Category: Humor

Dispatches from SNN (Slobovian News Network)

Santa Claus has appealed to President Biden for help in avoiding a planned reindeer strike this year.

SNN North Pole reporter Freezyn Myassov says that Christmas icon Santa Claus is at his wits end. His reindeer have proposed a reindeer strike on December 23rd, meaning that millions of children worldwide will go without Christmas presents this year. Santa and the reindeer are at odds over pay, benefits and working conditions.

Santa recently stated, “Mr. Biden did such a great job averting the railroad strike. I desperately need his help to save Christmas for children across the globe.”

The reindeer have requested several upgrades for their services, including a 50 percent pay hike, 21 days paid vacation, 7 days paid sick leave and for Santa to convert to an electric sleigh.

Ms. Myassov says that part of the problem seems to be a generational disconnect between the almost 300 year old Mr. Claus and the Gen X reindeer crew.

Gone are the classic reindeer lineup of Rudolph, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Comet, Cupid, Vixen, Donner and Blitzen.

They have benn replaced by hip-hop oriented deer with names like Reindeer X, YOYO, Cube, Drive By, Mojo, Lil Nastee, MJF and Antlah.

“Damn sonofabitches don’t do nothing but listen to rap music, smoke reefer, do TikTok and play video games… Hell they work one damn night a year year and they want seven days paid sick leave! And they want me to hire a LGBTQ reindeer — whatever the hell that is,” Santa complained.

He added, “It’s up to Mr. Biden. I would have asked Donald Trump for help, but he still owes me for all the shit I brought him last year. He claims the FBI confiscated the invoice from his house.”

SNN Words To Live By

“Nobody gets out of life alive.” — Hud (Paul Newman), 1961 film.

”A woman should never show her hand until a man is ready to eat out of it.” — Minnie Pearl, HeeHaw TV show.

“If you want to be a great writer, be either deranged or brilliant.” — Jimmy Breslin.

“Little men take, big men hit.” — MLB manager Birdie Tebbets.

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Former White House resident Donald Trump declares a World Cup controversy “like none you’ve ever seen.”

On December 3rd Netherlands defeated the United States 3-1 in a FIFA World Cup Round of 16 match. Or did they? Not according to former President Donald Trump.

Yesterday, in a hastily called press conference, Trump stunned reporters by declaring a “World Cup controversy.” He claimed that the U.S. team had won the match “bigly,” but the game was stolen from the Americans. He announced that he is insisting on a recount of the goals scored by both teams.

“I watched the game while eating the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake and while there were fine players on both sides, the American team played unbelievably well despite the fact that they were all suffering from bone spurs. I have no doubt that we won.”

The former president also accused the Netherlands of cheating as he claimed that they had players from both the Netherlands AND Holland on their team when all the athletes are supposed to be from the same country. He referred to this as Double Dutching which he said was tremendously unfair.

Trump also stated that “all the referees were from sh*thole socialist countries that treated the American players very unfairly, that I can tell you.”

He then went on to say that he was demanding “a complete shutdown of Neverlanders entering the United States until the game is replayed or until the U.S. is just declared the winner.”

“I have nothing against the Dutch people,” he added. “We even have some living in our great state of Pennsylvania. I have a great relationship with the Dutch. I have always had a great relationship with the Dutch. They like me and I like them. I was a bit miffed when they refused to sell us Greenland, but I’ve been to the Netherlands many times and it’s a beautiful country. Copenhagen is an amazing city. And they have a House of Orange which I like as orange is my favorite color. They also have nice ovens, I’m told.”

“But we need to reverse the results of the Netherlands/U.S. game” he cried. “Then the American team can win the World Cup like we did in the 2018 FIFA tournament when I was president. That football team, which was captained by Hershel Walker, beat France in the finals. A lot of people don’t know that.”

The former president concluded the press conference by stating that having the U.S. team win would make the World Cup great again.

USA, USA, USA!

Things are closing in on this ex-president & there’s only one way to escape prison time!

Like all filled with narcissistic shame, Donald Trump spent countless days & nights thinking up ways to end it all and escape prison time, instead of getting convicted for… oh, G-d, let me count the ways!

Trump’s Top 10 Ideas to Escape Prison Time

10. He’ll stand in the middle of 5th avenue during rush hour & hail a speeding off-duty taxi!

POOF!

