Blast From the Past I

Posted on 17 July 2010 by Larry Russwurm

To see the home page of this blog all you have to do is click on the banner where it says “The Many Rants of Larry Russwurm”. (You can try it out and then click the go back button and this post will still be here). On the right hand side of my home page, it lists my archived posts by month and further down is something called “Pages”. The “about” page or the “Frequently asked Questions” page you can look at any time. Today I’m concerned with the 5 “Jacques 2003” pages.

All 5 are Canadian political cartoons starring Jacques O’ Christmas Tree (that’s right, a jack o’ lantern head on a Christmas tree body). Firstly, if you click on one of these you will find a squished political cartoon. That’s because this blog theme isn’t made for pictures beyond a certain size. Still you can click on the squished picture and that will bring up the same picture in its proper dimensions.

Secondly, it’s been 7 years since 2003 so you might have forgotten the politics of the time. Because of this, below the squished picture, way down, I’ve tried to retell the pertinent information that makes the cartoon funny. I realize of course that having a section entitled “why it’s funny” might make more than a few of you think its not funny. Still I’m hoping some of you will like it.

Why are these cartoons only making an appearance now? Well in 2003 I was seriously thinking of drawing political cartoons with an eye on getting them published. The problem with this was I was only able to think of about one a week and sometimes not even that. So I might have gotten a part time job out of it, but would still have pressure sometimes. Anyways, after many weeks I only had these cartoons finished (I had more with punch lines scribbled down that I never drew).

I thought about it some more in the following years and noticed that most of my cartoons had multiple punch lines. So I thought maybe I could change over to daily nonpolitical cartoons. I had avoided these because of the daily thing. Now I was thinking of writing one punch line per strip in a story arc. That way my multiple jokes could stretch over a few days.

Any how I’m going to give the daily thing a go sometime this year. But obviously I need a better blog theme so the pictures will be undistorted. And there are other things I have to learn. But stay posted here and I will tell you where to go to find these daily cartoons. Jacques will of course be the star of these newer cartoons.

Posted in Art, Cartoon, Humour, Politics, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

And Some Think Hawking’s American Accent is Funny

Posted on 10 July 2010 by Larry Russwurm

Why is it that when I know a rock band is British, I know it because I’ve been told. Why can’t I tell a song is British by the accent?

In almost every single rock act there is no discernible British accent. Maybe this was imperative during the first wave of British acts to make it big over here in North America. So fine, maybe the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the Who had to start by hiding their Britishness. But why not, when established, revert to their British roots?

And there were successive waves of other rockers that may have wanted to display their Britishness proudly. How about Prog Rock (Led Zeppelin, Yes, Pink Floyd etc.) Glam Rock (David Bowie, Sweet), Art Rock (Queen, ELO) or the many acts of New Wave which seemed to go right till the end of the eighties. These acts were ESTABLISHED. Why couldn’t just one of them sing with a British accent.

Now, I’ve left out one wave of British music that I can discern a British accent on. The musically literate of you probably already know that some punk rock music kept the accent and even seemed to revel in their accents.

I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the simplicity of punk. Maybe keeping the accent makes the music sound just a little more guttural and that helped the music. Maybe having an accent kept punk apart from other category forms.

But wait you say, punk is kind of popular again with the pop/punk acts. That’s exactly what brings this to mind to me. Green Day is the biggest of these newer acts. And despite hailing from the United States, they seem to sing with a forceful British twang. Maybe not quite a British accent but with the US knowing that it is the center of the English speaking world, that’s as close as we’re going to get.

Why punk rock? I’m really not quite sure.

Posted in Humour, Music | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Low Resolution, Black and White Touch Pictures

Posted on 3 July 2010 by Larry Russwurm

Last week’s post about “One” made me think. Perhaps “One” could be made into a protagonist of a story. But , alas, I didn’t find him powerful enough as is to be good for a story.

But, still, I now had a guide for my thinking. Let’s take a tiny rod and say lightly touch an end to your back. Here we have a zero point. What if we press the rod forward with a pressure or to a certain distance. I find pressure to be preferable. What if our back could differentiate between ten different pressures without hurting? We would have 10 grades or degrees.

