Headlines that make you titter (sorry, I couldn’t resist)

Oh, dear… Auntie Beeb’s BBC News website feed today served me up this gem:

Great tits cope well with warming

What can I say…

Um, well…

How about: Benny Hill, Monty Python…

Which explains a lot about me…

Headlines that make you smile and/or have a cow

The BBC News website reports that ” EU farmers to produce more milk“.  Now, I had always been under the impression that it was cows producing the milk, but I guess things have changed a bit in agribiz…

Headlines That Make You Smile and Smile Again

OK, just had to post about this headline that made me smile I found on the BBC News website today — seems that Microsoft aren’t content with just being a bunch of yahoos, they want to buy the eponymous company.

Headlines that make you smile (this one’s gonna get me in trouble…)

“US intelligence budget disclosed” proclaimed the headline in Firefox’s Live Bookmarks list from the BBC News website’s RSS feed.

“OK,” I thought, “just how much would the US spend on intelligence?  Buck-fifty?” (umm, that’d be about $1.43 in Canadian money right now)

Wait, now I get it.  They’re not talking about what they spend on making the US intelligent.

Ouch… That’s *gotta* hurt.

I was listening to The Last Word today, Maureen Holloway’s choice little island of wit and gossip in The Wasteland That Is Morning Talk Radio, when I heard about this, er, hot item.

Thank heavens I wasn’t drinking a cuppa’ joe in the car (driving is a serious occupation, IMNSHO, so I don’t often try to do other things at the same time) or I’d have had to stop to clean a gynormous spit-take off the inside of the windshield (er, make that windscreen, in honour of Mr. Ramsay’s nationality).

And here I thought only race car drivers needed Nomex(TM) underwear…

Not exactly a headline…

…but it does make you smile. Well, once the extremely puzzled WTF? look leaves your face after reading it.

Let me back up a little in the story. Today was S’s last day at work before going on her maternity leave. So to send her off, we went out to lunch, to a Chinese restaurant not far from the office.

And at the end of the meal they served the obligatory fortune-cookies. Now, some of the folks got fortunes that were mildly amusing for their deep, philosophical sounding mottoes.

Me? Here’s what I got:

The rubber bands are heading in the right direction.

Huh?

I swear, that’s word-for-word what it says.

Now, maybe there’s some deep, philosophical saying in Chinese that has this as a translation… but it seems rather unlikely. Doesn’t it?

So K says “Why don’t you google it and see if it really is a translation of some Chinese saying.”

I didn’t really expect to turn up anything at all, let alone a reference to a Chinese saying. But I entered the phrase on Google’s search page, with it in quotes to see if an exact match would turn up.

And it did, although there wasn’t a citation of some ancient Taoist or Confucian pearl of wisdom. Apparently, I’m not the only one struck by the Beckettsian absurdity of the phrase — have a look a the search results here.

With that, I’m off to bed, where perhaps I’ll have some revelatory dream that will make the meaning of the fortune clear.

And monkeys might fly out of my butt…

Headlines that make you smile (#2)

“Boeing sales forecast takes off” is the headline for an article that appeared today on The Beeb’s news website.

It’s so obvious (and lame…) that it can’t have been an accident.  Makes you wonder if they’re letting the summer interns work unsupervised…

Headlines that make you smile (1st in a series)

Genes shed light on fish fingers

That’s the headline for a science article on the BBC’s news website.

Which made me smile, thinking of a couple of guys named Gene coming up with an explanation for a type of pseudo-food….