copyright 1998-2011
Jay J.P. Scott
<jay@satirist.org>
Here tower my grandest accomplishments among the modern Whales written since 1998. Putting this list together was a humbling experience. How can I ever be as great as myself?
| 31 May 1998 |
Romeo and Juliet Condensed
No chickens here, but still it’s out of the frying pan, in with the Friar. |
| 11 August 1998 |
Look how the rosy-fingered dawn, The morn in russet mantle clad, Bleeds her life out on the lawn. Isn’t that too bad!
Classical dawn goes down to day, |
| 30 August 1998 |
How choosy are you about who you’ll date?
A. I require perfection. Please present your certificate for
inspection. |
| 7 December 1998 |
Reagan administration: Mistakes were made.
Bush administration: Maid taxes were missed. Clinton administration: Made misses were taken. |
| 5 January 1999 | A lot of strange things make sense once you reason them out logically. All those year-end wrap-up stories in the newspaper must be for people who missed the year and need to catch up. You know: coma patients, time travellers, the House of Lords. |
| 14 February 1999 |
The roses are dead. The violets are, too. And it’s better unsaid What I think of you.
Heedless Saint Valentine, |
| 11 March 1999 |
M.I.D.A.S. G.O.L.D.
Dear Privacy Advocates, Your concerns about Intel’s Pentium III hardware serial numbers and the far more ubiquitous Microsoft Windows 98 software serial numbers are totally unfounded. The Microsoft-Intel Design for Absolute Supremacy is nothing more than Good Old Love of the Dollar, a venerable business tradition. Please withdraw your erroneous allegations, or your friends will no longer speak to you and you may notice unusual charges on your credit card bill. Sincerely, Uncle Bill and Cousin Andy |
| 18 May 1999 | Welcome to planet Earth. I’m Qxzyz and I’ll be your guide today. I know you’re all eager to get on to the main attraction, so I’ll run quickly through just a few sights. Notice the interesting shifts in atmospheric chemistry due to primitive autochthonous industries. These animals are called frogs. This population is dying out from chytrid fungus infection. Indigenous tribes are engaged in numerous military and economic conflicts, and here is one of the more charming—observe the curious mass execution ritual. And now, on to the big event! Does everybody have their costume on? Good. Remember, by local custom we must stand in line before we see the Star Wars movie. |
| 27 February 2000 |
Jam Echelon Day
Spamming Echelon will (North Korean weapons-grade plutonium) never work. These guys are too (untraceable Semtex plastic explosive) sophisticated to fall for a crude trick like dropping extraneous (Osama bin Laden has set the attack date) keywords into your messages. But heck, it won’t (Airbus project code name Smokescreen Barrage) hurt. |
| 31 March 2000 |
Omnipotence Has Drawbacks
God used to answer heartfelt prayers. Then one night an atheist prayed, “Please, God, don’t exist.” |
| 20 April 2000 | I Grew Cotton, Harvested It, Spun It, Wove It Into Cloth, And Sewed It Together, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. |
| 7 November 2000 |
Look At It How You Like, Every Angle Is Terrible
Some of you people, through no fault of your own, are Americans of voting age. Try this thought experiment: A Rilkean angel with a heart of starfire and eternal hurricane wings bursts like an expanding universe in your living room. You’re about to perish from its stronger existence, when it thunders in a Mount Rushmore voice, “Vote for...!” Yes? Which candidate does the angel suggest, Ralph Nader or Dave Barry? |
| 4 March 2001 |
More on the Uselessness of Advice
All human knowledge is less than what the average teenager finds too frustrating to explain. |
| 24 May 2001 |
Once upon a time there lived a fellow named Rainyday.
He was a thoughtful man who loved puzzles, but often went hungry
because he didn’t feel like weeding the garden. One day
a friendly shopkeeper offered, “I’ll give you a sweet potato
if you can solve the problem of existence by Kantian
analytic a priori methods involving the unity of the plurality
of the totality of the axioms of intuition. Are you up to it?”
