Must blog. . . .
The Dean told a joke during tonight’s sermon, a joke on a familiar theme in which a husband and wife are conversing. It occurred to me as I sat in the congregation with any number of gay/bi/ lesbian colleagues, students, and guests, that the “joke”—one of our most rigid literary genres, in certain ways—makes it necessary that the couple in the joke be straight, not gay. If one were to stipulate that the couple were gay, even indirectly, the way that a joke forces one to use an economy of information would require that the gayness of the couple be part of what’s supposed to be funny. A listener would be inclined to wonder why you told them the couple was gay, if you weren’t going to make that part of the joke.
So I was wondering how long it would be before you could tell a “couple” joke without tacitly reinforcing the perceived normality of heterosexual couples, the marginality of homosexual couples, and it occurred to me that this may be one of the reasons I don’t tell jokes much: the genre constraints make it harder to say what I want, on my terms. So although I incorporate humor in preaching, writing, teaching, and most every other aspect of life, I rarely tell jokes, more often narrating events or inflecting words to highlight peculiarities in the world.
That’s a lot to think about during a sermon, and by the time I noticed I’d been pondering instead of paying attention, the Dean was almost over. Sorry, Very Reverend Sir; I’ll pay closer attention next time.
Posted by AKMA at October 24, 2002 10:48 PM | TrackBackHere's one you can use, told to me by a good friend who isn't yet a rabbi:
A married couple was walking down the street, having an increasingly nasty argument, when they decided to go into a bar and hash out their differences over a drink.
They took a table, ordered drinks, and had an increasingly loud and bitter argument while the men in the bar--a gay bar, as it happened--tried to ignore the specatcle.
Finally, the enraged woman threw her drink in her husband's face and stormed out. The man swept the drinks off the table and chased after her. The patrons watched in silence.
Finally, one of the men at the bar said to the bartender, "You see? Mixed marriages never work."
Posted by: adamsj at November 2, 2002 03:10 PMHere's one you can use, told to me by a good friend who isn't yet a rabbi:
A married couple was walking down the street, having an increasingly nasty argument, when they decided to go into a bar and hash out their differences over a drink.
They took a table, ordered drinks, and had an increasingly loud and bitter argument while the men in the bar--a gay bar, as it happened--tried to ignore the specatcle.
Finally, the enraged woman threw her drink in her husband's face and stormed out. The man swept the drinks off the table and chased after her. The patrons watched in silence.
Finally, one of the men at the bar said to the bartender, "You see? Mixed marriages never work."
Posted by: adamsj at November 2, 2002 03:10 PMBut variables get one benefit people do not
Posted by: Polidore at January 13, 2004 02:22 AMWhen Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Anne at January 13, 2004 02:24 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Christian at January 13, 2004 08:30 AMA variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
Posted by: Cornelius at January 13, 2004 08:31 AMEach Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.
Posted by: Benjamin at January 13, 2004 08:31 AM