the lighter side

The best in comedy is often not found on TV, but rather in everyday conversations with friends that somehow spiral out of control. Collected here are the randomest of the random, saved for posterity.

Weather

• "Tornado's got the devil's heart and a dead soul. And until you see that, you ain't telling me nothin' about nothin'."
• "Tornado go down to the store for some blueberry pancakes, maybe some maple syrup..."
• "Those aren't raindrops. You're just a big aerosol particle."
• "Brazil has never had hurricanes and it is not having one now."
• "When we're done with you, you'll be spread along the ground like the coldy pool."
• "Look! It's overpowering the ground clutter!"
• "Wait until it gets into the ground clutter..."
• "It IS the ground clutter!"
• "I'm going to explode the Great Basin high and replace it with a whole bunch of Aleutian lows."
• "The weather is not nearly as complicated as meteorologists make it out to be. The weather is simply the weather - a thing, just as a Ford Mustang is a thing - and just as dependable and predictable as Microsoft Windows... it always manages to do what you least expected and least wanted it to do."

Meteorology

• "Equilibrium is like pornography. It's difficult to define, but you know it when you see it."
• "Are you a prospective student?"
• "I only vaguely remember something about a mysterious Q vector."
• "The brain cells that used to contain your personality were overwritten by the vorticity equation."
• "He's working under the faulty assumption that we learned something in thermodynamics."
• "Are you doing that barotropic thing again? What did we tell you about that..."
• "This? This is color."
• "It's not my fault I spilled that beer. Damn Earth's rotating too fast."
• "There doesn't have to be a body count for it to be an all-star sounding."
• "If you want to avoid other chasers, just go hide in the hail core."
• "Yeah, my final exam was pretty hard. Sorry about that."
• "If you do not know it, how will you know it?"
• "Warning: Do not inhale Exam 1 vapors. Exam 1 may impair your ability to smoke cigarettes and consume large quantities of alcohol."
• "Exam 2 is guaranteed to make your *** bigger! No exercises or pumps required!"
• "Work goes much faster with margarita!"
• "We would get elevator much faster if we threw freshmen out window."
• "Running into wall is not indicative of good work."
• "If you get two heads as a result of flipping one coin, you're obviously a meteorologist."
• "If you meteorologists didn't exist, I'd have to invent you. You're too much fun."
• "The answer is 3. But the meteorologists will say the answer is mostly 2 with scattered 1's and a chance of 0."
• "We busted on the cirrus chase because the supercell was in the way."
• "Professor ___ looked like he lost a battle against an electrical socket on Tuesday. By Thursday his hair had mostly recovered, but it still had a damn BWER in it!"
• "The accuracy of my 4-day forecast is a function of my wanting to leave."
• "Do meteorologists know the forecast? Of course they know the forecast, because they've already answered The Three Big Questions:
  1) Do you know air mass?
  2) Do you know dynamics?
  3) Do you know ground?"
• "I am appalled at how quickly you go through your data."
• "You could have talked about it... but you didn't!"

Hockey

• "The girl of your dreams would never take you away from hockey. She would feed you one-timers on Lake Ontario until her arms fell off."
• "Tell Jeremy [Roenick] I can't hear him because I have my two Stanley Cup rings plugging my ears"
• "[Mathieu] Schneider? I hate that guy!"
• "I've seen better ice on the roads in Saskatchewan."
• "What I want for Christmas is a Mike Bossy doll. Wind it up and he scores 60 goals."
• "You missed the most exciting 10 minutes in the history of the building. One night I had a breakaway."
• "[Jaroslav] Modry is not allowed to touch the puck anymore."
• "A good coach has to be like a gardener. Some guys need weeding, some guys need watering, some need sunlight, and some just need a Weedwhacker."
• "I gave Gary [Bettman] a hockey puck once, and he spent the rest of the day trying to open it."
• "It was easy for the Commies to hide their subs. They just put their boats in the corner of the harbor, because everyone knows Swedes don't go in corners."
• "When we lose, we get letters from religious organizations. They say until you change the name of the Devils to the Angels, you'll keep on losing."
• "He who lives by the cheap shot dies by the cross-check."
• "We could use [Tina Turner] on our team. She'd improve our appearance and she works her butt off."
• "The fans love fighting. The players don't mind. The coaches like the fights. What's the big deal?"
• "Hockey is 60 minutes of action with no easy way of avoiding a good clobbering."
• "You know you've come a long way when you look at the out-of-town scoreboards and there are no scores."
• "Are Niinimaa, Nurminen, Numminen, Noronen, and Nieminen all the same person?"
• "I'm a Kings fan. I got injured just watching the game the other night"

Math

• "We are fearless, we take square roots of negative numbers!"
• "Dividing by zero is a cardinal sin in mathematics."
• "One day you will be released on an unsuspecting public."
• "So you can see how this Laplace Transform idea is great, but we want something that's good for making money."
• "C? Yes, C is a fine constant. However, I prefer... -λ!"
• "No! 1 is a boring function!"
• "Whoops! Can't go that far..."
• "I won't hold you responsible for this proof, because I don't want to have to grade 45 different versions of it."
• "I miss having DJ McC as my professor, but I don't miss that smart guy that sat in the front."
• "The man's movements can be explained by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle."
• "How can a shaky old man inflict so much pain?"
• "I assume you're the kind of people who never go anywhere without a calculator."
• "You're enrolled? You can stay, then. That just means I'll have to kill one of the rest of you."
• "I'm doing you the courtesy - even though I know better - of treating you as mature adults."
• "When it comes to academic misconduct in my course, trespassers WILL be violated."
• "Math majors usually get put into other groups, because they have no subject matter of their own."
• "You! Stop talking! This isn't fun, it's statistics!"
• "If Roxy comes back, Roxy's getting an F. You should never do something so stupid as wear a shirt with your name on it on the first day of class."
• "Dr. (blank)? He's been dead 25 years and nobody's realized it yet."
• "I would insult Dr. (blank), but he'd kill me."
• "This is now Calculus II problem."
• "If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?"
• "We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!!"
• "Economists can certainly disappoint you. One said the economy would turn up by the last quarter. Well, I'm down to mine and it hasn't."
• "This isn't right. It isn't even wrong!"
• "A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee to theorems."
• "How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a light bulb? One. He gives it to three Oregonians, thereby reducing the problem to an earlier joke."
• "I didn't know it was impossible when I did it..."
• "I don't have any solution... but I certainly admire the problem."
• "Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them."

