Monthly Archives: November 2010

To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire. Would not we shatter it to bits.

Having spent a little bit of time in World of Warcraft last night, taking part in the beginnings of the Shattering – which primarily consists of a few quests to ‘go here, speak to him, speak to her, collect that, wear a dress, shout ‘DOOM’, kill a few of those’ in traditional MMO fashion – I’ve decided that I’m going to re-dub future January Sales as January Shatterings from now on.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen quite so many level-capped insanely-geared heroes of Azeroth running back and forth across Stormwind and Elwynn Forest, desperately making a grab for the various bargains on offer. Prophecies of Doom are particularly popular and selling like hotcakes, with a strong run on portents, conspiracies and doomsday cults too. Curiously, the hotcakes aren’t selling all that well. There’s a definite rush to get to Stormwind’s garden department, with people clearly looking to be the first to get their hands on a Deathwing Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Flame Grilling Machine.

All I can say is thank goodness for a lack of collision detection, otherwise the canals of Stormwind would be full of players throwing themselves out of the way of careening level eighty characters with armour spikes poking out of every conceivable appendage, with role-players and new players being the worst hit. Indeed, I picture bewildered newbies being trampled all the way back to the Spirit Healer, and indignant role-players being flung bodily into the canal, then having to pause for half an hour while they construct a detailed back-story of why they’re in the canal, what their motivation for being there is, and updating their description to describe how their dishevelled stranglekelp-strewn hair still beautifully accentuates their powerful, glowing, half-demon half-titan red eyes.

I’m still not entirely convinced that the Cataclysm won’t be caused by Blizzard telling players that Deathwing’s giant fiery wang is at a specific location and that they can get an achievement for riding it, then turning on collision detection as a thousand or more epic-laden characters descend upon it and all simultaneously smash into one another with the destructive power of several hundred hydrogen bombs, sundering the surrounding lands. Perhaps Deathwing won’t even make an appearance: like some Rock and Roll legend, just the mere mention of him has huge crowds of fans rampaging across the land trying to catch a glimpse, tearing their own hair out at the thought of getting close, screaming from faces clasped by shaking hands, tears rolling down between grimaced folds of fanaticism; the fans themselves destroying everything in their path until all the land has been razed and devastated. Deathwing will peer out from behind the curtain of his hotel window, despair at the sheer number of screaming fanatical heroes trying to claim a flame-forged autograph, and cancel his main concert, retiring to the comforts of an exclusive dungeon where a select crowd of ten to twenty five adoring fans will be allowed in to watch and worship him, while the world outside burns beneath the storm of rioting fans and frenzied shoppers.

This is the way the world ends: This is the way the world ends: This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a bit of a kafuffle.

A Blogger Walks Into a Bar

Looking at other fields, it’s often clear that they could be improved by the rigorous skills and discipline of blogging. Comedy, for example; so-called “jokes” are frequently unclear or confusing, so let’s see how one could be improved by the stringent analysis that only blogging can provide:

Sticks
So, you know that there are sticks, yes? They are part of a tree, and they are called a stick. And they are brown. Wood is brown, these sticks are wood, and therefore they are brown.

[Image: a stick]
[Caption: A Stick. Note colour (brown).]

The Word Sticky
Now, there is also the word sticky. Often when you append -y to a word it would mean “like a stick”, but in this instance it actually means “tacky” or “adhesive”, unrelated to *a* stick, in the sense of a piece of wood.

A Humorous Question
Thus here is a humorous question: what is brown and sticky? Now you are considering an item that is tacky or adhesive, yes, and is also brown, such as perhaps a small patch of syrup, or a dab of creosote, or more appropriately an unbranded wood preservative substance for of course creosote itself is regulated for the use of professionals only under EU Directive 76/769/EEC.

[Image: wood preservative]
[Caption: wood preservative substance meeting appropriate EU directives on benzo-alpha-pyrene and water extractable phenols]

You are perhaps even thinking that the answer is “excrement”, which is uproariously amusing, as excrement possesses intrinsic humour.

[Image: poo]
[Caption: Excrement]

The Answer
However I tell you the answer is as follows: a stick.

[Image: the same stick as before]
[Caption: A Stick.]

You will remember from the opening paragraph that the stick is brown, and from the second paragraph that “sticky” could be misinterpreted as “stick-y”, or “like a stick”, and of course a stick is unquestionably like a stick, thus rendering the answer technically correct, and yet at the same time confounding your expectations, from whence the humour is derived.

Thank you.