The only way it could have been Greatest-ER is if they'd managed to fit in a reference to Newton in the song (Greatest Thing In The World, EVER!)

Listen up you bohemians it's time you stopped mispronouncing mathematicians' names!  Like Kurt Friedrich Gödel  How do you say that? Well, you're probably wrong. Listen:

Listen:
Player 1:
 

THAT is how you say Kurt Friedrich Gödel And don't forget it!

THAT, also, is from the most awesome thing I found last week, the blog "Pronunciation of Mathematicians' Names," which is found here and which if anything undersells itself, in that "Pronunciation of Mathematicians' Names delivers more than it promises. It ALSO tells you how to pronounce math things, like, in Godel's case, it will tell you how to pronounce Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which are his theories that within any system there are theories which can neither be proven nor disproven within the parameters of that system, which is to say that Godel subscribed (before he knew it) to my longstanding argument "I can't prove it but I can't not prove it, so it must be true."

I found "Pronunciation of Mathematicians' Names" last week when telling the people in my office about the Stolen Newton Apple I had on my desk, and I told them it was from "Isaac Newton's apple tree," and Some Guy At Work said:

"Why are you pronouncing it 'I-ZACK?"

"Because that's how it's pronounced," I said.

He disagreed, saying that it was pronounced "I-zick," and so -- having NOT YET discovered the wonder (I'm being totally serious, I've bookmarked it) that is "Pronunciation of Mathematicians' Names" yet, we took a highly, extremely superscientific survey, accomplished by going to three other people in the office and saying to them:

Q: "Do you know the guy who discovered gravity by having an apple fall on his head?"

In an effort to get them to name Isaac Newton, only to get responses varying from "I think so?" to "I'm pretty sure I do" to "He didn't invent gravity," which was when I rephrased the question.  People are such sticklers.  WE HAVE NO PROOF GRAVITY EXISTED BEFORE ISAAC NEWTON.  Just because he didn't patent it or turn it into a reality TV show doesn't mean he didn't invent it.

Anyway, we finally turned to the Internet, which is perfect for this kind of question if you ignore the fact that we're using one of the greatest technological achievements in human history to waste time on a Friday afternoon, and that's when I learned that Isaac Newton's name is pronounced

Listen:
Player 1:
 


the wrong way, as far as I'm concerned.  Why have all those a's in there unless you're going to use them?  Stupid Isaac Newton, mispronouncing his own name.

Anyway, I wholeheartedly endorse you spending your entire day on that blog, learning how to pronounce things like "Archimedes of Syracuse,"

Listen:
Player 1:
 

who, I'm sure, they have to say of that he's "of Syracuse," because otherwise you'd get him confused with all the other Archimedeseses throughout history.  Although, like much of Archimedes' life, the "of Syracuse" is a lie: he left there when he was 10, to go to Alexandria, so "Archimedes of Alexandria" is more accurate.  (I learned that when I googled "Famous Archimedes," which I think we can all agree would be an awesome title for something.)

The Pronunciation of Mathematicians' Names would be the sole Greatest Thing In The World, EVER, except that before I could post about it I ran across this:




Saturday morning, the last peaceful day I had before going to film a movie, having Sweetie get sick and having my garage door explode, long story, I heard this song on the radio entirely by accident, the 'accident' being that I was taking Mr F and Mr Bunches to work on a Saturday morning so we could get some stuff done in the office, and I had forgotten my audiobook about fonts and my iPod is useless right now because I bought a new computer -- long-er story -- so I had the radio on and this song, which I hadn't previously heard, came on, and so I listened to it and thought "Well, that was a pleasant song."

Fast forward to six hours later, when the day has been exhausting and I was home and began picking up after dinner, Sweetie not feeling well and the boys having created their usual five-alarm disaster in the house.  I was trying to convince Mr Bunches that while I would help him pick up his airport, help meant that technically he had to do some of it and Mr F, meanwhile, was trying to eat cheese puffs while swinging and everything was chaos (fun chaos, but fun chaos is still chaotic, you know) and so I thought of that pleasant song from the morning and I went and found it on Youtube and I watched it -- that video, that one, above-- and it hypnotized me or something. I was enthralled by the video (which I had only just seen for the first time).

Since then, I have kept that video bookmarked on my computer at home, at work, and on my phone.  Whenever I get annoyed or tired or frustrated (which is A LOT this week because, remember: no computer yet, wife sick, garage door exploded) I've put it on and watched a bit of it, and felt better.

So there is your prescription to having a great Thursday: Put on that video, watch it a few times, and pronounce a mathematicians' name right, first time out the gate.

Up until today I thought I was more significant than a "Moo Box." (Greatest Thing In The World, EVER!)

This is not a part of my ongoing quest to get the "Comment of the Week" Status on Josh Fruhlinger's "Comics Curmudgeon" (but it can't hurt, right? Sycophancy never hurts.)

OH MAN I just came up with a whole new motto for me and everyone else in the world.  By the time you read this that will be the subhead for this blog.

