Interesting Links for 05-06-2014

[andrewducker]

• Teens being too soft for WW2 ‘not a massive problem’
  (tags: wwii funny )
• “Eat Less, Exercise More” Isn’t The Answer For Weight Loss
  (tags: diet weight health )
• Three-parent babies 'safe' to be born
  (tags: parenting children genetics )
• The Architecture of Open Source Applications: LLVM
  (tags: compiler programming )
• I would like to see this wolf

Comments

[guybles]

That children's stories thing has been floating around since at least 2006.

http://old.qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?start=60&t=118

It's good to see that a teacher of creative writing is casually plagiarising the internet for ideas...or maybe I shouldn't trust what the internet says. Which could be the basis for another item on the list, I suppose.

[andrewducker]

Both are entirely possible.

And thanks, I hadn't encountered that list before!

[guybles]

It's not to say it isn't funny - best not to get so jaded that I assume everything on the internet has been done before and, therefore, should be disregarded.

Although it sometimes feels like QI has done everything before...

[apostle_of_eris]

If with the literate I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
- Dorothy Parker

[danieldwilliam]

Tomorrow, the Captain and I are getting up at before dawn to re-enact his grandfather’s D-Day experience.

I’m going to attach the Captain and his USian friend to a kite, fly it over the Meadows, set fire to it and have them jump from the burning aircraft yelling “Geronimo!!!”

I will use the opportunity afforded by the wet weather and the early opening of the local butcher to wade through thigh deep through cold water and blood carrying an assortment of deadly weapons and some bagpipes.

Anyone who gets in the way will be bayonetted or garrotted or set fire to because those are the sort of transferrable skills the modern 4 year old needs.

Once the Captain and I have rendevoused with each other and the French couple from number 73 we’re going to find gramps and kick him in the nuts, repeatedly until he puts his hands up and says “Kameradan, for me Tommy ze var is over.”

We’ll see how well suited a dead octogenarian is at fighting WWII for sure.

[andrewducker]

I shall look forward to seeing the results! You should, with luck, end up with a sufficiently traumatised child to engender a lifetime of bad decisions and right-wing leanings!

[danieldwilliam]

That's certainly what I'm playing for.

What could possibly go wrong by layering a third and fourth generation of post-traumatic stress disorder on the preceding generations shell-shock?

[drdoug]

The children's stories not to write is mostly very funny, but it does have a few ringers on it. It seems to me that "Dad's new 'wife' Greg" is only a scary/bad thing for kids if you're homophobic and/or transphobic. And "The Popup Book of Human Anatomy" sounds utterly awesome, and I'm genuinely disappointed to find that it does seem to be fictional. I can also imagine that "Grandpa Gets A Casket" could be extremely helpful to kids if one of their grandparents did pop their clogs, which is a thing that happens

[drdoug]

On the Dawkins vs Fairy Tales thing, I noticed this Guardian de-bunking story, which included this quote