The world’s oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests that toilet humor was as popular with the ancients as it is today. It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
It heads the world’s oldest top 10 joke list published by the University of Wolverhampton on Thursday.
A 1600 BC gag about a pharaoh, said to be King Snofru, comes second — “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”
The oldest British joke dates back to the 10th Century and reveals the bawdy face of the Anglo-Saxons — “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.”
“Jokes have varied over the years, with some taking the question and answer format while others are witty proverbs or riddles,” said the report’s writer Dr Paul McDonald, senior lecturer at the university. “What they all share however, is a willingness to deal with taboos and a degree of rebellion. Modern puns, Essex girl jokes and toilet humor can all be traced back to the very earliest jokes identified in this research.”
The study was commissioned by television channel Dave. The top 10 oldest jokes can be viewed at www.dave-tv.co.uk.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has decided, after months of under the cloud of scandal, to step down after his Kadima party choses a new leader in September. The hope is to form a new government under the new leader and revive the party until next spring’s elections. Otherwise, Olmert could stay on until then.
Likud party leader and former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is leading all candidates by a wide margin in a new Haaretz poll.
When those polled were asked to pick between Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak for future prime minister, 36 percent said they preferred Netanyahu, as opposed to 24.6 percent who chose Livni. Barak was chosen by 11.9 percent of respondents, significantly less than the fourth choice “none of the above,” which garnered 19 percent.
Netanyahu scored higher when Livni’s name was replaced by Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz in the survey, with 36.6 percent of respondents picking him, over 14.8 percent for Barak, 12 percent for Mofaz, and 27.4 percent for “none of the above.”
Netanyahu looked like a pretty fair bet to win last time, too, until Ariel Sharon reshuffled the deck. That’s not going to happen again, though.
Dateline Earth: “Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet.”
Former vice president Al Gore—who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save—launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world.
“I tried to warn them, but the Elders of this planet would not listen,” said Gore, who in 2000 was nearly banished to a featureless realm of nonexistence for promoting his unpopular message. “They called me foolish and laughed at my predictions. Yet even now, the Midwest is flooded, the ice caps are melting, and the cities are rocked with tremors, just as I foretold. Fools! Why didn’t they heed me before it was too late?”
Al Gore—or, as he is known in his own language, Gore-Al—placed his son, Kal-Al, gently in the one-passenger rocket ship, his brow furrowed by the great weight he carried in preserving the sole survivor of humanity’s hubristic folly.
“There is nothing left now but to ensure that my infant son does not meet the same fate as the rest of my doomed race,” Gore said. “I will send him to a new planet, where he will, I hope, be raised by simple but kindly country folk and grow up to be a hero and protector to his adopted home.”
I’ve been involved lately in a little issues advocacy regarding card-check. Card-check involves a union being able to use a card that workers sign to compel a firm to recognize the union as the sole bargaining agent of the entire shop. My first post on the subject included Congressional testimony by a former union organizer.
A “card check” campaign begins with union organizers going to the homes of workers over a weekend, a tactic called “housecalling,” with the sole intent of having those workers sign authorization cards. Called a “blitz” by the unions, it entails teams of two or more organizers going directly to the homes of workers. The workers’ personal information and home addresses used during the blitz was obtained from license plates and other sources that were used to create a master list.
In most cases, the workers have no idea that there is a union campaign underway. Organizers are taught to play upon this element of surprise to get “into the door.” They are trained to perform a five part house call strategy that includes: Introductions, Listening, Agitation, Union Solution, and Commitment. The goal of the organizer is to quickly establish a trust relationship with the worker, move from talking about what their job entails to what they would like to change about their job, agitate them by insisting that management won’t fix their workplace problems without a union and finally convincing the worker to sign a card.
…From my experience, the number of cards signed appear to have little relationship to the ultimate vote count. During a private election campaign, even though a union still sends organizers out to workers’ homes on frequent canvassing in attempts to gain support, the worker has a better chance to get perspective on the questions at hand.
Now that would seem to be enough for most people to decide we should keep private ballots, but unions have been pushing the Orwellian-named Employee Free Choice Act, which would make card-check the law of the land. (Employers could agree to recognize a union on the basis of cards now if they choose, but are not compelled.) So the group organized in Minnesota, of which I am chair of its steering committee, started running news ads. This sufficiently infuriated the local Democratic leadership that they filed a complaint with the Minnesota elections board accusing the two groups and me personally. Yesterday, that suit was thrown out. They may refile the complaint against us; we’ll see.
The point remains that a major push for Democratic candidates this year is coming from gobs of union cash — some of it compelled under threat of financial penalties from their locals — and their top goal is to eviscerate the rights of workers to have a secret ballot by which they can decide whether they want to be represented by a union. They don’t like the heat from Johnny Sac calling them out for what they’re doing. For more, read here.
