Humor scrapbook, part I

Before there were blogs, there were scrapbooks.  Like many people in the pre-internet era, I saved clippings of interesting or humorous items in envelopes and folders and desk drawers, and eventually transferred them into "magnetic" photo albums.  Now I've reached the "downsizing" phase of my life, and have to decide what to do with the material.  I don't want to drag the albums around with me forever, but some of the material is too good to just throw in the dumpster.

So, I'm scanning the pages into TYWKIWDBI.  This is the first of what will eventually be ten weekly posts with material from my old "humor" scrapbook.  The content varies from priceless to junky (especially in the case of humor, which often doesn't age well), but there's no time to sort things out or curate the content (and in any case, old "magnetic" photo albums don't lend themselves to the rearranging of paper content, which starts to shred when you try to remove or rearrange it.)

The text on all the types of "scrapbook" pages can be very difficult to read. One possible workaround is to right-click on a page to open it in a new tab, then zoom the image on that tab.

Reposted from 2020 because we're even more in need of humor than we were five years ago.

Blogcation over

I was sorry to say goodbye to family and friends "up at the lake."  I was serenaded nightly by loons, so I hope I can find some way to embed a 30-second recording of them yodeling.  Not sure how to do that.

I need to recombobulate for a day or two, then will resume blogging after the weekend.

Blogcation

My cousin's place on Girl Lake, Longville, Minnesota.  The cabin is a legacy site, so the setback from the lake was grandfathered (nobody can build this close to the water nowadays).  

No blogging for two weeks - and no curation of comments.  Feel free to comment on old posts, but I won't review them for publication until I get back.

The "cosmic calendar" - depicted visually and verbally

This subject has been filmed before, including perhaps by Carl Sagan? but it's worth emphasizing.  Posting this now so that later I can add extended text from Orbit 13 of Orbital, which has I believe the best text description of the cosmic calendar.

Addendum:  I'll add the text description now so I can quit blogging for a couple weeks.  With apologies to the author/publisher - I really shouldn't excerpt so much, but here goes...

Too many people just can't recognize satire

Embedded above is a screencap from a post on X that I saw reposted on Facebook, where there were thousands of comments, the vast majority of which seriously argued that this is not a walkable community.  Others asked why you would walk miles to a gas station, and some suggested walking seven miles to a liquor store would be a good idea.  These must be the same people who become congressmen believing stories from The Onion.

Lots more similar posts from @bankertobuilder.

North Korean postage stamps created as instruments of propaganda

Rainbow airglow with visible gravity waves

The original image (at APOD of course) explains the phenomenon, and you can mouse over that image for additional information about the constellations and gravity waves.

Why "covered parking" might be designed like this

A fragmented but lucid discussion at the whatisit subreddit entry.

The disturbing childhood of R. Crumb

Those who came of age in the 1970s will remember Fritz the Cat and other cartoons by Robert Crumb.  Here is an abbreviated summary of his developmental years:

"One of five kids, Crumb was born in 1943 to Chuck, an enlisted Marine, and Bea, a diner waitress. In the span of a few years, Chuck’s posts took the family from Pennsylvania to Iowa to California, with each new place less stimulating than the last. When the children acted out, Chuck spared not the rod. (He was also suspected of being closeted: in the early Sixties, a family friend claimed to have seen him cruising in a public restroom.) For her part, Bea had already had a baby with her stepbrother when she was fifteen; her parents covered it up by claiming the child as their own. She had a weakness for amphetamines, often chain-smoked in front of the television, and was twice committed to mental hospitals. Robert once found a suicide note she’d left in the family car. His older brother Charles went further than that; he tried to kill himself by guzzling furniture polish when he was in his late twenties. Charles got beat up a lot in high school and liked to smash bottles and slash tires; he never moved away from home and spent his last decades heavily medicated, before taking his own life in 1992. Sandra, one of two sisters, married a close friend of Robert’s named Marty; when she became pregnant, she supposedly told Marty, in Nadel’s words, that “she’d fucked everyone, including the pizza delivery boy, and wanted a divorce.” (Robert experienced his first orgasm while wrestling Sandra when they were teenagers.) Carol, the other sister, seems to have led a comparatively quiet life and keeps to herself. Finally there’s Maxon, the youngest brother, an epileptic who refused to treat his seizures. When he wasn’t assaulting women, he embraced asceticism. “Every six weeks since the late 1970s,” Nadel writes, “he has passed a twenty-nine-foot strip of cotton through his gastrointestinal system, in the mouth and out the anus, a cleansing that takes about a week to complete.”

That passage from a review of the new book Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life in the current issue of Harper's.

