Friday, February 6th — An I Suck Doublepak

Today I Learned…

…that armadillos always give birth to identical quadruplets.  (Thanks Hanna!)

…and that there are audio clips on demand on the internet of President Obama saying awesomely profane things.  These aren’t fake — they’re excerpts from the audio recording of his best seller, “Dreams from My Father.”  I wish I could embed these, but WordPress has some annoying restrictions on scripts.  All I can do is give you this link to where I found them — it has the recordings (language NSFW),  text transcripts, as well as the author’s suggestions as to when he should use that quote throughout his day-to-day presidential business.

Sunday, December 7th — Dead Writers

Today I Learned…

…how a bunch of writers and poets either died or were found dead.  I don’t have time to reproduce the funny parts of the list, so I’ll just link to it here.

Any other funny and ineresting stories about famous people dying?

Saturday, November 29th — The Mortal Kombat Guy

(…I’ll be back tomorrow with the Rulloff’s trivia wrapup along with a special “What I Learned on my Thanksgiving Vacation edition. In the meantime…)

Today I Learned…

…that Maxim magazine had an interview with Hernan Sanchez, the voiceover artist for the announcer in the Mortal Kombat series.  And they made him say silly things using his recognizable voice into a microphone.  Click on the link to find the soundboard that resulted.   (Hopefully soon I’ll figure out if I can embed it here.)

Tuesday, October 21st — Colbert

Today I Learned…

…that Stephen Colbert changed the key word in the opening of the Report from “multi-grain” to “vote.”  That makes me really happy.  Good for you, Colbert.  Attack that portion of your audience that is so liberal they’re disaffected or refuse to vote because they don’t believe in working within the system (there was a sizeable contingent of those at Vassar, my alma mater).

On a similar note: http://www.votergasm.com/

Wednesday, October 15th — Investment

Today I Learned…

…what you should have been doing with your money over the past year.

If, one year ago, you had purchased $1,000 worth of stock in the following companies, this is how much money you would have now:

Delta: $49
AIG: $33
Lehman Brothers: bupkiss

However, if you had used the entirety of your money to purchase beer in aluminum cans, drank all of the beer, and then turned in the cans for the deposit (assuming you live in a deposit state like I do in New York), you would now have $214.

Tuesday, October 7th — The Economist

Today I Learned…

…that there’s someone out there who is brilliant.

Saturday, September 6th — Hey! Blinkin’!

Today I Learned…

…what really happened to Abraham Lincoln on that fateful night.

Wednesday, August 21st — Hey There Cthulhu

Today I Learned…

…that someone re-wrote that damned “Hey There Delilah” song from a few years ago into this work-of-art/monstrosity:

Anyone who rhymes fthagn with noggin is alright in my book.

Wednesday, August 13th — Latin

Today I Learned…

…the following insult in Latin:

TUA MATER TAM ANTIQUIOR UT LINGUAM LATINE LOQUATUR

I will leave the translation as an exercise to the reader.

Tuesday, August 5th — The Sokal Affair

Today I Learned…

…about the “Sokal Affair,” another tidbit gleaned from the Ig Nobel awards.  The Wikipedia article on this is much more eloquent than I have a chance of being, so I will quote it:

The Sokal affair (also Sokal’s hoax) was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal’s words: “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”^[1]

The paper, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity“^[2], was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax, calling his paper “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”, which was “structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics” made by postmodernist academics.

The resulting debate focused on the relative scholarly merits or lack thereof of sociological commentary on the physical sciences and of postmodern-influenced sociological disciplines in general, as well as on academic ethics, including both whether it was appropriate for Sokal to deliberately defraud an academic journal, as well as whether Social Text took appropriate precautions in publishing the paper.

First of all: Duke sucks.  Second of all: so does postmodernism.  Check out the Wikipedia article for more specific references to the paper itself — some of which are very funny.

The editorial staff of Social Text won the 1996 Ig Nobel prize in Literature for “eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist.”