More?

• "I have never been as strongly opposed to someone's existence before as I am about Paris Hilton."
• "You know something, buddy? You are a chump!"
• "I Garfunkled your mother!"
• "Mine?"
• "Never eat a green hot dog. Especially with the green ketchup."
• "In Texas, they measure distance by six-packs. You ask how far it is from here to there and they say, 'Oh, it's a one six-pack ride,' or 'It's a two-six-pack ride.'"
• "He wasn't tight with money, he was adjacent to it."
• "I learned a long time ago you take a lot more aggravation from a .300 hitter than you do a .200 hitter."
• "It's like ham and eggs. The chicken, he makes a contribution. But the pig, he makes a commitment."
• "Please don't make this a battle of wits. He's obviously unarmed."
• "I could sing better than that... with a trombone stuck up my nose."
• "In a scale analysis of history, your life drops out."
• "You could do a lot if you had infinite mass."
• "Oh, no. She's stuck in an infinite loop and he's a complete idiot. What are we going to do?"
• "King me, you rotten son of a b****. This time I'm gonna be ready for ya."
• "We didn't have any social science people. There were econ majors, but econ is an anti-social science."
• "I can tell an inorganic chemist from an organic chemist. The inorganic chemist is made of metal and walks stiffly."
• "This piece of software was made for social sciences people, because these people are particularly stupid."
• "You can't have fun in Kansas City, Kansas. Everything is illegal in Kansas City, Kansas."
• "I'm not sure what a Hot Pocket is. It's liquid, semi-solid, and a mixture of colloidal suspensions of unspeakable things."
• "Life insurance is basically betting that you're gonna die. If you win the bet, you die. But if you lose the bet, that means you're still alive... but that you lose your premium."
• "For years, I prayed to God to do something about my annoying neighbor and his stupid barking dog. Joe Pesci straightened that ****sucker out in one visit."
• "But sometimes, that's not enough, and you must douse yourself with Finest Mongolian Aftershave Lotion!"
• "I was playing poker the other night with tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died!"
• "The story so far: In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move."
• "Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'. Your editor will delete it, and the writing will be just as it should be."
• "Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."
• "How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light bulb? Three. One to screw in the light bulb, and the other two to fend off all the Californians trying to share in the experience."
• "A booming voice says 'Wrong, cretin!', and you notice you have turned into a pile of dust."
• "Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters."
• "Pedestrians are:
  A. irrelevant.
  B. communists.
  C. a nuisance.
  D. difficult to clean off the front grille."
  
• "One-Shot Case Study, n.: The scientific equivalent of the four-leaf clover, from which it is concluded that all clovers possess four leaves and are sometimes green."
• "The man who follows the crowd usually will get no farther than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been."
• "Corrupt, stupid, grasping functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as stupid, selfish, acquisitive employers have made of capitalism."
• "The difference between a misfortune and a calamity? If my opponent fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, it would be a calamity."
• "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That is the difference between a dog and a man."
• "There's no point being grown up if you can't act childish sometimes."
• "College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead if the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity."
• "A consultant is a person who borrows your watch, tells you what time it is, pockets the watch, and then sends you a bill for it."
• "It may be bad manners to talk with your mouth full, but it isn't too good either if you speak when your head is empty."
• "Pro is to con as progress is to Congress."
• "In my egotistical opinion, most people's C programs should be indented about six feet downward and covered with dirt."
• "Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again."
• "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular."
• "Peace, n.: In international affairs, a period of cheating in between two periods of fighting."
• "I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me."
• "In 1750, Isaac Newton became discouraged when he fell up a flight of stairs."
• "If the facts don't conform to the theory, they must be disposed of. Corollaries: (1) The bigger the theory, the better. (2) The experiment may be considered a success if no more than 50% of the observations must be discarded to obtain correspondence with the theory."
• "The President said he would quit if he got less than 50% of the vote. In a democracy, that's not called quitting..."
• "It is impossible to travel faster than light - and certainly undesirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off."
• "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
• "Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by spontaneously moving from where you left them to where you cannot find them."
• "Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible too."
• "An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys."
• "It is true that if your paperboy throws your newspaper into the bushes for five straight days it can be explained by Newton's Law of Gravity. But it requires Murphy's Law to explain why it is happening to you."
• "Xerox is a company that never comes up with anything original."
• "A block grant is a solid mass of money surrounded on all sides by governors."
• "Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. Everything else causes cancer in rats."
• "Bipolar, adj.: Refers to someone who has homes in Buffalo and Nome."
• "Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."
• "Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe - there's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines."
• "I'm sorry, but after reading all this, I'm having a hard time coming up with an explanation for all this nonsense which doesn't involve you being a total dumbass."
• "There is so much sand in northern Africa, that if it were spread out it would cover the entire Sahara Desert."
• "On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was far more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars, and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."
• "You can do this in a number of ways. IBM chose to do all of them. Why do you find that funny?"
• "It may be that your whole purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others."