: The Plagiarist Jára Cimrman

You've heard of Robert Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan, and the 'white-Hispanic' George Zimmerman whose nomen has proven to be one bad omen indeed. (Would we have heard about him at all had his name been Jorge Ramirez?)

Permit me to introduce you to Jára Cimrman whose Czech surname, if I am not badly mistaken, is pronounced like 'Zimmerman' when the latter is pronounced as it is in German.

Cimrman is quite a character with many noteworthy accomplishments to his credit. One of them is authorship of the philosophy of non-existentialism. As one reputable source has it:

Long before anyone had heard about Camus or Sartre, in 1886, Cimrman wrote pieces like 'The Essence of the Existence', which became the basis for his "Cimrmanism" philosophy, also referred to as "non-existentialism" (the main premise of this philosophy is that: "Existence cannot not exist").

But if truth be told, this Cimrman is a plagiarist. He stole the idea from me! In Does Existence Itself Exist? I defend the thesis that existence does indeed exist, and necessarily. The despicable Cimrman passed off my idea as his own and tried to hide his crime by packaging my thesis under the verbally different but logically equivalent 'Existence cannot not exist' He then falsely claimed to have developed his theory in 1886 long before my birth.

‘Redskin’ Offensive? What About ‘Guinea Pig’?

Apparently, the online magazine Slate will no longer be referring to the Washington Redskins under that name lest some Indians take offense. By the way, I take offense at 'native American.' I am a native Californian, which fact makes me a native American, and I'm not now and never have been an Indian.

But what about 'guinea pig'? Surely this phrase too is a racial/ethnic slur inasmuch as it suggests that all people of Italian extraction are pigs, either literally or in their eating habits. Bill Loney takes this (meat) ball and runs with it.

And then there is 'coonskin cap.' 'Coon' is in the semantic vicinity of such words as: spade, blood, spearchucker, spook, and nigger. These are derogatory words used to refer to Eric Holder's people. In the '60s, southern racists expressed their contempt for Martin Luther King, Jr. by referring to him as Martin Luther Coon. Since a coonskin cap is a cap made of the skin of a coon, 'coonskin cap' is a code phrase used by creepy-assed crackers to signal that black folk ought to be, all of them, on the wrong end of a coon hunt.

'Coonskin cap' must therefore be struck from our vocabulary lest some black person take offense.

But then consistency demands that we get rid of 'southern racist.' The phrase suggests that all southerners are racists. And we must not cause offense to the half-dozen southerners who are not racists.

But why stop here? 'Doo wop' is so-called because many of its major exponents were wops such as Dion Dimucci who was apparently quite proud to be a wop inasmuch as he uses the term five times in succession starting at :58 of this version of 'I Wonder Why' (1958). The old greaseball still looks very good in this 2004 performance. Must be all that pasta he consumes.

I could go on — this is fun — but you get the drift, unless you are a stupid liberal.