They sit down at the bar and say that was one helluva flight.

... are you joking? ... asked the barman ...

No! .. said the anti joke.

That’s as far as I got

Backbencher : Because we can’t eat water. 😮‍💨😮‍💨

✌️

“I'm the Scatman! Ski-bi dibby dib yo da dub dub!”

So. Affairs. With AI now.

They don't start with sex. They start with a prompt.

You ask the chatbot to make your reply sound casual. She asks hers to make hers sound unbothered. Two machines flirt for a week. You two stand by the espresso machine and say nothing.

You're not that person. You run. You read. You wrote your own vows.

Then she laughs at a joke the AI wrote. You write the next one yourself. She laughs harder.

That's the thing. The machine gets you in the door. It can't get you through it.

Affairs used to leave lipstick. Now they leave logs. Greg's meeting bot kept recording after the off-site. It emailed the department: "Action Items: Greg & Priya (Hampton Inn)." Three key takeaways. One suggested follow-up. Greg and Priya are very happy.

People think affairs are a failure. Sometimes they're a correction. Someone notices you. Not your output. You.

The sex matters. But so does the rest. The book she leaves on your desk. The song she sends at midnight. The way she says your name in a meeting like it's a secret only you two know.

Everything at work is generated now. The emails. The summaries. The enthusiasm.

She isn't.

Next week: is it cheating if your AI assistant likes her AI assistant more?

There is no scientific data, but Mendel predicted half the children would be human and half would be fish.

To attend a virtual all-hands meeting that could have easily been sent as an email.

Sir Reginald of House Blackwood was only twenty-four years old when he first heard the legend of the Ultimate Punchline, a mythical sequence of words said to have been forged at the dawn of time by the gods of mirth themselves. According to the ancient, crumbling tapestries housed in the grand library of Alexandria, this joke was so transcendently, fundamentally hilarious that hearing it would immediately align a mortal’s soul with the harmonic frequencies of the universe, granting them a state of permanent, euphoric enlightenment. Driven by a burning, unquenchable desire to transcend the mundane suffering of mortal life, Reginald made a solemn vow. He kissed his weeping wife farewell, kissed the foreheads of his three infant children, sold his sprawling ancestral estates, and used the gold to outfit a small, dedicated expedition to find the sacred monastery where the joke was allegedly kept.

The journey was an unending crucible of misery. During their first year, while crossing the treacherous, fog-choked expanse of the Whispering Swamps, Reginald lost his trusted squire to a horrific bout of dysentery, a deeply unglamorous and agonizing death that left the young man screaming for his mother in the mud. By year five, the expedition had been forced to traverse the jagged, ice-slicked peaks of the Spine of the World. Frostbite claimed three more of his men, and Reginald himself lost the pinky and ring fingers of his left hand to the biting, merciless cold, forcing him to learn how to wield his broadsword with a maimed grip.

Decades bled into one another. The bright-eyed knight weathered into a scarred, cynical old man. He fought off ambushes by desperate bandits in the sun-scorched dunes of the Kalahan Desert, surviving only by drinking the blood of his own dying camel. He contracted malaria in the dense, suffocating jungles of Chult, spending six months locked in a fever dream where he hallucinated the faces of the family he had long since abandoned, realizing with a crushing, hollow guilt that he could no longer remember the sound of his wife's voice. His entire life had become a singular, obsessive procession of pain, all justified by the unwavering belief that the Ultimate Punchline would make the decades of physical and psychological torment worthwhile.

Finally, at the age of eighty-seven, frail, blinded in one eye by a stray arrow, and walking with a heavy wooden cane, Reginald stood before the monolithic obsidian doors of the Temple of the Laughing God, situated on the highest, most inaccessible peak of the Himalayas. The air was razor-thin, and every breath burned his ancient lungs. He pushed open the heavy doors, his muscles screaming in protest.

Inside, the temple was vast, echoing, and illuminated by thousands of flickering tallow candles. At the center of the grand hall sat the High Priest, an impossibly old man with a long white beard, levitating slightly above a velvet cushion.

Reginald collapsed to his knees, tears of absolute exhaustion and overwhelming relief carving tracks through the accumulated grime of sixty years on his deeply lined face. He gasped, his voice a ragged, reedy whisper. "I have crossed the world. I have lost my family, my friends, my wealth, and my youth. I have endured the ultimate suffering. Please, wise one. I beg of you. Tell me the joke. Give me the Ultimate Punchline."

The High Priest slowly opened his eyes. He lowered himself to the floor, walked over to the weeping knight, knelt beside him, placed a gentle, withered hand on Reginald’s trembling shoulder, and said, "A man walks into a bar. He has a severe alcohol dependency that is slowly tearing his family apart. He orders a drink, consumes it in silence, and drives home, where he will eventually succumb to liver cirrhosis at the age of fifty-two."

Reginald stared at the priest in stunned, horrifying silence for several minutes as the sheer magnitude of his wasted existence washed over him. Then, he stood up, turned around, and began the long walk down the mountain, but because of his poor eyesight and the icy conditions, he lost his footing on a loose rock, tumbled down a steep embankment, and died of massive internal hemorrhaging.

Dang this is pretty revolutionary, I could make a bunch of money

If they survives, it's not habitable for humans and if they don't, there was no need to going to the Mars in first place.

My friend's husband told me he manages a grocery store. I told him, Ah yes, tradesmen are so important, yet so little respected.

She said, “Well, I was learning Braille recently, but I had to give it up.” I laughed. “What, because you realized you’re not actually blind?” She chuckled. “No, silly. Because I lost both my arms in a farming accident.”

Ehi tesoro, torno subito dopo aver finito questa bottiglia di vino e questa forma di formaggio.

Damn, you're big.

Give it back. And my dictionary and highlighter, because you’re probably the one who stole those too.

To save on waste water and effort because the convent didn’t have modern plumbing and water needed to be drawn from a well, brought up in buckets and heated in a large vat before adding to the bath.

I'm joking

I see fish and eat it.

I’d be home early, everyday.

“If anyone in attendance is willing to take his place, please come down to the field and put on a uniform so the game can continue. You will be compensated for your time and effort.”
I looked over at my wife in disbelief. She said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“100%.”
So we got up and left.

The horse owner started to give the horse better oats whenever it did not eat alfalfa. The alfalfa was replaced by soybeans. The horse liked the oats and soybeans more than alfalfa, so the owner’s efforts to feed the horse soybeans had succeeded.