Estimating Funny Quotes

The logic behind patriotism is a mystery. At least a man who believes that his own family or clan is superior to all others is familiar with more than 0.000003% of the people involved.

I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation--which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.

All practical jokes, friendly, harmless or malevolent, involve deception, but not all deceptions are practical jokes. The two men digging up the street, for example, might have been two burglars who wished to recover some swag which they knew to be buried there. But, in that case, having found what they were looking for, they would have departed quietly and never been heard of again, whereas, if they are practical jokers, they must reveal afterwards what they have done or the joke will be lost. The practical joker must not only deceive but also, when he has succeeded, unmask and reveal the truth to his victims. The satisfaction of the practical joker is the look of astonishment on the faces of others when they learn that all the time they were convinced that they were thinking and acting on their own initiative, they were actually the puppets of another’s will. Thus, though his jokes may be harmless in themselves and extremely funny, there is something slightly sinister about every practical joker, for they betray him as someone who likes to play God behind the scenes. […] The success of a practical joker depends upon his accurate estimate of the weaknesses of others, their ignorances, their social reflexes, their unquestioned presuppositions, their obsessive desires, and even the most harmless practical joke is an expression of the joker’s contempt for those he deceives.

Being funny for its own sake is very estimable. It's a nice thing but if you continue to be very funny, if you persist in it, you turn into a crank, like any other crank, because you become clever and you're always alert for an opportunity to make another crack and then you become silly. There has to be measure in these things and the humor has to be your humor and it has to be natural to you and without strain. So wit is a very good thing but persistent cleverness in wit can be very boring and trying to people.

I’m the living dead. I feel no connection to any other human. I have no friends and I don’t really care much about my family any longer. I feel no love for them. I can feel no joy. I’m incapable of feeling physical pleasure. There’s nothing to ever look forward to as a result. I don’t miss anyone or anything. I eat because I feel hunger pangs, but no food tastes like anything I like. I wear a mask when I’m with other people but it’s been slipping lately. I can’t find the energy to hide the heavy weight of survival and its effect on me. I’m exhausted all the time from the effort of just making it through the day. This depression has made a mockery of my memory. It’s in tatters. I have no good memories to sustain me. My past is gone. My present is horrid. My future looks like more of the same. In a way, I’m a man without time. Certainly, there’s no meaning in my life. What meaning can there be without even a millisecond of joy? Ah, scratch that. Let’s even put aside joy and shoot for lower. How about a moment of being content? Nope. Not a chance. I see other people, normal people, who can enjoy themselves. I hear people laughing at something on TV. It makes me cock my head and wonder what that’s like. I’m sure at sometime in my past, I had to have had a wonderful belly laugh. I must have laughed so hard once or twice that my face hurt. Those memories are gone though. Now, the whole concept of “funny” is dead. I stopped going to movies a long time ago. Sitting in a theater crowded with people, every one of them having a better time than you, is incredibly damaging. I wasn’t able to focus for that long anyway. Probably for the best. Sometimes I fear the thought of being normal again. I think I wouldn’t know how to act. How would I handle being able to feel? Gosh it would be nice to feel again. Anything but this terrible, suffocating pain. The sorrow and the misery is so visceral, I find myself clenching my jaw. It physically hurts me. Then I realize that it’s silly to worry about that. You see, in spite of all the meds, the ketamine infusions and other treatments, I’m not getting better. I’m getting worse. I was diagnosed 7 years ago but I’m sure I was suffering for longer. Of course, I can’t remember that, but depression is something that crept up on me. It’s silent and oppressive. I don’t even remember what made me think about going to see someone. But I did and it was a pretty clear diagnosis. So, now what? I keep waking up every morning unfortunately. I don’t fear death any more. That’s for sure. I’ve made some money for the couple of decades I’ve been working and put it away in retirement accounts. I think about how if I was dead that others I once cared for would get that money. Maybe it could at least help them. I don’t know that I’ll ever need it. Even if I don’t end it myself, depression takes a toll on the body. My life expectancy is estimated to be 14 years lower as a result according to the NIH. It won’t be fast enough though. I’m just an empty biological machine that doesn’t know that my soul is gone. My humanity is no more

I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: “Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?”Indulgently, I lifted my right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, “Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them.” Then he said smugly, “I’ve been trying that on all my customers today.”“Did you catch many?” I asked.“Quite a few,” he said, “but I knew for sure I’d catch you.”“Why is that?” I asked.“Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.

