October 2, 2013

The unintended "absurdity" theme.

After posting that last post, I saw I'd done 2 posts in a row with "absurdity" in the title. That more or less determines that I will at least do a Google "news" search on the word in an effort to make some sense of the coincidence. Perhaps everything is coming together today over absurdity.

I see there are over 3000 current news articles on congressional absurdity, and I decline to click on things like "The Double Absurdity of Ted Cruz's 'Filibuster.'" I also don't care about "The love for fantastic absurdity at the [Boston Symphony Orchestra]" or "The Sheer Absurdity of Favoring Eli Manning Over Peyton Manning."

But I'm motivated to click on "The absurdity of education" in the Saudi Gazette (comparing a British girls' school with 2 teachers and 8 students to a Saudi girls' school with 600 students and 50 teachers and no working bathrooms).

And then there's "2013 Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate absurdity and science," including:
Safety/Engineering Prize: The late Gustano Pizzo, for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers. The system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane’s specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to Earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. US Patent #3811643, Gustano A. Pizzo, anti-hijacking system for aircraft, May 1972.
And:
Peace Prize: Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, and to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding. The audience was asked not to applaud and were given a demonstration of one-handed clapping.

3 comments:

traditionalguy said...

One of the definitions for absurd is "manifestly false."

That is what awards are being given for these days. From planting an old Big Lie that Jews are a subhuman enemy to planting the new Big Lie that CO2 is a pollutant, psy-ops rolls along creating weak minded silly idiots everywhere.

Nobel Peace, Peace, and Peace prizes for the best facilitators of a middle east war of extermination on surrounded the now Jews is coming soon.

Matt Sablan said...

I want a cupcake shaped like a windmill. It isn't absurd so much as whimsical.

Wince said...

Seems to me quite clear Cruz's entirely realistic intention was to not allow Obamacare to, ahem, cruise through the senate without a whimper, but instead make the Democrats own it.

That's why Cruz earned so much scorn.