DNRC / "What did he say?"

:-) Dilbert's New Ruling Class

My favourite funny writer has to be the late, great, Douglas Adams. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently series were just brilliant, and he was a Macintosh user too - what more can I say? Also somewhere deserving of mention in my top ten is Tom Hartman - once my manager and still a friend and colleague at Novell who writes hilariously about his life and travels at Symbiotic Publishing. He's not going to win any spelling competitions but he makes up for it by being very funny.
Anyway, I mention this to plug my second-favourite funny writer: Scott Adams (Wow, my number 1 and number 2 are both called Adams. If you write funny stuff and your name is Adams drop me a line, and if you make me laugh you stand a good chance of being in my Top Ten Writers Called Adams). Scott is the creator of the famous Dilbert cartoons, in which Dilbert survives from day to day despite the antics of his Pointy Haired Boss and numerous other characters. Adams uses the alter-ego of Dilbert to lampoon modern-day management fads and jargon, particularly as it relates to the software industry, and they regularly cheer me up by falling into my inbox every day.

Go on, cheer yourself up by subscribing to the Daily Dilbert.

An added advantage to doing so - and even funnier actually - is that you will also get the monthly Dilbert's New Ruling Class newsletter, in which Adams celebrates that lower life form known as In-DUH-viduals. To whet your appetite here are a few excerpts from the latest newsletter, reproduced here with kind permission of Mr. Adams:-

TRUE TALES OF INDUHVIDUALS
==========================

Here now, more true tales of Induhviduals as reported by vigilant DNRC members:


There was a question in our company newsletter asking about whether they could water the flowers in the bathrooms since they were looking wilted and sick. The response was "The flowers are artificial."
[Editor’s note: Evidently some employee created a restroom gas cloud powerful enough to wilt artificial plants. You have to admire that on some level.]

==

So a few friends and I were at a museum, and they had this wall of analog clocks with a city name written under each one, showing what time it was around the world. We had about ten clocks in view, when my friend looks at a clock, looks at his watch, looks at the clock again, and says, “Well, this one’s pretty close, but all the others are way off.”

==

While working for a leather company, we were chatting in the lab about food. One of the other lab technicians pondered aloud, "I wonder why you never get the skin on beef?"

==

Every time my husband gets a new temp assignment, he gets a new security badge. The temp stands against the wall and the camera – generally in a fixed position – snaps the ID photo. My husband uses a wheelchair. So his security picture features the blank wall above his head.

==

On a canal boating holiday, the boat had a shower, with a stirrup pump that pumped excess water through the side of the hull.
A friend (an engineer) asked “Why didn't they put the hole in the bottom of the boat?”

==

I went to a local pizza restaurant and asked about the difference between a large and a medium pizza. The Induhvidual told me the large pizza had 10 slices and the medium had 8 slices. I told her to take one of the large pizzas, cut it into 8 slices, and I would pay for a medium. She just stared at me like I had asked her a question about Euclidian Geometry.

If you would like this in your inbox every month, go to dilbert.com and subscribe. You won't regret it.



:-( Mumbling Actors

Something that Scott Adams and I - and thousands of others judging by the comments on his blog - have in common is an exasperation with actors who mumble. For a while now I've been wondering if I'm going slowly deaf (my family would support this diagnosis but they're wrong), because I'm find it increasingly hard to hear what people are saying in movies. I now know it's not just me. Not only has Scott written about it on his blog but Karen and I have been to the film club in Riyadh a couple of times recently and both times the organizer had to pause the film a few minutes in and re-start it, with subtitles. This happened with Capote (great film), and also with The New World (turgid, you'll sleep right through it).

What is it with filmmakers these days? It seems almost as if the actors have been told to mutter/whisper their lines. Anyway, Scott describes it better than I ever could: read the blog entry.