Now lets make that one rod into a grid of rods. A person’s back below the shoulder blades isn’t perfectly flat but with the zero point of each rod set as lightly touching the back, it is close enough. All are able to poke into your back to a different degree of pressure. Or perhaps a different distance. What we have now is the amount of information available in a low resolution black and white camera. The degree from each rod is the intensity. Lightly touching back skin is zero or black. Pushing in at a ten is white or maximum intensity. The grid defines the picture.

The picture would be delivered by a low resolution digital camera, perhaps attached to the forehead.

There are problems I see with this regime of information.

Perhaps distance grades wouldn’t work. After all the distance measured by touch would probably be different if you were pushing in on your back skin over bone, muscle or fat..

And the problem with pressure grades is that a rod pushing in at the maximum pressure of 10 makes it easier to push in neighbouring rods to 10, thus a big area of maximum intensity might push in further than a point and might end up hurting the back.

Regardless of which regime of “intensity” grades is used I think we can successfully “see” (with touch) a low resolution picture on our backs – we just have to learn to interpret the result.

In this day of proven brain plasticity, I hope that a brain can learn to translate these touch pictures to a visual. The low resolution black and white pictures could be seen over time as motion pictures. A curious brain ought to be able to learn from this, especially if it is young and thus adaptable.

So hopefully there would be some sight for the blind, if a bit on the low quality side.

Now I’ve been writing these posts all with at least a bit of humour. So let’s say our blind person with the back get up points her head (and thus low resolution camera) at the sun. Then she might oscillate her head around instead of fully focusing on the sun. Why? She would be trying to massage her back.

You would see a hump back on people in occupations that would want to see behind themselves. So say, professional teachers would have hump backs with digital cameras pointing backwards so the students couldn’t get out of control.

More sneakily, some women might put their humps on the stomach, pretending pregnancy so as to obfuscate clues about the third eye or low resolution digital camera pointing backwards. But if they are ticklish this wouldn’t work. For instance those rambunctious students could tell by their teacher’s laugh they are being watched.

Posted in Mathematics, Music, Science, Wee Bit O' Humour, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Metallica’s “One” Not So Bleak

Posted on 26 June 2010 by Larry Russwurm

I’ll never forget “One” by Metallica. It was the first song I ever liked by the group and it heralds the beginning of their accessible period.

Well at first I just liked the pretty start and the singing parts. It took me a long time to accept the heavy ending. But I eventually accepted it. You see it might be a bleak sounding ending but the words were so bleak that I accepted it. At least I thought this was one of the bleakest songs I knew.

Near the end of the singing it goes “Land mine has taken my sight, taken my speech, taken my hearing, taken my arms, taken my legs”. And earlier on it said “Nothing is real but pain, now.”

We have a limbless Helen Keller with constant pain as a companion. That seemed so bleak to me.

Maybe “One” (I’m going to call him this for the duration of this post), can communicate if someone put a pen in his mouth and held a sheet of paper such that he could write on it. So one-way communication is possible.

But speaking of Helen Keller, the reason there was so much hope for her was that her instructor Anne Sullivan began tracing letters and thus words on her hand.

One may not have hands to spell words on but what about his back, his stomach, his cheek? Once One realizes what is going on he can have two-way communication.

Then, with two-way communication, the doctors can do their best for One’s pain. Maybe it’s a neglected part of his treatment. Maybe the pain will go away after One heals better. Maybe there’s nothing the doctors can do for the pain but drugs might help. With two-way communication odds are One’s situation can improve.

And maybe the pain is so bad that One does everything in his power to get to Switzerland and then gets access to assisted suicide. This is still a bleak ending but at least One isn’t helpless.

So now what do I do when listening to “One”? The story’s no longer so bleak that I feel forced to listen to the overly heavy ending. Do I now get to play just the pretty parts?

I hate to say it but over the years I got used to the heavy part and now accept it as part of the song. You win, Metallica. But if I thought of this years ago…

Posted in Music, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Women Can Levitate 10 Centimeters Off the Ground

Posted on 19 June 2010 by Larry Russwurm

This news was as shocking to me as it is to you. But instead of making a big deal over it, the news was buried in a seemingly unrelated news story.

China Airlines of Taiwan was fined for discriminating against short people. It only accepted applicants for its flight attendant jobs who were 160 cm tall or higher (women) or 170 cm tall or higher (men).

The excuse for this bias by the company was that the flight attendants needed to reach the overhead bins.

