Gary Gale

Posts about humour

Ooh That Sounds Rude; Mapping British Innuendo

many have tried. One thing that lots of people do seem to agree on is that part of being British is a love for and an appreciation of the British sense of humour. This can be roughly and with a sweeping generalisation said to consist of equal parts of finding fun in everyday situations Peep Show), satire and parody (Have I Got News For You), social awkwardness (The Office), surrealism and nonsense (Monty Python) and innuendo (the Carry On films).

Focus on that trait of innuendo for a moment. Could you possibly combine the British fondness for innuendo with geography and put it on a map? It turns out you can. So I did. It may be vaguely NSFW but there's real geographical data behind this.

No-one can really define what being British is, though many have tried. One thing that lots of people do seem to agree on is that part of being British is a love for and an appreciation of the British sense of humour. This can be roughly and with a sweeping generalisation said to consist of equal parts of finding fun in everyday situations Peep Show), satire and parody (Have I Got News For You), social awkwardness (The Office), surrealism and nonsense (Monty Python) and innuendo (the Carry On films).

Focus on that trait of innuendo for a moment. Could you possibly combine the British fondness for innuendo with geography and put it on a map? It turns out you can. So I did. It may be vaguely NSFW but there's real geographical data behind this.

Rude Places Map

Maybe it's part of bring British, but an airport whose code is BUM is just ... funny.

As a classic Web 2.0 style maps mashup, this is never going to win any awards for originality or innovativeness. But the source of each of these vaguely rude sounding names was from Yahoo's WOE data set, before the data was released via the GeoPlanet API and (currently offline) GeoPlanet Data download. A list of real but amusing sounding place names, culled from GeoPlanet by one of the old Yahoo! Geo team, has been sitting in a file on one of my backup drives for too many years now. But given a geographic data set. Stamen's wonderful Toner map tiles and a JavaScript maps API, in this case Leaflet, the temptation to make a map out of it all was just too strong.

Yes it's a map, yes it's geographical innuendo and yes, it's very much part of the British sense of humour. If you're British, try not to snigger too much; if you're not British, just shake your head sadly and mutter "those crazy Brits".

Of Robots And Teapots; Web Geeks Are Not Without A Sense Of Humour

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into their respective site's robots.txt file. Sadly, it looks like Yelp's robots.txt is now unfunny and businesslike, but Last.fm's subversion of this file is still there.

There's a line from the first Matrix movie, the only really good one out of the trilogy, where Morpheus says earnestly to Neo ... fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. It's time to add a corollary to this quote, along the lines of web geeks, it seems, are not without a sense of humour.

Last year, it was the web geeks who run the web servers for Yelp and Last.fm sticking Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into their respective site's robots.txt file. Sadly, it looks like Yelp's robots.txt is now unfunny and businesslike, but Last.fm's subversion of this file is still there.

$ curl -X get www.last.fm/robots.txt
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /music?
Disallow: /widgets/radio?

Disallow: /harming/humans
Disallow: /ignoring/human/orders
Disallow: /harm/to/self

But it seems like the BBC's web geeks also are not without a sense of humour. Earlier today, I happened across one of the more bizarre HTTP status codes out there on the interwebs. Not your usual HTTP 200 Success or HTTP 404 Not Found, but HTTP 418 I'm A Teapot ...

418 I'm a teapot (RFC 2324) This code was defined in 1998 as one of the traditional IETF April Fools' jokes, in RFC 2324, Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, and is not expected to be implemented by actual HTTP servers. However, known implementations do exist.

no, really. Take a look at the BBC's CBeebies site if you don't believe me.

The page even returns a HTTP 418 status.

Thanks are due to fellow ex-Yahoo! David Overton for pointing this gem out. Honourable second place mention is also due to HTTP 420 Enhance Your Calm.

420 Enhance Your Calm (Twitter) Returned by the Twitter Search and Trends API when the client is being rate limited. Likely a reference to this number's association with marijuana. Other services may wish to implement the 429 Too Many Requests response code instead. The phrase "Enhance Your Calm" is a reference to Demolition Man. In the film, Sylvester Stallone's character John Spartan is a hot-head in a generally more subdued future, and is regularly told to "Enhance your calm" rather than a more common phrase like "calm down".

... web geeks, it seems, are not without a sense of humour.

The Union Of Subsidized Farmers, Mummy and Slayers Of Virgins - More Mapping Madness

Yanko Tsvetkov, visual artist, graphic designer and illustrator, has been at it again producing more mapping madness and cartographical curiosities. The man behind the map of Europe according to the Hungarians has produced another crop of somewhat subjective maps of Europe, where the United Kingdom comes under the headings of The Union Of Subsidized Farmers (Where I Live), Mummy (according to the USA), Slayers Of Virgins (according to France) and Enigma Code Hackers (according to Germany). Apparently.

Here's a couple of examples; Europe According To The USA ...

Europe According to the United States of America

... and Europe According To The French.

Europe According to the French

Head over to his mapping stereotypes project page for the rest. It's mapping, but not as we know it, and as Yanko aptly puts it, "a sense of humour is highly recommended".

Yanko Tsvetkov, visual artist, graphic designer and illustrator, has been at it again producing more mapping madness and cartographical curiosities. The man behind the map of Europe according to the Hungarians has produced another crop of somewhat subjective maps of Europe, where the United Kingdom comes under the headings of The Union Of Subsidized Farmers (Where I Live), Mummy (according to the USA), Slayers Of Virgins (according to France) and Enigma Code Hackers (according to Germany). Apparently.

Here's a couple of examples; Europe According To The USA ...

Europe According to the United States of America

... and Europe According To The French.

Europe According to the French

Head over to his mapping stereotypes project page for the rest. It's mapping, but not as we know it, and as Yanko aptly puts it, "a sense of humour is highly recommended".