Darn, my snappy answer was already taken by #2.
A sad cloud cover from decades past?
MY COCK.
I joke, of course. It can definitely climb trees.
The mole that Sifu's cock cocked, but lost to?
8: You have a prehensile cock? That's really handy.
I'm about to step out the door, so I guess I should give up the punchline, eh?
Sifu exaggerates. But if you throw it against the wall, it will crawl back down. Wash in soapy water to reactivate stickiness.
This joke is really boring. I'd be much more interested in knowing what's big and purple and can climb trees.
15: I invite you to compose a joke, then, snot-rocket face.
What is big and purple and can't climb trees?
You have a prehensile cock? That's really handy.
17: I happen to have bronchitis and a sinus infection at the moment. Your epithet was hurtful and unnecessary.
what's big and purple and can climb trees
You guys are going to be disappointed; I can tell already.
Tor and Tuga would be disappointing answers. Is it that?
A: A big, purple, tree-climbing machine that's broken.
Off to swim a museum!
An obese asphyxiating quadriplegic!
A: A big, purple, tree-climbing machine that's broken.
Oh, that old Simon and Garfunkel song.
Does man-sized count as "big"? I'm going with Hitler's corpse.
The Phantom after he's had his hands chopped off.
||
I have to say, I liked this post by Saiselgy this morning.
It makes a good point, is rhetorically effective, and it's a good example of the value of writing pieces that aren't really a response to any current news but that just re-state some truth about the world that continues to be true. I appreciate that he makes a point of doing that from time to time.
|>
Oh, god, not you too, JP.
That isn't even how honor societies work.
The presence of one character with glasses in 34 destroys the entire XKCD aesthetic, which hitherto has not had characters with glasses, as I remember. Either have no glasses, or put glasses on 80% of the characters as would be the case in reality.
That isn't even how honor societies work.
Oh, really. Do tell.
I liked about 57.2% of that strip, but *really* liked that parts I liked. Probably from being relatively fresh from National Honor Society wars in my household. I am inordinately proud* that only 1 of my 3 kids graduated HS as a member in good standing. Hitler Youth for consumero-normative future neo-feudalists.
*And I appreciate that being in a position to hold that view is a luxury in its own right.
35 and 36 are great examples of Josh's wonderful "narcissism of small differences" characterization the other day.
Oh, is there some high-school specific honor society in question?
I think "aesthetic" was the wrong word there. Maybe I meant "gestalt".
WTF are honor societies anyway? Sounds like the Camorra.
The presence of one character with glasses in 34 destroys the entire XKCD aesthetic
On a second look I think that character is an homage to Jason from Foxtrot.
Further to 42, Bill Amend appears to agree.
One can choose not to join the Nat'l Honor Society. There were mass resignations in my high school when the "faculty adviser," an obnoxious gym teacher, was very heavy handed with the "morality requirement" in order to exclude people.
Nobody ever told me about no honor society.
44: The morality requirement? Were there checks to see if you had ties to the financial services industry or the Project for a New American Century?
39: Yes, but not sure it is universal. In our neck of the woods the National Honor Society rules. (And from Wikipedia I see that the first chapter was in Pittsburgh, so it may be stronger around here.) It annoyed me in high school and annoyed me as a dad of high-schoolers. (On preview, things like oud's 44 were one thing that set my teeth on edge.)
46: Just being odd in a non-nerd fashion, not performing one's gender in approved fashion [this one was just for boys], er, lifting up the side of one's shirt and saying "suck my left tit" to a classmate.
How did you get into Nat'l Honors Society? I remember it, but I don't think I qualified. Can I be a reverse snob?
41: I was thinking of the sort of group whose prototype in the states is Phi Beta Kappa.
50: "Selection is based on four criteria: service, leadership, scholarship and character."
51: Well, then, if you are going to be a stickler about "how things work" in the cartoon, you should note that the speaker in the first panel is a high-school student, and that is not how Phi Beta Kappa works.
I'm pretty sure selection for National Honor Society in my high school was based on GPA, GPA, GPA, and GPA. But I don't remember for sure, because it existed only for the purpose of being noted on college applications.
Oh, oudemia. I thought better of you! All I said was that PBK is the prototype. I had of course noticed that, but the mere fact that a society would draw its membership from high school students doesn't mean it can't get out of the Euthyphro problem the same way that PBK is supposed to.
Apparently it did exist at my high school, I was just wildly out of it's orbit.
52: In other words 54 is right, except they can not invite anyone who doesn't "fit" for any reason that appeals to the sponsor(s) and/or administration.
