Tag / Jeff Stahler

by multipleciduers

Sunday Funnies – LOLs – August 16, 2026

Similarly, hearing one side of a juicy conversation while on public transportation. If you are going to be talking loudly on your phone in public, please put the other person on speaker so we can get some closure. What did Betty say to Barbara?

This Gordo is from 1974. I had to memorize this in Catholic school, possibly less because it’s a great poem to introduce grade school students to poetry than because Kilmer was Catholic, something that was always emphasized by the good nuns. Original poem here. Ogden Nash wrote this parody:

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.

by zbicyclist

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Yes, it’s still hot here in Editorland. But the big problem is smoke, and the Air Quality Index (AQI) not the heat index (although it’s still hot). I cancelled a bike ride I was supposed to lead yesterday when the AQI got over 200 — very unhealthy — and the visibility was limited by smoke. But I had no idea how much worse it was going to get.

At 2:39 p.m. it looked as though the scale was near a maximum. It looks like it maxes out at 600 from the scale shown. I’d never seen it anywhere near this high.

But as it turns out, it could get even higher:

Luckily, I could shut all the windows, turn on the air purifier and AC, and chill out. Otherwise, I’d need to hunt up my leftover N95 masks.

The cartoonists at the New Yorker were quick to post on this issue:

by zbicyclist

Saluting (?) the Pharmaceutical Industry

“On April 26, 1954, [70+1 years, -1 day ago] six-year-old Randy Kerr was injected with the Salk vaccine at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. By the end of June, an unprecedented 1.8 million people, including hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren, joined him in becoming “polio pioneers.” For the first time, researchers used the double-blind method, now standard, in which neither the patient nor person administering the inoculation knew if it was a vaccine or placebo. Although no one was certain that the vaccine was perfectly safe—in fact, Sabin argued it would cause more cases of polio than it would prevent—there was no shortage of volunteers.”

by zbicyclist

How Did Those Resolutions Work Out?

According to this article in The Guardian, ” In the US, 44% of new year resolutions last two to three months; only 6% last a year..”

The most common resolutions:

About 40% of Americans make resolutions, but this varies by age. Younger adults (59% of those ages 18 to 34 versus 19% of those older than 55), which I would ascribe to the optimism of youth versus the resignation of those whose past resolutions haven’t really improved their fitness or finances.

by zbicyclist

What’s the Password?

Mark H. sends this one in: “It’s clear that this protects passwords from others, since she neither writes them down nor remembers them. But it would seem like they are also protected from her, hence useless. Maybe she has to use the “forgot password” routine each time, and so the password is never the same?”

According to NordPass, the most common passwords are still the most useless ones:

The same day Mark H. sent that in, there were two other password comics in my feed. These aren’t really synchronicities, because the jokes are all different, but why not pretend it’s National Password Day? (That’s actually the first Thursday in May.)

I worked at a company where every few weeks, a new 7 letter password would be automatically randomly generated for you. Well, maybe randomly. A colleague had gotten into a tiff with the head of IT, and his next password ended with 3 letters of his first name. The first 4 letters were an expression not allowed on vanity license plates. He was convinced there was nothing “random” about it. And, knowing the head of IT as I did, I’d bet he was right.