Leggo My Soul-Corroding Ennui

If you work in a spirit-crushing cubicle farm and can’t remember the innocent joys of childhood, here’s a compromise: Get a cube farm playset, including office furniture, a meaningless job title generator (“Domestic Engineering Associate”), and downloadable decorations.

If that’s not highbrow enough for you, theory.org has Lego versions of social theorists Judith Butler, Anthony Giddens, Angela McRobbie, and Michel Foucault. Post-structuralism sold separately.

Rimshot

A guy walks into a store and says, “Excuse me, I’d like to buy a guitar pick and some strings.”

The clerk looks at him uncomprehendingly. “Pardon?”

“I’d like a guitar pick, please, and some strings.”

The clerk thinks for a moment and says, “You’re a drummer, aren’t you?”

“Yeah! How did you know?”

“This is a travel agency.”

Churchill Anecdote #7

In 1931, George Bernard Shaw wired Winston Churchill: “Am reserving two tickets for you on opening night of my new play. Come bring a friend — if you have one.”

Churchill wired back: “Impossible for me to attend first performance. Would like to attend second night — if there is one.”

Fanciful Units of Measure

Little-used measurements:

  • 1.2096 seconds ≅ 1 microfortnight
  • π seconds ≅ 1 nanocentury
  • 3.085 centimeters ≅ 1 attoparsec
  • 2 mm square ≅ 1 nanoacre
  • 2.263348517438173216473 millimeters ≅ 1 potrzebie (the thickness of MAD magazine issue 23)
  • 20 terabytes ≅ 1 Library of Congress

After Jurassic Park came out, some paleontologists started measuring Tyrannosaurus rex food consumption in lawyers. If the average attorney weighs 150 pounds, they figure, a warm-blooded T. rex would eat 292 lawyers a year. A cold-blooded one would eat 73. I guess that means they were cold-blooded; there’s certainly no shortage of lawyers today.

Invisible Pink Unicorn

http://www.invisiblepinkunicorn.comWho says atheists don’t have a sense of humor? The Invisible Pink Unicorn (“blessed be her holy hooves”) was “revealed to” the Usenet newsgroup alt.atheism in 1990.

Since then, she’s acquired all the trappings of a real deity: gospels (“according to St. Sascha”), revelations (to “St. Bryce the Long-Winded”), relics (the Holy Sock of Bob), scripture, and historic artworks.

Because she’s invisible, it’s impossible to prove she does not exist. “The Invisible Pink Unicorn is a being of great spiritual power,” say the faithful. “We know this because she is capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorn is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that she is pink; we logically know that she is invisible because we can’t see her.”

Followers debate her attributes, but it’s generally agreed that she prefers pineapple and ham pizza to pepperoni and mushroom, which is said to be eaten only by followers of the Purple Oyster of Doom. The IPU also “raptures” socks from laundry as a sign of favor.

Is this harmless fun or awful blasphemy? It’s getting hard to care. As the French writer Edmond de Goncourt wrote, “If there is a God, atheism must seem to him as less of an insult than religion.”