For current political commentary, see the daily political notes.
Making a pun on someone's name is called onomastication — and the victim usually says, or at least thinks, "Oh, no!".
"Why can't you keep the ship from drifting?" asked the owner. The captain replied, "Some of the equipment is cantankerous."
I found my female sibling weeping, and asked her, "Having a crisis?"
How broad are the effects of increased CO2 on the ocean? They stretch from cost to cost.
Zucchini: a two-piece bathing suit for animals.
The Pioneer Award I received is a lot nicer than the pie-in-face Award that Bill Gates received at about the same time.
A drunkard took shelter on a full moon night in a large windowless building. Alas for him, it was a werehouse.
My friend had a few acacia trees which flowered acacionally.
Why is the English common law so concerned with property rights? Because the English gentry insisted on proper tea rites every afternoon.
In most of the world, gamblers use the poker face, but in Scranton they need only the Poconos.
When I visited Paris, I saw the Eiffel tower. What an eyeful!
The Grand Canyon is gorgeous.
Does an Anarchist man have an antistate gland instead of a prostate gland?
If you have trouble making decisions, you should get treated by an optician.
Which elements are used in medicine? Helium and curium, and if those fail, barium.
I asked a doctor when there would be a cure for the common cold, and he said it would happen when swine flu.
How does a chemistry professor punish a grad student in the lab? Put him on tight rations.
How should a girl prevent boys from getting infatuated with her? Use a detergent regularly, and when that fails, apply the antidote.
When he gets you alone in the back seat, it means he's in the mood for carpetting.
We discovered asbestos in the basement; what should we do? Clean it up asbestos we can.
For a glider pilot to stay aloft for a long time, he must have the courage of his convections.
The Boston Celtics have a very frank name that indicates the organization's true purpose: sell tix.
Who is the mayor of New York in the daytime? Not Bloomberg — he is the night-mayor. (I've used that against Mayors Wagner, Koch, and Giuliani and now Bloomberg.)
My neighbor in 1967 got a medical deferment from the draft by presenting his doctor with a case of sham pain.
"The bees' knees" is the plural of "the beanie".
The crow is a very wise bird: whatever it does, it does with caws.
The ancient Greek goddess of parking was Demeter. If you parked in an unpropitious place, you had to "feed Demeter".
The word "procrastination" comes from the Greek myth of Procrastes, who would stretch every task to fit the time available.
In anthropology, the way people in a group understand their behavior is called "emic"; an outsider's objective description of the behavior is called "etic". The relationship between the two is known as the "emetic" relationship.
I met someone who said, "I study microfinance," so I asked if they were too fine to observe with the naked eye.
A boy told me he wanted to spend a year studying abroad, so I told him that each one requires a whole life of study.
A girl I adored found a Latin lover, so I accused her of getting off on a tan gent.
Once when I was feeling sad I drove past an artificial lake and said, "I feel a dam sight better now."
I met a man who was picking his clothing apart at the seams. I asked him why, and he told me, "It's my work — I am an auto-detailor."
Which Jazz musician is most popular on the World Wide Web? Bix Baederbecke.
I had a great meal at a Moroccan restaurant. Some places are rockin', and some are Moroccan.
I went to a Nepalese restaurant and had a Nepalling dinner.
Cooking that makes you sick is called queasine.
MacDonald's sells "fast food", so called because it is made for not eating.
Did you hear about the pirates that boarded a ship and stole a cargo of truffles? They were hypha-lootin' pirates.
A meat chef resigned because he was tired of getting lamb basted.
In London Chinatown, we always used to eat at Poons, because we enjoyed their Lamb Poons.
The waiters at an Ethiopian restaurant in Boston are nasty. They add insult to injera.
Did you hear about the free-lance magic advisor? He added consult to conjury.
They are called contractors because their business keeps getting smaller.
The great gothic cathedrals were built by men with hairy behinds, who used to climb to the top of the unfinished building and shake them. People came for miles to see the famous "flying butt-tresses".
Composting is a very useful practice, but it never occurs to me to do it. I guess I'm non compost mentis.
We've all seen them with hearts, spades and maybe clubs, but not with the other suit. Thus, here is my pledge never to gafiate: I won't ♦ane.
Chinese gardens often have ponds filled with ornamental fish, and beautiful bridges over them. Watch out for those: if you stand on one, you can get carp-pool tunnel syndrome.
Harvard is built on vector calculus: it has grad students, div students, and girl students.
