Date: 2 Jun 88 17:46:10 PDT (Thursday)
Subject: Life 3.5
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"Of course the US Constitution isn't perfect; but it's a lot better than
what we have now."
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This one is making the rounds in Xerox Square:
What's the difference between Xerox and the 4H Club?
The 4H has adult supervision!
What's the difference between Xerox and the Titanic?
The Titanic had a band!
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In the March 29, 1988 edition of "PC Magazine" is a review of a King
James Bible text search/database program called "God Speed." For more
information you can circle a nuumber on the "bingo card."
The number is 666.
I Am not making this up.
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Los Angeles Times, April 26:
Eight Netherlands youngsters digging around the foundation of their clubhouse
on a vacant lot last Thursday unearthed two glass jars filled with gold coins
and jewelry worth about $215,000. According to Dutch law, authorities have
30 years to find the legal owners. If none is found, the gold and jewels
become the property of the finders. Cheer up, kids, you only have to wait
another 29 years and 360 days.
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From the 26-May-88 Wall Street Journal...
In an Orkin Exterminating Co. survey of what pests Pitsburghers fear most,
1.3% named their spouses and kids.
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From the trivia section of a local paper --
"In the classified ads of a New Jersey newspaper sometime back appeared this:
'Parapsychological insights, poems, paintings, ink blots, handwriting analysis,
Chinese lessons, lectures on the Far East. Also ironing, $4 an hour...'"
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A while ago there was the story going around about Idi Amin killing off 600
people .... just trying to keep up with the Jonses!
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Then there is always the sign that I saw upon arriving in LA two years ago.
(hell of a road trip) The speed limit is posted as 55, but there is a sign
telling you that you should slow down to 60 for the next curve.
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OJ: how many law professors does it take to change a light bulb?
Hell, you need 250 just to lobby for the research grant.
Another: lawyer's dog, running about unleashed, beelines for a butcher shop
and steals a roast. Butcher goes to lawyer's office and asks, "if a dog
running unleashed steals a piece of meat from my store, do I have a right to
demand payment for the meat from the dog's owner?" The lawyer answers,
"Absolutely."
"Then you owe me $8.50. Your dog was loose and stole a roast from me today."
The lawyer, without a word, writes the butcher a check for $8.50 [attorneys
don't carry cash -- it's too plebeian -- and the butcher hadn't brought the
shop's credit card imprinter to the lawyer's office].
Several periods of time later -- it could be the next day but that would be
unrealistic -- the butcher opens the mail and finds an envelope from the
lawyer: $20 due for a consultation.
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Diogenes went to look for an honest lawyer. "How's it going?",
someone asked. "Not too bad", said Diogenes. "I still have my lantern."
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One day this teacher went to school and told the class that it was his birthday
and for an exercise he wanted the class to work together and guess his age
from some arbitrary numbers that he had compiled.
So he gives the class the figures and tells them to guess his age. The class
really works hard and comes up with numerous figures some a little on the
high side other far to low, finally, little Poindexter yells out "Teacher,
I know your age!" teacher "So, Poindexter tell me my age and how you calculated it,"
Poindexter, "Your age is 48!"
Teacher, "Yes, that's correct, now how did you arrive at the answer?"
Poindexter, "Well, my father says that one of our neighbors that lives across
the street is half a moron."
Teacher, "So, go on?"
Poindexter, "Well, he's 24."
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I heard this on our local radio station this morning. It was about how Johnny
Carson wrote his own monologue and busted through the picket lines to deliver it.
Two of his jokes:
About the business with the Reagan's and their Astronomy phase:
"I know the zodiac signs are divided into 12 houses; I DIDN'T
know that one of them was the White House."
About the writer's strike:
"Yeah, I had to break through the picket line this morning.
Their picketers were carrying blank signs."
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When I was at Swarthmore, a physics prof I worked for had the lab group
rolling on the floor and laughing by telling MIT stories. My favorite
was the one about the Green building, where over winter break two dozen
students entered the building and spent a couple of weeks interchanging
the 12th and 13th floors. They rewired the phones and the elevator,
repainted numbers on doors, moved furnature around. I'm told the hoax
went undetected until someone tried to walk down the stairs from the
12th floor.
Too bad Swarthmore doesn't have correspondingly funny tales: all forms
of fun are strictly against the rules there :-)
For example: someone once exchanged the contents of two lounges in the
main building on campus. (hmm, wonder where that idea came from?)
Anyway, these were two parlors where people would hang around between
classes. Literally hundreds of people passed through them each day.
The rooms were right next to the admissions office, and so they were
nicely furnished, with a grand piano in one and lots of expensive
paintings in both. Not only did no one ever notice the switch, but no
one would admit to caring when it was pointed out to them!
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Several years ago here at the University of Rochester, I'm told that
someone once rewired the elevator of our 11-story building, and proceeded
to repaint the floor numbers in the hall outside the elevators. This
would have been fantastic if he hadn't gotten caught while repainting.
Imagine, going home to yor apartment on the 7th floor, and finding that
someone else lives there! You'd have to go up or down to the bottom or
top to figure out what floor you were actually on...
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* A friend of mine at U of Chicago once calculated the resonant frequency
of his dorm's stairwells, bought a test record with that tone on it and
played it into the stairwells from a number of stereo. Apparently had
the entire building shaking visibly before they got scared enough to turn
it off.
* Someone was foolish enough to penny me into her own room. Amongst
other things, I placed a call to the US Embassy in Nepal. The call
was completed and rung back some time the next day.
* Ran an imaginary student for a student government position. He was
named after a dog. He didn't actually make the ballot because his
false id was discovered by the administration, but he still won on
write-in votes.
* I once learned the day before that a professor would be late to one
of his classes the next day. I made up a "pop quiz" that was
incredibly hard, and then showed up and handed it out to the class,
telling them that I was a grad student the prof had sent to proctor.
* A friend and I put on surgical greens, masks, booties and so on, and
then splashed red food coloring on ourselves. Then we burst into the
medical library, arguing loudly, and go over to the reference copy of
Gray's Anatomy. I leaf through it, peer at a picture, and point and
say triumphantly "See, I *told* you it was on the left side. What are
you, dyslexic?" My friend looks abashed, shrugs, and we walk out.
----------------------------------------------------
Another stunt he mentioned required the cooperation of the students in
a class. Everyone should simply be a bit louder, more restless, when
the teacher is on the right side of the board then when he/she is on
the left. By the end of the semister, the teacher was writing in the
bottom left hand corner of the board...
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(From: Jennifer A. Schrader)
Well, here goes:
A long time ago, I was a little girl. I had two big brothers, and, as
the stereotype would have it, they tortured me.
I am passing the information on to you, so that you, too, may warp
the minds of the very young.
#1) They got me up at three o'clock on a Saturday morning and got me
dressed for school.
#2) They sat in the kitchen with wine (whine) glasses whilst running
wet fingers around the rim. When I awoke to the high pitched noise, I
was informed that Martians had landed and I was to hide under my bed.
#3) In the midst of the night, I found it necessary to use the little
engineer's room, and when I had returned and snuggled into bed, I
flipped over only to find a hand reaching for my face from under the
bed. Guess who...
#4) Every time I had ice cream, Douglas would tell me that he thought
his tasted a little funny. Being a generous (and gullible) child, I let
him taste mine until he was sure that his tasted okay. He never ate
more than a few spoonfuls, so it took me awhile to figure out what was
going on...
#5) In a desparate retaliation attempt, I waited for ten minutes behind
a bend in the hall to scare the next sibling to pass. Douglas passed,
and I scared the... well, I scared him. He grabbed me by the shoulders,
shook me, and yelled, "What do you think you're doing? Do you realize
if I had had my eyes crossed they could have gotten stuck like that?"
Little sisters can't win. I'm going to get back at them by earning more
than they do. Heh heh heh.
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And who says our educational system is in dire straits? I submit these
compilations as testimony to the debate, taken from children, newspapers,
and teachers:
"This paper needs a few comas."
"When papa passed away they burned his ashes and brought them home in a
urinal."
"We sat down to a picnic dinner of fricken chicasee."
"You shake milk in a big stirrer machine to make it homicidal."
"It was so hot during football practice that a lot of kids keeled over from
nervous prostitution. Rusty Banazek broke his clavichord in scrimmage."
"At the Knights of Columbus dinner, they will serve the same fish as last
year."
"Tomorrow Helen Henry visits the home of a retired Navy Captain and his wife,
an exotic U-shaped structure."
"LOST: Male cat. Needs medication. Owner very worried, neutered and declawed."
"Winners at the card party were William Davenport, a turkey, and Mrs. Trudy
Baker, a chicken."
"Dear Teacher: Stanley had to miss some school. He had an attack of whooping
cranes in his chest."
