Category: Just for Fun

What sound does a butterfly make?

It’s not as though the world isn’t noisy enough already. Ask Google for “animal noises” and you get a fun activity to share with a grand or great-grand.

Too tame for those jaded tweens? Visit The Creepiest Animal Sounds together for options like “lynxes having a conversation.”

Or if you have littlest ones to entertain, check out the nursery song, The Sounds that the Animals Make. (Note that I, Tuggie, make a cameo appearance in this production. I have a good agent.)

And the people they say blah-blah-blah. Ain’t that the truth.

What sex is your computer?

Editor’s note: This humorous piece is from an unattributed source. The earliest reference to it that I can find is in the NY Times in 1998, and even then, it was a judge reading from an email he received so who knows where it first appeared. So don’t mind the gender stereotyping that some folks in 2021 might find offensive.

As you are aware, ships have long been characterized as being female (e.g., “Steady as she goes” or “She’s listing to starboard, Captain!”).
Recently, a group of computer scientists (all males) announced that computers should also be referred to as being female. Their reasons for drawing this conclusion follow:

Five reasons to believe computers are female:

  1. No one but the Creator understands their internal logic.
  2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.
  3. The message “Bad command or file name” is about as informative as, “If you don’t know why I’m mad at you, then I’m certainly not going to tell you.”
  4. Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.
  5. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

However, another group of computer scientists (all female) think that computers should be referred to as if they were male. Their reasons follow:

Five reasons to believe computers are male:

  1. They have a lot of data, but are still clueless.
  2. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem.
  3. As soon as you commit to one you realize that, if you had waited a little longer, you could have obtained a better model.
  4. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.
  5. Big power surges knock them out for the rest of the night.