I was just wildly out of it's orbit
Obviously.
56: my poor apostrophe usage presumably providing hints as to why this might have been so.
Pwned on self-mockery: not honorable.
54 gets it right. Every year the top 6% of the graduating class by GPA was in the National Honor Society. They didn't ever tell us what our ranking was, so we only knew who was in the top 6% and who was in the bottom 94%.
Even my access point thinks xkcd sucks.
URL: http://xkcd.com/703/
Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category "Other"
It helps to know that "other" means "sucks".
But does it suck on Sifu's left tit?
Oh, man, the big mass freak out in re the NHS would have made for the cheeziest episode of My So-Called Life or Freaks and Geeks. Basically a bunch of mouthy types and weirdos and maybe gonna grow up to be gay boys were excluded from the NHS and a few jocko homo types with iffy records for things like plagiarism were let in. The president of the NHS, a big jock himself, but also a very good student and all-around honorable type (well, I have a story there, but that's for later!), was annoyed enough that he submitted a fake speech to the faculty adviser for the induction ceremony, and delivered a barn-stormer about people who were there who shouldn't be and people who weren't there but who should be and then he and a bunch of other folks walked out while everyone gawped at them.
I couldn't tell you whether that particular strip bears a suckular relationship to Sifu's titty, but in general I'm sure it does.
Sifu's left tit is large; it suckles multitudes.
66 TL;DR. What happened with your left tit?
A story in which he is revealed to have only ersatz honor or a story in which his honor is demonstrated? We have a right to know!
A story in which he is revealed to have only ersatz honor
66 is sad because he gave the speech right after his sex-reassignment surgery.
For Heebie's essay question: "Amy Bishop? Let her in NHS or not?"
At my school, the only obvious candidate for NHS to be denied an invitation was an outspoken feminist. Older me thinks poorly of younger me for accepting that bullshit passively.
Of course, this was back when I was a conservative tool. So.
70: Wellll, not what I was thinking, but one answer I could give is "And that young man grew up to be head of I-banking for [a particularly scummy bank]."
A story in which he is revealed to have only ersatz honor or a story in which his honor is demonstrated?
I think oud's choice of "well," to begin her parenthetical is suggestive of the former, but we shall see!
Yes, and the chipper conclusion, "that's for later!", as if promising a treat, seems to indicate that we will witness a fall from great height (no bigger treat than that, after all).
85: so a fall from a great height cushioned by an enormous pile of money, then. I was hoping for something involving , I dunno, ketamine and nudity?
"Amy Bishop? Let her in NHS or not?"
Were she eligible she would certainly be treated under the NHS (assuming she's found guilty but insane). But she's in Alabama, so she can fuck off.
NHS at my HS existed only in the form of an induction ceremony and to be noted on college applications. (Well, I think one year they organized an outing to the Cuarón Great Expectations film, presumably because it was an adaptation of a great work of literature, and therefore "intellectual".) The idea that a chapter could be the locus of "morality requirements" or really, any sort of controversy is news to me.
The application required the writing of some essay about how you embody the NHS values. The first year I was eligible for induction (junior?), I entertained myself by writing a sarcastic first draft which included a line that went something like, "When Alan Greenspan warned of 'irrational exuberance', I vehemently disagreed. I firmly believe that no degree of exuberance is irrational!" I may have also portrayed myself as someone who "shoots for the moon" and "lands in the stars".
I printed this draft and left it for my parents to read. They told me it was absolutely hilarious and that I had to start over. I did my best to remove the sarcasm from the final draft, but I was still denied admission my first time around. Later that year it happened to come up in conversation with a friend that I hadn't been inducted, and he looked at me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said as if he were consoling me on a death in the family, "Oh, I'm so sorry, man. It's really important for colleges."
I done a better job or better embodied the NHS values my senior year, as they let me in. And so I got to include a NHS '99 line on my applications after all. But think how much better off I'd been if I had been able to write down "NHS '98-'99"!
NHS "needed for"/"impresses"/[some other BS] is the biggest laugh of all.
Of course, this was back when I was a conservative tool
Standpipe Bridgeplate is SCMT!
81 menat to refer specifically to college admissions, but it is a general truth as well.
We had NHS, but membership was by a GPA-based cutoff, and I think the cutoff was county-wide. Result: At our nerdy magnet school, something like 60% of the seniors were in it. It did seem like it existed only to be used as some kind of checkmark.
54 was my experience; I don't recall anyone having the opportunity to exclude anyone (except, obviously, on the basis of GPA).