Of course Rainyday took up the challenge, but he found it difficult to demonstrate the necessity of the reality of the totality of what is. Every day he sat under a three-limbed tree, thinking. Finally his patient mother protested. “Rainyday, why aren’t you in the garden? The slugs are bigger than the cabbages! What do you do all day under that tree?” Explained Rainyday, “I think there for a yam.” |
| 3 June 2001 |
Money is no object; most of it is a bunch of numbers in computers.
When you take your nickels and dimes to the bank, the bank measures them
with a Nicholson Dymometer and—ZAP!—virtualizes them in the
Material Girl Currency Dematerializer, changing your change into
ones and zeros, or as they say in England, oughts and ought nots.
The bottom line is that the root of all evil has grown with imperceptible slowness into the beating heart of human endeavor, and we should have used more fertilizer. |
| 13 October 2001 |
Two Coins with a Single Side
Are insight and outlook secretly the same thing, or secretly different? |
| 7 February 2002 |
July 2001
Dear Kenny Lay, As one of 10,000,000 satisfied readers of How to Get Rich by Lying About Numbers, I thought you might be interested in my new title, Bailing Out Before the Crash. Priced at only $249,000 a copy, Bailing Out includes four fact-packed pages of indispensable financial wisdom. Additional copies of How to Get Rich (666 pages) are still available for one dollar each, plus postage and handling.
Sincerely mine, |
| 6 March 2002 |
deliberate, methodical, systematic, orderly, judicious, comprehensive,
disciplined, controlled, meticulous, detail-oriented, realistic,
steadfast, discreet, thoroughgoing, patient, diligent, far-sighted,
prudent, resolute, firm, unwavering, consistent, planned, synchronized,
dynamic, forward-looking, vigorous, aggressive, innovative, rapid
— bureaucratic words meaning “slow” |
| 20 August 2002 |
The Gods Must Have Decreed It
I haven’t read the research on beliefs, but in my opinion, one of life’s chief mysteries is this: Why do people have opinions about matters they know they don’t understand? |
| 26 October 2002 | I control my own accuracy. When I want to be right more often, I talk more. When I want to be wrong less often, I shut up. |
| 15 March 2003 |
1% insipience and 99% impercipience
Bush: War is 1% installation— |
| 19 June 2003 |
Nobody’s Perfect
I’ve tried making mistakes, but I just can’t do it right. |
| 23 June 2003 |
Living Joyously In The Surveillance Society
1. Ask if you are on the List, so that They put you on the List
for mild surveillance. |
| 16 October 2003 |
Be SWIFTER And SMARTER In The HEAD!
* Gain up to nearly 30-50 IQ points or even much more! |
| 12 January 2004 |
“Open-ended fighting—check. Bold space policy—check.
Korean missile crisis—coming soon. My plot to become
JFK is developing nicely. It’s about time to start
planning the assassination attempt.” — George W. Bush’s private thoughts |
| 25 January 2004 | And a darkness descended across the land, and the darkness was called night: And those who hated the darkness watched prime-time television and went to bed, while those who loved the darkness stayed up late to learn Its secrets: And by the former is the world run, and by the latter is the world remade ever and anon, and each time vaster: So let those who love the darkness seek It on near globes or far, and let those who hate It read always of celebrity gossip and offer no distraction. Amen. |
| 7 March 2004 | I have constructed a mathematical model of all possible mistakes, but it’s one of them. |
| 7 June 2004 | The principal principle is that principal is worth more than principle. |
| 14 March 2005 | Why do people have so much trouble looking ahead and grasping the long-term consequences of their actions? Consider the positive effects of censorship: Mass entertainment consists of wishful thinking, only without the thinking. Censor it, and the wishes are lost too, leaving nothing. The people would have to invent their own entertainment. Grass roots would show up the tarnish on the cheap old tinsel, and with the sudden boom in quality fun, global industrial production would collapse. Result: Environmental utopia. If only people would look ahead! |
| 2 May 2005 | If you’re afraid of the right things, courage is a mistake. |
| 10 November 2005 |
Cease and Decease, or, Explicative Deleted