You can tell a Cantabridgian because everything he writes is too long.
Fordham university is going to open a very expensive branch in Cambridge, to be called Canta-Fordham.
In biology, a syncytial connection is a tube between cells, formed in Las Vegas.
Modern neurobiology has determined that drunkenness occurs primarily in the michel lobe.
M&M's were invented in ancient Egypt, and were named after the pharaoh Amenemhet.
Daylight savings time was invented by a German politician. He was so proud that he changed his name to Adenauer.
In the 1980s there were two students at the AI Lab named Nomi. We were binomial.
I have a young relative named Noemi. I hope she doesn't go into TV.
A flautist is a musician who disregards performance conventions.
Where would a cryptographer bring you for a sexual fling? To a one-time pad.
What do you say when your sweetheart needs the toilet so
urgently that walking isn't fast enough?
Skip to my loo, my darling.
A company whose employees used pogo sticks to deliver bottled water was called "Pole and Spring Water."
When Jimmy Carter was chosen as the chief official of the state of Georgia, was that a goobernatorial election?
I broke the world record for lying in bed. Instead of a trophy, I got atrophy.
For a few years, Dubya made himself the "teflon president" through religion: he practiced gnostic Christianity.
The Bahai church invites people to join, but the Babai church encourages its members to convert to other faiths.
The delta Jews were a community of Jews who lived in the New Orleans
area in the 19th century. How did delta Jews greet each other?
They said, "How's bayou?"
The US mainstream media had a stroke, and now suffer from left-wing hemineglect.
When Europeans first visited the northern part of North America, they did not know how to survive there. The natives did. So they gave the Europeans advice based on their experience:
But the Europeans had no respect for the natives, and ignored this wise advice. So they kept on wearing insufficient clothing, teasing bears, and travelling with too few dogs. Sometimes they died, and the natives told each other, "I knew it."
Eventually they became known as the Inuit.
Basic is worse than C-sick.
Apple's response to Google Glasses will be called iBrowse.
A pair of travelling exhibits on theory of computation was known as the Turing Circus. (Three meanings!)
In the Greek myth of sysfs, every time the programmers thought it was working, they discovered they needed to rewrite it from scratch.
When a monastery sells jams and jellies over the Internet, is that monk e-business?
During the 1980s, millions of computers came to America through LSI-land.
The computer designers who believe processor chips are obsolete must be drinking gate-arrayed.
To go with its AIX system (a variant of Unix), IBM redesigned the X Window System and called it Panes. Thus, users of the RT-PC could have AIX and Panes on their machine.
My femmebot wanted an upgrade to be more attractive, so I gave her a sexy new core-set.
In the 1980s, GNU included a program designed to fake the use of COFF format without really understanding it. The program was called Robotussin (COFF medicine for your computer).
When a particularly nasty bug appears close to release time, is that regression to the mean?
At dinner at a Japanese restaurant, the person next to me said she wanted to work with abused children. Since we had not yet received the tempura, I responded, "If battered shrimps are your interest, we should have some soon."
Bento box: a shoe that isn't long enough.
The cooks that make negimaki are rapscallions.
When a waiter suggested eating cold soba, I informed him that I was in any case not planning to have any alcohol.
Did you know Senator Joe McCarthy was a Shintoist? He thought there were kamis everywhere.
After some time in the rainy capital, I came to understand why Kiwis refer to rubber boots as "Wellingtons".
I took the ferry to the South Island, and when I got off, the locals started mocking me. It wasn't that they were mean, though. They just wanted me to feel Picton.
Then I saw that someone was selling chairs and tables made of punga wood. He called them "ferniture".
In Mt Gambier, Australia, the prostitutes had so little custom that they had to moonlight looking after trucks parked in a large lot, while the drivers went to sleep or eat. Later the appreciative town commemorated them by converting the lot into Vansittart Park.
People in Australia who get Alzheimer's disease apply for Adelaide.
Kakadu National Park was named after the inbred feral chickens that couldn't manage all of "cockadoodle do".
How the echidna got its name: The first naturalist who described this egg-laying mammal at a meeting encountered contemptuous disbelief from his colleagues. One of them even said, "'e kiddin' ya".
Australians have domesticated the trolls, and use them to propel cars. So when a car gets low on energy, you take it to a pet-troll station.
Is there a cure for Tasmania?
Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org
Copyright (C) 2000,2010,2011,2012,2013 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of the entire contents of this page contents are permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.