American National Government & Monty Python

This morning I am working on constructing a quiz for my American National Government classes. To date, the classes have not done exceptionally well on these quizzes, which consist of questions solely from the reading material combined with questions from the power point presentations. Consistently half the students or more have made either D's or F's.

Jokingly, I had suggested to my family over the weekend that I should have three of the questions be as follows: 1. What is your name? 2. What is your quest? 3. What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? So this morning, as I was making out the test and therefore looking for a way to avoid working on it, I decided to Google "what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?" My quest ultimately led me to this site where someone had actually done some research and worked it out, all with a Monty Python theme.

So if you ever find yourself on the Bridge of Death, just remember, the answer is 11 meters per second, or 24 miles an hour. Hum, too bad it was 24 and not 42, then we might have found the question to the ultimate answer, but that's an entirely different story.

A little levity

One of the quotes on my google homepage today is a quote from Dick Cavett:

If your parents never had children, chances are you won't, either.

It's just a silly quote, but it reminds me of something someone said to me many long years ago when I was a teenager. I forget the girl's name now as she was only a casual acquaintance, but I swear she was absolutely serious when she said this. She told me that she knew that she would never be able to have children. When I asked her why, she said "It runs in my family, but it skips a generation." Hum. . .let's just think about that one for a minute. And she wasn't even blond!

Mutilated Christmas songs (Ron Paul Edition)

Did you ever want to take possibly the most annoying traditional Christmas song ("Grandma Got Run over by a Reindeer" is possibly more annoying)around and make it even worse? Well, obviously these people wanted to, and they succeeded!

However, I must say, if he could do most all those things (I'm not really in favor of getting rid of the FDA) I would vote for him. However, the President doesn't really have the power to do all that stuff by himself, and there is no way in Hell that the Congress is going to go along with most of it.

President of France or Lounge Singer, you decide

Today I was grading news journals that my students turned in Monday. One student had written about this article from the BBC. When I saw the picture in the article the first thing that came to mind was that Sarkozy looked like a lounge singer and it looked like he and Bush were performing some kind of dance routine when the picture was taken.


What do you think?

I like this cartoon

Cartoon via WaPo

I couldn't resist

I know, I haven't blogged anything in over two weeks and I end my silence with something like this, but I just couldn't resist.

The question is: Do you know how American beer is like making love in a canoe?

So true

Any cat owner will recognize the accuracy of this chart.

Okay, so I'm a sick individual

When I saw this commercial for the first time I laughed so hard I almost cried. I just had to share.

Sitemeter amusement

I like to periodically look at sitemeter and see how people are finding my site. The funniest referral recently was a google search for "experiences with taking off a hairpiece" (but not in quotation marks). Oddly enough, I was actually the 6th result on said google search. Who knows, thanks to this post, I might actually move up the list on that search.

The most common search that got people to my site was "fun words to say" thanks to this post.

Joke of the Day

The President's Morning Briefing:

Gates briefed the President this morning.

He told Bush that 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq.

To everyone's amazement, all of the color ran from Bush's face, then he collapsed onto his desk, head in hands, visibly shaken, almost whimpering.

Finally, he composed himself and asked Gates: "Just exactly how many is a brazillion?"

H/T: My Aunt Charlotte, via e-mail.