In its original sense, a shaggy-dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax. In other words, it is a long story that is intended to be amusing and that has an intentionally silly or meaningless ending. Shaggy-dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions of joke-telling. The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner. A lengthy shaggy-dog story derives its humour from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the long-awaited resolution is essentially meaningless, with the joke as a whole playing upon humans' search for meaning. The nature of their delivery is reflected in the English idiom spin a yarn, by way of analogy with the production of yarn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story
Short shaggy dog stories
A tall, weather-worn cowboy walked into a saloon and ordered a beer. The regulars quietly observed the drifter through half-closed eyelids. No one spoke, but they all noticed that the stranger's hat was made of brown wrapping paper. Less obvious was the fact that his shirt and vest were also made of paper. As were his chaps, pants and even his boots, including the paper spurs. Truth be told, even the saddle, blanket and bridle on his horse were made entirely of paper. The sheriff walks in and of course he arrests him immediately--for rustling.
A king carried environmentalism too far when he prohibited hunting of any kind. Soon the realm was overrun with lions and tigers and bears. "Oh My!" shouted the people. They revolted and threw the king out of the country. It was the first time the reign was called because of the game.
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more short shaggies at http://www.macscouter.com/stories/ShaggyShorts.asp
March 4 2025 Never-before-seen short stories by Harper Lee will be published later this year, it has been announced. Eight short stories written before the author started the novel that would become To Kill a Mockingbird were found in Lee’s New York City apartment after she died in 2016. They will be published in a collection titled The Land of Sweet Forever, alongside eight previously published non-fiction pieces by Lee, and an introduction by Casey Cep, author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Dr Edwin Conner, Lee’s nephew, said he and his family are “delighted that these essays, and especially the short stories, which we knew existed but were only recently discovered, have been found and are being published. She was not just our beloved aunt, but a great American writer, and we can never know too much about how she came to that pinnacle.” The Land of Sweet Forever “broadens our understanding of Lee’s remarkable talent” and “will prove an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Lee’s development as a writer”, according to the book’s UK publisher Hutchinson Heinemann, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The stories contain Lee’s “signature wit, that splash of darkness and those heartwarming characters for which she is beloved,” said Ailah Ahmed, Hutchinson Heinemann publishing director. “The pieces take us from Alabama to less familiar territory for Lee in Manhattan.” Just two books by Lee were published in her lifetime, 1961 Pulitzer Prize winner To Kill a Mockingbird, and Go Set a Watchman, which began life as an earlier draft of Mockingbird. There was controversy when that was published in 2015, with some raising questions about the extent of Lee’s involvement in the decision. At the time the author was 88 years old and profoundly deaf and blind. Born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, Lee was 34 years old when To Kill a Mockingbird, loosely based on observations of her family and neighbours in Monroeville was published. Since then, it has been translated into more than 40 languages and more than 46m copies have been sold worldwide. Lee won numerous awards throughout her lifetime, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She died on February 19, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/04/unseen-harper-lee-stories-to-kill-a-mockingbird-the-land-of-sweet-forever
This year’s Turing Award, an honor often dubbed the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” goes to two A.I. researchers who laid the foundations for tech breakthroughs like OpenAI’s GPT. Andrew Barto, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Richard Sutton, a professor at Canada’s University of Alberta, will share the $1 million prize, as announced March 5, 2025. Barto and Sutton won this year’s award for their contributions to the field of reinforcement learning, a process used to improve the behavior of machines. “Their work has been a lynchpin of progress in A.I. over the last several decades,” said Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, in a statement. “The tools they developed remain a central pillar of the A.I. boom and have rendered major advances, attracted legions of young researchers, and driven billions of dollars in investments.” Barto and Sutton won this year’s award for their contributions to the field of reinforcement learning, a process used to improve the behavior of machines. “Their work has been a lynchpin of progress in A.I. over the last several decades,” said Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, in a statement. “The tools they developed remain a central pillar of the A.I. boom and have rendered major advances, attracted legions of young researchers, and driven billions of dollars in investments.” The duo began working together in 1978 at UMass Amherst, where Barto served as Sutton’s Ph.D. and postdoctoral advisor. In the following years, they collaborated on numerous papers that shaped key algorithms and techniques of reinforcement learning and published the 1998 textbook Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, which has been cited more than 75,000 times and remains the field’s standard reference. https://observer.com/2025/03/andrew-barto-richard-sutton-win-turing-award/
March 7 is the eve of International Women’s Day, which is commemorated by the United Nations to recognize women’s achievements and to promote their rights and participation in economic and political spheres. March 8 was declared a holiday in Russia in 1917 after a huge demonstration on that date led by the Russian feminist and politician Alexandra Kollontai culminated in the Russian Revolution and to women gaining the right to vote. Wikipedia
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2916 March 7, 2025
