Article 171343 of rec.humor:
Newsgroups: rec.humor
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From: cate3@netcom.com (Henry Cate)
Subject: Life 9.C
Message-ID: [cate3D4vHxC.KyL@netcom.com]
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: Fri, 3 Mar 1995 16:32:00 GMT
Lines: 454
Sender: cate3@netcom8.netcom.com
Date: 15 Feb 93 17:46:20 PST (Monday)
Subject: Life 9.C
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glenn@nimbus.som.cwru.edu (Glenn Crocker) sifted out of rec.humor:
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From: todd@uvmark.uucp (Todd Cooper)
Heard from the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Florida during the
peak of the Andrew Hurricane:
"I don't know how fast the wind is blowing, the wind speed indicator blew away"
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Stuff Bob Cherry sifted out of rec.humor:
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From: IK20001@MAINE.MAINE.EDU (Solipsist@Large)
Paladins do it for all the right reasons.
Superheroes do it for Truth, Justice and the American Way.
Politicians do it...um...no they don't, I mean, well, they *do*,
but....well, no they don't....
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From: kent@brandonu.ca (Dorian Kent)
Heard these of the tv the other night.
I just recently bought an ant farm. I wonder where I can get tractors small
enough for it?
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Stuff nb02566@dsac.dla.mil (Edward K Patrick ) sifted out of rec.humor:
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From: aa395@yfn.ysu.edu (Perry Tarantine)
How do you make a Yugo go faster?
With a tow-truck.
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Stuff John Davidson sifted out of rec.humor:
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From: dbwebe@bb1t.monsanto.com
Why did the blonde stare at frozen orange juice can for 2 hours?
Because it said 'concentrate'.
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Stuff chester@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Craig Abbott) sifted out of rec.humor:
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From: tcg@mayo.edu (Thomas Gerber)
Don't know who made this up, heard it this morning on a local radio station
(KROC):
Q: Why are people in Arkansas having peanut butter and jelly for Thanksgiving
this year?
A: Because they're sending their turkey to the White House!
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Stuff watts@lams.msd.lmsc.lockheed.com (Robyn M Watts) picked up:
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From record@force.decnet.lockheed.com Thu Nov 5 13:36:04 1992
This was shared on InterNet by Steve Slominski of Carnegie Mellon Univ:
This morning I had the following telephone conversation with a
federal employee who shall remain nameless:
He: "Okay, so I'll fax you fifteen to twenty copies of the flyer."
Me: "Umm...why don't you just send us one and I'll make the copies?"
He: "Well, I was going to fax it to you on yellow paper...."
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From John McNelly:
Re:
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From: jmarlan@titan.nmt.edu (Jon Marlan)
Organization: New Mexico Tech
A few semesters ago I noticed a sign on campus that was pretty funny. Someone had tampered with a "ROAD CLOSED" sign so that it read "TOAD CLOSET."
I can imagine what some of our foreign students thought about that one.
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Reminds me of when I was vacationing in Maui. I saw a sign on a beachside cliff that said "SHEEP DROP". Being from Southern California, I knew that the early ranchers used to sail cowhides off the cliffs at Dana Point down to waiting ships, because it was impractical to get the cowhides down any other way. So the first thing that ran through my mind was, how did the Hawaiians keep the sheep from exploding on impact? But the truth is, the sign was supposed to warn, "SHEER DROP".
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"This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow as
the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."
_Hamlet_, Act I, Scene III
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Brian Gordon's (briang@eng.sun.com) siftings of rec.humor
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From: eyc@acpub.duke.edu (EMIL CHUCK)
Popular(?) beginnings for Clinton's Inauguration Speech in 1993:
10. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."
9. "This speech has been sponsored by the Democratic Party -- we're not
just a bunch of losers anymore."
8. "Is this thing on?"
7. "Thank you, Larry King."
6. "What do you mean, Al, that it's acid rain?"
5. "I'd like to thank the Academy for this award ..."
4. "On the first day of my Presidency, my true love gave to me..."
[but we can do this for another humorous thread]
3. "I've given this speech to Chelsea every time she had trouble falling
asleep."
2. "Gennifer, will you stop sending Flowers to me?"
AND THE NUMBER ONE MOST POPULAR BEGINNING FOR CLINTON'S INAUGURATION SPEECH:
1. "My fellow Americans, as well as you Republicans..."
Popular (?) endings for Clinton's Inauguration Speech in 1993:
10. "...Na-na-na-na. Na-na-na-na. Hey-hey-hey. Goodbye."
9. "...as long as we have the courage to change."
8. "...party at my place!"
7. "...and the patient said, 'No, that's my appendix.'" [Well, sorry
that's the punch line for a joke, but what's the use of telling you the
joke now.]
6. "...I listened to the hot air in Washington, but I didn't inhale."
