molly-guard /mol´ee·gard/ n.

[University of Illinois] A shield to prevent tripping of some Big Red Switch by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of the plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer's toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one day. Later generalized to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment. In hardware catalogues, you'll see the much less interesting description “guarded button”.

A grammar book walks into a bar

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.
• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intents and purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
• A question mark walks into a bar?
• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
• Courier New and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
• A synonym strolls into a tavern.
• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
• A dyslexic walks into a bra.
• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony .
  – Jill Thomas Doyle

A samurai, several AIs, and one Japanese guy trying to understand America.

NOBUNAGA is a Japanese comedy and storytelling project. It follows a small, confused, dignified samurai who has somehow wandered into modern American life, and is doing his best.

He is not here to judge America. He is here to misunderstand it beautifully //

The stories are written in Japanese by a guy in Japan. He writes them at his desk, mostly at night, mostly while drinking convenience-store coffee that he secretly considers superior to American gas-station coffee, although he would never say so to the samurai's face.

They are then translated into English with the help of a small army of AI tools — for nuance, for rhythm, for the small jokes that do not survive the jump between languages. The English you read here is collaborative: human taste, machine assistance, many drafts, no shortcuts.

Nate Bargatze @natebargatze
·
Nobody knows

Jim Geraghty @jimgeraghty
"But a goal will not count if a player is offsides."

"When is a player offsides?"

"Whenever anything exciting happens."
3:04 PM · Jul 5, 2026

Well, you see, Norm, it’s like this. A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it’s the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Now, as we know, excessive intake of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine.

And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers.

Would you rather have a smoke alarm that goes off 33% of the time you make toast, or one which never goes off when there's a fire ?

Re: 1/3 wrong of 60 is progress (?)
The problem is not with the "smoke alarm" it's with the fire engine.

1 day
MOH

Re: 1/3 wrong of 60 is progress (?)
When I'm making toast, I'm making toast.

I'm aware of what I'm doing and ensuring that the toast making doesn't escalate to a house fire.

If it does, that is fully on me.

I don't need a wonky security camera setting off a fire alarm for times a day because my dark brown slippers have vaguely the same shade as burnt toast and it blindly assumes a fire is in progress.

1 day
Yet Another Anonymous coward

Re: 1/3 wrong of 60 is progress (?)
But it could be useful if you're very confused and might be about to put marmalade on your slippers

Exclusive: The 'mythical superhero' picks his favorites from Parade magazine's recent list of 101

Hurling cars through the air with replicas of medieval siege engines has actually become a bit of a popular hobby, with early throws dating back to at least the early 1990s.

Ajax81611 Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
5y
166
Subscriptor
NASA missed a huge soft drink sponsorship opportunity here by not naming it the Perfect Elliptical Polar Stable Insertion with Coplanar Line of Apsides.

Bebu sa Ware
"the last full Moon on Feb. 29 was in 1972, and the next will be in 2048"
Just in case you were wondering. ;)

If you trust some gratuitous browser AI that kicks off with:

People also ask "Has there ever been a full moon on February 29th?"
What people ? Not normal people surely ? El Rego commentards excepted of course perhaps.

Jonathan Richards 1
Re: "the last full Moon on Feb. 29 was in 1972, and the next will be in 2048"
See, this is the quality investigative citizen journalism that I come here for.

--> Friday pint behind the bar

Philo T Farnsworth
Re: "the last full Moon on Feb. 29 was in 1972, and the next will be in 2048"
I'm hoping to make it to 2048 since I'll be a power of 10 in a power of 2.

Yes, I'm an old geezer.

ʎɹǝʌoɔǝᴚ sʍopuᴉM ʇɐ sǝʇɐuᴉɯɹǝʇ snq sᴉɥ┴

One destination passengers were definitely not hoping to reach

Bork!Bork!Bork! As if to demonstrate that whatever one operating system can do, Windows can do it better, bluer, and upside down, we present a bus stopping only at bork.

Today's example of signage woes - thanks to reader Spike - comes from a Nottingham bus, headed for Recovery (though hopefully the right way up).

According to an eagle-eyed Register reader, the screen normally shows the next few stops, but now it is only displaying a baleful blue screen and a warning that Windows is very unhappy about something.

"Your PC/Device needs to be repaired" is not the message a bus's passengers expect to see.

Words that rhyme with orange:
by: Lloyd Worthnone, hobby farmer

Don't mess with the IT department guys. Although their office might look as messy as mine, they are a force not to be screwed with.

