Live Chat With John Hodgman on Washington Post

Our guest blogger John Hodgman is too modest to pimp this, but there's a live chat session going on right now with him over at the Washington Post: John Hodgman Discusses 'More Information Than You Require' (WaPo). Snip:

New Orleans: What is the force of a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick?

John Hodgman: The force of a single roundhouse kick from Chuck Norris=one American Chuck.

In England, however, they use the old Imperial Chuck, which is the equivalents to 1.34 American Chucks.

That is all.

• [sebastiano]

  John Apple Hodgman, modest? HA!

  • [Xeni Jardin]

    Sebastiano: don’t be a douche.

• [Bob]

  OM, how about the unit of force used for the impact of Chuck Norris on the ground from tripping over a gopher hole: The Groundchuck.

• [Raines Cohen]

  John Hodgman is too modest

  Isn’t that sentence inherently oxymoronic?

• [pjcamp]

  It’s hard to imagine the world containing an extra third of a chuck.

  Even if they keep it in England.

• [OM]

  “How much wood would Chuck chuck if Chuck chucked woodchucks wood?”

  …I answered this one a couple of years ago on BB, IIRC. It’s the same amount of ground that a groundhog would grind if a groundhog could grind ground.

• [LSK]

  I arrived too late for the chat, and this question still burns in my mind: Is there any truth to the allegations that John Linnell, John Flansburgh, Jonathan Coulton, and (you,) John Hodgman are in league to enslave the world through words and music?

• [OM]

  …And is the unit of measuring the level of laughter when someone gets racked in the nuts hard called called the Chuckle, then? Or is a large measurement of Chucks called a Wagon of Chucks?

• [Simon Bradshaw]

  Of course, since metrication, the Imperial Chuck is more and more being supplanted by what’s commonly termed the Metric Chuck. Now strictly speaking there’s no such thing, since as any fule no the metric unit of roundhouse kicks is the damme, named for Jean-Claude Van Damme. (SI practice is that units named for people have lower-case names.)

  But, in the same way that 1000 kg is so close to one ton that it is known as the ‘metric ton’ or tonne, and there’s even a track event of 1600m as the ‘metric mile’, it turns out that the damme is close enough to the Imperial Chuck (0.973 Imp Chucks to be precise) that it’s become known as the ‘metric Chuck’ and increasingly references to a Chuck mean that, not the original Imperial Chuck. However, the spelling ‘Chuckke’, by analogy with the tonne, has singularly failed to catch on. It’s just too silly.

• [Will Byrd]

  Dear Xeni,

  Are you in luck! My sister and I just created a website specifically for pimping John Hodgman live online chats.

  –Will

• [ianm]

  Totally off topic, but since this seems to be somewhat of an off topic thread (on the topic of John Hodgman), I wanted to convey how much I enjoyed your TED talk.

  I just watched it this pasted weekend and thought it was clever, humourous, and very sweet. Well done, and very apropos for a whimsical little TED spot.

  If you haven’t seen it, check it out: A brief digression on matters of lost time.

• [OM]

  …What’s the unit of force for vomiting in disgust over nausea caused by too many Chuck Norrisisms?

  The Upchuck.

• [Mindpowered]

  Mmm…

  I wonder if Mr. Hodgman knows…

  How much wood would Chuck chuck if Chuck chucked woodchucks wood?