…Harry hesitated. He couldn’t help himself. Actually, under the circumstances, he shouldn’t be helping himself. It was right and proper to be curious. “What else can you do?”

Professor McGonagall turned into a cat.

Harry scrambled back unthinkingly, backpedalling so fast that he tripped over a stray stack of books and landed hard on his bottom with a thwack. His hands came down to catch himself without quite reaching properly, and there was a warning twinge in his shoulder as the weight came down unbraced.

At once the small tabby cat morphed back up into a robed woman. “I’m sorry, Mr. Potter,” said the witch, sounding sincere, though the corners of her lips were twitching upwards. “I should have warned you.”

Harry was breathing in short gasps. His voice came out choked. “You can’t DO that!“

“It’s only a Transfiguration,” said Professor McGonagall. “An Animagus transformation, to be exact.”

“You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That’s not just an arbitrary rule, it’s implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can’t just visualise a whole cat’s anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?”

Professor McGonagall’s lips were twitching harder now. “Magic.”

I’m only up to chapter 8 of 122, but this is so funny… in every chapter so far. Check it out. https://www.hpmor.com/.

From Crazy Ex-Girlfriend:

Rebecca & Paula together:

AND I REALLY WANNA TELL YOU THAT I’M SORRY
AND I REALLY WANNA TELL YOU THAT I AM THE WORST
AND I JUST WANNA SAY
I MISS YOU EVERY DAY
AND I WILL… BUT YOU GO FIRST

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-anbK8DUOw (2:27)

Obituary:

Hers was a bawdy, rowdy life lived large, broke and loud. We thought Renay could not be killed. God knows, people tried. A lot. Renay has been toying with death for a decades, but always beating it and running off in her silver Chevy Nova. Covid couldn’t kill Renay. Neither could pneumonia twice, infections, blood clots, bad feet, breast cancer twice, two mastectomies, two recessions, multiple bankruptcies, marriage to a philandering Sergeant Major, divorce in the 70’s, six kids, one cesarean, a few abortions from the Quietly Famous Abortionist of Spring Lake, NC or an affair with Larry King in the 60’s.

See the whole thing at https://www.fayobserver.com/obituaries/m0028451. Some story behind it from The Guardian:

The obituary describes abortions and an affair with Larry King, but he (Andy Corren, Renay’s son) said that he actually toned down some of Renay’s life – for the protection of those living and dead, and because not all statutes of limitations have expired.

Too lazy to put up something more useful, but these might make you smile.

xkcd.com is mostly tech- and science-related funnies, but everyone should get this. Note that every xkcd has an extra comment when you hover the mouse over it:

https://xkcd.com/2579

And sometimes a group does something so… wrong… that it makes even a serial killer shake his head. (A little subtle, watch carefully.) It’s an ad, yes, but one of my favorites. (30 seconds)

What? You never realized that states and DOT snowplow drivers and citizens might like to name their plows?

Some of my favorites:

https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/0,4616,7-151-9615-575096–,00.html

https://www.dot.state.mn.us/news/2021/03/02-snowplow.html

And some discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29883840.

I read The Da Vinci Code and hated the writing. Pedestrian at best, convoluted and clumsy at worst. John Oliver didn’t like it either:

None of this success would really bother me that much if it were not for the fact that the cryptic at the heart of The Da Vinci Code, the puzzle (that) art throb Robert Langdon has to solve involves a poem that begins,

“In London lies a knight a pope interred
His labor’s fruit a holy wrath incurred.”

Now we quickly find out the knight in question is Sir Isaac Newton. So Isaac Newton, labor’s fruit, you’re thinking apple, right? Apple. It’s your first guess and it’s also your only guess and you’re right because it’s fucking apple. No one should need Robert Langdon — a Harvard educated puzzle solver who fucks — to get to the bottom of this. A child could solve that puzzle. And yet the poem continues:

“You seek the orb that ought be on the tomb
it speaks of rosy flesh and seeded womb.”

So orb, rosy flesh, seeds. It’s fucking apple, is it. It’s apple. Guess how many pages there are between that poem and the solution to the puzzle. I’ll give you a clue. It’s a lot more than one. Both the book and the movie make it seem like only the brilliant Robert Langdon could possibly decode the mystery behind those complex words. Here is the scene in the movie version where he explains the solution like he’s Indiana Jones finding the Ark of the fucking Covenant to a speechless and awestruck Amelie:

(Langdon): “There was every orb conceivable on that tomb except one. The orb which fell from the heavens and inspired Newton’s life’s work. Work that incurred the wrath of the church until his dying day. A-P-P-L-E. Apple.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5IV9n223M. 8 min 46 seconds.

Here’s an example from the book:

It takes 830 words — two pages — for everyone to understand that the Super Duper Extra Special Secret Encoding is… it’s mirror writing: