DOUI Sports Corner...or, Spend it Like Beckham

The sports world is reporting today that David Beckham, the hottest commodity in soccer, will be leaving Real Madrid of the Euro leagues to join the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer here in the US. Joining Beckham in the United States will be his wife and ex-Spice Girl, Victoria Beckham (ne: Poshington, ne: Posh Spice) and enormous sacks of cash (ne: bucks, dinero, dead presidents, swag, booty (hee hee), jack, and moolah). It is reported that Beckham's new contract is worth $250 million dollars or roughly one million dollars per week. If the reports are true this will make him the highest paid player married to a person with the moniker Posh.

In other news Nick Saban the new coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide is denying reports that he will be leaving the team to pursue soccer. "I don't know how to make this any clearer", Saban said, "I will not be joining the Los Angeles Galaxy to play soccer." However, sources close to Saban say that he is at an undisclosed location trying his damn'dest to pick up the game as quickly as he can.

More at 11.

Degranulation of the Basophils

Earl Expando challenges me without fully understanding that he is not challenging a physical entity, but rather he is challenging one who has transformed into an information pattern. As such, I will accept his challenge, but I shall give him the answers he should have been seeking rather than the ones he is seeking.

1. How many counties does the nation of Sealand have? "E Mare Libertas" or "Freedom from the Moisture Heart of the Timid Dampest Depths"
2. Cameron Diaz has a tattoo of which MPAA President on her bum? Amoebic dysentery
3. Winston Churchill's favourite one-liner paired a nun with which type of penguin? Unwashed Foot Stench of the Coenobium
4. Albert Einstein originally wrote his General Theory of Relativity on what brand of chewing gum wrapper? Tempromandibular Joint with Recessed Manure Stains
5. The inverse quotient of a fractional trigonemetrical proof resembles which kind of marsupial? Vinculums Duct-taped to a Leaking Sieve
6. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood...backwards? The major histocompatibility complex molecules of Sir John Gielgud's wattle
7. Just what the hell does a woodchuck look like anyway? Hoary marmots
8. How much communication with Satan did Dan Brown require to write The DaVinci Code and what well known talk show host introduced them? "Malleus Maleficarum, A Five Step Guide to Turning Beef-Nose Sandwich Stains into Hearty Soup" by Ronald Phartflaps
9. On a scale of 1 to 10, what is Paris Hilton and Britney Spears combined IQ? Deindividuation of Eukaryotes
10. If green were purple, what colour would a banana be? Indole, skatole, thiols and oatmeal: the breakfast of champions
11. Who invented the safety razor and how many people did they kill in the research and development phase? How many did they kill in the marketing phase? Seven pygmy horses embedded in a mucilaginous matrix
12. In episode #1672 of The Simpsons (or as real fans know, episode AAC07B9QZ) entitled "Homerlicious," Homer scratched which part of his body with a half-empty can of Duff's beer? Delicious fried rumen and charbroiled reticulum in giblet gravy
13. (Bonus Question) What is the middle name of the Emperor of Switzerland? Little Lord Fauntleroy's favorite pet aurochs

Behold, now you know everything you should have wanted to know, Mr. Earl Grey Excremando. I hope it has begun the transformation of your being from flesh and gristle to knowledge matrix.

Oh Wiki, You're So Fine

Well, I see from his most recent post that Nuffy is still alive. Also, he appears to have addictively read through the entire content of the English version of Wikipedia (also, possibly the Finnish and Portugese versions).

Of course, as regular Internet denizens of the World Wide Web Ethersphere know, Wikipedia is a massive online Encylopedia edited by anyone willing to take the time to change the spelling of Paris Hilton's first name by exchanging the "ar" for "en." This massive online database has a tremendous amount of information, particularly on comic books, sci-fi television, and The Simpsons. It also contains a fair amount of history, science, and politics, some of which is actually accurate.

However, Wikipedia is so large, I cannot imagine that even someone like Nuffy, who has completed several advanced speed-reading classes and has a chip in his brain, could read it all. I suspect he's done some very detailed skimming, so I challenge him to answer the following questions, the answers to which can be found in Wikipedia (unless they aren't in which case the question is a trick question).

1. How many counties does the nation of Sealand have?
2. Cameron Diaz has a tattoo of which MPAA President on her bum?
3. Winston Churchill's favourite one-liner paired a nun with which type of penguin?
4. Albert Einstein originally wrote his General Theory of Relativity on what brand of chewing gum wrapper?
5. The inverse quotient of a fractional trigonemetrical proof resembles which kind of marsupial?
6. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood...backwards?
7. Just what the hell does a woodchuck look like anyway?
8. How much communication with Satan did Dan Brown require to write The DaVinci Code and what well known talk show host introduced them?
9. On a scale of 1 to 10, what is Paris Hilton and Britney Spears combined IQ?
10. If green were purple, what colour would a banana be?
11. Who invented the safety razor and how many people did they kill in the research and development phase? How many did they kill in the marketing phase?
12. In episode #1672 of The Simpsons (or as real fans know, episode AAC07B9QZ) entitled "Homerlicious," Homer scratched which part of his body with a half-empty can of Duff's beer?
13. (Bonus Question) What is the middle name of the Emperor of Switzerland?

