Recently in Humor Category

The 29th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony was held yesterday. The winners are listed here. The Biology Prize went to "Ling-Jun Kong, Herbert Crepaz, Agnieszka Górecka, Aleksandra Urbanek, Rainer Dumke, and Tomasz Paterek, for discovering that dead magnetized cockroaches behave differently than living magnetized cockroaches."

Gov. Gavin Newsom launched a task force on Tuesday that will spread homeless camps from Los Angeles and San Francisco to every corner of the state.

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Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg will co-chair the new task force due to his success in building affordable housing on flood control levees.

If you hit an animal with your car, it is presently a crime in California to scrape it off the pavement, take it home, and barbeque it. "Unlawful possession of wildlife" can cost you 6 months and $1K. But Ben Christopher of CalMatters reports that legislation under consideration beneath the copper dome would create a partial exception.

Joel Shannon has a report in USA Today titled: Witches plan to hex Brett Kavanaugh using effigies, coffin nails, graveyard dirt and more

PEACE PRIZE [SPAIN, COLOMBIA] -- Francisco Alonso, Cristina Esteban, Andrea Serge, Maria-Luisa Ballestar, Jaime Sanmartín, Constanza Calatayud, and Beatriz Alamar, for measuring the frequency, motivation, and effects of shouting and cursing while driving an automobile.

REFERENCE: "Shouting and Cursing While Driving: Frequency, Reasons, Perceived Risk and Punishment," Francisco Alonso, Cristina Esteban, Andrea Serge and Maria-Luisa Ballestar, Journal of Sociology and Anthropology, vol. 1, no. 12017, pp. 1-7.

ECONOMICS PRIZE [CANADA, CHINA, SINGAPORE, USA] -- Lindie Hanyu Liang, Douglas Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, D. Lance Ferris, and Lisa Keeping, for investigating whether it is effective for employees to use Voodoo dolls to retaliate against abusive bosses.

REFERENCE: "Righting a Wrong: Retaliation on a Voodoo Doll Symbolizing an Abusive Supervisor Restores Justice," Lindie Hanyu Liang, Douglas J. Brown, Huiwen Lian, Samuel Hanig, D. Lance Ferris, and Lisa M. Keeping, The Leadership Quarterly, February 2018.

Jenny Gross reports in the WSJ on a different Resistance movement.

Australia is having a referendum on same-sex marriage, but there is a problem, Rob Taylor reports for the WSJ.

Only marginally, if at all, on-topic, but amusing:  Joe Parkinson and Georgi Kantchev have this story in the WSJ.  The headline is "British pubs ban swearing, are accused of having %$&# for brains."

Jess Bravin of the WSJ has this light-hearted look at the SCOTUS cafeteria and the traditional assignment of the junior justice to the governing committee.

Justice Gorsuch arrives at the cafeteria as something of a stealth candidate. President Donald Trump, despite running several restaurants in his hotel empire, selected a judge with practically no food-service experience.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Justice Gorsuch previously sat, has no cafeteria in its Denver courthouse. He avoided signaling his culinary philosophy during confirmation hearings in April.

"The Senate overlooked that," laments retired Justice John Paul Stevens, who first dined in the cafeteria as a law clerk in the 1940s.

The article headline advises, "Don't Eat There."

On a day when a little humor could come in handy, take a look at this story.

It is an only in Silicon Valley kind of story, as police say high-tech thieves were caught stealing thousands of dollars worth of GPS tracking devices from a Santa Clara tech company.

"These devices kind of look like cell phone chargers, so they probably thought they had some kind of street value," Roambee Corporation Co-Founder Vidya Subramanian.....

"The moment we realized they had a box of trackers, we went into recovery mode," Subramanian said. "We notified the police and equipped them to track the devices, and in about 5 or 6 hours, it was done."

Before making off with about $18,000 worth of the devices, the thieves grabbed a beer out of the fridge and cut themselves in the process, leaving fingerprints and blood evidence.

Several Senators supporting Judge Gorsuch, including Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) have made comments about him being from "the West" in contexts that imply that California (home of Justice Kennedy and originally of Justice Breyer) is not "the West."  Is it?

Purely geographically, of course, California is farther west than Colorado, Texas, or Arizona.  But is a movie set in California a "Western"?  The Birds?  Nope.  Magnum Force?  Nope.  Beach Blanket Bingo?  Nope. 

Okay, maybe there is something to that.

This is off topic but too good to pass up.

The Onion explains it all.

This video featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jimmy Fallon will probably not be adopted by the Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training, but it's worth watching anyway.

For those who, like Bernie Sanders, are sick of hearing about Hillary Clinton's emails, the Onion reports that her campaign has come up with a solution:

NEW YORK--In an effort to prepare for any new revelations that might emerge about her emails during her tenure as secretary of state, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reportedly told her staff Tuesday to ready the launch of several electromagnetic pulses to disable all of the nation's electronic devices.