Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

No, that isn’t a nightmare low-residue menu–it’s three different foods introduced in 1937.

And, for a few more factoids from the Food Timeline:

• Beans and walnuts are the oldest of the 14 superfoods–their use dates back to 7000 BC.
• Popcorn was invented about 3600 BC; butter wasn’t discovered until 600 years later.
• Marshmallows and liquorice both date back to about 2000 BC.
• I am older than Marshmallow Peeps but younger than Bisquick.

Thanks to Niek Hockx for this delicious linkage!

…in fact, twelve questions, but this is my personal favorite:

In retrospect, wouldn’t it have been smarter to just TP Wilson’s house, and he would be all like “Valerie, the trees are filled with toilet paper!” and you’d be laughing your butt off outside, which would be so cool.

It’s dangerous to criticize a Muslim cleric, even one whose fatwas promote hatred and violence.

So the Saudi government is fighting fire with..humor. They’re using semi-official press to make fun of frivolous fatwas. They republished, for example, this recent fatwa against playing soccer by regular rules…

3. Do not call “foul” and stop the game if someone falls and sprains a hand or foot or the ball touches his hand, and do not give a yellow or red card to whoever was responsible for the injury or tackle. Instead, it should be adjudicated according to Sharia rulings concerning broken bones and injuries. The injured player should exercise his Sharia rights according to the Koran and you must bear witness with him that so-and-so hurt him on purpose…

14. You should use two posts instead of three pieces of wood or steel that you erect in order to put the ball between them, meaning that you should remove the crossbar in order not to imitate the heretics and in order to be entirely distinct from the soccer system’s despotic international rules…

Bogota’s use of “traffic mimes” cut their pedestrian death rate in half. But this use of humor sounds even more hopeful to me.

This article is in the NY Times paid op-ed section. Nobody likes paying, but there aren’t many US institutions more worthy (and needy) of $$ support than our big, good newspapers.

Wired News has the story and pix–so do about a billion other sources.

Damn, next year we are sooooo doing better than attending in effigy!

The original Star Wars, reduced to three minutes of Flash in “Star Dudes,” reminds you how funny minimalism can be–and how much you loved its hokey original!

No, not those ancient take-out boxes I just excavated from fridge…the BBC has news (and horrible photos) of some 4,000 year-old noodles unearthed in China.

The article quotes Professor Houyuan Lu: “Prior to the discovery of noodles at Lajia, the earliest written record of noodles is traced to a book written during the East Han Dynasty sometime between AD 25 and 220, although it remained a subject of debate whether the Chinese, the Italians, or the Arabs invented it first…Our discovery indicates that noodles were first produced in China,”

In other words “Take that, you anti-Marco-Polo-ite Italian pasta patriots! Neener neener to those who claim the Arabs were first! All your spaghetti are belong to us!”

But wasn’t that tactful of the BBC to hold back this news until after Columbus Day?

I’m sorry I ever hinted Brits weren’t polite…

Sooo good to be home again. No, that’s not my house–it’s a sliver of ivy-covered autumnal tower from the Bavarian castle with wonderful wifi. And I don’t miss it, not one little bit. I’m back in the stolid brick Cambridge house that has all my own dear stuff inside it, including my very own bedroom and bookshelves and bathtub. Ahhhhhh! Which reminds me of one of my favorite stories about my somewhat-irascible Grandpa Devine.

Long, long ago, in the late fifties or early sixties, I happened to be visiting his stolid brick NH house when he got what was then a very unusual phone call.

I heard only one side of it–his side–which went something like this:”Yes….yes…yes…WHAT?”

“I beg your pardon?”….

“This house? Do I want to remodel this house?”…

“Madame, have you ever seen my house?”…

“No, I didn’t think so. If you had, you would never have made such a phone call. This house doesn’t need to be remodeled, any more than the TAJ MAHAL!”…

“Good DAY, Madame.”

I’m so glad to be home, in my very own Taj Mahal.

Sigh–Joi Ito watched the Ig Nobels, but I couldn’t get the webcast to play until now. So I am sitting here, on my Bavarian mountain, listening to the “Infinite Chopsticks” overture as I write this blogpost.

Meanwhile, I’ve been making do with Feedster searches for “ignobel” and “ig nobel“, and “igs.”
These turned up various stories in MSM: AP, ABC Science Online, The Guardian, and New Scientist.

And, would you believe, the Ig Nobels got blogged in

• French
• Russian,
• Spanish
• Chinese
• Japanese,
• Korean.
• Dutch (“Testikelprotheses goed voor Ig Nobel-prijs”)
• Vietnamese, and
• Portuguese (I think).

Ahh, I did get to see my own children at about minute 24 carrying “Frank Junior” onstage–he gets “introduced” about minute 33. And I see that Marc Abrahams has posted this year’s winners, releasing me from the heavy burden of secrecy. Ahhhh.

Wait–do two “aahhh”s make up for my initial “sigh”? “Subvocal utterance: A four-dimensional calculus”–if I could just publish such a scholarly paper, I might just win myself one of those Ig Nobel Prizes!

A recent scholarly paper by Richard Price asks, “In an expanding universe, what doesn’t expand?“

The expansion of the universe is often viewed as a uniform stretching of space that would affect compact objects, atoms and stars, as well as the separation of galaxies. One usually hears that bound systems do not take part in the general expansion, but a much more subtle question is whether bound systems expand partially. In this paper, a very definitive answer is given…

If parts of the universe grew, but others didn’t, here are my nominations…

• Let parking lots stretch while our cars all remain the same size.
• Let space inside airplanes get bigger while bodies stay constant.
• Let people get taller without anyone getting fatter.

Sadly,Price’s research has not yet stretched (sorry) much beyond models of classical atoms.

And real-life observation suggests opposite effects for every single one of my hopeful wishes….

Thanks to Tingilinde for the link!