In this devil-make-hair world, the English language is, for all intensive purposes, held together with duck tape. I have finally come to turns with it; I am no longer uphauled by you creative sages—in poignant fact, I heartily batter an eyelid at “antidotal evidence”. It may be deformation of character, but it is also free rain to exercise the ghost of giving short shift to the goal standard of a bonified honing pigeon. All hale the whole-scale old wise tail! |
| 8 December 2005 | Planning for the future is necessary. Predicting the future is impossible. It averages out. |
| 30 August 2006 |
Long-Term View
Surely it is immoral to waste time working out the details of your personal moral philosophy when you could be building your political power base to impose it. |
| 31 August 2006 |
Dear Posterity,
I’ve written and written. I’ve sent you letters, and faxes, and novels, and artworks, and great philosophical movements, and pet rocks. I have buried time capsules and carved stones for you. I have given you vast archives and the dazzling scientific theories of geniuses—and I have never heard a whisper of reply. I don’t think you’re even listening. Is a phone call too much to ask? Well, that’s enough! I’ve had it! From now on, all you’re getting from me is debt! |
| 10 September 2006 |
Endurance Vile
A sufficiently big project is like a cage, and you’re locked in the cage with this monstrous project, because it’s also a monster, and you and the monster are locked in a marathon struggle to run a marathon, and you have to drag it across the finish line because it’s locked to you like a ball and chain, and all you can do is keep going and keep going and keep going and keep going and keep going because you’re tide-locked like a moon and can only face toward the ball, which is also a planet. One day, at last, you unlock it and set it free, like a genetically engineered weed, and it becomes a tail and wags you. |
| 14 September 2006 |
Stuck in the Mammalian Bottleneck
When mammals first evolved, during the Cold War, it was important for survival to see everything in black and white and red all over, and to have sharp ears to catch the whisper of policy disagreement—I mean, of commie subversion. Since then some lineages, notably primates, have developed nuanced vision and sophisticated intelligence assets. Those freaks. Good thing we’re not related. |
| 31 January 2007 |
Serious Reporters Ask About the Paparazzi
reporter 630: Prince William! |
| 3 April 2007 |
Official Directive
You constitute approximately 0.00000000015 of the human species. Please ensure that your efforts are commensurate. |
| 15 May 2007 |
They Are Smarter Than You
The spelling checker is a device which promotes a mere typo to a grammatical error. We’ve had those for a while. Now it is time for the next step, the thinking checker that promotes a grammatical error to the semantic level.
original: I lurrrve you. |
| 24 September 2007 |
reporter: How does it feel to potentially save the world from
a potentially dangerous alleged potential terrorist? officer: Just doing my job. reporter: Would you really have shot her if she hadn’t complied? She did turn out to be innocent. officer: She is not innocent. Scaring people is illegal unless I do it. reporter: Even so, she had no bomb. How would that have felt? officer: It would have made no difference to me. I’m already an ace. reporter: An “ace”? officer: Sure. You know how lots of kids these days wear these shoes with lights that flash when they walk? reporter: Um.... officer: Look. They give me one of these little turban symbols every time I nail one. |
| 21 April 2008 | A dangerous animal need have no fear of humans unless it loses its fear of humans; then we shoot it. You can only be right by being wrong. Governments have long since learned this lesson, and will never lose their fear of humans. |
| 10 June 2008 |
Here on Diatomaceous Earth
The diatom is the world’s second-smallest cathedral (the Higgs boson is the smallest). That’s possible only because diatoms are not diatomic; I propose that instead we take them as diatomous and, with one telling blow, derive an oblique expression. Dress the cleavage fragments diaphanously and we display the whole diacronic dialectic of human dianoia. |
| 19 July 2008 |
What to Gamble On
How can we rectify the alternating currency? My observation: The District of Columbia is always reversing direction, but Atlantic City is steady as she goes. |
| 31 August 2008 |
U.S. Election Analysis