Thus a 170 cm man can barely reach so that means that a 160 cm tall woman must be able to levitate the extra 10 cm. We know this because a company wouldn’t lie in a court statement.

Posted in Humour, Politics | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Too Young for Death Defying

Posted on 12 June 2010 by Larry Russwurm

If you’ve kept up even partially on the news, you might well have heard of the 16 year old girl who wanted to boat around the world or the 13 year old boy that wanted to scale Mount Everest. That 16 year old is currently lost on the high seas [she’s been rescued since I wrote this] since she started her goal.

I think the parents of these two children need a talking to. And maybe they should have to repay the public for any necessary rescue operations. As Dr. Phil keeps pointing out, teens’ brains aren’t even finished forming yet. Indeed the caution centers that let them see around corners haven’t finished growing yet. So I am a firm believer that minors should not be allowed to try death defying anything.

I believe this so strongly that I believe “youngest ever” records should be stricken from the news. Or books. Or any recording. Teens and teeny boppers and kids don’t need to have temptation facing them in the news. The attention shown will probably draw more kids into wanting this “success”.

And it is death defying. Whole ships are still sometimes lost at sea, with much more than a single boater. Over 175 people have died somewhere on the top of Everest.

And you know I think I see the attraction for a 16 year old girl and a 13 year old boy.

The girl gets to get out from under her parents thumb. She’ll be all alone (theoretically) for months. What’s to stop her from inviting that cute boating boy out to visit her in international waters. She has to navigate around the world, surely she can guide him out to her ship. She could invite out friends and have an “I got rid of my parents” party. She could be out there experimenting with alcohol and drugs.

As for the boy, he’s probably heard about the over 175 bodies on the top of Mount Everest. To his 13 year old self, that alone could be the attraction. Maybe he could poke some of these bodies with a stick. He could also do the low level prank of mixing the gear up from a few bodies. If ever someone did a recovery operation, they might have to get the DNA evidence to match everybody with their right stuff.

You might be angry with my giving this pair motivations that sound base and immature. I’m sorry but many teens and teeny boppers are like that. If their motivations are pure, they can do it after the age of 18. So they won’t be the “youngest ever”. Tough. They made it to 18 alive which sounds like success from a real parent’s perspective.

Posted in Politics, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Make the Historians Do the Math

Posted on 10 June 2010 by Larry Russwurm

In an earlier post, the No Name Decades , it was made known in the comments section that the ‘Teens really don’t start till January 1, 2011; just as the noughties didn’t start till January 1, 2001. This does not make intuitive sense to most of us 3rd millennium people, even if it is technically correct.

The problem, you see, seems to stem from the fact that the Romans and their descendants didn’t have a zero. Thus, the order of years went from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. Since this first decade, century, millennium had no zero, the 21st century must start on January 1, 2001 rather than January 1, 2000. Isn’t life just so confusing.

Then again, how often do the non historians among us talk about say the third century? Or for that matter the third century B.C.? Since we mostly talk about A.D. stuff and indeed mostly stuff in our lifetimes or a handful of lifetimes backwards, why not include 1B.C. as the zero year of the first decade, century, millennium A.D.?

Thus the nineties went from January 1, 1990 to December 31 1999, the noughties existed from January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2009. The third millennium will exist from from January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2999, the 21st century will exist from January 1, 2000 to December 31, 2099; exactly the way we intuitively think they exist.

Let the historians worry about the repercussions. Did you go into history to hide from more complicated math? Bwuh, huh, huh! Now deal with 1 B.C. being part of the 1st decade, century, millennium A.D. Now the 1st century B.C. will have gone from January 1st 101 B.C. to December 31st, 2 B.C. Want to deal with ancient history? Deal with the complications as well.

So, finally, we can stick our tongues out at Arthur C. Clarke and all his acolytes who insist that the noughties, 21st century, and 3rd millennium didn’t start until 2001.

But most importantly, my 20/20 joke in The No Name Decades gets saved. That, after all, is the most important point.

Posted in History, Humour, Mathematics, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

An Unsaid Ethnic Slur

Posted on 5 June 2010 by Larry Russwurm

In a way, I’m jealous of black people.

It’s definitely not the years of slavery (yes it existed in Canada, too, only it ended sooner). And it’s certainly not the 100 years it took to attain full civil rights.

