Dedicated to my late brave, beautiful and silly mummy, Debra Ross. I love you mumster.

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Category archive for funny

Because archives are so much easier than having just hundreds of posts on the home page. I learned that the hard way.

Ten fresh new Rubenerd Fun Facts!

Fun Facts!

WARNING: I didn’t make any of these facts up, these are all true facts that I’m submitting as part of my application to become a Singaporean and/or Australian overseas representative of the American Federal Bureau of Miscellaneous Information.

In light of my recent purchase of David Letterman’s Late Show Fun Facts, I’ve been inspired to relay some Fun Facts of my own. I’m nothing compared to Dave and his writers, but the one advantage I do have is being able to use hyperlinks to point people to relevant information. Think of this as a knockoff HyperCard version of the magnificently written Late Show Fun Facts.

Here are 10 Rubenerd Fun Facts to get us started. This could turn into a series (I can hear Neil Neil groaning!).

  1. The world’s only recorded sighting of an orange beetroot was by a person wearing tinted glasses.

  2. Jim Kloss once owned 300 hectares of tundra in northern Siberia, but had to give it up when he couldn’t read the tax forms.

  3. Right handed people find it just as difficult to write with their feet as the ambidextrous.

  4. Australia and Austria are the only two countries to have the same first five letters. Tough luck Slovakia and Slovenia!

  5. Custard, hair tonic and transmission fluid are chemically identical.

  6. Headaches aren’t real, they’re all in your head.

  7. Labradors aren’t really smarter than other breeds, they’re just better at feigning interest.

  8. More people have been filmed falling out of office chairs than hot air balloons.

  9. The current dulcimer record is held by Esther Golton who played continuously for over 19 weeks before the instrument caught fire.

  10. The ice that builds up on the inside of old fridges is more toxic than arsenic.

  11. A brick is denser than a full can of paint, but both feel the same when dropped on external bodily appendages.

Even Ferraris need to be pushed!

Even Ferraris need to be pushed!

That of course is my fabulously ridiculous father in Singapore. :-)

Roast beef sandwiches for underage cats

An underage cat having trouble eating roast beef.
An underage cat having trouble eating roast beef. Photo by Daniel Mayer

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. In light of the fact I have been going through the source code of a 10,000+ line C application on and off for the last four hours, I decided to take a much needed break and proceeded to appeal to my loyal Twitter followers for a topic I could briefly discuss. Neil O’Carroll responded to my call with the following tweet:

Want to do a cat song for 121, but wifey still sleeping upstairs, don’t think she’d appreciate guitar/harmonica sounds from below.

That’s clearly the wrong tweet. Neil O’Carroll responded to my call with the following tweet:

@rubenerd Topic suggestion: Blog about roast beef sandwiches for underage cats.

First of all, I would like to send Neil O’Carroll a sincere mail bomb… I’m so sorry, a sincere thank you, for giving me the opportunity to discuss this incredibly important topic that I’m sure concerns a great deal of us.

Let me be blunt. Please. I ran over my pencil sharpener with my motor scooter. We are living in uncertain times economically, militarily and economically, all three of which are contributing to a severe downturn in the abilities of pet owners and feline fanciers to indulge their cat’s desires for cooked meats. The situation has become so critical that beef consumers in particular have become the latest victim acute shortages; and none have been so negatively affected as those who prefer to roast their beef for their cats, felines and other feline related cats. Economically, militarily and economically.

One positive side effect of this whole debacle however has been the that the issue of underage cats has once again been given the opportunity to be scritinised. Unfortunately our discourse in the past has been limited to roasted meats being fed to adult and adolescent cats, leaving out completely the issue of feeding beef of the roasted meat variety to underage cats which lack the necessary dental and digestive capability to chew and eat such meat with such parts of their bodies respectively.

ASIDE: My computer is telling me that I’ve misspelled "scrutinised". It claims it should be spelled "scrutinized". I would be willing to to spell it with a z, but that’s not how you spell "scrutinised". You can see the dillema I’m facing. Great, now its saying I’ve misspelled dilemma.

Asahina Mikuru with a very cute... damn it, you were supposed to be holding a moose!
Asahina Mikuru with a very cute… damn it, you were supposed to be holding a moose!

I put it to you ladies and genteman that the time has come to genetically engineer cats that are able to eat roasted meats of a beefy nature much earlier in the life cycles. If we refuse to acknowledge this dire need soon, I fear we may be letting down entire future generations of cats. No other source of food is as high in vitamin C, iron, folate, mercury, arsenic, vitamin a+, vitamin w- as roasted chicken, and I’m sure a similar statement can be made for other roasted meats, in particular the one which I’ve already forgotten I started talking about but which I hope dear reader you have not.

You see, at this point as a reader of this post you have a distinct advantage over I, the writer, for nine distinct reasons, eight of which are meaningless and stupid. The remaining advantage is this: as a reader you have the ability to either read this post in its entirety, or merely skim it and claim at a later date that you have read it when the topic of Ruben Schade and his very informative fridge magnets and blog come up at housewarming parties which may or may not be unfounded given that you may have been living at your current address for a number of years. As a writer I do not have this luxury, I must sit through the entirety of the pointless rambling nonsense because I am the one creating it. I cannot skim through creating something: George W. Bush tried to do that with a new, un regulated subprime mortgage buying-and-selling banking business and suffice to say it didn’t work.

