{"id":314,"date":"2007-06-06T13:39:11","date_gmt":"2007-06-06T17:39:11","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/?p=314"},"modified":"2007-06-06T13:46:12","modified_gmt":"2007-06-06T17:46:12","slug":"five-funny-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=314","title":{"rendered":"Five Funny Moments"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why five? I don’t know, perhaps because I have five fingers on one hand. Actually, I have five fingers on both <\/em>hands, but I really only care to count with the one a the moment. I’m just feeling a little random (as opposed to when I usually feel very random) and very sleep deprived, and decided to share these five with you:<\/p>\n

1) Mandlebrot Set, by Jonathan Coulton. I laughed so hard when he came to the line “Mandlebrot’s in heaven… at least he will be when he’s dead. Right now he’s still alive and teaching math at Yale.” I laughed doubly hard when Wayfare heard it and couldn’t stop giggling either. She didn’t really seem to share my appreciation for Jonathan Coulton (I’ve loved him since I first heard Code Monkey) until that moment.<\/p>\n

2) “What kind of pirate?”<\/p>\n

3) The Great Outdoors<\/a><\/i> with John Candy, Dan Akroyd, and others. I was a kid at the time, but when I first saw it and the shotgun blew the fur off the bear’s backside, I laughed for over 10 minutes straight. It was, as far as I can remember, my first uncontrollable, unstoppable laughing fit (that had no tickling involvement). I nearly fainted. It was so funny that even on the second, third, and fourth viewings I laughed hysterically (though not as much). <\/p>\n

4) Blub by Dave Barry.<\/a> This was my first experience with Dave Barry, who I found very funny right up until his retirement. This is still my favourite story from him, and I first read it as I was getting ready to go on the Grade 12 Jamaica scuba diving trip. In the middle of the night, with everyone in the house asleep I read it, and literally laughed out loud. “Motate” entered my vocabulary at that point (followed shortly afterwards by “Moseby”). Related to this, though separated by vast tracts of time, space, and media format, is the appearance of the seagulls in Finding Nemo. “Mine?” “Mine?” reminded me of Dave Barry’s fish, as well as being incredibly hilarious and spot-on for sea gulls.<\/p>\n

5) Douglas Adams. He wrote a lot of stuff that I love, and still laugh at even after reading it many times over. It’s hard to pick just one quotation to serve as an example, but perhaps “Very strange people, physicists – in my experience the ones who aren’t dead are in some way very ill”. Which, of course, I read while in the depths of third year physics. Or “The light works,” he said, indicating the window, “the gravity works,” he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. “Anything else we have to take our chances with.” Which so perfectly describes life in a lab.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why five? I don’t know, perhaps because I have five fingers on one hand. Actually, I have five fingers on both hands, but I really only care to count with the one a the moment. I’m just feeling a little random (as opposed to when I usually feel very random) and very sleep deprived, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}