Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Who hasn’t encountered people in the workplace who are never satisfied with what others do but feel that they have to make suggestions for improvement even if they have no idea what they want or are completely unable to articulate it?
No one? I thought so.
Incidentally, the sound engineer who does not speak at all says the most with his expressions.
Cartoonists have a very difficult task because they do not have space to fill in all the necessary information and have to use images to convey a lot of background information so that people get the joke. But in doing so, they are heavily dependent on the reader getting the allusions.
As an example of how much background knowledge is needed for humor, take this cartoon.
To get the joke, you have to recognize the person as William Shakespeare. You have to know that he was a playwright and thus his works were performed by actors, that many of his plays were done at the Globe theater, and be familiar with the aphorism written on his shirt.
This makes humor hard to cross cultural boundaries.
Sometimes in one’s moments of idle thinking, one comes up with hypothetical scenarios that are so silly that one would think that no would bother to actually try them out. Fortunately, there are people who have the time and and resources to actually do it and film the results.
On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver castigates all four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden) and the members of their administrations as well as the US military and intelligence agencies for the disaster that they created that has led to massive tragedy for the long-suffering Afghan people.
This appalling situation reveals once again that when your basic policy goals are flawed, you start on a road which eventually leads nowhere, however many resources one assigns to it.
John Oliver devoted a segment of Last Week Tonight to the problem of ransomware, where hackers break into a computer system, lock up all the data, and then demand payment, usually in cryptocurrencies, in order to provide the key to unlock it. Barely a day goes by without some report about a new ransomware attack. The news stories focus on the havoc caused by attacks on big entities like hospitals, local governments, and businesses. But Oliver points out that with more and more people having their home devices hooked up to the internet, those become vulnerable as well.
[Read more…]
Language advisory, of course.
