Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with witty

Dont leave me hanging on the telephone...

gergtreble — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:04:43 -0800

Help me find on hold music for my company. My company recently asked me to come up with suggestions for on hold music. So far we have come up with:

Call me - Blondie
Hanging on the telephone - Blondie
Hold me - Fleetwood mac/savage garden

oh and

Never gonna give you up - Rick Astley (Yay! Rickroll)

So give me your best witty on hold suggestions!

Make my card-signings witty!

KateHasQuestions — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:53:20 -0800

What witty things can I write on co-workers cards? About once a month cards get passed around our office for everyone to sign. Writing "Happy Birthday!" and "Congratulations on your new addition to the family!" and "It's been great working with you, good luck at your new job" seems so lame, but I can never think of wittier things to write, especially on the spot, for people I don't know too well.

Help me come up with a few good things to write for all of life's occasions - birthday, wedding, baby, leaving the company, promotion, death in the family - so I would have a good stock to choose from next time I have to sign a card.

Don't Tase Me, Hasbro

vanoakenfold — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:21:58 -0800

In light of the recent Mattel/Hasbro suit against Facebook's Scrabulous application, what witty sayings can I spell out in Scrabble tiles to voice my perturbation with the suit? So far I've got (using blank tiles for punctuation/etc). Credit will be given to MeFi username and posted blog-ward =P I may reword it slightly to account for a dearth of necessary tiles, although I've got multiple sets. Using obscure OSD-kosher words nets you a triple word score.

Hasbro? Has Broke
Just be happy with the free advertising Hasbro
Imagine a PR nightmare of "pulling a Hasbro"
Don't tase me, Hasbro

Merry Fucking Christmas Cards

melorama — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:11:27 -0800

Where can I buy legitimately funny, sarcastic and/or offensive Christmas Cards? After seeing the greeting cards that The Onion are selling, I was wondering who else out there sells the best greeting cards in the same sarcastic/witty/snarky vein. I'm not looking for cute-funny, obviously-shocking-funny, or geek-funny. In other words, smart but unpretentious, sometimes twisted and sarcastic humor.

The style of card I'm looking for should appeal to someone who is a huge fan of things like The Onion, Chunklet Magazine, McSweeney's, etc.

Dad's in Town and I'm Graduating from School Pale Ale.

jennyjenny — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 07:36:10 -0800

What should I name my beer? I am making beer with my father when he comes to visit. It will be an india pale ale.

I would like the name to somehow reference either a) the fact that the beer was made with my dad; or b) the fact that it is being made close to my graduation from school.

And I would like the name to be fantastically witty. My dad has made a number of beers with fantastically witty names, and I would like to keep with that tradition.

But I am totally drawing a blank. Metafilter?

Is there anyone else like Chuck out there?

reenum — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 15:00:50 -0800

I really love Chuck Klosterman's writing. Please help me find more authors/columnists like him. I really love the scholarly and witty way Chuck Klosterman writes about pop culture. I am looking for writers similar to him. So, MeFites, is there anyone else out there who can write about a subject in an intelligent or scholarly way, while still remaining accessible to a wide audience? The writing doesn't have to be constrained to pop culture. It can be about any other subject. It can also be any medium (blogs, books, magazines).

Thanks all!

"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire

TheNewWazoo — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 09:41:28 -0800

My girlfriend needs a quote of needs 25 words or less to summarize her college experience! Hope me to hope her, Mr. A. Metafilter! For background, she's come to a larger city from a medium-sized college/state-office town to attend a all-women's liberal arts college and enjoy a classically Romantic undergraduate experience, while double-majoring in History and English. She rides horses (eventing), loves literature of all types, and generally appreciates The Good Life of wine, food, and song while still being a not-so-closeted sci-fi/fantasy nerd. Politically liberal and very conservation-minded, as well.

She's having a lot of trouble in her search for a quote to put in her yearbook - something ranging from witty (think Wilde) to "inspirational" without being too sappy. Not necessarily something that summarizes a college experience, but worth associating with same.

I feel after-school special.

cior — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 05:46:04 -0800

I'm an adult who gets bullied on the public transit bus. There, I said it. Each morning at 6:54am I catch an hour-long bus from my house to my office. On this bus are two women (40-50's) who seemingly work all night in some sort of nursing capacity. When I get on, I usually find them sitting across the aisle from one another carrying on about one of their relatives or generally gossiping about life.

