Old Jews Telling Jokes- Yet Another Reason To Be Thankful For HTML 5

Here’s another reason to be thankful that websites are moving over to HTML 5 and passing by Flash… Old Jews Telling Jokes.

My Catholic “cousin” (my mother’s best friend growing up hence adopted “cousin”) and I have been talking quite a bit about Apple’s new products. Well, more accurately, I’ve been asking questions and he’s been telling me that because he works for Apple he’s not allowed to answer any of them. 🙂 Now that the iPad is released, however, we can chat about how amazing it is…

So two nights ago we were exchanging e-mails and I was telling him how much I love the iPad. He wrote back to me that he’s glad I do, since he was one of the many people involved in its development. He then told me that he’s been thinking about me quite a bit because he’s been visiting a specific website quite often and laughing hysterically.

The website in question? No not Gear Diary, but “Old Jews Telling Jokes”.

Old?? Old?? I didn’t know whether to be a bit offended, but I would point out to him that he’s the one with the 18-year-old son about to start college. 😉

My curiosity was piqued, so I decided to go over and visit the site early this morning from my iMac before I headed out for the day. I watched two of the jokes and had a good laugh. The site is exactly what it advertises– it presents snippets of older Jewish Americans telling some of traditional Jewish jokes that have been passed on from family member to family member… and some others that are more modern and yes, at times a bit crass. (You have been warned.) Some of the jokes are outright funny. Others have a little bit of Hebrew or Yiddish and so they might be lost on anyone who didn’t grow up as part of the Jewish American experience. It’s a simple concept which is executed even more simply with plain clips. That is part of its charm.

Seeing as the “season” is in its sixth week, and it posts a joke a day, I had a good bit of joke telling to catch up on. But I had to run so there was no time to watch more. “Too bad this site is using Flash,” I thought, “I guess I’ll have to wait until I get home tonight or tomorrow, since I am only carrying my iPad with me now.

“Not so fast.”, I thought. I fired up the site on my iPad and saw the thumbnails of various videos.

One was clearly crossed out and unplayable, But the others weren’t. So I tapped on one of them. The video began to play in the small box. Apparently the small thumbnails weren’t using Flash after all.

Then I double tap on the small window and, lo and behold, I got the joke-teller in a large, high-quality video with no stuttering whatsoever. (Clear proof that it was not using Flash.) 😉

Obviously this site is yet another example of the increasingly fast move to HTML5.

Seems you can teach old jews a few new tricks after all. 🙂

If you need a laugh, jump over to the site; even if you don’t understand Yiddish, there are some good laughs there. But remember, the site uses some colorful language, so it is NSFW for sure.