9.  He’ll superglue his hands to his throat!

8.  He’ll tell Melania to go pick some poison mushrooms!

7.  When he finally has a vasectomy – the doctor slips on a grease spot!

6.  He’ll stay in his tanning bed way too long & ‘orangutans orange’ becomes ‘campfire black’!

5.  He’ll play 10 rounds of golf in one scorching day – 1 diet coke!

4.  He’ll win ‘the Guiness Book of Records’ for most burgers eaten at 2 am & call for his mommy!

3.  He’ll go to Vegas, put his last million on ‘red’ & get carried out on a stretcher – brain dead!

2.  He’ll borrow Don Jr’s rifle, but accidently shoots him in his ‘arrogance’ – finally losing his voice & balls!

And #1 – He’ll get ‘the ultimate liposuction procedure’ at the spa & Disappears!

POOF!

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Since we were discussing XML earlier this week, it’s a good time to take a peek at this submission from Mark.

Before we get into it, though, we need to talk briefly about some different XML parsing philosophies. XML documents are frequently large and deeply nested trees, and once loaded into memory, consume a lot of it. So there are two methods we might use to parse XML. We might parse and load the entire DOM– having all of that expensive processing and memory usage. The advantage is that we have the whole structure in memory, and can quickly and efficiently navigate through it. The other option is to read it as a stream, and process it one node at a time. This is both faster and a lot gentler on memory, but it means you have forward-only access to the contents.

Or, you can just do what Mark’s co-worker did:

public void ReadXml(XmlReader reader)
{
	string xml = reader.ReadOuterXml();
	XElement element = XElement.Parse(xml);
	…
}

This method accepts an XmlReader, which is C#’s implementation of that forward-only, stream-oriented version of an XML parser. They then extract the OuterXml as a string- the contents of the file– and hand it off to XElement.Parse, which is the DOM-oriented, extremely expensive method of parsing.

For bonus points, they’ve greatly increased the memory footprint, since this has to have the whole file in memory as a string, and then the whole file in memory as an XML DOM tree. This is extra offensive as XElement has a Load method, which can take an XmlReader and parse the file without loading the whole string into memory. And, more than that, since the XElement type represents an XML element, it’s great for holding portions of an XML document, but since we’re loading (presumably) a whole document, the XmlDocument class (which also has a Load method) is probably the correct one to use.

The final note is where this XML data is coming from- it’s coming from another C# application, using the same underlying model library, and the objects in question were tagged with .NET’s serialization attributes. That’s a long way of saying “.NET autogenerated code for serializing/deserializing this data, and this method doesn’t need to exist at all.”

In short, given the challenge of “loading XML from a document”, they’ve managed to make the wrong choice at every opportunity.

Yes, it’s Runoff Season: Beyond the Georgia senate race, runoffs are running rampant across the USA and the world.

Georgia voters could be forgiven for thinking that Raphael Warnock’s (D) senate win is the only runoff of the year. But a quick glance at the news headlines shows that it’s runoff season, and they are running wild, everywhere.

Donald Trump and Ye (formerly Kanye West) have been vigorously running their mouth off all year about their favorite piques. The latest polls indicate they are in a virtual tie for verbal runoff. This is going to trigger a runoff runoff next month. Because this is such an unprecedented event, it is termed a one-off runoff runoff.

In Washington, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is running his feet off between Republican factions as he tries to curry favor and secure, at any cost, the position of House Leader in the next congress.

NFL quarterback Tom Brady and his wife, supermodel Gisele Bundchen, are running off from each other: Brady having called a reverse that was stopped for a loss, while Bundchen threw a ‘Hail Mary’ pass out of bounds.

Also in football, Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones is running off with the Orval Faubus Governor’s Prize for Photography, sponsored by the Arkansas KKK. Former Dallas Cowboys star running back, Herschel Walker is running off to some place where he will not be required to comment intelligently on anything except football.

Comedian Dave Chapelle is running off with the Malcolm X Award for courage in combating anti-Semitism.

Around the world, Russian troops are running off as fast as possible from Ukrainian soldiers. In Hawaii, lava runoffs threaten highways on the Big Island. Everywhere else, the poor and the oppressed are still being run off their land.

And finally, according to Mother Goose, the dish has run off with the spoon.