5. "...but I'm really [[[takes off his mask]]] Jimmy Carter!"
4. "...and that address again for Hillary's cookie recipe is 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC 20001."
3. "...and here's my OMB director, Ross Perot."
2. "...and I believe in a place called Hope."
AND THE NUMBER ONE MOST POPULAR ENDING FOR CLINTON'S INAUGURATION
SPEECH:
1. "...Hell with this speech. Here's a little something I learned to
play on my sax when I was a little boy."
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From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Arkansas and Bakersfield jokes?
In a San Francisco newspaper, it was mentioned that we might
be facing four years of Arkansas jokes, most of which reportedly sound
like Bakersfield [CA] jokes, but according to the paper, who can keep
pigs and sheep straight? I've never heard any Arkansas or Bakersfield
jokes before this, so can anyone say is any of this is fair or not?
Here goes...
What's the biggest pick-up line?
Nice tooth.
What's the biggest legal issue?
When a husband and wife get divorced, do they remain brother
and sister?
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From Risks:
--------------------------
From: steen@kiwi.swhs.ohio-state.edu
Doctor service phone logs skewed
A new central system is being tested in Denmark for people to call a doctor
service at off hours, and possibly get a housecall (this is for non-emergency
cases, i.e., not the equivalent of 911). The patients in the Danish city of
Odense complained loudly that the waiting for a phone call to be answered was
too long, while the provider said their computerized logs showed no caller had
to wait more than 10 minutes. After many complaints they tested the
equipment, which showed it was not able to register waits longer than 10
minutes! Steen Hansen
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From: Les Earnest [les@sail.stanford.edu]
Overheard by Don Knuth on recent trip
Q. What kind of computer music will President Clinton play on his
saxophone?
A. Al Gore rhythms.
--- Cornell U Linguistics Department
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From: Alexandra Haropulos
["What would happen in a battle between an Enterprise security team, who
always get killed soon after appearing, and a squad of Imperial
Stormtroopers, who can't hit the broad side of a planet?"]
That's easy - I worked on that project. The Enterprise security team lands
just as the Imperial Stormtroopers fire at a totally different target,
miss, and accidentally vaporise the security team.
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From Bob Dolan's humor collection:
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A recent public service message has a woman smoking a cigarette in a circa
1970s computer room, gazing at pages of computer printouts.
The caption above the picture says:
``You're bright enough to master Cobol and Fortran.''
And the one below the picture says:
``And you're still smoking?''
I wonder what she was smoking that made her want to learn Cobol and Fortran.
--------------------------
"The Very First Businesses
Many, many years ago, there was no business on Earth. This is because the
Earth was primarily molten lava, which is not a good economic climate. Office
furnitur would melt in a matter of seconds.
Then the Earth started to cool, and tiny one-celled animals - the amigo, the
parademic, the rotarian - began to form. Over the course of several million
years, these animals learned to join together to form primitive corporations,
called 'jellyfish,' which were capable of only the most basic business
activities, such as emitting waste and eating lunch. By today's standards,
these corporations were very unsophisticated: if, for example, you mentioned
the phrase 'Dow Jones Industrial Average' to them, they would have no idea what
you were talking about. They would probably sting you.
Did Dinosaurs Have Businesses?
Nobody can really say for sure, because the Ice Age destroyed all their
records. But paleontologists now believe that, yes, dinosaurs probably did
have businesses. Not the Brontosaurus, of course. That would be ridiculous?
How would he hold his briefcase? But the Tyrannosaurus Rex has those funny
little arms, which would have been perfect. Paleontolgoists think he was
probably in Sales.
Primitive Human Businesses
When primitive humans first came along, they did not engage in business as we
now think of it. They engaged in squatting around in caves naked. This went
on for, I would say, roughly two or three million years, when all of a sudden a
primitive person, named Oog, came up with an idea. 'Why not,' he said, 'pile
thousands of humongous stones on top of each other in the desert to form great
big geometric shapes?' Well, everybody thought this was an absolutely terrific
idea, and soon they were hard at work. It wasn't until several thousand years
later that they realized they had been suckered into a classic 'pyramid'
scheme, and of course by that time, Oog was in the Bahamas.
Business During the Middle Ages
Business during the Middle Ages was slow. The main job opportunity available
was serf, which involved whacking at the soil with a stick. It was not the
kind of work where you had a lot of room for advancement. The best a serf
could hope for, if he was really good at it, was that he would be rewarded by
not having one of his arms sliced off by a passing knight.
