Published November 16, 2008 | 
Do you feel better or worse knowing that ancient Greeks joked about approximately the same things we do? The link to the news story is all over LJ, so I brought you the link to the actual multimedia book:
Philogelos: The Laugh Addict – The World’s Oldest Joke Book.
My husband’s avatar is cheating on me! Link from fastfwd.
Turning an apartment into a crystal cave. Conceptual art I actually like. From jaylake
The glass spinning wheel. Link from sogwife.
Geographilia: am I sick because I find this image sexually arousing? (Totally SFW.)
Other favorites: these blue melting ridges, this peak, this storm. And don’t even get me started on the Iceland pictures.
What’s wrong with the accents in Trading Places? (cross-posted from else-LJ)
Dan Ackroyd is trying (and failing) to do the traditional east-coast Preppy accent, sometimes known as Locust Valley Lockjaw. The Main Line version of it is so extreme that I once asked a preppy friend of mine if her aunt was English. The actress Anne Francine, once a Main Line debutante, exemplifies what Ackroyd should have sounded like. (From about 1:10 to about 1:40 she is in full Main Line voice.)
Chris Matthews of Hardball has the remnants of classic Philadelphia accent — strong enough in some words that I grin every time I hear him. The truly classic Philadelphia accent swallows many Ls and most mid-word consonants, too, and is therefore eschewed by those hoping for a career in broadcasting. Most unstressed vowels are pronounced as “uh,” the medial NT in words like “mountain” are replaced with a glottal stop, and the medial T is invariably pronounced as a D. Basically, it sounds as though you’re talking through a mouthful of cheesesteak and/or someone else’s knuckles.
Jamie Lee Curtis was trying to emulate that accent. However, her character was from a coal town. She should have sounded like the locals in this coal documentary trailer.
I love that humor hasn’t changed much, though I wish the page you linked to had some examples. It makes me feel connected to the past, or the human family. We’re us – we were and are and will be, and I’m in that “we”. I imagine the feeling I get from that is a lot like what drives people to research their ancestry, to feel your place in the threads that run backwards and forwards.
There’s a joke I love in the Malleus Maleficorum (though of course the authors report it as a genuine anecdote of the existence and evil of witches, since they’re writing the book of how to find and kill witches):
A witch steals some guy’s penis, and so he goes to her, and says, “Hey, give me my penis back!” So the witch says, “Okay, climb this tree and up in the tree there’s a bird’s nest and in the bird’s nest you’ll see all the penises I’ve stolen. Grab yours and climb down and put it back on.” So he climbs up the tree, and he sees a penis that’s bigger than all the others and reaches out to grab it, but the witch calls up to him: “Not that one! That belongs to the village priest!”
It mostly elicits eyeball-rollings among modern listeners, but I bet it mostly elicited eyeball-rollings in the Middle Ages, too. :)
It’s going to get even weirder when I tell you I hiked down in that canyon at Zabriskie Point.
Re: the Joe Decker photo
Oh my god! To be aroused by awesome beauty–especially when things are merging together–I’m with you, sistah!
The “husband’s avatar” headline, to be honest, makes it sound like the avatar is independent of the player. This isn’t at all how that works, of course. That story is full of irony, though. The capper being that the woman’s turned to someone she met via World of Warcraft for comfort.