Ask a Stupid Quetion Get a Stupid Answer

[Math Is Hard]

Read any good books lately?

I've read very few good books lately, but this morning I was reminded of a story that was read to me when I was just a little tyke.

I remember once in kindergarten, this woman came to our class to read us a children's book she had written. She was a friend of our teacher, I think, and was hoping to get the book published.

The story went like this:
***
There was a little boy whose parents were going away on a very long trip. To help him pass the time, they gave him a box of crackers and told him to eat one cracker each day. When the box was empty they would be home again. They told him that it was very, very important that he obey the rules and ONLY eat one cracker per day or there would be a punishment.

So the parents went off on their trip. The little boy was very good the first two weeks, but in the third week he missed his parents terribly. He knew that when the last cracker was gone his parents would be home again so he longed to finish all the crackers. Finally he couldn't stand it anymore because he missed his parents so much. He gobbled up all the crackers at once and the box was empty. In an instant, the front door swung open and his parents were standing before him, suitcases in hand.

"Mommy! Daddy!" he cried. He was filled with such happiness to see his parents again. He jumped up and ran to them, hugging and kissing them both.

"Were you a good boy?" said the father, "Show me the box of crackers."
The boy hesitantly produced the empty box.

The father shook his head with grave dissapointment. The mother looked away sadly. "Because you have disobeyed us, you will never see us again."

And then the parents picked up their suitcases and walked away. He never saw them again.

***
My quetion is: do you think the nice lady who read us the story ever found a publisher for her book?

 

[zoobyshoe]

My quetion is: do you think the nice lady who read us the story ever found a publisher for her book?

I'm surprised you didn't know:

She sold the story to Thomas Harris, who fleshed out the character of the little boy and followed his psychological development from the early childhood incident she sketched to it's logical conclusion as the character of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

Anything else?

 

[Huckleberry]

I never read a book. I don't know how to read. Edgar Cayce is my great uncle. He came to me in a dream one night and showed me how to understand books by osmosis while I sleep. At this very moment I'm asleep with my head resting against the monitor. Uncle Ed was just telling me the quetion of the life, universe, and everything.

Do you know what the quetion is?

 

[Danger]

The positive form of a regular quet.

Do new version Volkswagon Beetles float?

 

[BicycleTree]

All cars float, until they sink.

Are there any exceptions to this rule?

 

[Huckleberry]

Yes.

Last Tuesday a group of 11 Cubans were found 10 miles from the Florida Keys floating in a 1950'2 era Buick. A man named Luis Grass Rodriguez converted the old buick into a boat. Generally Cuban immigrants are returned to Cuba if they fail to make it to shore. U.S. Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart has asked the State Department to allow Grass and his family to remain in the United States. Unfortunately, the boat-car is no more. It sank after being machine gunned by the U.S. Coast Guard.

If ham comes from pigs then why does hamburger come from cows?

 

[cronxeh]

because cows and pigs have a deal.

 

[zoobyshoe]

because cows and pigs have a deal.

And...?

 

[cronxeh]

ham = pig
hamburger = cow

now how do you get from a pig to a cow ? you apply a burger to a pig

hence, you feed your pigs with burgers, feed the pig to a cow, and you end up with a cow-hamburger.

its really quite simple

 

[Huckleberry]

Cronx, in this thread you are supposed to answer a stupid quetion with a stupid answer, then create a stupid quetion for someone else. You can't answer a quetion and not ask a quetion. Nor can you ask a quetion and then answer your own quetion without asking another.

Does that make sense?

 

[cronxeh]

so what if i was to just say that what i would say would be said to satisfy this equation and make it true?


ah, but then you ask what equation, and i say well these two sentences, and this particular sentence is actually a statement, which negates the entire purpose of this thread and subsequently makes this post true

 

[Huckleberry]

That's a mouthful indeed. And it was all done without once using the word quetion.
I would say in response to your quetion that the answer is most definitely, irrefutably, a number not greater than or less than by even an infinitesimal amount, but exactly equal to 42.

If I was my clothes twice a week and have a ball of lint the size of a baseball from each load, then why do I still have any clothes left after a year or two?

 

[Math Is Hard]

If I was my clothes twice a week and have a ball of lint the size of a baseball from each load, then why do I still have any clothes left after a year or two?

I wouldn't be so cavalier about ignoring the law of lintropy if I were you. You're bound to get caught sooner or later.