If you wanted to be a knight you had to know somebody, and it really wasn't
that much better than being a serf. You were always being sent off to try to
get the Holy Land back from the Turks. This was no fun at all, because of
course the Holy Land was very sunny, meaning your armor would get hot enough to
fry an egg on. In fact the Turks, who dressed in light, casual, 100 percent
cotton garments, would often do this. They'd sneak up behind a knight and
crack an egg on his armor, then race away, laughing in Turkish, before he could
turn around. So as you can imagine, knights would come back in a pretty bad
mood, and often would have to slice off several serf arms before they even
wanted to talk about it.
So the bottom line is that the Middle Ages were hardly the kind of ages where
anybody wanted to make any long-term business commitments. All the really
smart investors were waiting for the Renaissance.
The Renaissance
The Renaissance was caused by Leonardo da Vinci, who drew the first primitive
sketches of what would eventually become the helicopeter. Of course, nobody
really understood the significance of this at the time. But people did realize
that, whatever this new invention was, it was going to require a tremendous
amount of insurance. Thus a major business was born.
This was followed by trade with the Orient. The way this worked was, Europeans
would gather up some gold, and they would tromp across Asia to the Orient,
where they would trade their gold for spices. They didn't really want spices,
you understand, but the Orientals claimed tha spice was all they had, and the
Europeans, having tromped all that way, wanted to take home something.
AFter some yeas of this, the Europeans were starting to run out of gold. Also
their food was so heavily spiced that it glowed in the dark. They probably
would have all died of heartburn if Columbus had not discovered the New World.
The New World
Every schoolchild is familiar with the story of how Columbus set off in three
tiny ships (the Pinto, the Cordoba, and the Coupe de Ville), and right away his
crew started getting very nauseous and asking why for God's sake he had decided
on three tiny ships instead of one medium ship. Nevertheless Columbus pressed
on, ignoring popular fears that he would sail off the edge of the Earth, and
finally he and his hardy band made it to the New World, except for the Pinto,
which mysteriously exploded, and the Cordoba, which due to a navigational error
actually did sail off the edge of the Earth.
The New World had an extremely good business climate. For one thing, there was
plenty of land, and nobody owned it, unless you counted the people who had been
living there for several thousand years. For another thing, it had an
abundance of the two crucial factors you need for economic development: Water
Power, in the form of rivers, and Raw Materials, in the form of ore. So soon
millions of Europeans flocked over to the New World to make their fortunes.
They stood around all day, sunup to sundown, throwing handfuls of ore into the
rivers and waiting for economic development to take place. They would have
starved to death if a friendly Indian named Squanto (which is Indian for
"Native American") hadn't come along and shown them how to plant corn. "You
put the seeds in the ground," explained Squanto. He couldn't believe what kind
of morons he was dealing with.
Soon the corn came up, and the Europeans decided to celebrate by inviting all
the Indians over for a big Thanksgiving dinner, then sending them off to live
on reservations in North Dakota.
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From: Miles O'Neal [meo@pencom.com]
This resurfaced after the internal IBM email from John Akers
announcing his imminent departure (which, interestingly,
noted that *all* internal and external candidates for his
replacement would be equally considered - we should ALL
apply!). No idea who wrote it...
Big John
Updated Version
Every morning at Armonk you see him arrive
In a big fancy car that a chauffeur would drive.
Kind of big in the wallet and narrow in the mind,
and every VP knew how to kiss the behind of Big John.
Big John, Big John, Big Bad John.
Nobody seemed to know why John was the boss.
He just never had to care about profit or loss.
He didn't do much except raise his own pay.
Many earn in a year what John earned in a day, Big John.
Some said he came down 'round White Plains
Where he showed that success takes style, not brains.
When a slick four-color foil presentation
Left the other fast trackers in subordination, Big John.
Big John, Big John, Big Bad John.
Then came the day at the annual meeting,
When stockholders screamed they were taking a beating.
And the workers were shouting for a decent wage.
Then a riot broke out and they rushed the stage at Big John.
The execs on podium started to panic.
Then the chairman who captained the Big Blue Titanic
Announced to the crowd he'd solution their flight,
"I'll find out where you work and I'll sell off your site," said Big
John
Big John, Big John, Big Bad John.
The directors, all sensing their ouster was near
Cried, "We're market driven! Let's get out here!"
And twenty men bailed out with their golden chutes,
Now's there's no one left up there to salute Big John.
With ballots and proxies and mob felt empowered,
But with tear gas and swat teams in less than an hour
The workers were beaten, the hall had been wrecked,
And everyone knew that they'd been 4-checked by Big John.
Big John, Big John, Big Bad John.
Now they never reopened that worthless pit,
They just showed an ICN Broadcast from in front of it.
When asked about his long term strategy
He said, "I'll fire 'em all and that will leave only me, Big John."
Big John, Big John, Big bad John.
--
Henry Cate III [cate3@netcom.com]
The Life collection maintainer, selections of humor from the internet
"The Greatest Management Principle in the World" by Michael LeBoeuf:
The things that get rewarded, get done.
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