It is estimated that on average, the British drink 165 million cups of tea every day 511 John Quincy Adams was gifted a pet alligator by a French general, which he kept in a bathtub in the White House 512 Cows have been proven to produce more milk when they are listening to music 513 If you were to play the world’s longest musical piece, it would take around 630 years

Queer how that was always cropping up. Here she was highly respectable, married, mother of a small boy, and, in spite of all that, knowing all that, these people took one look at her and immediately got that now-I-wonder look. Apparently it was an automatic reaction of white people—if a girl was colored and fairly young, why, it stood to reason she had to be a prostitute. If not that—at least sleeping with her would be just a simple matter, for all one had to do was make the request. In fact, white men wouldn't even have to do the asking because the girl would ask them on sight. She grew angrier as she thought about it. Of course, none of them could know about your grandmother who had brought you up, she said to herself. And ever since you were big enough to remember the things that people said to you, had said over and over, just like a clock ticking, 'Lutie, baby, don't you never let no white man put his hands on you. They ain't never willin' to let a black woman alone. Seems like they all got a itch and a urge to sleep with 'em. Don't you never let any of 'em touch you.' Something that was said so often and with such gravity it had become a part of you, just like breathing, and you would have preferred crawling in bed with a rattlesnake to getting in bed with a white man. Mrs. Chandler's friends and her mother couldn't possibly know that, couldn't possibly imagine that you might have a distrust and a dislike of white men far deeper than the distrust these white women had of you. Or know that, after hearing their estimation of you, nothing in the world could ever force you to be even friendly with a white man. And again she thought of the barrier between her and these people. The funny part of it was she was willing to trust them and their motives without questioning, but the instant they saw the color of her skin they knew what she must be like; they were so confident about what she must be like they didn't need to know her personally in order to verify their estimate.

It’s the year 3012 and all food is gluten-free. No restaurant, grocery, or bakery serves anything with gluten in it, and guess what? Everything still tastes great. ... The amount of time people save by not having to ask—or answer—the question “Is that gluten-free?” when ordering food has lengthened every individual’s life span by an estimated fourteen hours. This “extra time” is used by most people to write negative reviews on the Internet of things they see or hear or have heard about.

Are they organised?' Nicholas called to her. 'What's your system?' 'Right now they're grouped by how many estimated uses they have left,' Joanna said, glancing away from Collins. 'I reorganise them a lot, though, just for fun.' She was aware, too late, how extremely un-fun this made her sound, but Collins saw her face and said, 'Don't worry, Nicholas is no fun, either.' 'Well, I haven't been given much of a chance, have I?' Nicholas said, carefully putting the book back in place. 'For all we know, I might be absolutely amazing at karaoke.' 'Karaoke's fun people who suck at dancing.

AARP’s retirement calculator; it can be found on AARP.org. (As of this writing, the link to the calculator isn’t on the home page; you’ll need to click on “Work & Retirement,” then on “Retirement Planning” to locate it.) The calculator will ask your age, your salary, your savings, and some questions about Social Security and the sort of lifestyle you imagine your older self having before giving you an estimate of how much money you’ll need at retirement and how much you’re likely to have if you continue to earn and save at your current levels. Another source of information is dinkytown.net. This website has a funny name, but if you like calculators, you’re going to be quite pleased.

Wash trading, as it was called, would have been illegal on a regulated US exchange, though the sight of it did not bother Sam all that much. He thought it was sort of funny just how brazenly many of the Asian exchanges did it. In the summer of 2019, FTX created and published a daily analysis of the activity on other exchanges. It estimated that 80 percent or more of the volume on the second- and third-tier exchanges, and 30 percent of the volume on the top few exchanges, was fake. Soon after FTX published its first analysis of crypto trading activity, one exchange called and said, We’re firing our wash trading team. Give us a week and the volumes will be real. The top exchanges expressed relief, and gratitude for the analysis, as, until then, lots of people assumed that far more than 30 percent of their volume was fake. Sam was less surprised that Binance was wash trading than by how badly they were doing it. “They were doing a B-minus job at market manipulation,” he said. One Binance bot would make a wide market in Bitcoin futures, and another Binance bot would enter and lift its high offer. If, to keep the numbers simple, the fair value of bitcoin was $100, the first Binance bot would insert a bid at $98 and an offer at $102. No normal trader would trade against either—why sell for $98 or buy for $102 on Binance what you could buy or sell on some other exchange for $100? But then, at regular and predictable intervals, the second Binance bot would enter the market and buy at $102. It looked as if a trade had occurred between two different parties, but it hadn’t. It was simply Binance buying from Binance.