So to all of those reading this post I ask you this question: why has your refrigerator but two doors when clearly the amount of material you have forced into it warrants the need for several more? I also ask you to consider the plight of underage cats and their inability to eat roast beef, or indeed any other roasted meat while we’re on the subject. Because after all, isn’t there a little underage cat in all of us?

Important philosophical post on Barack Obama

This really made my morning!

Provided by Terri Noble on today’s Whole Wheat Radio collaboration page. Well actually it was yesterday’s collaboration page for us here, but let’s not make this time-zone whatnot any more confusing than it already is. I only just got used to using daylight savings again.

Lesson 3 in grilled cheese sandwich observation

Welcome to your third grilled cheese sandwich observation lesson. If you missed our first lesson, or second lesson, feel free to refer back to them before proceeding. And as usual, feel free to take notes.

As far as I know this is not a grilled cheese sandwich, and quite frankly it concerns me that you think it is. Please seek counseling.

This is not a grilled cheese sandwich
Photo by Wnmunews on Wikimedia Commons

Sophisticated MacBook Pro cooling consulting solution

My sophisticated MacBook Pro cooling system

What happens when your MacBook Pro has been busy compiling code for several hours and has started melting into the table? Put a box fan next to it. Not only is it an incredibility sophisticated solution, inexpensive and stylish, but it actually works. You read it here folks.

See Jim, I’m a person who provides consulting solutions too!

Temperature gauge showing 74 degrees Temperature gauge showing 74 degrees

On RSS, Michael Moore, Jim Kloss and Taxis

Bowling for Columbine promotional poster While I don’t entirely agree 100% with his methods of delivering facts, or even some of his assertions, I have a pretty positive view of Michael Moore and find his films incredibly thought provoking and wildly entertaining at the same time. I can remember going with the whole of my year 10 English class to see Bowling for Columbine at the Lido Cinemas on Orchard Road in Singapore, and later seeing Fahrenheit 9/11… twice.

ASIDE: I’ve probably permanently lost half my American readers with the admission that I like Michael Moore. I’m tempted to say that the better half have stayed, but that would dig me down even deeper so for the sake of preserving my own life I think I’ll just leave it right there. I like Mike!

Anyway it seems Mighty Mike (no I’m not talking about our state premier Mike Rann!) may have the goods, but his site administrators are stuck in a Web 1.0 mindset. Heavens almighty how I hate the "Web 2.0" moniker!

Jim Kloss himself! In a tip of the hat to my presence, Jim Kloss from Whole Wheat Radio has stated including some nerdier links in his Google Reader weblog and pointed me to the fact that MichaelMoore.com… doesn’t even have an RSS feed! Come on Mike, you’re nerdy readers need this! Even Fox News has RSS feeds!

For what it’s worth, as an XML guy I infinitely prefer Atom to RSS but I know many readers still choke on it. Alas we’re stuck again with a standard that’s good enough, and despite Atom being superior it’s not a compelling enough upgrade for enough people. I could go on talking about Betamax and Plan 9 and United Linux and waffle irons

Asa Shigure
Taximetre plus SG$50.00! Where to?

And why don’t we have pink taxis? In Adelaide they’re all white (get it… they’re all white? They’re all right? Right? White? Oh come on, that was funny!), in Singapore they’re mostly yellow and blue with a few reds and teals, why not pink? Think of it, you could paint a really cute anime character on the side, hire cute people in ridiculous cosplay costumes to drive… I know I (as well as other desperately lonely nerds) would pay a huge premium for such a service! You could even update the nerds who would want to travel in such a taxi by creating an RSS feed that contains the locations of the entire fleet at any given time! It would work perfectly!

RSS, Jim Kloss, Atom, Betamax, Pink, Google, Michael Moore, Shuffle, Whole Wheat Radio, Plan 9, Bowling for Fahrenheits on Shaw Road in Orchard Theater… come on people it makes perfect sense!

Palin pick backfired amongst younger voters!

Sarah Palin in Alaska
Now would be a great time visit Alaska, because Sarah Palin isn’t there!

Well look at that, it appears among the young voters the stunt was supposed to enthrall and energise in the first place, John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate has appeared to have backfired.

According to an article on the Adelaide Now website (the online version of our local newspaper), a Harvard University survey of 2400 people aged 18 to 24 found that while 25% claimed the decision would make them more likely to vote for John McCain, a whopping 40% claimed the decision made them less likely. That’s right, for every person who was swayed to vote by the decision, it backfired on two.

By comparison, Barack Obama’s selection of Joe Biden marginally increased support for his ticket.

My generation has been getting a bum rap for a long time now for our disorderly conduct, self centred nature and lack of respect for our elders… you know, all the charges the generation before last labelled our parents with too. It’s good to see that in the sea of silliness that is politics there are some people within my generation’s ranks at least who posses a certain degree of inaccurately-named common sense.

I hate to admit it, but this story gave me a genuine case of schadenfreude! John McCain isn’t exactly a great choice, but Sarah Palin is a joke, plain and simple. And before you say that I’m a joke for saying it, I admit I’m shamelessly copying Salman Rushdie’s description.