Funny Bone

*Update*
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Lead Massive Rally to "Restore Sanity and/or Fear" in DC (01Nov2010) JON STEWART: "We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is, on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing hate, and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done. But the truth is, we do. We work together to get things done every damn day!"

Being in the Air Force means having to move frequently. When some friends of ours were transferred to a nearby base, the local TV station interviewed them for a human-interest story. The interviewer asked their five-year-old daughter how she felt about settling into a new home. She calmly replied, "Oh, we carry our home with us – we just have to find a house to put it in."
-- Alan Whittle

My friend, a Marine, didn't care that his trip to the shooting range had been canceled, but he was put off that his physical exam was still on.
"Should it bother me," he asked, "that they don't seem to care how well I can shoot, but they are interested in how fast I can run?"
-- Dawn Gutierrez

Original Source Reader’s Digest

Original Source: New York Times

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IT’S O.K. to liken Shigeru Miyamoto to Walt Disney. When Disney died in 1966, Mr. Miyamoto was a 14-year-old schoolteacher’s son living near Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital. An aspiring cartoonist, he adored the classic Disney characters. When he wasn’t drawing, he made his own toys, carving wooden puppets with his grandfathers’ tools or devising a car race from a spare motor, string and tin cans. Even as he has become the world’s most famous and influential video-game designer — the father of Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda and, most recently, the Wii — Mr. Miyamoto still approaches his work like a humble craftsman, not as the celebrity he is to gamers around the world.

Perched on the end of a chair in a hotel suite a few dozen stories above Midtown Manhattan, the preternaturally cherubic 55-year-old Mr. Miyamoto radiated the contentment of someone who has always wanted to make fun. And he has. As the creative mastermind at Nintendo for almost three decades, Mr. Miyamoto has unleashed mass entertainment with a global breadth, cultural endurance and financial success unsurpassed since Disney’s fabled career.

Mario, the mustached Italian plumber he created almost 30 years ago, has become by some measures the planet’s most recognized fictional character, rivaled only by Mickey Mouse. As the creator of the Donkey Kong, Mario and Zelda series (which have collectively sold more than 350 million copies) and the person who ultimately oversees every Nintendo game, Mr. Miyamoto may be personally responsible for the consumption of more billions of hours of human time than anyone around. In the Time 100 online poll conducted this spring, Mr. Miyamoto was voted the most influential person in the world.

But it isn’t just traditional gamers who are flocking to Mr. Miyamoto’s latest creation, the Wii. Eighteen months ago, just when video games were in danger of disappearing into the niche world of fetishists, Mr. Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s chief executive, practically reinvented the industry. (Mr. Miyamoto’s full title is senior managing director and general manager of Nintendo’s entertainment analysis and development division.) Their idea was revolutionary in its simplicity: rather than create a new generation of games that would titillate hard-core players, they developed the Wii as an easy-to-use, inexpensive diversion for families (with a particular appeal to women, an audience generally immune to the pull of traditional video games). So far the Wii has sold more than 25 million units, besting the competition from Sony and Microsoft.

Last week Nintendo released its new Wii Fit system in North America, a device that hopes to make doing yoga in front of a television screen almost as much fun as driving, throwing, jumping or shooting in a traditional game. Though there were no hard sales figures available as of Tuesday, there were reports of stores across the country selling out of Wii Fit.

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Original Source: Washington Post

Original Source: CNN

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CANNES, France (AP) -- Fur might be a politically incorrect fashion statement on the red carpet at the world's most-prestigious film festival. Not when you're the star of a movie called "Kung Fu Panda," though. DreamWorks Animation, whose past Cannes entries include the first two "Shrek" flicks and "Over the Hedge," put its adorable martial-arts hero alongside the festival's highbrow cinema entries Thursday with the premiere of the action comedy whose voice cast includes Jack Black, Angelina Jolie and Dustin Hoffman.

While Black hammed it up with some kung fu poses, he wisecracked that the incessant camera flashes could go a long way to solving the energy crunch. "If you harnessed all that electricity, it would probably be enough to take a small unmanned ship to the moon and back," Black said. "It's got to be 1.21 gigawatts of light flashes. It's just going to be sick. Do we really need that many pictures? Where are all those photos going?"

Black provides the voice of Po, a panda in ancient China who idolizes his country's martial-arts heroes but is too slow and clumsy to emulate their moves, stuck instead toiling in his family's noodle shop. A twist of fate lands Po under the tutelage of a revered kung fu master (Hoffman), who must train the klutzy panda to battle an evil snow leopard (Ian McShane) intent on marauding and vengeance. Po's allies include a tiger (Jolie), a viper (Lucy Liu) and a monkey (Jackie Chan), whose graceful martial-arts skills put the lumbering panda to shame.

"I do think that Po the panda is going to give Shrek a run for his money, because I think that Po in a very different way is without question the most lovable character we've ever created," Katzenberg said. "Shrek's an anti-hero hero. Po is an unlikely hero. He is more in tune with what we are ourselves. He actually has to find the hero within, and I think we all have a hero within us. "So it's just very relatable to find this kind of average guy who's working in his dad's noodle restaurant suddenly have an ambitious fantasy to be something great, only to learn that being the best version of yourself is greatness."

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Black also let slip that his co-star, Jolie, and her partner Brad Pitt are expecting twins, who would be the fifth and sixth children for the couple, joining siblings Maddox, Pax, Zahara, and Shiloh. Jolie confirmed the news, mentioning she may decide to give birth to the twins in France.

Images courtesy of AFP and EPA/GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO