no.stupid.answers

Ah, the seasons are changing; we are coming up on changing the clocks in a few. The fall and winter seasons make me feel dark and poetic. Let’s explore that together with Jim for this week’s WikiAnswers Wednesday.

Are there any poems written about WikiAnswers in both trochaic and iambic pentameters?

The great thing about WikiAnswers is its natural versatility. Here’s one unnamed example of both poetic meters in action. I’ve isolated each part of each line so you can clearly tell this way which part belongs to which meter.

׀ Yee-haw ׀ Fight-em ׀ Cow-boys ׀ Give-em ׀ Hell-er ׀

׀ Wi-ki ׀ An-swers ׀ the-Site ׀ with-Two ׀ Op-tions ׀

׀ Shake-speare ׀ Wrote-em ׀ in-Iam ׀ bic pen-Tameter ׀ he-Did ׀

One can clearly see that the first line is written entirely in trochaic pentameter. The second line switches from trochaic to iambic and back to trochaic again at the very end. The last alternates as well.

If Shakespeare were alive today he would have most certainly edited one of his most famous lines from Hamlet “to be or not to be? That is the question”. He would change his work today to read,

“To be or not to be? That is the question and the answer can be found at WikiAnswers.”

That’s a line I can stand up and cheer for.

Yours truly,

Jim

Hey there! How’s going? Feel like learning about speeds of dugout canoes on Lake Malawi today from Jim? I knew you did!

What’s the average speed of a dugout canoe on Lake Malawi?

As many of you know, I was in Africa for several months this year including several weeks in Malawi, almost all of which were spent on the shores of beautiful Lake Malawi. Almost immediately upon arrival I was intrigued by the very question asked by a clearly intelligent WikiAnswers participant, as noted above. Immediately I began to devise experiments to determine the average speed of the canoes.

I thought the best way to discover the answer to this perplexing riddle was to be in the water itself next to the canoes. However, almost from the beginning things began to go horribly wrong. Unknowingly, I swam into the sacred nesting grounds of a group of hippos. Hippos don’t eat meat, but they will crush you to death if they feel threatened and are responsible for more human deaths in Africa than lions, tigers, polar bears, penguins, bald eagles, and raccoons combined!

Before I knew what was happening, I was fighting off a pack of hippos armed with waterproof guns and huge powerful jaws that kill a man with one bite. Fortunately, I made it past the few hippos, but soon thereafter I encountered my next challenge: overly chlorinated water.

My eyes began to burn like the fires of a fiery-hot hell. Someone thought it would be a good idea to try to chlorinate this part of Lake Malawi and accidentally spilled 2 million metric tons of chlorine into this one part of the lake. Ironically, this accident is what led me to solve the great riddle of the dugout canoe speed. Seeing that I was in excruciating pain, a fisherman paddled over to me and put me in his canoe. He paddled me back to shore and took me to the local clinic for treatment. On the way I asked him what the average speed of a dugout canoe was and he kindly responded: ten kilometers per hour.

I want to wish our Jewish readers out there a happy new year and to all my friends in Malawi and the rest of you, have a great October.

Yours truly,

Jim

Remember Jim? Of course you do!

He’s managed to make contact with me from the depths of Africa, where he is currently hiding from assassins researching banana leaves. He sent this WikiAnswers Wednesday question via Morse code and after decoding it, I realized there is something very important to be said for vaccination research.

Do mosquitoes have tails?

I don’t know if mosquitoes have tails, but I can tell what they do have: malaria.

Malaria’s a bitch, and I know first hand after having gone through some pretty miserable days with it a few weeks back. I was all set to get on a boat on Lake Tanganyika, when I felt like dying. The first day is pretty awful, in part because the medicine you take in helping you get rid of the disease also goes ballistic on your body. The next day was bad, but I didn’t feel like dying. After that I felt a lot better.

Still, I hate mosquitoes, and I don’t think your question is the right one in this case. The correct question should be how do we get rid of all mosquitoes forever, regardless of any negative consequences this might have on the natural balance of the world or whatever. Does this help?

Why do you even care if they have tails? Does it matter? Yes, they do have tails… Do you feel better now? Or… No, they don’t; has your life significantly changed?

Anyways, have a nice day and I hope you don’t get malaria.

Jim