While doing my own laundry, I was just reading about the strange incident which led Richard P. Chineyman to begin his investigations into Dark Light. It seems that during his grad school days, Chineyman lived in a cheap one-room apartment which he shared with several grad student room-mates. Chineyman was frequently criticized by his roomates for spending too long in the shower and using all the hot water. To teach him a lesson his roomates decided one evening to flip off the bathroom light and flush the toilet, leaving him helpless in the darkness and scalding hot water. However, it was at this moment that he observed his first evidence of Dark Light and he leapt from the shower tripping and shouting excitedly in his mother tongue.

Given that Chineyman always ended up paying the electric and water bills, why were his roomates such jerks ?

 

[Moses]

becuase he turns the bathroom lights on and the kitchen tap off all the time, you know watermelones need to be flushed while bicycles gets really old and need some romance, those boys go jerks.


why some people hatse me when i put shoes on their mouths?

 

[Huckleberry]

Good quetion. I have no idea why people might be upset when you put shoes on their mouths. Its always the first thing I do when entertaining guests. I know the post man appreciates it. When he delivers the mail I give him a glass of lemonade and put a shoe on his mouth. It really clears up the sinuses and gets the blood flowing.

I did read something about a disease that can be spread by this friendly greeting custom. Foot and Mouth disease is a nasty, highly contagious virus that causes vesicles and erosions in the mouth. The teeth fall out and the gums shrivel up and a foul smelling puss constantly oozes. Its hard to get a date with toothless, oozing gums so the practice of putting shoes on people's mouths is vanishing as more people become informed of FMD.

My sister worked at a magazine in Hollywood several years ago. She had a contact at another magazine and they had a job opening for a video game tester. Knowing how much I like video games she convinced her contact to not select anyone for the position until she had asked me if I wanted the job. When she asked me I turned down the job because I would have to relocate to San Francisco and I was fairly happy with the prospects of my current job. I also was in the middle of a semester at school. Months later the company I was working for closed down 2 of the shifts that worked in that building and I was layed off.

My stupid quetion is...
Is playing video games a good way to make a living?

 

[BicycleTree]

It depends on the video game. Like, playing pac-man for a living would be horrible.

Did pac-man ever get foot and mouth disease?

 

[Huckleberry]

Did pac-man ever get foot and mouth disease?

Nope. The weird, purple jellyfish that he always ate didn't have any feet. PacMan didn't have any feet either. He lived in a 2-dimensional, footless, electronic universe.

There is this teenage girl in Russia that has an unusual visual ability. She can look into the human body with more clarity than an ultrasound. She can then diagnose all sorts of illnesses. This ability manifested itself after she had her appendix removed. Her ability only works in the daytime and she can use it to look into the bodies of people from their photographs as well. She also has the ability to withstand all but the coldest of temperatures of her homeland with no discomfort or permanent injury.
Professor Yoshio Machi verifies her talent..."She was able to look at them and apparently see what the problem was. Her ability is not x-ray vision, but she definitely has some kind of talent that we can't explain yet." Professor Machi of Tokyo University specializes in studying superhuman powers in human beings.

Why didn't I get any super powers when my appendix was removed?

 

[Danger]

Maybe they missed your appendix and took your glossary instead.

Does Stealth have to be so ugly?

 

[Huckleberry]

Does Stealth have to be so ugly?

It does if you are trying to be stealthy on a septigenarian nudist colony during a game of volleyball.

I'm currently reading a children's book about Gary Ganoosh and his magical laser pointer. His parents bought him a laser pointer with a shiny aluminum belt clip from a carnival clown. The clown whispered very special instructions to Gary. Following the clown's instructions Gary attached a ten ohm resistor in series with the batteries. He then coupled a sound signal across the resistor through a 100uf capacitor from his deceased grandfather's hearing aid. Finally gary put a sheet of wadded up metal foil under the clip.

When Gary turned on the laser pointer he heard an electric hum. The light flickered and sputtered like a 1000 watt candle and suddenly coalesced in front of him as the radiant image of his grandfather. In a scratchy, static voice his Grandfather spoke to him...

That's as far as I got in the book so far. Some of the pages are missing.
Does anyone know what the grandfather said?

 

[Math Is Hard]

That's as far as I got in the book so far. Some of the pages are missing.
Does anyone know what the grandfather said?

Yes, it was a silly little poem his grandfather wrote for him:

There once was a lad named Gary,
Who really liked his job at the dairy,
How his heart would flutter,
When kneading an udder,
But the cows, they grew a bit wary.

