Hans Cathcart’s Homepage

At Norbert’s New Years party last night, we started watching some YouTube videos on his Apple TV and came across one of Jeff Dunham’s comedy routines.  As a result one of the guests, a teacher, came to understand a joke one of her students had made in her class — an innocent joke, that due to unfortunate prior circumstances and a lack of common experience was interpreted more seriously than it was intended.

One of the puppets Dunham uses in his comedy routine is called Achmed the Dead Terrorist, and the puppet has the habit of yelling “Silence - I kill you”.  It was during one of the teacher’s English classes that the commotion in the room brought her to yell “Silence!”, to which the obedient student yelled “I kill you”.  Funny, and he probably scored some points with the girls, but the teacher unfortunately didn’t know the routine.  Instead, she had previously had the unfortunate experience of being a teacher at a school that had had a school shooting by an upset former student.  To her, hearing one of her students yell “I kill you” must have been pretty disturbing and understandably shocking.  The kid did explain the comment by referring to Dunham, but she didn’t see the skit till yesterday.

It’s saddening that school violence has put schools, teachers and parents on such an edge, and that schools aren’t the innocent playgrounds of when I was growing up.  And as wrong as Achmed is in a politically correct sense, Dunham’s skit is still pretty funny.

You’re spending too much time on YouTube, aren’t you?  You’re at work, yes.  Ok, that’s probably alright.  If you haven’t been to TED, the site — cause getting into the actual event is like impossible, you’re missing out.  To start you off, watch Ze Frank’s presentation from 2004.  The Hans Rosling talk is a classic.  Jill Bolte talks about her brain.  And Johnny Lee plays with Wii.

From time to time my brain wanders and I think about Pay It Forward, the Catherine Ryan Hyde novel which was turned into a film staring Haley Joel Osment. The story left an indelible impression on me, no doubt because of Osment’s remarkable performance. So when I stumbled upon Tom Kyzivat’s Helium animation on Adobe’s Flash On showcase site, the story reminded me of the novel again. Tom is a remarkably talented young artist, and I’m sure we’ll see much of him as his career develops. Helium is sweet and fabulous, and SnowMitch vs SlushMel has a pretty amusing commentary on movie fight scenes.

A few days ago I received the “The Best of Rod Machado Live on 14 Audio CDs” and I haven’t been able to stop listening. I’m on the sixth CD now and I’m still laughing at how he starts his speeches. Now listen to me! If you’ve ever taken any of the flight training lessons in Microsoft Flight Simulator, Rod was your instructor.