Obvious Things You 0nly Just Realised - 2020

[beanheadmcginty]

I've only just clocked the similarity in appearance between Mr. Happy from the Mr. Men and the classic yellow smiley face. Now I know one is British and the other American in origin, but did the latter influence the former or is it just coincidence? Why didn't Roger Hargreaves get sued?

[touchingcloth]

Is the yellow smiley face American in origin? I assumed it was just based on pictures of faces going back decades or centuries or more, and the reason Hargreaves didn't get sued was because any patent lawyer in the world would have said "prior arsed art, mate".

[Better Midlands]

A nun was sitting in the bath....
....when there was a knock on the door.

Oh no, she thought. I can't let anyone in here while I'm taking a bath. "Who is it?" she called out in trepidation.

"It's the blind man," came the reply.

Well, I suppose if it's a blind man there's no harm letting him in, thought the nun, and she told the man to come in.

A man in overalls walked in holding a tape measure and wearing a tool belt. "Nice tits love," he said. "Where do you want your blinds?"

[kittens]

i have a vivid memory of reading all of these nun jokes a few days ago most likely on this website. have they been posted recently and if so is this being done on purpose. thanks all

[olliebean]

Is the yellow smiley face American in origin? I assumed it was just based on pictures of faces going back decades or centuries or more, and the reason Hargreaves didn't get sued was because any patent lawyer in the world would have said "prior arsed art, mate".

The oldest known smiling face was found by a team of archaeologists led by Nicolò Marchetti of the University of Bologna. Marchetti and his team pieced together fragments of a Hittite pot from approximately 1700 BC that had been found in Karkamış, Turkey. Once the pot had been pieced together, the team noticed that the item had a large smiling face engraved on it, becoming the first item to with such a design to be found.

[Jockice]

How do you get a nun pregnant?

Fuck her.

[Ambient Sheep]

i have a vivid memory of reading all of these nun jokes a few days ago most likely on this website. have they been posted recently and if so is this being done on purpose. thanks all

I was about to say, getting a terrible feeling of déjà vu.  Yeah we did the whole nun jokes and surreal duck jokes (but not, I think, the elephant jokes) in a thread a while back, which in turn linked back to even older ones.

Yeah, here you go:
https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,74035.msg3888647.html#msg3888647
a year ago less five days... and it links back to FOUR older dissections of the nuns in the bath and duck jokes. :-)

EDIT: IIRC, in the end we discovered that the duck joke was allegedly invented in a creative writing class in Seattle or somewhere, in the late 70s.

[Ambient Sheep]

Meanwhile, how did the Avon Lady get pregnant?

Because Max Factor.

[kalowski]

Two in the front and two in the back.

Bloody George Ezra.

[Replies From View]

Edit:  just realised

[Twonty Gostelow]

I was about to say, getting a terrible feeling of déjà vu.  Yeah we did the whole nun jokes and surreal duck jokes (but not, I think, the elephant jokes) in a thread a while back, which in turn linked back to even older ones.

Yeah, here you go:
https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,74035.msg3888647.html#msg3888647
a year ago less five days... and it links back to FOUR older dissections of the nuns in the bath and duck jokes. :-)

More likely kittens was thinking of the ongoing thread in Comedy Chat of jokes you've made up yourself unless you'd rather repeat old ones everybody's heard
https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,72077.msg3891086.html#msg3891086
https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,72077.msg4248415.html#msg4248415

[sirhenry]

I had a One Thousand and One jokes book which I got from the crapstand in an Asdas when I was about five, and one particular joke became my go-to one for decades:

I think I was confused when I first read it, so asked my dad and he explained that not understanding it was the point, and I've loved a non-joke and shaggy dog story[nb]The same book had a long winded story about using a buried pet hamster having daffodils appear on its grave, the punchline being "tulips from hamster jam".[/nb] ever since.

When I was a kid there was a joke I didn't understand on Do Not Adjust Your Set, so I asked what my mum what it meant and she similarly explained that it was just meaningless absurdity. This was a whole new concept to me and I loved it[nb]and it explained so much of the humour in the show[/nb], so the joke became a family tradition. It was "How do you get off an elephant? You don't, you get off a duck!"

Or at least that's how I remembered it. It was twenty years before I heard the correct version and it was such a disappointment: "How do you get down off an elephant? You don't, you get down off a duck!"[nb]This is probably quoted correctly in one of the other threads, but I still prefer my 6-year-old version.[/nb]

[Ambient Sheep]

More likely kittens was thinking of the ongoing thread in Comedy Chat of jokes you've made up yourself unless you'd rather repeat old ones everybody's heard
https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,72077.msg3891086.html#msg3891086
https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,72077.msg4248415.html#msg4248415

Yes, it seems that the latter is probably what he's thinking of.  Hadn't noticed it being bumped.

[JaDanketies]

Whack-a-Mole sounds like Guacamole, perhaps deliberately

[touchingcloth]

Whack-a-Mole sounds like Guacamole, perhaps deliberately

Not a thing I've just realised, but way too long after I first came across moles (mole-ays) being a thing in Mexican cooking and realising they were a kind of sauce, I had the realisation that that's where the -mole ending in guacamole comes from, and it translates fairly boringly and somehow horribly as "avocado sauce".