I'm actually missing the last five pages from the book. Do you remember what happened at the end of the story when the carnival clown started showing up at Gary's window late at night?

 

[Huckleberry]

Oh, I have those pages. Let me see...

The carnival clown was only a carnival clown by day. He would invent all sorts of magical devices from ordinary everyday items. The ideas for his inventions always came to him in the morning. He would spend the rest of the day telling children about his inventions. Along with the laser pointer poetry spectralgraph he also invented the swirling toilet dimensional vortex for getting to school quickly, the infinite vision mirror that shows you the back of your own head from across the universe, the cubist's 4d carboard box as luxury apartments for homeless people, and the upsidedownatron which really didn't do anything except spill drinks on people.

What the carnival clown didn't know is that at night he became a giant, scary, ectoplasmic apparition formed somewhat like Ron popeil with red, glowing eyes. He would then seek out poets and storytellers around the world and look at them through their windows. If they did not entertain him he threatened them with bad grammar and cat mating sounds. He used their creativity and using his psychic energies transformed it into new inventions that he would remember upon waking.

The story ends when Gary's grandfather tells him the secret of the Ganoosh family.
Oh wait. I'm missing the very last page.

Does anyone know the secret of the Ganoosh family and the end of the story?

 

[Moonbear]

Does anyone know the secret of the Ganoosh family and the end of the story?

His great great great grandfather, Ali, immigrated from a tiny, virtually unknown country, Mirrorland. He married and after many years of great enjoyment, realized he and his wife were infertile. They sought out the help of the very wise Baba Ramalamadingdong, who provided them with two clones. The first they named in honor of the person who aided them to bring these precious clones into the world, Baba Ganoosh, Gary's great-grandfather, and his sister Tabouleh. The only sign that they were clones rather than children conceived in the normal way was the unusual tabby coloration down their backs. But they were purrrrfectly normal in every other way.

The moral of the story is:

Darn, it looks like someone spilled something on my copy of the book and the last line is illegible. What was the moral of the story?

 

[Huckleberry]

What was the moral of the story?

The moral of the story is to keep all the pages INSIDE the book. Or it could be, don't clone people from cat livers.

The aftermath of the story...
After the law prohibiting foreign born citizens to run for presidential office was repealed Baba Ramalamadingdong won the election against Arnold Schwartzeneger in a landslide victory. It really was a landslide victory. Schwartzeneger was buried under ten feet of mud while driving down I5 during a heavy rain storm. He immediately declared Mirrorland to be the capital of the world.

One day sitting in his fun house palace of mirrors and watching the news late at night with his girlfriend the emergency broadcast signal interrupted his program. He assumed it was another test and quickly hit the mute button so as not to wake his wife. Then he averted his eyes because of an extreme allergy to the QVC channel that always managed to appear before the station returned to its regularly scheduled programming. By doing so he missed some important news.

What important news did President Baba Ramalamadingdong miss?

 

[zoobyshoe]

What important news did President Baba Ramalamadingdong miss?

An FBI spokesman had alerted the major networks and news services to a break in the ongoing standoff between Black Triangle/White Stripe UFO/Skunk cult members and the FBI negotiator assigned to the case. Hold up in an outhouse on a rural property outside of Hope, Idaho, USA, an unknown number of cult members were holding two baby skunks hostage, and were threatening to release them in the direction of the nearest FBI sniper, on his belly in the grass about 20 yards away. Negotiations had been bogged down from the start when it became clear the cult leaders didn't understand that the FBI wanted the release of the hostages. All attempts to explain this to the cult leader via cell phone conversation had been thwarted by his sudden bursting into a rage and screaming "WELL, MAYBE YOU'RE LIVING IN A POST APOCOLYPTIC WASTELAND HALLUCINATING THAT YOU'RE NOT!" In less exited moments the cult leader seemed disoriented, and frequently tried to persuade the FBI negotiator to purchase a flashlight, or flashlight radio combination. During these times, the FBI spokesman said, the voice of a second cult member could be heard in the background saying "Buy one! You don't know what these little guys'll do to you if you're caught out in the dark without a light!"
The break came in the form of a request for "...some cat food or something for the skunks." "Concern for the hostages is an excellent sign," the unidentified FBI negotiator said, There's some Stockholming taking place, which makes it less and less likely they'll hurt them."