Turkey’s Constitutional Court has decided not to ban the ruling AK Party, accused of undermining the country’s secular system.
But the judges did cut half the AKP’s treasury funding for this year.
That’ll show ‘em! (I honestly have no idea which funds or what they are used for–and the story does not elaborate.)
In all seriousness, this is a healthy result for Turkish democratic development as well as a positive move for all who would like to see a functional example of democracy in an Islamic society.
Still, the overall situation is not at healthy as one might like:
At least seven of the 11 court judges would need to vote in favour for the party to be banned. But six judges wanted a ban and five did not want to do so.
Being one vote shy of being banned is escaping by the thinnest of margins.
The flack department at HuffPo emails to tout Isabel Wilkinson’s post, “A Week In John McCain’s Shoes — His $520 Ferragamo Loafers, That Is.” It documents, in extensive detail, McCain’s wearing of a pair of black calfskin Salvatore Ferragamo ‘Pregiato’ Moccasins, which retail at Nieman Marcus for $520.
Apparently, this goes to show that McCain doesn’t buy his shoes at WalMart. And is a hypocrite?
In response to Barack Obama’s foreign tour, McCain spent much of his energy last week emphasizing his focus on domestic issues. What better way to show his American pride than to tour the country in Italian leather?
No word on what shoes Obama wears. I’m guessing, given that he’s a youngish millionaire with a sense of style, that he’s wearing expensive shoes, too. At any rate, while Allen-Edmonds and other American manufacturers make some nice shoes, I can’t imagine many Americans will be upset that an elderly gentleman who can afford it wears comfortable Italian loafers.
Fashion-wise, I prefer lace-ups, including Allen-Edmonds, with a suit. I do, however, own a pair of chocolate suede Ferragamo bit loafers (perhaps Nirvanas, but I’m not positive) that I bought last summer in Florence for substantially less than $520.
Two pieces by Jodi Kantor in the NYT looking at Barack Obama’s days teaching at the University of Chicago are drawing widespread interest in the blogosphere. The first, “Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Apart,” is a series of anecdotes woven together to present the picture of a gifted teacher who had one foot in the classroom and another in politics and who refused to do anything, including writing scholarly articles, which might be used against him in a campaign. A companian blog piece, “Inside Professor Obama’s Classroom,” provides some primary source documents, mostly course materials.
The overnight reaction has come mostly from the Right. Daniel Halper draws our attention to this passage:
While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s professorial reserve, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.
“He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale.
Nor could his views be gleaned from law review articles or other scholarship; Mr. Obama has never published any. He was too busy, but also, Mr. Epstein believes, he was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as Ms. [Lani] Guinier’s writings had hurt her.
“He figured out, you lay low,” Mr. Epstein said.
Halper thinks this signifies a man with too much ambition, a point AllahPundit also makes. Perhaps. It’s also a remarkable demonstration of discipline. Clearly, Obama loves to debate ideas and to engage. That he could be so careful for so long in an attempt to achieve something so incredibly unlikely as the presidency is stunning. (Perhaps especially so to me, since the ability to keep a low profile and hide my views to advance my career has never been among my talents.)
Pejman Yousefzadeh draws our attention to this, a passage that struck me as well:
“I don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.”
The statement is an odd one about a man who’s about to take his party’s presidential nomination and would seem the favorite to win that office in his mid-40s. But, yes, he’s a man who got what he needed out of each stop in his career without fully giving of himself.
Pejman cites it, though, as a rebuttal to Cass Sunstein’s suggestion that Obama’s time at Chicago should comfort conservatives, since surely free market economics must have rubbed off. Instead, “The University of Chicago is an entry on his resume. It has had no impact whatsoever on his thinking.” That’s overstating it a bit — Kantor makes it clear that Obama was using the classroom as a means of honing his ideas and delivery — but fundamentally true. Obama has known who he is and what he thinks for a long time and everything since has been about getting to where he wants to be.
UPDATE (Alex Knapp) I admit that I am extraordinarily amused by the right-wing kerfuffle over this article. If you had told me, just one year ago, that you would hear conservatives complaining that a left-wing college professor was not imposing his ideology on his students, I would have gladly bet good money against that proposition. This is why I love election years. They’re the years where black is white and up is down.
A young aide to Senator Jim Webb was found dead along a Virginia highway yesterday morning.
Authorities in Botetourt County [Virginia] this [Tuesday] morning discovered the body of a well-known Democratic operative and U.S. Senate aide along U.S. 220, dead from an apparent gunshot wound.
The body of Frederick W. Hutchins Jr., 26, of Roanoke was found shortly after 7 a.m. along southbound U.S. 220 by a Botetourt County deputy who had stopped to check on a vehicle parked on the highway’s shoulder, according to the sheriff’s office. Hutchins was an aide to U.S. Senator Jim Webb, D-Va.
