160401 No joke

Well, it's been a while but I read a news report that the Chinese government's official news agency released an announcement to the effect that April Fool's day is a distinctly Western tradition at odds with Chinese culture and should be shunned by loyal Chinese citizens. It's reception has generally been that people are assuming that the announcement itself is an April Fool's joke. Could be, although the Chinese government are hardly known for their sense of humor. Still, this means one of two things must be possible: either the report was real and humor is being seriously threatened for a big chunk of the world's population; or the report was a joke and the Chinese government has therefore told more jokes than this blog for the calendar year. In either case, I can not allow this to stand. I've got to return to some semblance of productivity and I've got to do it in the form of a grand gesture. Or a hand gesture. No, no, a grand gesture would be better. What I need to do is unearth the great lost plays of William Shakespeare. I'll release their titles, one every day, for the rest of April. All that remains now is to make up 29 unseen Shakespeare plays.

110520- A joke

.....If you live in the U.S. you may have heard about the fundamentalist Christian who predicted that Armageddon begins tomorrow. (Can you believe he's a self-taught biblical scholar?) According to his interpretation of scripture, the devout will be taken to heaven in the Rapture and the rest of us will stand in the corner and think about what we've done until we all burst into flames in October. You see, one of the problems with self-taught scholars is that they're not always aware of the idiosyncrasies of ancient languages. The books of the Bible have gone through multiple translations, after all, and not everyone is familiar with all of the "i-before-e" type exceptions to the rules in Aramaic and Babylonian. I suspect the whole thing is just a matter of misspelling. Considering how many people in the Bible Belt are overweight, it's more likely that they'll experience the Rupture.

100513- A joke

.....This month's book selection is a young adult novel about four teenage girls who share a pair of pants. It's called "Sisterhood of the Roving Yeast Infection".