Tag Archives: humour

Other duties as assigned

Leave a reply

One of my favourite running jokes is that the biggest part of a Principal’s job is ‘Other duties as assigned’. The funniest part is that none of them are actually assigned. They are the jobs that spring up unexpectedly, and don’t really belong to anyone, and so they are either something a principal does themselves or something the principal has to delegate, which in itself is a task to do.

It can be as gross as clearing dog poop off of a field between custodial shifts. As industrious as assembling shelving that you thought would come pre-assembled. As mundane as scheduling staff at a special event to ensure appropriate supervision. Or as glorious as getting duck taped to a wall or getting a face full of whipping cream. It’s 1001 other duties ‘as assigned’… or it can be the many wonderful things I shared in my post called ‘Role of the Principal’ back when I was in China in 2010.

It’s really all the ‘other’ duties that makes a principal a principal.

If it hurts…

Leave a reply

I had sciatic pain from about December to March. It got bad enough that my doctor requested a pain specialist appointment for me, and I had it yesterday. Despite the fact that I’m no longer in pain, I kept the appointment so that I can learn more about my disc issues and maybe figure out some preventative measures to ensure I don’t end up in 4 months of pain again.

Have you ever seen that joke where a patient is talking to a doctor and says, “Doctor, when I poke right here, it hurts.” And the doctor replies, “Well then don’t poke there.” That’s essentially the advice I got.

The specialist said that I’m getting old, (it wasn’t intended as an insult, he told me we are the same age), and that the wear-and-tear that my back shows is typical for active people my age. He then said that of course I should stay active and keep doing what I’m doing. Then came the punchline: “If you do something and it hurts, then stop doing it.”

That’s what I waited months to hear. He told me that he used to do a lot of running until he had a knee replaced and now he walks. I asked him if I should stop using a weighted vest to workout, something I was doing before the pain, but haven’t tried since. His response you can guess, “Try it. If it hurts, stop.”

“But if it hurts, the pain might come back for a while.”

“Oh yeah, it could be two to three months.”

It ended with him joking that he could write me a note to give to my wife to get out of doing dishes for a while. I wasn’t amused.

I don’t know exactly what I was looking for, but it wasn’t this. I suppose I’ll just keep doing my physio exercises, keep going to the gym, and if something hurts, I guess I just stop doing that thing.

In living satire

Leave a reply

A few years back I heard someone say that we are living in the timeline that is the laughing stock of all other timelines, and I’m routinely reminded of this.

I read a quote from the leader of the most powerful nation in the world today, shared in a social media post commenting on it, and my BS detector went off. This had to be fake… satire to anger those not intelligent enough to get the joke! So I went onto the web version of this man’s social media propaganda machine that bears the word ‘Truth’, (again this screams satire), to see if the quote actually came from the horse’s mouth.

It did.

He actually said this ridiculous statement. I know what you want to ask. I know I’m being too vague, and you are wondering, ‘What did he say this time?’ But here’s the sad truth: I could have written this a week ago, a month ago, a year ago… the only thing that would be different is the quote itself. Not the fact that it’s so obtuse that it is offensive. Not that it’s a disgrace to the office he holds. Not that it’s so off colour that you’d think it was satire if you didn’t read it at its source.

So here we are in living satire. Living in a joke of a timeline, where we can’t distinguish the difference between the truth and what is satirical, fake news shared on ‘The Onion’. And here I am writing a post that will be just as relevant a week, month, or year farther into our comical, if not sad timeline.

The best paper (n)ever written

Leave a reply

Anyone who writes regularly understands writer’s block. It is a scary thing to face and when you are in it, it feels like there is no escape. So when I heard of this paper, I had to look it up:

JOURNAL OF APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS 1974, 7, 497 Number 3 (FALL 1974)

THE UNSUCCESSFUL SELF-TREATMENT OF A CASE OF “WRITER’S BLOCK’‘
Dennis Upper

No abstract, and completely blank other than the word ‘REFERENCES’, of which there are none. A foot note mentioning that portions of this paper were NOT presented at a conference, and one more thing that makes this priceless:

COMMENTS BY REVIEWER A

“I have studied this manuscript very carefully with lemon juice and X-rays and have not detected a single flaw in either design or writing style. I suggest it be published without revision. Clearly it is the most concise manuscript I have ever seen—yet it contains sufficient detail to allow other investigators to replicate Dr. Upper’s failure. In comparison with the other manuscripts I get from you containing all that complicated detail, this one was a pleasure to examine. Surely we can find a place for this paper in the Journal—perhaps on the edge of a blank page.”