One of them, the one who sits across the aisle from me likes to open her window. Mind you, this morning it was 25F outside. From where she sits, she gets a light dusting of fresh air. From where I sit, it's an artic blast that a) farks up the newspaper I'm reading, b) throws my hair into my face and c) freezes my nose off.

I've responded to this situation by bearing it, non-confrontationally until both of the women get off the bus (at the same stop). I then, get up and close the window. This seems like a perfectly good solution to me, but for some reason it's not acceptable to them.

Last week, as they did the little dinger thing that signals for a stop (bonus question: what is that thing?) I got up and went across the aisle to close the window after they were out of their seats and towards the front of the bus. This act was met with a very loud and demeaning call-out peppered with phrases like:

Who does she think she is?
Look at Little Miss Thing
Uhn-uh, she's closing the window again.

It's truly endless, and so far I haven't acknowledged any of it.

At this point, everyone on the bus stares at me and laughs. They get off the bus feeling like queens. The window gets closed and I'm humiliated.

I'm looking for a way to shut them down and reclaim my power. How would I go about doing this? Mind you, I don't care that the window is open while they're on the bus but I'd like to be able to shut it while the bus is stopped as they're getting off, for reasons of balance.

Sitting in another seat isn't an answer as the bus seems to run on a sort of unspoken assigned seating arrangement (we're all regulars) and simply waiting until they are completely off the bus to close the window is too wimpy for me.

What else can I do? What witticism can I lob in their direction? What should I do when my witticism provokes a tirade in response?

Music with smart lyrics?

jdroth — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 10:24:33 -0800

Lately I've been fascinated by "smart" songs: songs with witty, intelligent lyrics, especially if the lyrics are literary. Can you recommend more music of this sort? [samples inside] Joanna Newsom is typical of what I'm after. Here's the first stanza from "Bridges and Balloons":

We sailed away on a winter's day
with fate as malleable as clay;
but ships are fallible, I say,
and the nautical, like all things, fades.

And I can recall our caravel:
a little wicker beetle shell
with four fine maste and lateen sails,
its bearings on Cair Paravel.

I adore the complexities of those lines: the vocubulary, the rhyme, the assonance. In "Sea Ghost" by the Unicorns, it is the metaphor that I like:

I dove into that freezing sea with the parasite attached to me
I had hoped the salt below would divorce what was wed above
But league after league it yet remained
For the fleshy vessel, I, kept it sustained

And so we froze a while surrounded by one big tear
Which only reminded me of a former home
But we weren't welcome, the sea made that clear
By filling us with saline and sailing us blue blue back into
The atmosphere

Are there other songs with great, extended metaphors? Or, there's the more obvious wordplay of Colin Meloy, such as that found in The Decemberists' "The Legionaire's Lament" (note that I think some of this gets forced: "mirage/shiraz" is wince-worthy):

Medicating in the sun, pinched doses of laudanum,
Longing for old fecundity of my homeland.
Curses to this mirage! A bottle of ancient Shiraz,
a smattering of distant applause is ringing in my poor ears.

On the old left bank, my baby in a charabanc,
Riding up the width and length of the Champs Elysees.

If only summer rain would fall on the houses and the boulevards
And the side walk bagatelles. It's like a dream,
With the roar of cars and the lulling of the cafe bars,
The sweetly sleeping sweeping of the sand.
Lord I don't know if I'll ever be back again.

What I'm looking for is music with smart lyrics (or maybe smarty music, too) from any genre. Bonus points for songs that are catchy and tuneful (as I feel the above are). I want to make a brainy mix, just for fun. (Also acceptable: classic poems by modern performers.)

Witty Worm

dejah420 — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 13:30:11 -0800

Bugger. I got bit by the Witty worm. It destroyed my boot sector and has ripped shreds through other data. I was able to use the recover CD from Alienware to get the system booted, but it seems to have installed a second version of windows. Because so much is toasted, I plan to fdisk and start over, but I'm trying to get as much data off the system as I can beforehand. But, I can't get my CD burner to work, even after reinstalling the Roxio software that came with the system, and updating all the drivers. [more inside] So, does anyone know of a freeware CD burning software that I can try that doesn't require rebooting the machine to install? Alternately, does anyone know of a good data repository site where I could just upload a few hundred megs of stuff? Fortunately, I back up fairly regularly, but I still have about a months worth of docs, client sites and 3d models I don't have backed up.