Recently, when I was on my way out to check the bowl of cat food I leave out for stray kitties, I observed it to be nearly empty. Picking it up to bring it in and fill it, I discovered to my great alarm that the bowl was occupied by a small, but very talented, octopus, who had reconfigured the pigmentation of his skin to look like a thin layer of standard, commercially produced dry cat food (I won't mention any brand names).

What should I do with it?

 

[Huckleberry]

I think you should name it shooby and hang it from your vehicle's rear view mirror. It could hang there by two of it's tentacles and swing all day and practice blending into things as you drive down the road. I think it has been eating the stray cats in your neighborhood, so just leave your door open a crack at night and it should be fine.

Does octopus ink come out of carpeting?

 

[Math Is Hard]

Does octopus ink come out of carpeting?

Indeed, it does. But it took me much experimentation to find the right combination of baking soda, clam juice, limburger cheese, and vinegar to lift it from the fibers.

It all came about during the summer I spent off the Galapagos Islands exploring Michel Cousteau. One night he said to me over dinner, "je m'en fiche!" Being very new to French at the time, I thought he was telling me that he wanted me to tie him to the bed and place many small stinging jellyfish on his naked limbs while I paraded around the room in an Edith Piaf mask slinging a large, loaded, ink-spewing octopus to-and-fro while singing "Inky, Dinky, Parlay Voo".

My French has gotten better since my days with Michel, but what I never understood was, what does it mean when they say "Cherchez le fromage"?

 

[zoobyshoe]

My French has gotten better since my days with Michel, but what I never understood was, what does it mean when they say "Cherchez le fromage"?

I would much prefer you anser your own quetion because I am dazzled by where your mind goes when prompted by a snippet of ambiguous French. However, facts are facts, and the facts behind the admonition "Cherchez le frommage" are these: it is a reference to the philosophical, metaphysical, and scientific guideline Occam's Cheese Knife. This tells us that whenever confronted with unexplained phenomena the first quetion to ask is "Who cut the cheese?" ("Qui a' coupé le frommage?")

Recently I opened the door in response to the doorbell to be startled by the insane, angry red face of the neighborhood letter carrier.

"There's an OCTOPUS in your mailbox!"

Indeed, the curious little thing has been getting into and onto everything. Is there anything as surprising as going at your keyboard only to feel the soft, rubbery recoil of an octopus who's nap you've disturbed?

 

[cronxeh]

Moonbear + Moonbeer = Moon(bear+beer) ??

 

[Math Is Hard]

Is there anything as surprising as going at your keyboard only to feel the soft, rubbery recoil of an octopus who's nap you've disturbed?

I was almost this surprised once. I reached out to pet my octopus and was greeted by the startled indignation of a sentient and semi-ambulatory computer keyboard.

What do you call an octopus with nine tentacles?

 

[plover]

What do you call an octopus with nine tentacles?

Well, many programmers would call it ++octopus (not octopus++ which is a term for the attempt to create a nine-tentacled octopus, which, while it does eject a nine-tentacled octopus into a parallel dimension, just leaves with you an ordinary eight-tentacled one; it might be possible to retrieve the 9t-o if you could get the 8t-o to tell you its name, but the 8t-o always claims to have forgotten it – many believe that this is the reason for that venerable saw: "sooner try to get a manatee to tell you its shoe size than an octopus to tell you its name"), but programmers are very silly people who are often found sitting around reading manatee shoe catalogs so I don't think we should listen to them, but, instead, should harken to the Elizabethan poets, who would wander about the English countryside calling "Hey nonny nonny" in transparent attempts to lure the elusive nine-tentaclers from their hiding places in various mews and ha-has (and once an Elizabethan poet was spotted wandering about the countryside mewing with here and there an interjected "haha!" – but nobody could figure out what he was looking for), and while your average pus-o'-nine-legs is a bit tougher to whistle up than a barnyard tabby, evidence that these intrepid wordsmiths had at least some success is adduced from a variant version of Shakespeare's Othello, which has Iago saying at I.i.116-7:

I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter
and the Moor are now making the beast with nine tentacles.
​

There is also a rumor that Linnaeus wanted to include these enneadic octopodes in his classification system as "Tritripus tritripus", but neglected to complete this entry when his wife said to him: 'Oh Carolus, tri tri again?'

It is feared that these decapods manqué quickly became extinct once chefs in England discovered that they could serve them in place of plum pudding and nobody knew the difference, or, at least, nobody ever said so.

I've been trying to get an octopus to take up residence in my email mailbox, but my ISP keeps complaining about the damp. In case I'm ever successful, do you know if octopus work well as spam filters?