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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2936 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 20, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Apparently, back in the day, random aphorisms were very frequently used to fill up empty space in the corners of magazines.

And in general, so were random factoids. Here's an example from James Lileks's blog:

[Below a newspaper comic] Queen Elizabeth was the first English sovereign to use a fork

Note the little fact: one of those things newspapers used to fill up white space. I will always remember one in the Fargo Forum: “Ants will go to any lengths to get water.” Seemed rather ominous.

That line was cut short, it's supposed to read “Ants will go to any lengths to get water on Mars."

That's right, did you think it was just human curiosity that pushed us to the stars? You thought humans were clamouring to travel millions of miles through an environment that kills us almost on contact, just to play at subsistence farming on a dead ball of dirt? Or was it The National Aeronautics and Space Ants?!

Did you really think Elon Musk made Space X because he's a billionaire man child raised by tv? His parents just coincidentally gave him a nonsense name which is an obvious and lazy anagram of 'melon us, k'*? Of course not! He is actually four ants puppeting an extraordinarily elaborate balloon 'animal'. The real reason he bought Twitter was to return it to the 140 character limit to push humans like you and me (I'm human) to use texting language.

*Ants, it might surprise some to learn, having invented texting during the signing of the treaty of Westphalia after realising worker humans like you and me (not an ant) only have one antennae and a strict social taboo against communicating with it. it didn't catch on however, until we invented mobile phones - which gave us antennae we could communicate with.

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