It all started one day with this guy, the origional Etherkiller, developed with a few misc parts to warn new users that the IT department is not to be messed with. You too can make one at home, connect the transmit pins of the RJ-45 to HOT on 110VAC and the recieve pins to Common. Modify to suit tase by varying pinout.
This led to some general discussion that this particular device really is in a class of devices, now called the "killers", which need to be made.

https://x.com/RealDonKeith/status/2012537106443145506

That cat gifting a mouse to the other cat

Re: for all those who say "it shouldn't be this difficult". apparently it is.
A previous vehicle I owned would tell me to take the turn for "Go Dall Ming". (Godalming ["goddlming"])

Of course, English pronunciation of names is often obtuse (apocryphally, to confuse foreign spies into giving themselves away), for example:

• Mainwaring ("mannering")

• Cholmondeley ("chumley")

• Featheringstonehaugh ("fanshaw")

• Mousehole ("mowzle" [ow as in cow, not as in tow])

• Worcester ("wooster")

• Towcester ("toaster")

• Leicester ("lester" [not lie-cester])

• Loughborough ("luffburraw" [roughly])

among many others.

Re: for all those who say "it shouldn't be this difficult". apparently it is.
Having grown up in East Anglia with regular family holidays on the coast, the journey often passed by such fantastic places as:

Happisburgh ("Hayesborough")

Postwick ("Pozzick")

and Wymondham ("Windam").

My better half has english as a second language, but is very much fluent. As far as they're concerned, brits seem to just make up the words and how they're said as we go along. Probably not untrue.

Also further away is Bicester ("Bisster").

Of course, there's the somewhat old joke about the american tourist calling Loughborough "Loogabarooga"

Try Deepl:
Reindeer length is an old unit of measurement of length used when moving reindeer. Reindeer length is the distance a reindeer can travel between (reindeer) urination breaks. Reindeer cannot urinate while running, and running too long can cause them to become paralysed. The maximum distance a reindeer can run is up to 7.5 kilometres.

Re: Try Deepl:
Nobody said they couldn't urinate while flying. That's why I stay inside on Christmas Eve.

Now let's meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rob" who at the time of Y2K worked for Sun Microsystems in the UK.

As a global company, Sun had an early warning system for any Y2K problems: Its Australian office was 11 hours ahead of the UK office, so if any problems struck there, the company would get advance notice.

Which is why, as midnight neared Down Under, Rob's boss called Sun's Sydney office … then heard the phone line go terrifyingly silent as the clock ticked pas midnight. Rob said that "scared the hell out of my manager" – at least for a few moments, because the phone soon rang.

"It was the Australian office, laughing their heads off," Rob told On Call. ®

The Federalist is here with a step-by-step guide on how to properly load a dishwasher and end your kitchen nightmares once and for all. //

Plates and bowls scattered across the wheeled racks at random. Silverware senselessly jammed into one or two of the many available basket pockets. The entire ensemble is so wretched that it resembles some trashy piece of modern abstract art.

But what’s a man to do? How is he supposed to get the woman in his life to stop loading the dishwasher like a cracked-out squirrel storing away nuts for the winter?

A simple proposal on a 1982 electronic bulletin board helped sarcasm flourish online. //

The emoticons spread quickly across ARPAnet, the precursor to the modern Internet, reaching other universities and research labs. By November 10, 1982—less than two months later—Carnegie Mellon researcher James Morris began introducing the smiley emoticon concept to colleagues at Xerox PARC, complete with a growing list of variations. What started as an internal Carnegie Mellon convention over time became a standard feature of online communication, often simplified without the hyphen nose to :) or :(, among many other variations. //

Between 2001 and 2002, Mike Jones, a former Carnegie Mellon researcher then working at Microsoft, sponsored what Fahlman calls a “digital archaeology” project. Jeff Baird and the Carnegie Mellon facilities staff undertook a painstaking effort: locating backup tapes from 1982, finding working tape drives that could read the obsolete media, decoding old file formats, and searching for the actual posts. The team recovered the thread, revealing not just Fahlman’s famous post but the entire three-day community discussion that led to it.

The recovered messages, which you can read here, show how collaboratively the emoticon was developed—not a lone genius moment but an ongoing conversation proposing, refining, and building on the group’s ideas. Fahlman had no idea his synthesis would become a fundamental part of how humans express themselves in digital text, but neither did Swartz, who first suggested marking jokes, or the Gandalf VAX users who were already using their own smile symbols. //

Others, including teletype operators and private correspondents, may have used similar symbols before 1982, perhaps even as far back as 1648. Author Vladimir Nabokov suggested before 1982 that “there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile.” And the original IBM PC included a dedicated smiley character as early as 1981 (perhaps that should be considered the first emoji).

What made Fahlman’s contribution significant wasn’t absolute originality but rather proposing the right solution at the right time in the right context. From there, the smiley could spread across the emerging global computer network, and no one would ever misunderstand a joke online again. :-)

But vanity plates can get you in trouble. One security researcher found this out when he ordered a plate that read, "NULL" — also the word the computer system entered for a ticket whenever a cop left the license plate field blank. Similar results have happened to drivers who opted for "NO PLATE," "NOTAG," or "VOID." They ended up receiving thousands of dollars in tickets for things they didn't do.