From: Henry Cate Date: 19 Feb 87 18:34:13 PST (Thursday) Subject: Life 1.K What I Did Over Christmas Break. I bought 200 acres of land but they were all stacked on top of each other. I used my TRS-80 to start World War III, but I got arrested for disturbing the peace. I built an anti-gravity device and strapped it to my skis, but I forgot to install an 'off' switch so I had to pay for the chairlift rides down. I found the Loch Ness monster and discovered the reason it so seldom emerges is that it has cable. I divided eight by three and discovered a previously unknown integer called 'eithreeght.' I sprinkled some baking powder over a couple of potatoes but it didn't work. I had a paper due and I asked for more time so now the universe is going to last an extra week. When I asked for more time right away I got six days all at once. I taped David Letterman and you should have heard him scream when he pulled it off his chest. I squeezed some fresh orange juice but soon discovered that orange juice is incompressible. I bought one of those key rings that beeps when you clap, then I lost my hands. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Hot Dogs Employed in Robbery Threat >From AP: Cleveland Heights, Ohio - Murshin A. Rahman, 37, of University Heights, was charged with aggravated robbery after he allegedly held up a savings and loan using a package of hot dogs. Rahman was held without bond pending an appearance today in Municipal Court. Police said the suspect told a teller that the brown leather attache case he was holding contained a bomb. The teller gave him an estimated $2400. Police caught the suspect and found that the bomb consisted of hot dogs wrapped in foil, with wires leading to a wad of putty. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Two Brians are piloting a plane, when they discover that they must make an emergency landing. Luckily enough, there is a nearby (unused) airstrip, so they decide to land there. As they fly over it, one says, "that's an awfully short runway; I don't know if we can land on it." The other points out that there's no choice, so they have to try. They bring the plane in as slowly as possible, touching wheels right at the beginning of the runway, and immediately hit the brakes. The plane slides to a halt with the front wheels hanging off the runway's end. One Brian turns to the other and says, "We made it, but this is the *SHORTEST* runway I've ever seen." The other says, "Yeah, but it must be at least two miles *wide*." ******************************************************************************* A tough looking fellow swaggers into a bar. He is wearing a t-shirt with the statement, "I hate little Henrys" printed on it. Naturally, a little Henrys is standing at the other end of the bar. He sees the message on the t-shirt and immediately charges up to confront the wearer. "What does that say?" he shouts to the wearer. "You see," says the wearer, "you little Henrys can't even read!" Becoming more furious, the little Henrys says, "What did you say?" The t-shirt wearer responds, "And that's another thing -- you little Henrys can't hear, either!" By now, the little Henry is ready to explode and he yells, "All right, that's it! Get your *** outside so we can settle this once and for all!" Just as they get outside, the little Henry takes a really large knife out of his pocket, flicks it open and says, "Now, sucker, let's get on with it!" The fellow in the t-shirt draws a pistol from his pocket and replies, "And that's the worst thing about you little Henrys. You are so dumb that you bring knives to gun fights!" ******************************************************************************* Q: How many little Henrys does it take to change a light bulb? A:: None: little Henrys aren't afraid of the dark. Q: How many little Brians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: 10. One to hold the bulb and nine to rotate the ladder. Q: How many strong little Brians does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: 115. One to hold the bulb and 114 to rotate the house. Q: How many little Brians gods does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Two. One to hold the bulb and the other to rotate the planet. ----------------------------------------------------------------- >From this week's Science: "Seitz notes that Sagan published the nuclear winter thesis in Parade magazine a month before it appeared in Science. He [Seitz] writes: "The peer review process at Parade presumably consisted in the contributing editor conversing with the writer, perhaps while shaving -- Sagan is both." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Health Books Mark Twain warned against reading them. He said, "You might die of a misprint." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: New Yorker Humor >From the 1/19/87 New Yorker: ---------- Adv. in the Eagle, newspaper of the American University: "ACCURATLEY YOURS Professional word processing company. Open 24 hours every day." New Yorker comment: "Maybe you need a little rest." ---------- >From the California Aggie, newspaper of UC Davis: "'I found people are happy with the Constitution.' Schjoth said. 'After 200 years, it is still working effectively.' It is the Supreme Court's responsibility to translate the document, he said. The question remains whether 12 people can translate the Constitution for the entire nation." New Yorker comment: "...or if perchance nine might suffice." ---------- >From Newsday: "The plot is less than the sum of its parts. It concerns an unconventional family -- a free-spirited mother and her three young-adult children -- that visits an English seaside resort. There they meet a young dentist, who falls in love with the older daughter, his grumpy landlord, the mother's nervous soliciter, the friendly waiter, and a stuffy barrister." New Yorker comment: "Maybe it's dentistry that makes the world go round." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Why do cows have long legs? It they didn't it would lead to their utter destruction. ----------------------------------------------------------------- COMPUTER KILLERS OF MARIETTA MARIETTA, GA. -- If you *really* hate that clunker computer of yours, you can put it in the car, drive to the Bullet Stop in Marietta, GA (off Cobb Drive at Powder Springs Rd.) and put it out of its misery on the two-year old shop's firing range. With a machine gun. Cathy Lavista of The Bullet Stop explains, "We had an Apple, a little old Apple, and there was a Xerox copy machine. Hewlett-Packard also brought in one of their printers, one of the great big ones, and set circuit boards on top of them. And they blow apart nicely -- little pieces go everywhere. You wouldn't need a very big gun. You could knock it out with 50 rounds off an HK, a German machine gun. Then if you really want to finish it off you could put it out of its misery with a Thompson sub-machine gun. That shoots .45 caliber shot, it's the old gangster gun, and it really cleans it up." Of the customers: "They shoot from pretty close. By the time they get them in here they hate them. They usually take them out at 30 feet, you like to see what you're doing. When we sweep the range we find little bytes and pieces of things." (She laughs at her cleverness on that last line.) Actually, Ms. Lavista says, computers aren't the only things The Bullet Stop will let you shoot. "You can shoot it as long as you can get it through the doors and it's already dead. We had to open a side door for the printer." ----------------------------------------------------------------- >From the Friday Jan. 23, 1987 S.F. Chronicle, Herb Caen Column. Bomb scare at the Presidio PX! Joanna Moore, wife of Col. Brian Moore, suddenly found herself surrounded by grim faced bomb squaders, MPs and firemen when her handbag exploded in a cloud of mysterious smoke. What had happened: her collection of matchbooks from recent restaurant forays was to close to her Bic and a can of hair spray, producing instant blast-off. After pledging allegiance to Ronald Reagen and the Republican Party, she was released, muttering, "If I were a terrorist I'd never have used my best eelskin bag." She was not burned except metaphorically. ----------------------------------------------------------------- In the begining the Lone Ranger didn't have Tonto or even Silver. He did have a horse named Diablo. And before every mission he would Mount Diablo. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Are you tired of seeing the same old list of "excerpts from accident reports on insurance claims" that gets remailed every few months or so? Well, here's a different batch of similarly confused writing. [What follows is from the AP news wire; reprinted without permission.] LEESVILLE, La. (AP) - "My son is under the doctor's care and should not take P.E. today," one parent wrote. "Please execute him." That death sentence was inadvertently recommended in a note which a parent who was in a hurry or possessed of an uncertain vocabulary wrote to excuse a child's absence from school in Vernon Parish. Duplicated copies of some of the parish's more astonishing excuse notes were given out at a School Board meeting this month. "Some of them were obviously made up by students," Richard Carter, assistant principal of Leesville High School, said Wednesday. But most, he said, were probably legitimate excuses written by parents in the rural northwest Louisiana parish. In these samples, names were replaced with either Fred or Mary to protect innocent and guilty alike. One parent appeared to have taken drastic action: "Please excuse Mary for being absent. She was sick and I had her shot." Another had a more comprehensive request: "Please excuse Fred for being. It was his father's fault." "Please ackuse Fred being absent on Jan. 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 and 33," wrote a parent who lives by an unusual calendar. "Mary was absent from school yesterday as she was having a gangover," wrote one who apparently expected the school to be tolerant of social follies. "Mary could not come to school today because she was bother by very close veins," wrote one parent. "Fred has an acre in his side," said another. And in an extreme case of people losing things, "Please excuse Fred from P.E. for a few days. He fell yesterday out of a tree and misplaced his hip." In a confusion of office work and medical terms, one parent wrote: "Please excuse Mary from Jim yesterday. She is administrating." And several had a racier tone: "Please excuse Fred for being absent. He had a cold and could not breed well." "Please excuse Mary. She has been sick and under the doctor." "Please excuse Mary from being absent yesterday. She was in bed with gramps." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Remark on the efficacy of fortune-tellers, from the memoirs of a New York policewoman: I've been told lots of things by [gipsy fortune-tellers], but I've never been told that I was a plainclothes policewoman about to arrest them. ----------------------------------------------------------------- BUMPER STICKER SEEN ON A CAR IN FLORIDA: "Leaving Florida? Take a friend." -The Commision Against Progress in Florida ----------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Praise or attack? Open-Apple, Feb '87 mentions a Wall Street Journal article... Recently, Apple Computer Inc. purchased a $14.5 Cray Research supercomputer to aid in the design of their next-generation Apple computers. John Rollwagen, Cray Research Inc. chief executive, told Seymour Cray about how Apple was using their newly purchased Cray supercomputer. "There was a pause on the other end of the line, and Seymour said 'That's interesting, because I'm designing the next Cray with an Apple'." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Heard on the radio Heard on Charles Osgood's "Newsbreak" this morning, in a story about nobody being perfect: A woman in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida was recently fired from her hotel job for poor performance. However, the hotel fired her while she was on jury duty. There's a state law in Florida that says you can't fire anyone while they're on jury duty. The woman sued, and even though her job only paid $375 a week, she was awarded $2.8 MILLION. She was given $200,000 in compensatory damages, and $2.6 million in punitive damages. By the way, every member of the jury was, of course ... on jury duty. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Quote from a recent issue of InfoWorld: "...One of the best rumors of the week is that Apple has come up with an alternative to the mouse: a light pen that lets you point and click in thin air. It has no tablet and no wires, just a disconnected box that plugs into the mouse port on the back of the machine. You draw in space and click using a button near the tip." There's the ticket to business acceptance of the Mac: The boss walks in and sees everybody with their hands in the air waving this light pen around. ----------------------------------------------------------------- A family I know had two cats and one infant. One of the cats died, and the other was lonely. The cat wandered through the house looking for company. He decided that the best bet would be the creature closest to his own size, namely, Joshua. One day, Joshua's mother heard the kid hollering like mad. She went rushing into the room, to find that the cat had started grooming Joshua! The poor kid's hair was all slicked down, and the cat was starting on the kid's eyebrows. I imagine I'd be startled to find myself being groomed by a cat, too. Shortly after that, the family inherited another cat, so the baby was safe from being licked to death. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Arthur C. Clarke's Law : It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Recipe for LARGE quantities of soapsuds: 1. Fill a large bucket with hot water. 2. Empty contents of one bottle of dishwashing detergent into bucket (Ivory, Joy, Dawn, or equivalent). 3. Drop in a few pounds of dry ice that has been crushed to small pieces. 4. STAND BACK! Recipe will fill a phone booth, or a small room (or even a big one). A friend and I once did this in the bed of his truck. While stopped at traffic signals the whole bed would fill up to the rim with suds. Then, as we would accelerate away from the light, large "chunks" would break loose and waft lazily through the air, causing much consternation to the traffic behind. On the freeway the result was much smaller pieces of suds billowing out of the back of the truck. It looked like a snowstorm! It's funnier to see than the description sounds. We were hysterical. Also, the soap can be omitted from the above to obtain fog. A phone booth that is opaque with dense fog looks pretty strange too. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Last month, after one the boats was eliminated from the Cup, the crew members decided to go sightseeing for kangaroos. Sure enough, they were successful: They were motoring through the bush when the car hit a kangaroo with a thud. The driver was taken aback. But then he decided it might be neat to take off his official team Gucci jacket, put it on the limp kangaroo, prop up the animal and pose for pictures with it. This worked fine until the kangaroo, who was merely stunned, woke up and bounded away - with the car keys inside the jacket. The stranded crew eventually made it back to civilization, but only after a long, long walk. ----------------------------------------------------------------- When some people immigrate to the United States they often try to assimulate the culture. This can be difficult at first, for example the fourth of July, and Thanksgiving are hard to understand without knowing American history. Well a man named Ali moved into San Jose in late October, heard about Halloween and did some research. He brought candy and organized a small party with some relatives. Halloween night Ali's wife commented to her brother. "Some times my husband is weird" "Oh how so?" "Right now Ali's bobing in thorny leaves." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 13 Feb 87 09:56:57 pst From: hplabs!cae780!tektronix.TEK.COM!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!wanttaja@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Ronald J Wanttaja) To: hplabs!CSL.SRI.COM!RISKS Subject: Re: The student's extra $25,000 At a recent aviation safety conference, Jack Eggspuler told a story similar to that of the student with the extra $25,000 credited to his account [Steve Thompson, RISKS-4.46]: He had banked for years at a small-town bank. One day, a large banking conglomerate bought up the small bank. After this, Jack noticed that his deposits weren't being listed. He went into the bank to talk to them. It turned out that his account number, which had been assigned to him when the bank was independent, was identical to Borden Industries' account number with the conglomerate. Yup, his penny-ante deposits were going into Borden's account. He thought it was straightened out. A week or so later he went in to cash a check, and asked for his balance. It was: $9,238,345.35. Ulp! He thought of a new Piper, but settled for a copy of the printout. He's got it hanging on his wall... GIBU: Garbage in, Bucks out? ----------------------------------------------------------------- here is one someone at work told me... Why do floresent lights hum? cause they don't know the words ----------------------------------------------------------------- FAMOUS LAST WORDS "I think there's a world market for about 5 computers." - Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM (around 1948) "The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." - Admiral William Leahy, US Atomic Bomb Project "This fellow Charles Lindbergh will never make it. He's doomed." - Harry Guggenheim, millionaire aviation enthusiast "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." - Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, five days before the Crash of 1929. "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." - Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre "God himself could not sink this ship." - Anonymous Titanic Deck Hand "Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances." - Dr. Lee De Forest "Everything that can be invented has been invented." - Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Patent Office, 1899. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Movie Chinese [...] As an aside, I have a friend who is Korean and in the martial-arts skit in Kentucky Fried Movie where the bad guy is giving some sort of speech in "Chinese", he claims what he really is saying (in Korean), is something like: "I'm really embarassed to be doing this and the only reason I'm doing it is because they're paying me a lot of money. So here I am saying nonsense that you probably wouldn't understand unless you were Korean." ------- Message 2 I've heard that, in TORA TORA TORA, Richard "But The Japanese Never Signed The Geneva Convention" Loo, when interrogating an American officer in "Japanese", was really asking him things like, "DO YOU WANT DUCK SAUCE WITH YOUR EGG ROLL?!?" in Chinese (he used to work in a Chinese restau-