"Dear Teacher: Lynda was away as she had stripe infection."
"Dear Teacher: Please excuse the stink on Bill's clothes. We've been spraying
the garden because it is full of abnoxus incests."
"Dear Teacher: Please excuse Jane. She had an absent tooth. Wednesday she will
have an appointment with the orinthologist."
"Dear Teacher: Please excuse my daughter's absence for the past week,
as she had a case of the fool."
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Eager to know the result of a physics exam he had taken, my brother
asked his teacher, "How far am I from making an 'A' in this course?"
Replied the instructor, "Do you want that in light years?"
On the morning of my son's wedding, he noticed that one of the tires
on his car was flat. He went to a nearby garage to have the tire changed,
and while the attendant was working, my son nervously exclaimed, "I'm getting
married this afternoon."
The attendant looked at him, shook his head and said, "Gee, today really
isn't your day, is it?"
A couple I know were discussing their wallpaper, which had just been
hung. Dov was annoyed at Debby's indifference to what he felt was a poor
job. "The problem is that I'm a perfectionist and you're not," he finally said to her.
"Exactly!" she replied. "That's why you married me and I married you!"
The patient went to his doctor for a checkup, and the doctor wrote out
a prescription for him in his usual illegible writing. The patient put it
in his pocket, but he forgot to have it filled. Every morning for two years
he showed it to the conductor as a railroad pass. Twice it got him into
the movies, once into the baseball park and once into the symphony. He got
a raise at work by showing it as a note from the boss. One day he mislaid
it. His daughter picked it up, played it on the piano and won a scholarship
to a conservatory of music.
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CORPORATE DIRECTIVE NUMBER 88-570471
In order to increase the security of all company computing facilities,
and to avoid the possibility of unauthorized use of these facilities,
new rules are being put into effect concerning the selection of
passwords. All users of computing facilities are instructed to change
their passwords to conform to these rules immediately.
RULES FOR THE SELECTION OF PASSWORDS:
1. A password must be at least six characters long, and must not
contain two occurrences of a character in a row, or a sequence of two or
more characters from the alphabet in forward or reverse order. Example:
HGQQXP is an invalid password. GFEDCB is an invalid password.
2. A password may not contain two or more letters in the same position
as any previous password. Example: If a previous password was GKPWTZ,
then NRPWHS would be invalid because PW occurs in the same position in
both passwords.
3. A password may not contain the name of a month or an abbreviation
for a month. Example: MARCHBC is an invalid password. VWMARBC is an
invalid password.
4. A password may not contain the numeric representation of a month.
Therefore, a password containing any number except zero is invalid.
Example: WKBH3LG is invalid because it contains the numeric
representation for the month of March.
5. A password may not contain any words from any language. Thus, a
password may not contain the letters A, or I, or sequences such as AT,
ME, or TO because these are all words.
6. A password may not contain sequences of two or more characters which
are adjacent to each other on a keyboard in a horizontal, vertical, or
diagonal direction. Example: QWERTY is an invalid password. GHNLWT is
an invalid password because G and H are horizontally adjacent to each
other. HUKWVM is an invalid password because H and U are diagonally
adjacent to each other.
7. A password may not contain the name of a person, place, or thing.
Example: JOHNBOY is an invalid password.
Because of the complexity of the password selection rules, there is
actually only one password which passes all the tests. To make the
selection of this password simpler for the user, it will be distributed
to all supervisors. All users are instructed to obtain this password
from his or her supervisor and begin using it immediately.
----------------------------------------------------
Once there were these two birds who, every year for quite a few years, had one
egg, which they hatched and nurtured and loved until the little chick was ready
to leave the nest. Then, one year, they had TWO eggs! Well, they were just so
excited they could hardly stand it; this year they would each have an egg to
take care of and love. They kept close watch on those two eggs so that no harm
came to them. Then one day when the eggs were ready to hatch, an earthquake
shook the tree that the nest was in; the two birds flew away to safety, all the
while worrying about those two eggs that were about to hatch. When the tremor
was finished, they hurried back to the nest. As they neared it, they heard one
strong "Cheep" coming from the nest. They were worried that something might
have happened to the other egg, but when they got to the nest, they found that
there were two chicks cheeping in unison. This just goes to show that two can
cheap as lively as one.
--
Henry Cate III [cate3@netcom.com]
The Life collection maintainer, selections of humor from the internet
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in
overalls and looks like work. - Thomas Edison
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