I can’t decide what I like best about this, the originality of the paper itself, the brilliance of the reviewer, or the fact that it was published.

I wish that I was clever enough to have written this when I was stuck with writer’s block! 😆

Awful(ly funny) voice-to-text

Leave a reply

I hate the iPhone voice-to-text. I’m never ‘going to’ say ‘gonna’. And I definitely didn’t intend to send the following text to my wife:

“Yes, chat later I’m in the middle of sex right now. No problem for me to come.”

Context: I was at the gym working out, and my wife was going to run an errand later, and was asking me to help. I was in the middle of a SET!

Not 20 minutes later I was trying to tell my wife we could meet a friend at 11 but instead of, “Tell him eleven, maybe?” Voice to text changed it to, “Tell him I love him, maybe?” At least I caught this one before hitting send and corrected it.

Perhaps I need to enunciate my words more clearly. But dang, I’m so grateful that the first mistake was sent to my wife and not a colleague at work. I think my voice to text mantra needs to be, ‘Speak, EDIT, then send’ from now on!

New study: ‘Stupidity is Contagious’

Leave a reply

Is this the newest epidemic?

New study: ‘Stupidity is Contagious’

Some very interesting findings have come from a new study:

  • Researchers at the Institute for Cognitive Decay claim stupidity spreads “at rates comparable to the common cold, but with longer-lasting effects.”
  • Dr. Helen Tropp, lead researcher:
    “It turns out stupidity is highly contagious, especially when transmitted through phrases like ‘I did my own research’ or ‘That’s just your opinion.’”
  • Study participants who spent just 10 minutes in a room with someone spouting conspiracy theories lost an average of 12 IQ points, some “permanently.”
  • Exposure is not limited to in-person contact: scrolling through the ‘For you’ section of X (Twitter) carries “a 73% risk of infection.”
  • In rural test sites, researchers noticed “stupidity clusters” forming, which they compared to “wildfires fueled by bad takes, energy drinks, and supplements promoted on ‘Bro Culture’ podcasts.”
  • One experimental group was forced to binge-watch reality TV marathons—nearly half had lowered basic math test results afterward, and 12% struggled to write in complete sentences when asked to summarize episodes in a paragraph.
  • Professor Alan Greaves, epidemiologist:
    “We tried developing a stupidity vaccine, but test subjects refused it, saying they ‘don’t believe in science.’ At that point, we gave up.”

And if these ‘research based’ bullet points weren’t enough ‘evidence’, let me be explicit in saying these were all Chat GPT inspired, following a response to my request for them stating, “Here’s a bundle of fake “facts,” bogus statistics, and ridiculous quotes you can mix into your parody piece.” I tweaked them a little, but none of them were my ideas.

Stupidity travels at the speed of laziness.

Stupidity isn’t contagious, lazy thinking is. We no longer live in a world where information can be taken at face value without some level of fact checking. Our bullshit detectors need to be left in the ‘on’ position. And we need to be sceptical of evidence, be that evidence in favour of or against what we believe.

It can be a quote, an AI generated video, or even a person of influence that you have followed and admired, but who was equally duped (or lazy) in their gathering of information… Misinformation, fake “facts”, and downright intentional falsified data is everywhere these days, and if we are lazy with our diligence, it’s easy to contribute to the spread of information and lies.

So while this study was made up, it seems to me that if we are lazy in the way we consume (and share information), as many people seem to be, this really is leading to the spread of stupidity.