Maybe you were supposed to show that you'd done some sort of volunteering? I suppose that could be dread arbitrariness, but in practice don't think it was used that way. No one at my HS cared that much.
Huh. i remember no induction or application or any such stuff. I think I just woke up one day and found out I was in. I typed that onto my college apps and got accepted -- surely all thanks to my being a member of NHS.
Every time I here about high school experiences, it makes me so grateful I was abroad at that time. No class rankings, no NHS, no valedictorians, no high school sports, nowhere near as much cliquishness, no proms in the American sense, open bars at high school dances. And if you were going to an American college you didn't even have to care about the one high stress thing, the end of high school exams.
87: It doesn't fit at all, but I am now imagining you as the young albert brooks at the beginning of Broadcast News (""You'll never make more than $19000 a year!")
my ejection and permanent ban from the club in 10th grade
My gosh, Knecht, what horrible thing did you do?
It was left tit related, wasn't it?
92: Completely neglecting her right? How dishonorable!
Huh. In our NHS chapter, sucking oudemia's left tit was part of the entry requirements.
New Jersey really is a different place.
94: It was the 3 days truancy to go to New Jersey to do it that he got nailed on.
I think I was in the NHS, and I seem to remember some kind of application and the principles as stated upthread, but there were only 25 people in my graduating class, so it really couldn't have mattered at all. Everyone knew how everyone would end up; getting into the NHS or not would only have meant a slightly more or less famous college for the college-bound.
96: The exact opposite of my experience.
""Why do men always feel obliged to suck both nipples alternately?"
Its one of those grass is always greener, er, nipples always more suckable, er, things.
I was never invited into the National Honor Society -- therefore I conclude, that it may not be a complete fraud.
98: You don't feel obliged to suck both nipples?
You haven't found men to be obliged to do so?
A male German friend expressed perfect understanding of why women don't think they are obliged to blow on one nipple?
You did suck on KR's French friend's nipples?
I gather this is the sort of situation where I am supposed to acknowledge that I have been "pwned". But what would be the value-add of doing so when this fact is so obvious to all who can see?
Why do men and women and people like that always feel obliged to say "Members of my gender prefer X", instead of "I prefer X"?
I was invited into the NHS, but I think there were some hoops to jump through, the exact nature of which I can't recall. In any case, the whole thing seemed like a waste of time, so I didn't do it. I have not discerned any negative effects on my life from that decision.
96: "Why do men always feel obliged to suck both nipples alternately?"
I've always treated it like a "Stations of the Cross" thing, only with naughty bits.
What I find more interesting, though, is that my dad was in the NHS when he was in high school. I guess this makes sense given the context, but it's hard to imagine him ever joining anything.
35, 36-110: Boy what a fruitful discussion has resulted from a link to a single xkcd cartoon. People should link to it more often.
People should link to it more often.
Really, it seems to me that each new xkcd should be posted on the front page (or, perhaps, beneath the fold*) so that we might have a discussion of it.
If only one of the front page posters would oblige us!**
* pace parsimon
** I foresee an obnoxious script that rewrites all xkcd-referring comments
** I foresee an obnoxious script that rewrites all xkcd-referring comments
Oh, man, this is a great idea.
Even better would be an obnoxious script that adds attributes to xkcd-referring hyperlinks coupled with some obnoxious javascript that intercepts clicks on those links and sends them to goatse. (Rather than simply rewriting the links, which would be too obvious.)
Goatse is a little '03, neb. Aren't there any decent contemporary shock sites?
Do you honestly want the answer to that, DS?
I like the classics. Plus, I've already seen goatse, so I know I wouldn't be too bothered by calling up the URL and seeing it again. I'm not eager to be exposed to more of them.
See, I'm not going to follow the link in 118.
116: Probably not. I'm not following that link either.
A girl I worked with in high school was in NHS in her Catholic school and was expelled from their chapter for getting pregnant. She also couldn't walk at graduation for the same reason. Her boyfriend? Still in NHS and still allowed to participate in graduation. Totally messed up.
I knew I was tempting fate by linking two xkcds in the same thread yesterday.
I hate how bit.ly obscures URLs. I'm not opening that link either.
118: ARGH! WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO US, SIFU?
Sigh. This is what I get for being busy today instead of following threads. As soon as I read neb saying something about honor societies, I was going to write a comment saying "neb's just pissy because he wants more respect for being Phi Beta Kappa". But then he had to go and ruin it by mentioning Phi Beta Kappa himself, hours before I show up.
