Garfield Minus Garfield

A friend pointed me to Garfield Minus Garfield yesterday. Looks like it’s only been around for a few weeks, but it’s pretty brilliant. Basically, these are a bunch of Garfield strips with Garfield (and anything he says) removed. What’s left is a bizarre, surreal, and generally hilarious monologue. It’s ironic that Garfield becomes radically funnier (even funny at all is huge progress) when the main character is removed. For instance:

Or:

This reminds me of the various efforts to make Marmaduke funny, but I think this works quite a bit better. Maybe it’s my own bias, but I feel like there’s more of a public call for Garfield (really Jim Davis) to go big or go home. I wasn’t aware of Marmaduke in quite the same way I was aware of Garfield (or, say, Family Circus), and so seeing Garfield be legitimately funny is particularly striking to me.

The Garfield Minus Garfield thing is also novel (in my experience, anyhow) because it takes an existing work and makes it funnier strictly by removing material. This has, of course, been done before, but I feel like this is a particularly profound example if only because it’s so repeatable. Making things funny by taking them out of context isn’t a new idea (Stephen Colbert even issued a challenge to his viewers to make the funny by taking a perhaps too-easy interview and editing it to take things out of context. The challenge was never mentioned again on the show, a winner was never declared, and none of the edited interviews were ever shown on TV. I’m guessing it’s because they just weren’t funny. The art of Garfield Minus Garfield is that it’s taking something non-obvious, removing parts of it, and achieving something far better than the original.

I think it’s brilliant.

An update to the exploding wind turbine post

I was a little bit wrong about the wind turbine explosion post from yesterday. I wrote:

2. The second blade crashes into the support tower, breaking both the tower and the blade.

The bit about “breaking the tower” isn’t quite right. Wind turbine towers are generally built from a tapered sections that are stacked together and that slip over one another. It’s a lot like stacking traffic cones or paper cups. This kind of construction is called a “monopole tower,” and it’s the same way that really tall street lights and signposts (like on the highway) are built.

Each section of a monopole tower is hollow and made of relatively thin sheet steel. The base is anchored to a solid platform (like a concrete bed), and then the upper pieces are lowered down onto it with a crane. Some combination of gravity and friction (from the sections compressing under their own weight) holds the thing together. There are rarely, if ever, welds, rivets, or bolts holding the sections in place. The overlap between the sections for a tower the size of the one in the video is usually on the order of 2m (or a bit less).

What (I think) actually happened to the tower in Denmark is that, when it got hit with the wind turbine blade, one of the tower sections crumpled and buckled near the overlap. That crumpling was enough to “squirt” the top section off of the one below it and ultimately cause it to fall over. If you look at the second video in the previous post, you’ll notice that there are no ragged edges or other signs of catastrophic failure on the part of the tower that’s still standing. The actual edge of the section that fell is pretty clean, too, but the area near the “break” is pretty severely caved in. Update: There’s now a much clearer view of the “break” courtesy of epn.dk.

Anyhow, I realize that what I’m talking about still probably fits most people’s definition of “breaking the tower,” but I wanted to clear up that a blunt fiberglass blade — even a really big one moving pretty fast — is unlikely to actually break through the steel wall of a tower.

Also, somebody in Reddit land was kind enough to post a translation of the Danish news coverage. My favorite line: “Vestas had technicians up in the mill this morning, when the brakes of the mill failed, and [they] got busy getting out,” writes jp.dk.

Obama Neologisms

To wit:

• Obamacan — a republican who’s voting for Obama.
• Obamanation — What the country will turn into, if Obama is elected. (pejorative)
• Obamanated — To be pwned by Obama.
• Obamaton — an Obama fan whose devotion approaches that of a robot. (my favorite)

Side Effect

An idea resulting from being tongue-tied: if they make a DS version of Mass Effect, they should call it Side Effect.