July 17th 2008

I wanted to broaden the outlook of a group of kids I was working with.
I asked them to write something on their views of foreigners.
All turned in more or less acceptable pieces except
for little Billy, whose essay, in full, was
"All foreigners are bastards."

I was a bit taken aback, but made no direct comment.
My next session, I talked about Greek architecture,
Roman law, English drama, German music,
Italian poetry, Russian novels, Chinese philosophy and
African sculpture. I then asked the group to write
something else on foreigners.

When I finally got little Billy's paper it said, in full,
"All foreigners are bastards. Some of them are clever bastards!"

~~~~Q: Are you sexually active?
A: No, I just lie there.

~~~~Q: What is your date of birth?
A: July 15th.
Q: What year?
A: Every year.

~~~~Q: What gear were you in at the moment of the impact?
A: Gucci tracksuit and Nike Trainers.

~~~~Q: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
A: Yes.
Q: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
A: I forget.
Q: You forget? Can you give us an example of something that you've forgotten?

~~~~Q: How old is your son, the one living with you?
A: Thirty-eight or thirty-five, I can't remember which.
Q: How long has he lived with you?
A: Forty-five years.

~~~~Q: What was the first thing your husband said to you when he woke up that morning?
A: He said, "Where am I, Cathy?"
Q: And why did that upset you?
A: My name is Susan. 

~~~~Q: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo or the occult?
A: We both do.
Q: Voodoo?
A: We do. Q:
You do?
A: Yes, voodoo.

~~~~Q: Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep,
he doesn't know about it until the next morning?
A: Did you actually pass the bar exam?

~~~~Q: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

OLD STUFF below.

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a
brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud toward him.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban
sunglasses, and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd: "If
I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give
me one?" The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks
at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, "Sure. Why not?"

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer,
connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the web and
he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on
his location, which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans
the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. Then the young man opens the
digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing
facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on
his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored.
He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel
spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this
data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives
a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150 page report on his
hi-tech miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the
shepherd and says: "You have exactly 1586 sheep."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep" says the
shepherd.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused
as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then the shepherd
says to the young man: "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your
business is, will you give me back my sheep?"

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why
not?"

"You're a shepherd consultant." says the shepherd.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required." answered the shepherd. "You showed up here even
though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already
knew; to a question I never asked; and you don't know crap about my
business...Now, give me back my dog."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hi Mom. Can I leave the kids with you tonight?
You're going out?
Yes.
With whom?
With a friend.
I don't know for why you left your husband. He is such a good man.
I didn't leave him. He left me!
You let him leave you, and now you go out with anybody and nobody.
I do not go out with anybody. Can I bring over the kids?
I never left you to go out with anybody except your father.
There are lots of things that you did and I don't.
What are you hinting at?
Nothing. I just want to know if I can bring the kids over tonight.
You're going to stay the night with him? What will your husband say if he finds out?
My EX husband. I don't think he would be bothered.
From the day he left me, he probably never slept alone!
So you're going to sleep over at this loser's place?
He's not a loser.
A man who goes out with a divorced woman with children is a loser and a parasite.
I don't want to argue. Should I bring over the kids or not?
Poor children with such a mother.
Such as what?
With no stability. No wonder your husband left you.
ENOUGH !!
Don't scream at me. You probably scream at this loser too!
Now you're worried about the loser?
Ah, so you agree he's a loser. I spotted it immediately.
Goodbye, mother.
Wait! Don't hang up! When are you bringing them over?
I'm not bringing them over! I'm not going out!
If you never go out, how do you expect to meet anyone?

────────────────────────
Mr. Combs had a furniture store specializing in ornate antiques in the
baroque style. He had walking pneumonia last month but was at the store anyway. He was in one of the baroque style chairs rubbing Vicks Vaporub on his aching chest when he serendipitously discovered that the soothing ointment
gave the furniture a wonderful, deep, rich shine.
He immediately told the other furniture store owners since their
furniture was more modern in style and they were not competitors. Soon
he got reports that the Vicks treatment not only failed to work on the
modern furniture, but ruined some of it. Mr. Combs is very unpopular
now, and his only consolation is that he learned one important rule:
If it's not baroque, don't Vicks it.

___________

Joe wasn't the brightest guy in the world, and his coworkers were
continually ribbing him at the factory. One in particular, Gunther,
would greet him each morning and precipitate this exchange:
"Say, Joe, you seen Ben?"
"Ben, who?"
"Ben' down and kiss my ass!"
Tired of falling for the same joke day after day, Joe confided in his
more worldly brother, who said, "Listen. Next time you see this guy,
ask him if he's seen Eileen. He'll ask, 'Eileen who?' and you say, 'I
lean over and you kiss my butt!'"
Memorizing his lines, Joe went to the work early to wait for Gunther.
As soon as the bully arrived, Joe ran over.
"Hey Gunther, you seen Eileen?"
"No," Gunther answered, "she ran off with Ben."
Joe frowned. "Ben who?"

_____________________
Alice was well into her sixties when she went to her doctor
complaining of nausea, exhaustion, and occasional cramps. After a
thorough examination the doctor sent her to the hospital for a battery
of tests, and finally confronted her with the results.
"Mrs. Jones, medically impossible though it seems at your age, there's
no doubt about it.... you're pregnant."
"Impossible," she cried, and fainted dead away. When she came to,
she staggered to the phone, dialed her 78 year old husband, and
yelled, "You've knocked me up, you randy old goat!"
There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Then a voice
said, "And to whom am I speaking?"

_____________
Marty arrives home from work and as soon as he sets foot in the house, Sadie is on to him, telling him that their friend Marvin has finally quit smoking.
"Imagine that, Marty," she says, "someone who smoked 3 packs a day for twenty years has stopped smoking all of a sudden. Now that's what I call will power, something that you definitely don't have."
But Sadie hadn't finished.
"And that's not all. I hear that Bernie, that drunken friend of yours, is finally giving up drinking - another example of the kind of will power that you don't have."
"OK, Sadie," said Marty, "you want to see will power, do you? Well here's will power.I am going to sleep in the spare room from now on. I am going to prove to you that I won't be affected at all by not sleeping with a woman."Marty keeps to his word.
One night, when he had been sleeping alone for a week, there is a knock on his bedroom door.Marty shouts out, "What do you want?"
Sadie replies, "Marvin has started smoking again."

_____________
While meditating in the country, a poet noticed a farmer looking at him curiously. "Ah," said the poet, "perhaps you, too, have seen the golden-red fingers of dawn speeding across the eastern sky, the red-stained sulfureous islets floating in a lake of wine in the West, the ragged clouds at midnight, blotting out the shuddering moon?"
"No," replied the farmer, "not lately. I've been on the wagon for more than a year."