At my high school NHS had not only a GPA requirement but a "service project" requirement. My service project involved writing a replacement for some outdated software someone or other in the school system was using, only to find that it wouldn't install on her horribly broken Windows installation, and then gave up. I got credit for it anyway. See, suckers? I didn't even deserve my NHS membership. I bet Chicago will wish they could retroactively revoke my college admission when they find out.
Proper honor society members would fix the messed-up grammar in my second sentence above. But not me!
Is 118 sadder than the picture of Jan and Lance?
127:A sad story.
I have told people here that I was a) blackballed by three teachers from NHS and b) given three arbitrary 'D's in order to keep from being Valedictorian (out of 600), but have allowed the crowd to accept a vague moral turpitude as justifiable cause. I actually prefer that, but for grins here's the story, short and simple.
My state required a passing grade in Driver's education in order to get a driver's license. I failed the test twice, for reasons I don't remember, but akin to weak parallel parking. No accidents or violations or gross mistakes. Vut my teacher failed me. I did not protest or appeal, I am easy going to the point of immobility.
Two weeks after the 2nd failure, without me asking in any way, my father handed me a valid driver's license.
What was my 16 yr old self to do? I was on record in the county and state capital as having passed all the tests and qualifications. Refuse it? How was I going to get another?
At one point the three teachers closest to me stood me in a classroom and asked me how I got my license. I stood mute. He was my father. And then they gave me 'D's for "A" work.
Hey, bob. In the end, not having been in the National Honors Society didn't matter that much, I hope; I don't know about not being Valedictorian. Not to mention the Ds. Your dad kind of messed up, there. But you had a driver's license.
Sad story.
I have sometimes wondered if the teachers didn't go to the cops, and the cops told them there are a thousand people in fifty counties who could have falsified those records. We, the cops, are not going into it without a way in, a witness, which will have to be the boy.
But then my politically connected father was very close to most of the cops. I wasn't close to my father.
Who knows. Shit happens, huh.
Was I a very bad person?
Was I a very bad person?
Not even remotely. It sucks -- a lot -- that you were punished. There is no way a young lad of 16 should be expected to spill the beans in a situation like that.
You must know that.
This is the only time and place I have ever discussed this story.
Those three teachers were very proud of and very invested in me, and very disappointed and frustrated.
Excellent people all, one of them is a famous good guy.
Thing is, they couldn't know I didn't ask my dad for the favor, and I didn't know any way to tell them. I just wanted to hide somewhere.
We had the NHS ceremonies in the basketball arena in front of the student body. Three times my peers went to the podium while I watched from the stands.
I was fucked up before, so I can't say it changed my life.
129, 134: in some ways, yes. But I find it very life-affirming.
Wow, that's a harsh reality to be hit with at a young age, bob.
I was mad & frustrated but I never really blamed the teachers. Like I said, as far as they knew I was complicit. I of course blamed my father, but this was after years of abuse, and irresponsibility and the stupid gesture was his style. He though he was cool and doing a good thing. He was a minor corrupt political functionary in a sundown town.
I keep wondering what what I could have done. I was just too scared to sit down and try to explain a felony, if a common one in certain local political circles, with these bright forty-year-olds.
The license was for an occasion. I didn't really care, and didn't drive, at all as I remember, for another year.
What is big and purple and can't climb trees?
IT'S MOLE!
What is big and purple and can't climb trees?
Waves of grain.
Waves of grain.
I think you mean mountain's majesty.
Bob, you have my sympathy, that's a tough situation to be in.
They way that you tell the story now it feels like it's still an emotional memory for you, I can't imagine how trapped and frustrated you felt at the time.
118: has anyone else noticed that link shorteners are one of the worst Internet security ideas ever? Exploit case: Evil link shortener sends you to My.OsamaBinLaden.com or whatever and groks your browser context while it's at it to use in god knows what XSRF/XSS malarkey.
I actually know someone who's using this special power for good rather than evil, but that's another story and I think they've not gone public with the exploit yet.
has anyone else noticed that link shorteners are one of the worst Internet security ideas ever?
Yes. Various corners talk intermittently of banning them. I'm opposed: without link shorteners, Rick Astley would be dead in a ditch somewhere.
Various corners talk intermittently of banning them.
Hm. This is going to make it harder to sell my "takealengthylinkandsbbreviateitsomewhat.com" idea.
For those who don't trust shortened links, someone could register www.loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooongurl.com to bring things back to normal.
Meanwhile, on the subject of shock sites.