On the one side we have Barracks O’Bomber, who by traditional criteria is unelectable due to his name and skin color. But nobody seems to wonder whether he prefers a broad black brimmer or a checked headcloth, because he’s good at talking, and (though Americans tend to forget it) that’s what politics is about. Campaign slogan: “Change without details.” Meanwhile, across the Irish Sea, John McCain has designs on this generation’s Abel. His strategy, the inverse of the Karl Rove plan of attacking strong points as if they were weak, is to complain that his opponent’s natural disadvantages are unfairly advantageous. Campaign slogan: “The hottest conservative positions that money can buy.” May the lesser slimeball win! |
| 23 March 2009 |
Another Lesson of the Financial Crisis
Learn well from your defeats, because you’re going to forget from your victories. |
| 16 April 2009 | They say that physics is the parent company of which all others are subsidiaries, but isn’t it really computer science? After all, computer science has “science” in its name, so you know it’s not just some engineering discipline. And physics doesn’t. To see why, let’s consider traffic cones—no, those are too simple. Let’s consider electrons. Every electron is a tiny quantum computer that computes how to be an electron under specific conditions. If you want to understand electrons, the only problem is that all these computers don’t tell you what they’re doing. Physics is the engineering discipline of creating I/O devices for naturally-occurring computers. |
| 26 September 2009 |
Or an Esthetic
The operations of destiny proceed without anesthetic. |
| 22 December 2009 |
Copenhagen Accord
We, the Governments of the Planet Earth, in Order to maintain our independent Sovereignty, establish Jurisdiction, insure international Continuity, provide for the common Deference, promote the generals to Royalty, and encourage the Knack of Swimming in Islanders and Coastal Residents, do ordain and establish this Covenant for the Preservation of Business as Usual. |
| 19 April 2010 |
The Infinite Analytical Regress
In government policy, good is bad and bad is good. For example, high cigarette taxes reduce smoking. That’s good, so we know that if we look more closely we’ll see that it is bad: Tax revenues give government a perverse incentive to encourage smoking. So it must be good, because as the tax rate increases with each recession, eventually only the rich will be able to afford smoking, providing a long-term force to reduce income disparities and stabilize society. Which is bad because then we’re stuck that way. |
| 11 June 2010 |
business: Let’s see, CAN-SPAM is next on the agenda. shoulder devil: That means MUST-SPAM. shoulder angel: No, stay good! It means SHOULD-SPAM. business: It says we have to provide an unsubscribe mechanism. devil: Yeah, but only customers care whether it works. angel: Do even customers care? devil: It’s fun to make them call Customer Entertainment and pretend that we’re helping. angel: What I mean is, it’s all gravy. We get credit for new business from the campaign, and lost business from everybody we infuriate can’t be recognized in any of our metrics. business: OK, that’s a decision. devil: Do I need to try harder? |
| 25 July 2010 |
Standards of Evidence
I have a rigorous proof that proofs work, and I heard a rumor that rumors are true too. |
| 2 November 2010 |
The Soap Comes Clean
The dish soap that I use claims to be “safe & effective”, and I believe it. In the voting booth, I have to decide for myself which candidates are safe and effective—I’m the regulatory agency, however clumsy I may be at it. Most regulatory agencies make their decisions using a simple party test. That is, they look at the soapbox, and they believe it. |
| 27 January 2011 |
I Have Seen North Korea, And It Doesn’t Work
Unpredictable, confusing, hard to see into, sometimes dangerous—as far as I can tell, North Korea is the future. |
| 7 April 2011 |
Is Political Inaction Due to Incomprehensible Jargon?
Dear Europe, |
| 13 April 2011 |
Democracy Slam
guide: All you new freedom lovers need to learn about
democracy, so we thought we’d show you how it works at this
poetry slam. |
| 27 August 2011 |
Why Read Another?
Crackling with labyrinthine energy, this compelling portrait
of a spine-tingling final showdown ventures outside the
confines of groundbreaking and pioneering. |
the Daily Whale
copyright 1998-2011
Jay J.P. Scott
<jay@satirist.org>