44 posts tagged “funny”
Is there anyone in the world as creative as kids trying to get out of something they don't want to do? The Mile End Centre for Sports and Exercise Medicine ran a study to measure activity levels in 200 East London children, but when they analysed the results they were baffled.
They asked the children to wear pedometers to measure their activity levels, and couldn't understand why some of the most active children were obese. Until they found out the children had attached their pedometers to their pet dogs.
Overweight? Apparently. Ingenious? Definitely.
There is no sensible way for me to explain this, so I will say only that if you are in need of some laughter, you must check out Antonia's video.
This is a clear example of not knowing that you wanted something until you get it - how could I have known that a woman and her daughter in hastily improvised beards, yearning for the sea, would be the thing to make me laugh til I cried?
Guardian readers can be a bolshy lot, so it's a brave company that submits to their ethical blog Q&A. Howies dealt with it pretty gracefully when they were turned over, but you'd have thought it would have given Neal's Yard Remedies some idea of what they might be in for. Apparently not...
It's impossible to say at what point they decided this had all been a terrible idea - was it when a reader asked:
Do you see no problem with trying to be 'ethical' while at the same time selling snake oil for a living?
or perhaps:
I was wondering what your policy was on dealing with the situation of one of your stocked alternative medicines actually being proven to work. Would you discontinue it? After all, it wouldn't be alternative any more, just medicine.
or maybe:
I've been soaking a £20 note in a bathfull of water for the last few days, is it ok to pay for an order using my new homeopathic money? I now seem to have rather a lot of it.
We'll never know.
I still haven't given in to the lure of twitter, but stories like this make it ever more appealing - #Radio4minus1letter. After all, who wouldn't want to listen to
The Sipping Forecast. Nice cup of tea. Milk, veering. Sugar, 1 or 2. Biscuits later. Good.
or
Desert Island Diss (a program about insulting people stranded on desert islands)
In this Saturday's Guardian Weekend magazine, various celebrities were interviewed by children. It makes for a fantastic read - full set here. They got some much more interesting answers out of the interviewees than many celeb profilers usually manage, and I also found myself warming to people I don't usually expect to like.
I particularly enjoyed Richard Hammond being interviewed by 7 year old Kirsty Stark. I would also have loved to hear the answers to some of the questions they didn't get to ask.
After all, who hasn't wanted to ask Lewis Hamilton "What do you do if you need a wee while you're racing?" or Roger Federer "Is Gillette really the best a man can get?".
The wonderful Regret the Error has a roundup of 2008 errors, mistakes and general screw-ups. I think my favourite is Dave Barry apologising for a spelling error in his Miami Herald column:
In yesterday’s column about badminton, I misspelled the name of Guatemalan player Kevin Cordon. I apologize. In my defense, I want to note that in the same column I correctly spelled Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarak, Poompat Sapkulchananart and Porntip Buranapraseatsuk. So by the time I got to Kevin Cordon, my fingers were exhausted.
(via Bookslut)
If you're feeling in need of an antidote to the 'painful lives' section of bookshops, David Hepworth has found it:
Fantastic. I am fully on board, and thinking of heading off to Waterstones with a label-maker.
Very funny Caitlin Moran piece on keeping diaries. Not only do they tend to be shatteringly banal, but teenage diaries are also incredibly embarrassing:
Reading my teenage diaries now, there are things that - even 20 years later - cause me to get up briskly from my chair and walk around the room, making pained, opened-mouthed noises; quite similar to those I used during labour.
“I now fancy David Baddiel more than anyone on the planet - but it's not like the stupid obsession I had with Nigel Kennedy.” “Drew a picture of Edward Scissorhands and cried.”
I'm sorry. I'm going to have to run up and down the garden for a minute.
Imagine if everyone kept a diary during their teenage years. When time-travel is finally invented, the space-time continuum would just be cluttered with mortified adults travelling back to 1987 to give their lumpen, adolescent selves a slap."
I have (intermittently) kept diaries for years, so whilst I love the immediacy they give to memories that would be otherwise forgotten, I am also familiar with the horrified yelp as you read a particularly embarrassing paragraph. Comedy gold.
McSweeney's have Hamlet's facebook news feed. It is very funny. That is all.
(via Bookslut)
It's been a bit of a tough week so far. But this makes up for everything:
I may never stop laughing.