[kittens]

More likely kittens was thinking of the ongoing thread in Comedy Chat of jokes you've made up yourself unless you'd rather repeat old ones everybody's heard
https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,72077.msg3891086.html#msg3891086
https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,72077.msg4248415.html#msg4248415

yep, this is it. genuinely was thinking i must have had a vision of the future. mystery solved

[beanheadmcginty]

Is the yellow smiley face American in origin? I assumed it was just based on pictures of faces going back decades or centuries or more, and the reason Hargreaves didn't get sued was because any patent lawyer in the world would have said "prior arsed art, mate".

In the Wikipedia article on yellow smiley faces here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley

It says: "According to the Smithsonian Institution, the smiley face as we know it today was created by Harvey Ross Ball, an American graphic artist. In 1963, Ball was employed by State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts (now known as Hanover Insurance) to create a happy face to raise the morale of the employees. Ball created the design in ten minutes and was paid $45 (equivalent to $376 in 2019). His rendition, with a bright yellow background, dark oval eyes, full smile, and creases at the sides of the mouth, was imprinted on more than fifty million buttons and became familiar around the world. The design is so simple that it is certain that similar versions were produced before 1963, including those cited above. However, Ball's rendition, as described here, has become the most iconic version."

[Bazooka]

Adam Sandler is not Canadian.

[Replies From View]

acid house face, if you ask me

[touchingcloth]

Log flumes from off of theme parks are based on when loggers used to send their logs back to civilisation floating on a channel - or flume - of water.

A logjam comes from when one of those flumes would get jammed by a log.

[Dewt]

Adam Sandler is not Canadian.

Him and Sarah Silverman are from right here in Manchester, New Hampshire

Sometimes Sandler likes to return and flash his money around like a cunt

[Paul Calf]

Manchester
So much to answer for...

[Replies From View]

Log flumes from off of theme parks are based on when loggers used to send their logs back to civilisation floating on a channel - or flume - of water.

A logjam comes from when one of those flumes would get jammed by a log.

And that's when you have to get the plumber 'round.

[touchingcloth]

And that's when you have to get the plumber 'round.

A magic plumber played by Adam Sandler.

[NoSleep]

And that's when you have to get the plumber 'round.

Mario doesn't appear in Frogger.

[Icehaven]

acid house face, if you ask me

Some time in the very early 90s I got a smiley face sticker from a cereal packet and I wanted to put it on our car window but my mum wouldn't let me because she said people would think we were drug dealers. Apart from the obvious absurdity of anyone thinking a middle aged woman and an 10 year old girl driving about in a battered old Peugeot Estate were flogging pills, the notion that we'd also be advertising our wares with a sticker from some cornflakes was glaringly mad to me even then. I wasn't even allowed to put it on my lunchbox ffs. I blame the Daily Mail.

[kalowski]

And that's when you have to get the plumber 'round.

[buzby]

Whack-a-Mole sounds like Guacamole, perhaps deliberately

The original Japanese game made by TOGO in 1975 was called Mogura Taiji ('Mole Buster'). 'Whac-A-Mole'  was a US ripoff of it built (and named by) Aaron Fechter of Creative Engineering in 1977, commissioned by a carny called Gerard Denton who saw the TOGO version at the 1976 International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions convention, but didn't want to buy one off the Japanese. Fechter's version had 8 machines linked together on a trailer for use in a travelling fair. Denton later sold the machine to Bob Cassata of Bob's Space Racers who then started manufacturing their own copies of it to sell to travelling fairs and amusement parks and single machines for arcades. It effectively became a ripoff of a ripoff.

In 2008 Whac-A-Mole machines started randomly locking up. Marvin Wimberly, the programmer who Bob's Space Racers contracted to do the software development was accused by BSR of writing a logic bomb into it's code that made the machines lock up after a set number of cycles. He was arrested and charged with intellectual property offences and faced up to 15 years in jail. He insisted it was a bug that had been introduced through some new diagnostic and self test routines. The case was eventually thrown out of court when it became clear that Wimberly still owned the rights to the code and he then sued the company.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/523941/computer-virus-brought-down-whac-mole

In 1981, TOGO sold the rights to manufacture Mole Buster to Namco, who reworked it into Okashi Daisakusen (Funny Sweets Battle), which had attacking cake monsters instead of moles (to appeal more to female players, apparently). Namco then took it to the 1982 Amusement Operators Expo in Chicago, where it was renamed Sweet Licks for the US market and Choco Kid for Europe.

I don't think I've ever seen a Whac-A-Mole over here (though apparently there are a few around, and you can buy new ones for £4000), and I've never seen a Choco Kid-branded machine in the UK either. The versions I saw in UK arcades in the 1980s were always Namco Sweet Licks machines:

[Sebastian Cobb]

I can't for the life of me recall the branding but I've deffo been on machines that had all green holes and orange creatures you bashed rather than confectionary.

[Dex Sawash]

My top play tip for mammal pest smasher games is drop the mallet and bash the cunts down with side of your fists. Cover 2/3 of holes with dominant hand, other 1/3 with.... no point in typing the rest is there.