Canadian measurements

Leave a reply

I saw this very funny post on social media:

Americans: I use miles and pounds

Europeans: I use kilometres and kilograms

Canadians: [snorting a line of assorted measuring systems] I’m 5’8, I weigh 150lbs, horses weigh 1000kgs, my house is an hour away and I drive 80 km/h to get there, I need a cup of flour and 1L of milk.

What amazes me is that despite living in 2 worlds, with a mix of pounds and kilograms, miles and kilometres, Fahrenheit and Celsius, I am absolutely useless at converting between these measurements. It’s 20° outside, I have no idea what that is in Fahrenheit. I heat my wife’s latte milk to 170°, I have no idea what that is in Celsius. My wife’s weight scale is in kilograms and no matter how many time I weigh myself on it, I need Siri to convert it to pounds for me.

You’d think that I’d learn, but no, I just blindly choose the system of measurement that I’m used to and am completely oblivious to the conversion to any other system.

Am I the only one?

Old jokes, new format

Leave a reply

Build it and they will Like, Follow, and Share… the newest craze to hit the internet is nothing more than a rehashing of old ideas in a new format. By now everyone has seen the Bigfoot videos where an AI Bigfoot is doing a selfie vlog and telling jokes as well as doing ridiculous antics. If you haven’t seen them, Google ‘Bigfoot Vlog’ and they will show up in droves. I’ve notice a few things. While a few of them are refreshingly funny, most of them rehash really old jokes, many of which are based on racism, sexism, or tropes that have all been done before. It’s literally just old jokes in a new format.

But they work. They get the click, likes, and shares. They are going viral. And they are creating copycats that are now doing the same thing, using AI, but with people rather than Bigfoot. Videos that are mostly 100% realistic and yet still sit somewhere in the uncanny valley of almost right, yet not fully. And again, just rehashing old content in a new format.

Expect a lot more of this. Also expect world crisis to be leveraged for the same attention. You’ll see bombing in the middle east that’s actually just AI video. You’ll hear government leaders and celebrities saying outlandish things, except it won’t really be them. You’ll see alien landings, meteor landings, and even plane crashes that didn’t happen but were rather prompted into video reality.

When we get tired of the jokes, we’ll just start to get fooled more and more by AI drama that is invented to draw our attention. But for now, the jokes will come. They will get more inappropriate and cross lines a person wouldn’t with a video of themselves. And as attention wanes they will get more extreme, more tasteless, and so abundant that we’ll just be tired of them… as I am already tiring of them.

Those Gen X… and their use of ellipses

The Generation X’s ‘casual use of ellipses‘ is something I am… unapologetically guilty of.

It’s not just about leaving something unsaid… the pause often feels better if it’s longer than a comma… and yet a colon or semicolon just doesn’t work as well.

A single sentence sometimes flows better than two… even though there might be a second idea that makes the sentence too disjointed or too long to read in just one go.

And sometimes the stream of consciousness flow of ideas invites the use of an ellipses, a thoughtful, momentary pause, to help the idea along without another kind of punctuation getting in the way… while still keeping the stream flowing despite a change in sentence tense.

And if you are a generation that thinks us old, and wants to tease us about our archaic use of punctuation, there is another Generation X trait that I happen to hold in situations just like this… I don’t care. If you don’t like it… you don’t have to read what I write. Don’t worry… I won’t be offended.

Oh, and for those of you that actually don’t care about how I use ellipses, I do apologize for my overuse of it above. It doesn’t always have to be used.

The (backhanded) Compliment

She approached me with a glowing smile “Mr. Truss can I take a picture with you?”

“Of course.”

It was just a few minutes after convocation was over and she’d crossed the stage and received her diploma.

“You were my favourite principal ever… actually no that’s not it… you were my least obnoxious principal.”

“Well thank you, I’m honoured.”

Most people would call that a backhanded compliment, but when you are talking to a neurodivergent student, and you’ve worked with a few of them, you see the real compliment. You really are honoured by it.

After all, despite the words said, here is a student, graduated and thrilled a to be moving on, and she wants to take a picture with me.