Out Of The Office******

I will be taking a short blogging break this week.  Viv and Pseu, instead of giving me what I thought would be about a two-week break from Apartheid’s All Right…,  must have sat up for several long nights, trawling through my book.

The results are in and they approve enough that I only need to take a shortish sabbatical from my first love (you), to fix daft mistakes (page number, anyone?) and wean myself from my favourite punctuation mark: the semi-colon (the colon is my second favourite).

Thank you again, Viv and Pseu, for doing this.  And for your efficiency.  

I suppose.

While AAR... was being critiqued, I had intended to work on my poo collection* but that will have to wait a bit longer.

*Don’t panic, New Subscribers; you haven’t signed up to some weird, kinky blog by accident.  I’m talking about a book of poems about poo (okay, maybe a little bit weird) that I am going to use as a practice run for publishing my own e-book. It will be available to download for free.  It can’t be kinky if it’s free on the internet, can it?

While I’m at it: (hmm…maybe my first- and second-placed punctuation marks are in the wrong order; like my favourite top two films of all time** they are almost interchangeable).

**Terminator 1 and 2; I can never decide which one I love more.  You can see why I might love them both, just like the colon and semicolon: the second stems from the first; has a similar function; but works brilliantly on its own.

Where was I?  Oh, yes: while I’m at it: apologies to New Subscribers (assuming you’re still here at this point) for abandoning you so soon after we’ve just met.  I will only be gone a few days.  A week at the most.  A month, tops.***

***Who am I kidding?  A few days away from the blogosphere and my head threatens to explode.  My regular readers know that, which is why I didn’t bother apologising to them for my absence.****  They know there will barely be one.

*********Viv, I hope you appreciated that full stop/new sentence; I can take criticism and learn from it.

*****Because I have overdosed on the asterisks (try saying that when you’ve had a few; I couldn’t manage it sober), I have colour-coded the remarks so that you don’t get confused.  That’s much easier to read, isn’t it?

However long I am gone, you will still have your daily joke.  Enjoy them but, most of all, miss me.  My ego can’t handle indifference.

******I say ‘Out Of The Office’ but I won’t be, of course.  I don’t have an office.  I have a living room with an untidy desk (the Hub’s) and computer (the Hub’s). If I want to be like Virginia Woolf (I don’t) and have ‘a room of one’s own’ in which to write (I do), I will either have to wait five years while Spud finishes school and university (he will be going into the small room when he moves out but his bedroom has been earmarked – by me – for the Hub and his messy desk and his computer and his stuff), or sell a lot of free e-books.

Joke 578

These are for an old school friend who is a statistician and sometimes reads my blog.  The law of averages suggests he won’t read it today, but you never know.

The inside of a hot air balloon’s envelope, seen from the gondola. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The first one is from statisticsjokes.

A historian, an engineer and a statistician are duck hunting.  A duck rises from the lake.

The historian fires first, and shoots 10′ over the duck.

Then the engineer shoulders the shotgun and shoots 10′ under the duck.

The statistician exclaims “Got him!”

This one is from stats.stackexchange.com.

A guy is flying in a hot air balloon and he’s lost.  He lowers himself over a field and shouts to another guy on the ground, “Can you tell me where I am, and which way I’m headed?”

“Sure!  You’re at 43 degrees, 12 minutes, 21.2 seconds north; 123 degrees, 8 minutes, 12.8 seconds west.  You’re at 212 meters above sea level.  Right now, you’re hovering, but on your way in here you were at a speed of 1.83 meters per second at 1.929 radians.”

“Thanks!  By the way, are you a statistician?”

“I am!  But how did you know?”

“Everything you’ve told me is completely accurate; you gave me more detail than I needed, and you told me in such a way that it’s no use to me at all!”

“Dang!  By the way, are you a principal investigator?”

“I am!  How’d you know that?”

“You don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you’re going.  You got where you are by blowing hot air, you start asking questions after you get into trouble, and you’re in exactly the same spot you were a few minutes ago, but now, somehow, it’s my fault.”