Poem of the Day - The Workmans Friend

The Workmans Friend

by Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan)

When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night -
A pint of plain is your only man.

When money's tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt -
A pint of plain is your only man.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A pint of plain is your only man.

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare -
A pint of plain is your only man.

In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life -
A pint of plain is your only man.

More about Flann O'Brien.

The Stig

Top Gear, the greatest car show on earth, always introduces their mysterious but tame racing driver (The Stig) with a "Some say" intro line.

Some say that when he saw Star Wars, he thought it was a documentary.
Some say his pubes are fibre optic...and his pee is pure nitrogen
Some say he has an oil pump instead of a heart, and that he can see in ultraviolet
Some say he never blinks and that he roams around the woods at night foraging for wolves.
Some say he's wanted by the CIA and that he sleeps upside down, like a bat.
Some say that he appears on high value stamps in Sweden and that he can catch fish with his tongue.
Some say he is illegal in 17 US states and he blinks vertically.
Some say that his breath smells of magnesium and that his scared of bells.
Some say that he lives in a tree and that his sweat can be used to clean precious
metals.
Some say that his heart ticks like a watch and that his confused by stairs.
Some say that his voice can only be heard by cats and that he has two sets of knees.
Some say that his terrified of ducks and that there’s an airport in Russia named after him.
Some say that his skin has the texture of a dolphin’s, and where ever you are in the world if you tune your radios to 88.4, you can actually hear his thoughts.

World Ideologies as Explained by Reference to Cows

Feudalism

You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

Pure Socialism

You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. You have to take care of all the cows. The government gives you all the milk you need.

Bureaucratic Socialism

Your cows are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs the regulations say you should need.

Fascism

You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.

Pure Communism

You have two cows. Your neighbors help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.

Real World Communism

You share two cows with your neighbors. You and your neighbors bicker about who has the most "ability" and who has the most "need". Meanwhile, no one works, no one gets any milk, and the cows drop dead of starvation.

Russian Communism

You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the black market.

Perestroika

You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the Mafia takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the "free" market.

Cambodian Communism

You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.

Militarianism

You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.

Totalitarianism

You have two cows. The government takes them and denies they ever existed. Milk is banned.

Pure Democracy

You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.

Representative Democracy

You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.

British Democracy

You have two cows. You feed them sheeps' brains and they go mad. The government doesn't do anything.

Bureaucracy

You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.

Pure Anarchy

You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbors try to take the cows and kill you.

Pure Capitalism

You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

Capitalism

You don't have any cows. The bank will not lend you money to buy cows, because you don't have any cows to put up as collateral.

Environmentalism


You have two cows. The government bans you from milking or killing them.

Political Correctness

You are associated with (the concept of "ownership" is a symbol of the phallo centric, war mongering, intolerant past) two differently - aged (but no less valuable to society) bovines of non-specified gender.

Surrealism

You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

Ab absurdum

A Few More Douglas Adams Quotes

"The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned."
          - Answering Richard Dawkins' question 'What is it about science that really gets your blood running?'. as quoted in Richard Dawkins' Eulogy for Douglas Adams


"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be."
    - Speech at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge, UK, 1998

"The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth – when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass – the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another – particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish."
    - The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980

Your Guide to Geeks

(Click the image to enlarge it.)

John Green Quotes

"I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane. "
— Looking for Alaska

"Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself."

"Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future--you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college."
— Paper Towns

"Lucky Charms are like the vampires of breakfast cereal. They're magical, they're delicious, they're a little bit dangerous and bad for you. They initially make you feel great, but then over time you realize that maybe your relationship with Lucky Charms is just a little bit unhealthy and you start to think, 'Maybe I don't want to be in a long-term relationship with a breakfast cereal that tastes delicious but damages my health.' But then the Lucky Charms gets all stalker on you and for some reason you kind of like that. It makes you feel special. So yeah, you spend your life with Lucky Charms. That's awesome. That's a great way to... get diabetes."

The Victor