SuperEgo and Ego walk into a bar; the bartender says, “I’m gonna need to see some ID.”
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I’m breeding racing deer: trying to make a quick buck.
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My roommate said he couldn’t be friends with someone who was so bad at navigation.
I was so mad, I packed all my things and right.
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I was going to add a weak vampire joke but I decided not to — it needed a little more bite.
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Best to avoid jokes that suck.
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I tried to spend the morning balancing my checkbook, but it kept falling off my chin.
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How did I get from Armenia to Iraq? I ran.
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That last one reminds me of a punchline that went,
I threw Iraq and Iran.
Can’t remember the rest of the joke.
And here’s on for the vampire joke pile:
Peasant A: The count’s gone mad!
Peasant B: You sure?
"Peasant A: "Yes, he’s totally batty!
Also, I feel like there’s a blind joke in a vampire’s lack of reflection somewhere. And a joke about vampires and all the garlic in italian(-American) food.
A woman goes to visit Dracula. Says she’s gotten depressed since becoming a vampire because she can’t see herself in the mirror anymore.
Dracula says: “I went through the same thing once. You just need to adjust to being invisible in mirrors. The great illusionist David Copperfield is in town. He’s amazing. He can even make the Statue of Liberty disappear with mirrors. Go see him.”
“But Dracula, I am the Statue of Liberty.”
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I googled “lost medieval errand boy”, but it said “this page cannot be found”.
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6:30 is my favourite time of day, hands down.
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Big news: scientists have announced that the great work of the Earth is complete! Our massive planet-sized computer has finally discovered the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, whose answer was first calculated aeons ago by Deep Thought.
The question itself, though, was somewhat underwhelming.
“What is ‘6 7’?”
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Combining a number meme older than me with a modern number meme that’s kind of stupid is surprisingly funny.
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Seen on Mastodon:
A coprolite isn’t my favorite kind of fossil, but it’s a solid number two.
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Groan!
Is it weird that I now wonder if fossilized urine is a thing to make the obvious number 1 joke? On a tangential note, I understand animals have been preserved mid-fart in amber…
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Not the same way as coprolites; the problem with liquids is they just don’t stay in one place long enough to fossilize. (There are possibly some fossilized impressions of the traces urine left in soil, though.)
The Romans thought it was a thing, though! It was widely believed until the 1600s that lynx urine crystallized into a translucent yellow gemstone called “lyngurion” or “lyngurium”, which could attract lightweight objects (straw, leaves, thin cloth) if it was held near them. The reason it was so rare was because lynxes deliberately buried their urine so they couldn’t be tracked by it, making it hard for humans to find.
In the 1600s, people got better at studying lynxes, and figured out that lyngurium was just amber—fossilized tree sap. The fact that it attracts straw and cloth is still important, though: amber is one of the earliest ways humans found to build up a static charge (like when you rub a balloon against your hair), and thus our modern word “electric” comes from the Greek word for “amber”.
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Interesting; I had once heard that Icelandic, instead of Icelandifying the word “electricity”, created their own word which translates “amber-power”. But I didn’t know the role of amber behind the word electricity itself.
Mhm! Some languages love adopting words directly from other languages (English, Japanese) while others despise it and avoid it at any cost (Icelandic, Mandarin). So Icelandic uses rafmagn (amber-power) and Mandarin uses diànqì (lightning-chi), while English adapted the term from Greek and Japanese from Chinese.
(And then there’s French, where the government really wants it to reject foreign loans, but the people actually speaking the language are happy to accept them. When this happens, the people always win.)
When a word is taken directly from one language into another like this, it’s called a “loanword”; the alternative, where you break it down into pieces and translate the pieces individually, is called a “calque” (like how ça va sans dire was translated word-by-word into English as “it goes without saying”).
For an easy-to-remember example, “loanword” is a calque of German Lehnwort (lehnen “to loan” + Wort “word”), while “calque” is a loanword from French calque “tracing”. How’s that for a high-effort dad joke?
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Well, that explains electricity’s association with the color yellow when natural lightning is usually white or a llight blue. And the situation with fossil pee is about what I expected…hard to imagine a stagnant pee puddle of sufficient size sticking around long enough to dry out to produce sizeable crystals and then those crystals surviving without being redissolved or ground to dust… I understand limestone is a product of evaporating solution, but we’re talking things like a constant drip in a cave or an entire lake evaporating for sizeable limestone deposits if I’m understanding the geology correctly.
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