Bike tunnel in Switzerland

Awesome.  Looking forward to comments from readers.

The ultimate legacy of our lives

"Assuming 128 grams a day and a lifetime in the vicinity of seventy-five years, you’ll leave behind around three and a half metric tons of feces when you die. The volume of your urine will be closer to thirty-eight thousand liters, a bit larger than a standard twenty-foot shipping container and about double the accumulated volume of your flatulence. You’ll have made hundreds of liters of tears, though even for the most emotive of individuals, the portion derived from feelings will represent a minuscule fraction of that number. For all the hullabaloo surrounding ejaculation, the total semen production of even the most alacritous masturbator could be contained handily by a shelf of two-liter soda bottles, and though a period sometimes seems as though it will never end, you could only barely paint a closet with the three or so liters of menses produced during a lifetime. You’ll have made a great deal of mucus, though, close to a hundred thousand liters. And when Atropos snips the thread of your life, the hair from your head, measured as a single strand, will stretch more than three and a half million feet. This is what you will leave behind.

Of course, you’ll leave behind another thing: your body itself. It’s uncomfortable to think of the body in this way, in the same category as feces and hair, but despite the desires of countless theologians, the trajectory of your body’s final journey will be less like the fiery passages of the stars and more akin to those meandering pilgrimages taken by your feces and urine, your blood and vomit and tears. It will become something that must be dealt with, something that must be disposed of. We may disagree over the existence and nature of an afterlife, but not about the stench of rotting flesh...

What, if anything, remains? In the most purely physical sense, your body contains about five hundred megajoules of energy, enough to run a sixty-watt light bulb for one hundred days or to drive a midsize sedan a mile, or, to put things in dietary terms, roughly 120,000 calories, the equivalent of a hundred Big Mac combos. This energy, stored in the form of chemical bonds—namely as molecules of glucose, protein, and fatty acids—will remain intact after you die. It needs only to be converted into adenosine triphosphate to continue its chemical journey in the shape of another. Since no single creature will be capable of digesting your body in its entirety, the scavenging of this energy will take the form of a vast buffet. The glucose in your thigh muscle might be catabolized via glycolysis by a rat while a fungus might hydrolyze the proteins in your skin. The real prize at this feast, however, will be those molecules that most efficiently store energy, your fatty acids, so that the caloric orgy reaches its apotheosis in that fattiest of all your organs, that thing which seemed most you: your brain..."

Excerpts from "Mortal Coils," in turn excerpted from Earthly Materials by Cutter Wood, via the April 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine.  Posted for me for future reference re the meaning of life and humankind's role in the cosmos.

"Sami Blood"

This is an excellent movie.

Sami Blood is set in Sweden in the 1930s and concerns a 14-year-old girl who experiences prejudice at a nomad school for Sami children, and decides to escape her town and disavow her Sami heritage.

The film premiered at the 73rd edition of the Venice Film Festival in the Venice Days section, in which it was awarded the Europa Cinemas Label Award and the Fedeora Award for Best Debut Director.

Reposted from 2018, because today I rewatched the movie with new eyes, after having discovered that the "Fin-" part of my Finseth family name indicates that some ancestor had been from the Sami ethnic group. 

The movie is a bit dark because it examines prejudices the southern (Uppsala) Swedes had (1930s) against the subarctic Samis - prejudices that starkly resemble ones the Europeans in North America had against the Native peoples there.  The acting was superb - especially by the lead - Lene Cecilia Sparrok - who is a Norwegian Southern Sami reindeer herder/actress. 

An observation on political dialogue - updated

"We know they are lying.
They know they are lying.
They know we know they are lying.
We know they know we know they are lying.

But they are still lying."

I found this quotation in Scribal Terror back in 2021 (it's sad that blog is no longer active).  At the time it was attibuted to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn in his 1973 work, The Gulag Archipelago.

After I posted the quotation here, an anonyous reader found documentation that this attribution is spurious and that the source is apocryphal.  The discussion at the Quote Investigator site is worth reading, and the sentiment expressed in the quotation is worth preserving, so I'll leave the quotation here.

Map of British English dialects

Discussion at the source includes the definition of a dialect, the inaccuracy of borders, and the meaning of "British."

Rotate your insulin injection sites

These accumulations of subcutaneous amyloid developed on the lower abdominal wall of a 47-year-old man at the sites of his repeated insulin injections.

"In this case, surgical resection was performed for cosmesis. Histopathological assessment showed amorphous eosinophilic deposits, positive Congo red staining, and apple-green birefringence under polarized light. The specimen also stained positive for thioflavin T under fluorescence."