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PaperclipPerfector  5hr ago (text post)   148 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 17, 2026

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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I've been enjoying the new skits from SNL UK.

The critics were (understandably) wary at first, worrying that the show would struggle to find its own identity, but it seems to have done a good job. Highlights include DadSwap, what kind of Irish is your grandad, and the British Themed Pub song.

Hilarious excerpt from the URL Standard:

The application/x-www-form-urlencoded format is in many ways an aberrant monstrosity, the result of many years of implementation accidents and compromises leading to a set of requirements necessary for interoperability, but in no way representing good design practices. In particular, readers are cautioned to pay close attention to the twisted details involving repeated (and in some cases nested) conversions between character encodings and byte sequences. Unfortunately, the format is in widespread use due to the prevalence of HTML forms.

  • These two lines are real list items…

  • …using HTML's "li" element.

• These two lines are fake list items…

• …using HTML's "p" element.

Which is better?

  • Notice that, if you try to select the bullets preceding the real list items, you will fail. This is because the bullets are generated by CSS, not actually in the HTML. In contrast, the fake list items have real, selectable bullet characters that were typed manually.

  • On the other hand, the fake list items do not have the proper "listitem" accessibility role, while the real list items do. In the context of Markdown on this website, this problem cannot be fixed. In the context of raw HTML, it can be fixed by adding the role manually.

  • We can also consider parallelism. Every "section" element has a selectable "h" heading element. Shouldn't a list item's bullet character serve as an analogous pseudo-heading? The fake list items can satisfy this criterion if typed in raw HTML (not if filtered through Markdown), while the real list items cannot.

Yeah, many of the older browser standards are really bad. Lots of the newer stuff at least makes some vague attempt to be based on a semi-coherent theoretical model -- eg, the "new" CSS layout models like flex and grid are vastly superior to the older ones. But because browser standards are kind of like religious texts and are almost never deprecated, you end up in this wonky situation where you have to override the defaults on everything to get sane behavior because the default is to be compatible with whatever monstrosity some random guy came up with one afternoon in 1996. It also puts you in this horrible situation where all the low-entropy vocabulary is taken by the old, bad ideas, so doing the wrong thing is super convenient and easy, and doing the right thing is some arcane incantation that nobody can remember, e.g., the infamous "How do you center a div? Not with <center>!"

If you had a time machine, what would be your pettiest reason to use it?

I would get F.R. Hassler to adjust the US customary weights and measures so that an inch is exactly 25mm, a pound is exactly 480g and a pint is exactly 480ml. The pound would be the largest adjustment, but the US can afford to have the bigliest pound and no distinction between dry and fluid ounces.

I would get Antonin Dvorak to fix the musical equivalent of sudden erectile dysfunction in Symphony 9, Movement 4 by patching the main theme with the solo from Iron Maiden’s “Fear of the Dark.”

There's an Irish comedian called Shane Clifford who said that, if he could go back in time and kill one person, he wouldn't go for the obvious choice (Adolf Hitler) but rather a left-field choice: Leonard Cohen. Now, Clifford is a great admirer of Leonard Cohen, and loves his music, but if Clifford went back in time and smothered Cohen in his cradle, at least he'd never have to listen to a young busker butchering "Hallelujah" every time he walks down a pedestrianised street in the city centre.

Following the same reasoning, I think I might kill Dolores O'Riordan, lead singer of the Cranberries. A song she wrote for the band, "Zombie", was recently voted the greatest Irish song of all time, beating out such indisputable, timeless classics as "With or Without You" and "One" by U2, "The Boys are Back in Town" and "Dancing in the Moonlight" by Thin Lizzy, "Brown-Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison, "Fairytale of New York" by the Pogues among countless others. You simply cannot fathom how much I despise "Zombie", nor how omnipresent it is among buskers or acoustic guitar dickheads in tourist-trap bars. The song sounds like a fifteen-year-old who got a guitar and a Boss DS-1 for Christmas and, after a month's practising, attempted to write a grunge song. There's no groove to speak of, the lead guitar tone is shockingly thin and tinny for what I can only assume was a very expensive album to record, and O'Riordan's staccato vocal tics (grating at the best of times) reach their nadir in the chorus. Not only is it not the greatest Irish song ever, it's not even the greatest song by the Cranberries: "Dreams", for one, is obviously superior.

First of all, you can't prevent the creation of Zombie because then Bad Wolves wouldn't have been able to cover it in 2018, a cover which is better than the original. And also, if you killed Dolores O'Riordan, we wouldn't have Linger, and I can't abide such an outcome.

I would put a cornucopia on the fruit of the loom logo and never speak of it again.

You did -- I removed it right after you left.

@ToaKraka, you're the resident civil engineering autist enthusiast, I need your help.

There used to be a page on Wikipedia about converting a typical American square street grid into a grid that requires no traffic lights.

Basically, you convert streets running east-west into alternating one-way streets and partially block off streets running north-south so that the grid looks like a brick wall (and you swap the lanes on half of them). The final result is a lot of T-intersections without dangerous left turns.

However, I cannot find a single trace of this on Wikipedia any more, and LLMs have failed to come up with a searchable name for this grid. You are my only hope.

Is this the kind of system you mean?

There are also couplets

Is this the kind of system you mean?

I can't see the picture because Imgur is being an ass about VPNs, but from the description it sounds like it. I don't know if it features drive-on-left streets, but I don't remember if they were a feature of the original design or something I hallucinated.

This sounds like the "intersection median island" or "forced-turn island" traffic-calming measure.

It wasn't a traffic-calming measure, the goal was to increase the average speed by eliminating red light stops.

I guess there's also the RCUT (restricted-crossing U-turn or reduced-conflict U-turn) intersection.

  • FHWA: 1 2

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