Monday, April 18, 2011

Hunting Elephants

No, this post is not about going after Republicans with hostile intent, although on most days that might seem like a good idea. It is about actually hunting elephants, and how this activity might be performed by members of various professions. I thought I'd pull this out of Bilbo's Mighty File O' Bloggable Stuff and update it because I can't bring myself to rant about political stuff on a Monday which will be tough enough to get through, anyhow.

Here's how various professionals hunt elephants:

MATHEMATICIANS hunt elephants by going to Africa, throwing out everything that is not an elephant, and catching one of whatever is left.

PROFESSORS OF MATHEMATICS will prove the existence of at least one unique elephant and then leave the detection and capture of an actual elephant as an exercise for their graduate students.

COMPUTER SCIENTISTS hunt elephants by exercising Algorithm A:
1. Go to Africa.
2. Start at the Cape of Good Hope.
3. Work northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent alternately east and west.
4. During each traverse pass,
a. Catch each animal seen.
b. Compare each animal caught to a known elephant.
c. Stop when a match is detected.

EXPERIENCED COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS modify Algorithm A by placing a known elephant in Cairo to ensure that the algorithm will terminate.

HARDWARE ENGINEERS hunt elephants by going to Africa, catching gray animals at random, and stopping when any one of them weighs within plus or minus 15 percent of any previously observed elephant.

ECONOMISTS don't hunt elephants, but believe that if elephants are paid enough, they will hunt themselves.

STATISTICIANS hunt the first animal they see N times and call it an elephant.

CONSULTANTS don't hunt elephants, and many have never hunted anything at all, but they can be hired by the hour to advise those people who do.

CONTRACTORS hunt elephants on behalf of state governments which don't have enough state workers left after budget cuts to carry out unfunded federal mandates to conduct elephant hunts.

DEMOCRATS don't believe in hunting elephants, but will share the elephants you catch with the people who voted for them.

REPUBLICANS believe there would be plenty of elephants for everyone if only job-killing taxes and onerous government regulations on elephant ownership were eliminated.

TEA PARTY REPUBLICANS believe the government spends too much money on elephant-hunting, that all funds dedicated to that purpose must be eliminated from the federal budget, and that absolutely no new taxes to facilitate elephant-hunting be imposed, ever.

BIRTHERS won't believe you've actually caught an elephant until you show them a certified, signed birth certificate with a raised seal, signed by a zoologist who is recognized as a world-class expert on elephant patrimony. And if you get that, they will also want DNA test results proving it's really an elephant.

MEMBERS OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEES' UNIONS don't hunt elephants because everybody knows that public employees don't do anything but sit around on their wide backsides while enjoying generous benefits and accumulating huge pensions.

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT hires hackers to break into the computers of other governments that already own elephants and digitally transfer ownership to selected Chinese zoos.

THE LIBYAN GOVERNMENT hunts everything, and figures that sooner or later it'll get an elephant.

LAWYERS don't hunt elephants, but follow the herds around arguing about who owns the droppings.

SOFTWARE LAWYERS will claim that they own an entire herd based on the look and feel of one dropping.

SENIOR MANAGERS set broad elephant-hunting policy based on the assumption that elephants are just like field mice, but with deeper voices.

QUALITY ASSURANCE INSPECTORS ignore the elephants and look for mistakes the other hunters made when they were packing the jeep.

SALES PEOPLE don't hunt elephants but spend their time selling elephants they haven't caught, for delivery two days before the season opens.

SOFTWARE SALES PEOPLE ship the first thing they catch and write up an invoice for an elephant.

HARDWARE SALES PEOPLE catch rabbits, paint them gray, and sell them as laptop elephants.

Got another idea for how someone hunts elephants? Add it as a comment!

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

4 comments:

Amanda said...

Now THAT was funny!

KathyA said...

This is amazing... I especially like the economists' definition.

Mike said...

Who does own the droppings?

Malaise Inc said...

I would suggest that, even after seeing the DNA test, the Birthers would still claim that the elephant was a big-government bloated mouse born in Hawaii and not in Kenya.

But, YMMV.