Nuffy and Stew posting again?...

...Well, if you can call Stew's post a post. Still, one person recently suggested to me that "brevity is the soul of wit" (Ha!) so maybe Stew's become a minimalist.

Still, this is just another of the 12,482 reasons to vote for The Dictionary of Unfortunate Ideas for "Most Humorous Blog" at the 2007 Bloggies Awards. Today is the last day, so you don't have much time. Do it now. Do it! Now!!!

Please?

(Stew and Nuffy, what do you think? Too desperate sounding? Perhaps a bit more sophistication and nonchalance? Bribery?)

...and now a word from Stew

Ditto.

The Lostest Human Person on the Face of the Earth

Lost. Like an old rag dumped into the phantom tube of the infinite zone. I was lost. Wandering. Like a rag-draped old three-legged mule in the gritty endless ocean of the moon desert. For nigh on several months I have been the lostest person in the history of time. Loster than Benny Hinn's anointed satchel of power. Loster than Terrence Trent D'Arby's favorite purple felt hat. Loster than The Lost Saucer! I was the lostest object in the entire span of the macroverse. I was lost.

It all happened so mysteriously, and it is all Wikipedia's fault. For Carbindle's sake, I only went there to look up rare disorders and obsure cultural references. Instead, I found myself wandering in the myriad multi-trillion labyrinths of rawest knowledge. I turned left. There before me, everything I could ever want to know about extremophiles living in the butt crack of Zeus. I quickly turned right! Before me, copious paragraphs of wax-thick prose detailing Dr. John Bowlby's loss of pants during the Oxford debates of 1963 on the nature of war and human drippings. I scrambled up a ladder, hoping to escape the limitless parade of mind butter. Instead, I had clambered in the wisdom-cube of physisorption and Cyclic nucleotide-gated ion channels.

All about me, knowledge, factoids, rotting old rancid trivia, bloated droplet-oozing bags of ideas.

I screamed! Danny Devito's middle name is Michael! Sealand is the smallest nation in the world! James "Scotty" Doohan invented the Klingon language! You can survive in the vacuum of space if you are there for less than 90 seconds! Wigan pit brow girls scandalized Victorian society by wearing pants! Save me from this uncontainable manure flood of wisdom! Save me!

Only when I had read everything and learned all that there is to learn did I escape Wikipedia, and now I am free. Wiser in useless information than a hundred billion Mr. Miyagis, I have returned to the Dictionary, and now, my physical body having been transformed from flesh into an information pattern, I return to you, luscious ones. The time for knowing is upon you like a writhing oiled-up Mark Northover on a baked potato.

You are not prepared.

Our changing vocabulary

Whilst I was having a conversation a few days ago, it occurred to me that our language is constantly changing (assuming you're not currently speaking Esperanto). Namely, it is changing in ways that make it much more difficult to say something without someone thinking you are talking about sex. Whether it's the fact that "gay" now means "homosexual" rather than "flippantly happy," or the proliferation of Bond films, where just about everything has either a sexual or violent connotation, we are being conditioned to treat every statement as some clever variety of smut.

I especially recall sitting in a classroom once where the lecturer was discussing war and piracy and how the victors always came away with the "booty." The snickering, chuckles, and hand-gestures were near universal among the students, of a generation that only associates the word with sexual anatomy and regrettable early Jamie Foxx films.

As a public service, and also for my own amusement, I've put together a list, by no means complete, of terms and phrases that modern folk should learn to avoid due to their potential for double entendre. Avoid them like the clap.

• booty (pirates excepted, of course)
• Shiver me timbers!
• Kiss the black spot!
• Walk the plank!
• poopdeck

All right, apparently these first ones are all sayings that pirates use. No wonder people consider them sexual as well as social reprobates. Anyway, here is the non-pirate version of the list, which excludes obvious ones such as "tart," "fanny," "banana," and "anaconda":

• plough the fields
• shaft (including "mine the shaft," "you're bendin' the shafts," and the movie Shaft (both))
• wicket
• sausage (You'd think this one obvious but in Britain there's still a comfort zone for the word.)
• hole in one
• suction
• nub
• nibble
• all words rhyming with "lass"
• ride 'em cowboy
• Engelbert Humperdink (last name especially)
• Gird your loins!
• sod the pitch (particulary British, this one)
• estuary
• milk the cow
• Gingrich
• Pelosi
• spread the mayonaisse
• stuff the turkey (particularly American)
• hose
• Bilbo
• wand
• Howdy Doody (another American one)
• Ryder Cup
• liquor
• Ken Livingstone
• super-size
• pork-n-beans
• raconteur
• nasal spray
• sandwich
• sushi
• Phillips-head screwdriver
• guacamole
• spotted dick (very British, and an old joke to boot)
• jackhammer
• Titanic
• Leonard Nimoy
• leotard
• Gamera
• up the river
• finagle