C’est Rire category archive

Earth-shaking news.

Q. Why are Americans so concerned with the sex lives of others?

1. The Video:

2. The comments.

Via Delaware Liberal.

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The Guardian reports on a staged-for-TV debate over bicyclists in London.

The anti-cyclist rhetoric was rather over the top, but Jeez-oh-man, this is a great line, and, sadly, it contains some truth. Leave it to the Brits to turn a phrase:

“To a cyclist, a red light is merely a way of bringing a dash of colour to a city street.”

Bloomberg:

The unclaimed phonebooks piling up in the lobby of Stefano Belardini’s apartment building spell trouble for Italian directory publisher Seat Pagine Gialle SpA: They show advertisers that few people use them.

“I haven’t opened a phonebook in years,” said Belardini, a 39-year-old Rome-based lawyer. “The best use I put them to is as door stoppers or footrests.”

I think I’ve used a phone book twice in the past year.* One of those times, I was looking up something in the white pages and, despite my $300.00 bifocals, I had to get a magnifying glass to read the listings. When I need a phone number, I tend to look it up on the internet because the computer is right there in front of me and because I can, like, you know, actually read the numbers.

Back in the olden days, the phone book was service provided by the telephone company. Then came deregulation and now I get two phone books each cycle, sometimes three, one of wastes away in a drawer until the cycle repeats itself while the others head directly into the recycling bin.

____________________

Also, I’m old. I already know who I’m going to call.

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Leave your quarters at home if you’re visiting Salisbury, Md.:

Three parking meters were stolen from the downtown area Wednesday morning, according to city police.

When it is a virtual wedding, is the cake topped with avatars?

If something gets repeated often enough, the mindless media just keeps repeating it.

Black Friday, the official start of the holiday gift-buying bonanza and the biggest retail shopping day of the year.

The Friday after Thanksgiving is not and never has been the “biggest retail shopping day of the year,” but, if reporters believe it is, it becomes so in their world.

The sad part is that this delusion infects reporting that matters, such as political and economic stories. Reporters keep repeating stuff they’ve heard without regard to fact.

Aside: The actual article is worth reading.

From El Reg:

Erik Estavillo is seeking $1m (£600,000) in damages, claiming the orc-tastic roleplaying game (World of Warcraft) has turned him into a blank-eyed basketcase who can no longer function in the real world (as the lawsuit itself appears to prove). Having apparently become addicted to rampaging around some made-up mountains clobbering other collections of pixels with big clobbering weapons, Estavillo is calling pusher on the WoW developers, whom he accuses of “sneaky and deceitful practices”.

All I can say is, “WoW.”

On Waldon Pond, of course.

When troopers arrived at the scene (of a loud party–ed.) a number of individuals fled on foot, police said. Trooper Jason Grozier found one of these individuals in the parking lot of the Marlin Market, and attempted to make an arrest, when he was intentionally struck by a vehicle operated by Waldon Remington III.

I remarked yesterday as we were driving to Thanksgiving dinner that this is the most fertile area I have seen for creative and clever vanity tags.

Today’s local rag seems to have been listening (the article is about a couple whose license plates are “MR. VAIN” and “MRS. VAIN”:

A 2007 survey found that about 1 in 6 Virginians have personalized plates – making the commonwealth the vainest state in the nation.

Some examples below.

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Candidates’ unconcession speeches have no legal meaning, so it really doesn’t matter whether wingnut Doug Hoffman stays conceded.

That’s fortunate for Hoffman, who doesn’t seem to know whether he’s on his side or not.

He’s sort of like the young lady, Carmen Cohen.

Her father called her Carmen, but, for some strange reason no one knew, her mother called her Cohen.

At the end of the day (God, I’ve come to hate that phrase) By bedtime, she didn’t know whether she was Carmen or Cohen.

“Tie me wallaby down, sport, tie me wallaby down.”

I just saw the English version of this ad. It posited that Italian restaurants serve pizza.

Three Four things.

• I’ve been to lots of Italian restaurants, like this one. Pizza was an afterthought. Pizza is a big deal at pizza joints, not at restaurants.
• “Dr. Oetker” is German. What do Germans know about pizza?
• The best pizza joints are run by Greeks.
• Modern pizza has little to do with traditional Sicilian pizza. I’ve had both, including Sicilian pie made by a real Sicilian. I know.

No sale.

You can’t make this stuff up:

Here’s what happened: In 2005, Texas voters and the state Legislature approved a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

But the amendment included the following clause, which was reportedly designed to ban civil unions and domestic partnerships: “This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”

One thing that is “identical…to marriage,” of course, is marriage.

Via Unqualified Offerings, which recasts this as a jobs bill:

All those Texans who thought they were married will now have to go to another state and get married all over again. They’ll spend money on caterers, dress designers, priests, cake decorators, wedding planners, musicians, and numerous other creative professionals.

If God hae wanted there to be water in it, he’d hae put water in it:

Two crates of Scotch whisky which belonged to the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton are to be recovered after a century buried in the Antarctic ice.

The McKinlay and Co whisky was found buried under a hut built and used during Shackleton’s unsuccessful South Pole expedition between 1907 and 1909.

Finkel and Eastwick’s most recent study, published last month, questions why women are so often found to be more selective in choosing partners than men. In almost all speed-dating events, women sit in stationary positions and men rotate to talk with each of them. When Finkel and Eastwick set up a dating event like that, the standard result bore out – women were more selective.

But when they reversed the roles and had women rotate, that was no longer the case. Suddenly, the men became more selective and the women less so. Finkel postulated that the act of making an approach changed the dynamic between two people – the one who walked up is more likely to feel attracted to the person sitting across from him or her.

I wonder whether this has bearing on shopping behavior.