Hutchins had been shot in the head, and a gun was found beneath his body, Sheriff Ronnie Sprinkle said. The sheriff added that the official cause of death would be determined by the state medical examiner. Hutchins’ body was outside the car, which was north of Fincastle, on a small embankment beside the road. Sprinkle said the death occurred between 4:30 a.m., when an officer passed the scene and no vehicle was present, and 7:08 a.m., when another officer stopped to check on the parked vehicle.
Sad and truly bizarre. No further details are available. Indeed, the Roanoke Times report is the only coverage thus far at Google News.
I’m always bemused by stories like “Dunkin’ Donuts to offer healthier menu items.”
Looking to entice those hungry for a healthier option, Dunkin’ Donuts will begin offering a new slate of better-for-you offerings in August.
The menu, which will debut in stores Aug. 6, will feature two new flatbread sandwiches made with egg whites. Customers will be able to choose either a turkey sausage egg-white sandwich or a vegetable one. Both will be under 300 calories with 9 grams of fat or less, the company said.
I get why Dunkin’ Donuts wants to diversify its menu to cater to a wider clientèle. What I don’t understand is why people who want to eat healthy would be in a doughnut shop. I mean, the place has Donuts right in its name.
Aside the controversy of using a campaign worker’s spouse (see the update) to pen what might otherwise have been seen as an interested letter to the editor, I thought Susan Gaertner’s letter about the claim of Michele Bachmann that the price of a gallon of gas could be $2 in the US in four years deserved some commentary. It is really a bold claim Rep. Bachmann (R-MN, in whose district I live) makes and thus worth consideringin more detail.
Most of the letters you read these days involve the EIA’s estimate of the effect of opening drilling in ANWR. As I wrote about this last week, the report assumes that the price of a barrel of oil in 2020 would be less than $60. If $140 a barrel produces a price of $4 for gasoline, what does a price of $60 a barrel for oil produce? Those of you who answered “$2″ can stop now; you’ve just agreed with Rep. Bachmann. (Though that’s 2020 versus Bachmann’s forecast date of 2012; if you’d like to argue a price that stays at $140 through 2012 — or higher — and then falls to $60 by 2020 so that EIA is right and Bachmann is wrong, I invite you to tell that story and wish you good luck.)
So let’s suppose EIA is wrong about that forecast. This kind of cuts the legs out from Gaertner’s substantive claims, but let’s answer her question for her anyway. What might additional drilling produce for a price change? The key lies in understanding it’s about more than just additional oil production.
James Hamilton posts this evening that demand for gasoline in the US appears to be more responsive to prices now that we’re at $4 than it was when we were at $3 a gallon. I have talked about this in terms of the “second law of demand“: consumer responsiveness to price changes is time dependent and expectations dependent. If the price rise is temporary, you smooth your consumption of gasoline through a combination of less spending on other goods and by saving less. If on the other hand you believe it is permanent, you make bigger changes, like dumping your SUV, riding a bike or buying a more fuel-efficient car. As that shift occurs, you move from a very inelastic demand curve to a more elastic one, and that produces a snap-back of prices towards where you were before. Jim’s graphs would indicate that since the beginning of 2008 we are seeing some of that. That should give one some hope that the price decline we’re experiencing right now could be the beginning of a longer period of lower gas prices.
But it’s also expectations-dependent for suppliers, particularly at the refinery level. There’s a very interesting post on VoxEU from Lutz Kilian of U. Michigan regarding the sources of increase in gasoline prices. Most importantly, his model distinguishes the market for gasoline and the market for oil. Domestic demand for gasoline and speculation over oil futures play almost no role in the price of gas; foreign demand and supply uncertainties explain most of the change in Kilian’s model. That result makes sense to most observers (it fits, for example, that CFTC report on speculators.) The price spikes following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita reflected very tight refining capacities that were upset. Those shocks went to gas prices, with negligible impact on world oil prices.
Part of the plan pushed by Rep. Bachmann is to pass HR 6139 to cut the bureaucratic hurdles that impede the construction of new refineries. Sure, they take years to produce, but the prospect of additional capacity would reduce uncertainty about gasoline supplies and reduce inventories (which, unlike crude, have been going up versus a year ago.)
Inventory uncertainty, then, can play a substantial role in gasoline prices. Easing the regulatory chokehold on gasoline production could take much more off the price of gasoline today than anyone’s projection of the impact on crude oil.
If you use the self-check at Walmart, pick the Spanish language option–that way the durn thing won’t talk to you and tell you every inane thing it thinks you need to do. Since what one needs to do is pretty easy to understand, the inability to read the screen doesn’t matter.
So see, for those who get annoyed at “Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Spanish” there is a silver lining after all.