It’s because of the current state of political correctness. It appears to me that no one is allowed to use an ethnic slur except the people whose ethnicity has been slurred. This is a change from the past when groups tried to keep an air of superiority by slurring other groups.

And despite whites being slurred with say “cracker” or “honky”, these never became a tool of power because largely the whites were in control. Whites like me laughed with everyone else if “honky” was used in a black sitcom in the ’70s. Were we laughing with the blacks or that this attempt at equality was a failure? Blacks and other minorities caught on and it wasn’t till the current round of political correctness that they found the aforementioned way to get back that lost power.

And now with mention of the “N” word thought to be intolerable for use by any but blacks, I think that blacks currently have a wee bit more power on this front. Which is why I’m a bit jealous.

Then I thought of an ethnic slur for myself. An ethnic slur that would offend me, a white of German descent.

It’s not “cracker” or “honky” (of course). With the German thing you might think it could be “Kraut” or “Hun” or any slur used in the two World Wars. But those slurs are about as bothersome as the aforementioned “cracker” or “honky”. The slur I’m thinking of I won’t name because it might bother me deep down if I were to let it and I’m not sure if I can use it myself, because I might not be considered the offended group.

It’s a slur I grew up knowing in rural Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada. Generally it has been used against Amish people and Old Order Mennonites. Maybe it can be stretched to mean all Mennonites. Maybe it can be stretched into being used against people who appear to belong to these groups. Maybe it can be stretched to mean any peoples that are technologically backward like the Old Order Mennonites and the Amish.

When I was a child, I learned this slur and “knew” it couldn’t be me so I had a bit of a power imbalance going like with other slurs and their users.

But after high school, I learned that my Mom’s family who I had previously only known had come from Russia, were originally Mennonites.

Indeed they had been sponsored over to Ontario by a Mennonite church during the Russian Revolution. But, when my mother’s family saw how the Mennonites that sponsored them lived, the family switched over to the Lutheran religion.

So there it is. By descent I’m Mennonite. (At least going by black culture, part black people are allowed to claim black heritage. [This is a forgiving attitude – I applaud blacks for this.]) However, being Mennonite is a religion. So my Mom’s family changed this about themselves. So this is unlike race. In fact I think that eventually religion will be seen as the weaker right when compared to race. But I digress.

Since I actually used my slur as a kid exactly like a non Mennonite, I think that I cannot claim it and thus won’t share it with you. Which to me, in one respect, is too bad. I was kind of hoping to hear from someone from Pennsylvania. Old Order Mennonites are also called the Pennsylvania Dutch because most of them hail from Pennsylvania. I kind of want to know if the slur I’m talking about also exists in Pennsylvania. Just to see if my area came up with the slur.

Also, when I first came up with the slur and thought I could use it, I came up with a chant that had the ability to evolve into a song. The chant is thus:

You see I am a bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep,
But you can’t call me a bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep,
Unless you are a bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep,
So that is my chant, chant , chant , chant..

I was going to add more verses to make it ethnic specific, but see how neat it is right now. My slur is only one syllable long as you might tell from this chant. So any ethnic group that has a slur one syllable long can use this as well. You could also use a slur 2 or 4 syllables long using this form. If your slur is 3 syllables or 5 or higher syllables, you’ll have to write your own chant.

Don’t comment that you’re an Old Order Mennonite or Amish person and give me an okay to use the slur. Because the people most likely to be called this slur are likely to not have a computer. So I will not name the slur.

One more point. I don’t think Amish or Old Order Mennonites are totally defenseless. Don’t forget that they also know the language German and can talk behind the backs of most of us who don’t speak German. For all I know, all the times I’ve seen the Amish or Old Order Mennonites speak German, they could have been insulting me the entire time.

Posted in Music, Politics, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Sharp Shark

Posted on 1 June 2010 by Larry Russwurm

Programs that can hear a word and, say, type it out, are old. Despite their advancing age, these programs still can’t interpret speech easily.

Have you tried the automated call centers where you have to over enunciate the word you are trying to use just so the dumb computer program gets it?

Well dumb is part of it. I swear that humans themselves can’t interpret speech that well either. Part of our expertise in interpretation is that we half know what is going to be said. In other words we are using more of our mind than just our interpretation-of-speech centers.

Then there are some people like my Dad. A few years ago his hearing was getting really bad. I was seriously worried that I’d never be able to communicate with him like I did when he was younger. He refuses to use the various hearing aids he has. And his interpretation skills have gotten better.

