Friday Funnies

[BSR]

 

[mike carey]

This is completely true, it's an account of everyone's life.

[+ jeezopete]

[mike carey]

I've been watching some mindless YouTube videos that are spoken narratives with random images or videos, sometimes relevant to the story, often not, and the narrative also in printed text on the screen. The mismatches and howlers in the spoken versus written narrative are frequent, as are random flips into Chinese, Cantonese, Vietnamese, French, Italian and whatever other language the software selects, usually only for a few seconds. One frequent flip is for the spoken narrative to spell out amounts of money as, say 'dollars 142 zero zero zero' and sometimes substitute 'ling ling ling' for the zeros. That's Mandarin. The videos are a variety of morality tales of familial or financial betrayal, parents' wildly extreme favouring of a 'golden child' over another to the point of heartless and absolutely complete exploitation of the, often by then adult, non-favoured child. You get the picture. Small variations on a few themes, but enough different twists and even witty or pointed one-liners for you not to give up on the whole genre.

Well, over the last week or so I had heard hospital scenes where they would refer to a 'for line' in the narrative, and my mind dismissed it as something that I could ignore because not knowing what they were talking about didn't detract from the story being told and I couldn't be bothered stopping and trying to work it out.

Fast forward to today, and I happened to be watching the screen at the same time as they repeated the phrase, and I had to snort my coffee. The text on the screen showing when they mentioned the 'for line' said 'IV line'.

[Danny-Darko]

[+ poolboy48220]

11 hours ago, mike carey said:

I've been watching some mindless YouTube videos that are spoken narratives with random images or videos, sometimes relevant to the story, often not, and the narrative also in printed text on the screen. The mismatches and howlers in the spoken versus written narrative are frequent, as are random flips into Chinese, Cantonese, Vietnamese, French, Italian and whatever other language the software selects, usually only for a few seconds. One frequent flip is for the spoken narrative to spell out amounts of money as, say 'dollars 142 zero zero zero' and sometimes substitute 'ling ling ling' for the zeros. That's Mandarin. The videos are a variety of morality tales of familial or financial betrayal, parents' wildly extreme favouring of a 'golden child' over another to the point of heartless and absolutely complete exploitation of the, often by then adult, non-favoured child. You get the picture. Small variations on a few themes, but enough different twists and even witty or pointed one-liners for you not to give up on the whole genre.

Well, over the last week or so I had heard hospital scenes where they would refer to a 'for line' in the narrative, and my mind dismissed it as something that I could ignore because not knowing what they were talking about didn't detract from the story being told and I couldn't be bothered stopping and trying to work it out.

Fast forward to today, and I happened to be watching the screen at the same time as they repeated the phrase, and I had to snort my coffee. The text on the screen showing when they mentioned the 'for line' said 'IV line'.

a server at the company cafeteria had a name tag "VI", as in Violet. My co-worker asked her "Is your name really six?" 

[mike carey]

1 minute ago, poolboy48220 said:

a server at the company cafeteria had a name tag "VI", as in Violet. My co-worker asked her "Is your name really six?" 

Another one that keeps cropping up is when they are talking about academic results, and the script mentions a 3.8 GPA, for which the narrator calmly intones 3.8 gigapascals. (For those unaware, pascal is the metric unit of pressure. I've never been able to conceptualise car tyre pressure in kPa, but that's me.)

[keefer]

2 hours ago, mike carey said:

I've never been able to conceptualise car tyre pressure in kPa, but that's me.)

From Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing...

 

Quote

We made another turn and almost rolled again. The Coupe de Ville is not your ideal machine for high speed cornering in residential neighbourhoods. The handling is very mushy . . .  unlike the Red Shark, which had responded very nicely to situations requiring the quick four-wheel drift. But the Whale Bad of cutting loose
at the critical moment - had a tendency to dig in, which accounted for that sickening "here we go' sensation.

At first I thought it was only because the tires were soft, so I took it into the Texaco station next to the Flamingo and had the tires pumped up to fifty pounds each - which alarmed the attendant, until I explained
that these were "experimental" tires.

But fifty pounds each didn't help the cornering, so I went back a few hours later and told him I wanted to try seventy five. He shook his head nervously. "Not me," he said, handing me the air hose. "Here. They're
your tires. You do it."

"What's wrong?" I asked. "You think they can't take seventy-five?"

He nodded, moving away as I stooped to deal with the left front. "You're damn right," he said. "Those tires want twenty eight in the front and thirty two in the rear. Hell, fifty's dangerous, but seventy five is
crazy. They'll explode!"

I shook my head and kept filling the left front. "I told you," I said, "Sandoz laboratories designed these tires. They're special. I could load them up to a hundred.

"God almighty!" he groaned. "Don't do that here."

"Not today," I replied. "I want to see how they corner with seventy-five."
He chuckled. "You won't even get to the corner, Mister."

"We'll see," I said, moving around to the rear with the air- hose. In truth, I was nervous. The two front ones were tighter than snare drums; they felt like teak wood when I tapped on them with the rod. But what the hell? I thought. If they explode, so what? It's not often that a man gets a chance to run terminal experiments on a virgin Cadillac and four brand- new $80 tires. For all I knew, the thing might start cornering like a Lotus Elan. If not, all I had to do was call the VIP agency and have another one delivered . . . maybe threaten them with a lawsuit because all four tires had exploded on me, while driving in heavy traffic.  Demand an Eldorado, next time, with four Michelin Xs. And put it all on the card . . . charge it to the St Louis Browns.

As it turned out, the Whale behaved very nicely with the altered tire pressures. The ride was a trifle rough; I could feel every pebble on the highway, like being on roller skates in a gravel pit.., but the thing began cornering in a very stylish manner, very much like driving a motorcycle at top speed in a hard rain: one slip and ZANG, over the high side, cartwheeling across the landscape with your head in your hands. 

 

[CuriousByNature]

10 hours ago, mike carey said:

Another one that keeps cropping up is when they are talking about academic results, and the script mentions a 3.8 GPA, for which the narrator calmly intones 3.8 gigapascals. (For those unaware, pascal is the metric unit of pressure. I've never been able to conceptualise car tyre pressure in kPa, but that's me.)

That would be a whole lot of pressure...

[+ jeezopete]

Can't remember if I posted this before, but I just made a hotel reservation and in the fine print it stated: 

The Hotel has all non-smoking rooms. All rooms are cleaned and treated as non-smoking rooms. A minimum $250 cleaning fee will be assessed on the reservation credit card for smoking cigarettes in rooms or on balconies and $420 for smoking anything else. 

Kudos to the PR person who thought that one up.  😉

[mike carey]

2 minutes ago, jeezopete said:

Can't remember if I posted this before, but I just made a hotel reservation and in the fine print it stated: 

The Hotel has all non-smoking rooms. All rooms are cleaned and treated as non-smoking rooms. A minimum $250 cleaning fee will be assessed on the reservation credit card for smoking cigarettes in rooms or on balconies and $420 for smoking anything else. 

Kudos to the PR person who thought that one up.  😉

Took me a moment.

[+ jeezopete]

[+ jeezopete]

[+ jeezopete]

[+ jeezopete]

[mike carey]