Anyway, here's what I'm on about now, as the British would say probably, maybe? I don't know any British folk.  Technically, that's not true.  I know my "aunt," Suzanne, who I believe is British but isn't really my aunt because she and my uncle never married.  Or maybe they did, now, because I haven't spoken to Uncle Doug in years.  Who knows? Anyway, she's British, as is Prince Harry of Wales, and while I don't know him, I know of him and that's about the same thing, at least insofar as my chances of ever getting knighted are concerned.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the latest Greatest Thing In The World Ever, which is this:

That's a real book, and an e-book, and it's real funny (and e-funny.)  I ate lunch today, as I do everyday, and at lunch today I thought to myself "What should I read while I eat lunch?" my choices being:

-- HuffPo
-- "The Brothers Karamazov,"
-- "The Gone Away World"
-- Other stuff like The New Yorker but I wasn't really going to read them so it was pretty much those three.

Then I thought "Hey, I'll read The Comics Curmudgeon instead," which you'd think (previously noted sycophancy and it's relationship to hurting already noted) was based on that being A BRILLIANT WEBSITE THAT OCCUPIES MY MIND ALL THE TIME AND I READ IT EVERY DAY.

Now that Josh Fruhlinger is no longer reading this post but instead has gone to tell all his 'buddies' (he uses the term ironically, I bet) that some guy on the Internet thinks he's brilliant, I can reveal the SECRET REAL REASON I READ THE COMICS CURMUDGEON which was:

My internet was loading slowly and so when I tried to go to the HuffPo front page to see the news, it took more than 3 seconds and I got bored and went instead to a different site, with the first one that came up being The Comics Curmudgeon.

So this post is basically being sponsored, as it were, by the simple-but-true-fact that if you make someone wait more than 5 seconds for something their brain stops focusing on that thing, which is actually probably true, if you take as "true" that I once heard something on Freakonomics, I think, about a hospital that revised its ER computers to provide medical histories faster because if a person waits 10 seconds that person, even an ER doctor, will forget what he or she was doing (I used "she" because doctors can be women, you know!).

I read today's Curmudgeoning quickly -- it's short -- which is good for internet people, 100% of whom stopped reading this post 8 words into it because it didn't contain a sexy picture of Sarah Hyland

until now

PROBLEM SOLVED!

So out of curiosity and because I still had some lunch left to eat, and therefore was not "done" with lunch yet, I downloaded the first 50 pages of that book-- remember what this post is about? -- for free,  because I'm not about to throw ninety-nine whole cents at something on the off-chance it might be good, right?

That's how people think about my books, apparently, anyway, so anyway, I downloaded the first 50 pages for free and was reduced to laughter and/or tears nearly 8 or 9 times in that first 50 pages, and found the rest to be so enjoyable that it immediately became The Greatest Thing In The World, EVER, and I heartily recommend you just shell out the $0.99 to get the ebook because I did, and I probably now will not get any more work done all day, but that's the breaks, kiddo, as the British like to say.

What makes it so great? Not just the hilariously bad writing, which is handily compiled FOR YOU by the book, but also the comments on each -- a one- or two-liner, usually, that has the effect of "sweeping the leg" when it comes to resisting the humor.

Take, for example, the "Moo Box" entry, which on Wikipedia is this:

The Moo box is a box, when you turn it upside down, creates the mooing of a cow.

And the comment in the book?

How’s this for a bleak realization: It’s extremely unlikely that your life will ever be notable enough to  warrant its own Wikipedia entry. Unlike the Moo box.

But this one was my favorite of first 50 pages, and what convinced me to buy the book:

At Disney Word, the Christmas Special ran until 2005 due to copyrights w/ some songs in the show like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But is rumored to return in the future!

___________________________________________________

You’ve just encountered the most depressing
exclamation point in the history of the English
language.

I'm laughing all over again.

One more:

Wikipedia says:

A cheese sandwich is a basic sandwich made generally with one or more slices of any kind of cheese on any sort of bread.

_____________________________________________

Book says:

From the Food Network’s newest hit series Anthony
Bourdain Phones It In.

It's awesome.  And, in case you were thinking about not reading any further in this post:

But actually you could have quit because it's over.

Want to know if there were ever any other Greatest Thing[s] In The World, EVER? There were but they were located on another blog, one that is sadly devoid of pictures of women in various states of undress but which does have MEN in various states of undress.  Long story.

CLICK HERE TO GO SEE MORE GREATEST THINGS IN THE WORLD EVER.

CLICK HERE FOR THE MEN UNDRESSED THING.

OH YEAH IF YOU WANT TO BUY THE BOOK THERE ARE LINKS TO EACH VERSION AND THE FREE PART HERE.

He's right. I AM GOODER THAN THAT. (The Greatest Thing In The World, EVER!)

I just found out this guy exists this morning when his NCAA selections were featured on our local news.  At first, I was thinking "Man, local news just got way more worse than I thought it was."

Then, two seconds in, I was hooked, and I've now committed my life to watching every Kid President thing ever.  I want to hire this kid to walk around my office to simply be incredible.

This one is great:

And this was my introduction to Kid President:

Kid President for... um. President? OF EVERYTHING.