What’s that? I said he can interpret better. So much better, in fact, that most of the time I just think I’m talking with him like it used to be. Either he has gotten way better with less or he is now at least partially reading lips. Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy about this. Every once in a while I’m curious and ask him if he has his hearing aids in. Each time the expected answer is wrong. He doesn’t have his hearing aids in.

So computers might have to become more skilled in other areas before they become skilled enough to interpret speech as well as a human.

In fact, I think computer interpretation of the human voice is going to have to be better than human in order to do all we want computers to do.

I think that obviously even human speech recognition is fallible. Think of the saying “card sharp”. Others might say “card shark”. I think these two cliches resulted from faulty interpretations of each other by humans. I wonder which saying came first. “Coincidence,” you might say. But what about another pair of sayings: “end of the road” and “end of your rope”. There seems to be a pattern of similar sounding, meaning the same thing sayings that I think comes from our inability to interpret the speech exactly.

I think we humans hear things differently than each other. It’s going to be hard to have a computer interpret words in such a way that all humans agree on the meaning. And I didn’t even bring accents into the conversation – yet.

Posted in Language, Science, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Theme Songs and Age of Shows

Posted on 29 May 2010 by Larry Russwurm

Have you ever winced while watching the theme song intro to the Simpsons and thought this goes on forever. Or maybe you haven’t but eventually will.

This year I came up with a thought. “You know I can probably make a guess about how long a show has been on the air by the length of its theme songs.” Remember Gilligan’s Island? They told a complete story in theirs. The same with the Beverly Hillbillies. But for more recent shows it seemed to me the intros were shorter. Indeed, some intro theme songs were so short I couldn’t remember them even after having seen every new episode for a minimum of a season. But when I did the research I remembered the very short theme songs.

Well let’s take a look at the list that I used. I chose only the shows that I watch so when checking the themes on YouTube, I would know from memory if the theme was complete. This was especially valuable for the Simpsons, because the theme can vary depending on the length of time used on its couch gag.

Unfortunately, you are going to know what shows I watch. And thus you are going to lose all respect for me. The first thing you’re going to notice is that I only watch sitcoms. I can’t stand watching hour longs where they take everything so seriously even though the show isn’t being very realistic. I know sitcoms are unrealistic, but I can view this unrealism as just a setup to the next joke.

The Simpsons : Theme song length 59 seconds
The Cleveland Show: 29 s
Family Guy: 32 s
American Dad: 33 s
How I Met Your Mother: 14 s
2 ½ Men: 23 s
The Big Bang Theory: 22 s
Modern Family: 10 s
Cougar Town: 6 s
Parks and Recreation: 32 s
The Office: 33 s
30 Rock: 19 s
South Park: 27 s

First of all, from this list you can tell there are two major outliers that go against the correlation I’m trying to show. The Cleveland show is new this year and its theme song is as long as those from many years ago. The other outlier is How I Met Your Mother. This show is a number of years old and yet its theme song is almost as short as this year’s brevity champs: Modern Family and Cougar Town.

First we’ll deal with The Cleveland Show. Largely it is brought to us by the same people who brought us Family Guy and American Dad. Note that the length of this theme song is almost identical to those two other shows. Despite my correlation of age of show to length of theme song, there is an even stronger correlation. Shows made by the same people as other shows have almost identical theme song lengths. This is true of 2 ½ Men and The Big Bang Theory; Parks and Recreation and The Office.

As for the outlier, How I Met Your Mother, we might just say that this show with its short theme song was the trailblazer that other, newer shows followed.

The rest of the shows roughly correlate age of show to length of theme song. To avoid the same people same length of theme song thing we can just take the earliest of those shows. Now we have a roughly straight line if we graphed our results.

When I started thinking about this topic I assumed the one outlier would be the theme from The Big Bang Theory. But the Bare Naked Ladies do this theme and the only song I know that squeezes in more words per second than a typical Ladies song is The End of the World as We Know It by REM. So by sheer wordiness I thought the theme song was longer than it really is.

No wonder I noticed this correlation this year. The ridiculously short theme songs of Modern Family and Cougar Town are a very big clue. Indeed these new themes are so short I don’t think they should be called songs. I vote instead for the name of theme riffs.

Posted in Humour, Mathematics, Music, Stage and Screen | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments