From: cate3.osbu_north@XEROX.COM
Newsgroups: rec.humor
Subject: Life  2.U
Date: 29 Jul 92 03:50:31 GMT
Reply-To: cate3.osbu_north@xerox.com


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     Climbing a mountain in silence helps to give ascent.
     
     The more waist, the less speed.
     
     One man's Mede is another man's Persian.
     
     A fool and her money are soon courted.
     
     The egg in the hotel, about to be cooked, was picked up by a priest
on his way to a monastery, out of the frying pan into the friar.
     
     There is no time like the pleasant.
     
     It was reported that England was uffereing from a plague of aunts.
     
     The busy lawyer wanted an alert young woman to act as deceptionist.
     
     The two bits of protoplasm could remember when they were cell-mates.
     
     Beautiful legs are sometimes without equal, but bow-legs are always
without parallel.
     
     He thought all women were biased.  "Buy us this." and "Buy us that."
     
     He didn't like cycling with friends, he wanted to clyclone along.
     
     Greta Barbo dreamed one night that she sprinkled boxes of grass seed
in her hair.  She awoke moaning, "I vant to be a lawn."
     
     He was going to sell his armor for twenty two cents an ounce, it was
first class mail.
     
     The man told the ghost to go away, "You don't have a haunting license."
     
     Why did they hang the picture?  They culdn't find the artist.
     
     He had untold wealth, it wasn't reported to the IRS.
     
     Did you hear about the Arab baker who every morning at 6:00 would
bow to the yeast?

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     The lecturer on physiology addressed the student nurses.  "We will take
up the heart, kidneys, lung, and liver in that order."  "Oh dear, another
organ recital," whispered on nurse to the other.

     A paper ran an item staing that "The departing Mr. Smithers was a member
of the defective bureau of the police force."
     The chief of police made a strong protest, whereupon the paper published
an apology as follows: "Our announcement should have read "The detective
branch of the police farce."
     
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MAY THE NET FORCE BE WITH YOU

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Did you know that 'gullible' is not in Webster's Dictionary?

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There used to be a saying:
"The sun never sets on the British empire,
because God doesn't trust an Englishman in the dark."

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Once a group of friends and I, including a guy named Brian
Pot (pronounced Po) went out to eat. As there was a long waiting line,
Brian signed the guest register and we went to wait at the bar. I
spilled my drink when the PA system announced that the table was ready
for the Pot Party.

Now how could they know what I was toting in my purse?

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	*---------------------------*
	| Hard work may not kill me |
	| But why take that chance? |
	*---------------------------*

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The Poles have a saying about how communist governments rewrite history:
"Only the future is certain; the past is always changing"

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From the Toronto Star, March 10:

     A would-be bandit failed because he had written a holdup up note on another
bank's withdrawal slip.
     When Leonard Goodin decided to rob a Toronto-Dominion bank branch last
Sept. 4, he wrote his holdup note demanding money on a withdrawal slip from
the Royal Bank of Canada, court heard yesterday.
     The teller looked at the note and told Goodin, "You have the wrong bank.
 This is a Toronto-Dominion, not a Royal."
     She returned his note but Goodin pushed it back at her along with a
brown paper bag in which the money was to be placed.
     The woman again reminded him he was in the wrong bank and returned the note.
     "The accused stared at the victim, shook his head and left the bank," court was told.
     An hour later Goodin successfully robbed another bank - even though it wasn't
a Royal branch.

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A few months ago in upstate New York, a man decided to rob a local bank.
He walked into the bank holding a brown paper bag. He looked around for
a moment, and must have decided he was in the wrong bank, because he then
left, walked across the street, and robbed a DIFFERENT one!

He took a bystander hostage, where she was forced to drove the thief to his 
house, and drop him off! He then let her go. She promptly called the police, 
and they went and arrested the man at his house.

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CAR PHONE USER HELPS IN ARREST
 
Fresno (AP)
  A motorist used his car telephone to alert the California Highway Patrol
that a truck driver was weaving back and forth on Highway 99 south of Fresno
and seemed to be drunk.
  So, officers stopped the truck driver Tuesday night but found that he 
hadn't been drinking, Patrolman Jim Taylor said.
  Then, they checked the motorist who had telephoned them and stopped
behind the truck when the Patrol pulled it over.  The motorist failed a
sobriety test and was arrested for investigation of drunken driving, Taylor
said.
  "The truck was probably going straight, and he was the one weaving,"
Taylor added.
 
True story out of a local newspaper.  This guy was apparently really loaded!

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Re: the "college age girl" "in affluent area of Santa Monica" who "couldn't
come up with the significance of the figure 1492."

Everyone has his own favorite statistic about the failures of American education.

One awfully good one (William Buckley's favorite, as it happens) is that
60% of the college seniors in Texas cannot name the country to the south.

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Speaking of Outside Magazine stories, there is an article in the current
issue that talks about some of the stupid things that people do to the buffalo
in Yellowstone National Park. Here are a couple examples (from memory, for
I don't have the article handy) - remember that a buffalo can outrun a thoroughbred
racehorse in a quartermile race:

o a man decided to throw rocks at a buffalo, just to see what it would do. It charged him.

o a man wanted to have his picture taken with a buffalo, except the buffalo
was laying down. Thinking that this wouldn't make a very interesting photo,
he started kicking the buffalo to make it stand up. The buffalo did stand
up, and then it hooked him. He was evacuated to a hospital. After two months
he finally died.

o a man wanted to take a picture of his two year old daughter with a buffalo,
so he set her on top of the animal. You can imagine what happened next.

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   A certain old cat had made his home in the alley behind Gabe's bar for
some time, subsisting on scraps and occasional handouts from the bartender.
One evening, emboldened by hunger, the feline attempted to follow Gabe through
the back door.  Regrettably, only the his body had made it through when
Gabe slammed the door, severing the cat's tail at its base.  This proved too
much for the old creature, who looked sadly at Gabe and expired on the spot.
   Gabe put the carcass back out in the alley and went back to business.
The mandatory closing time arrived and Gabe was in the process of locking up
after the last customers had gone.  Approaching the back door he was startled
to see an apparition of the old cat mournfully holding its severed tail out,
silently pleading for Gabe to put the tail back on its corpse so that it could
go on to the kitty afterworld complete.  Gabe shook his head sadly and said
to the ghost: "I can't.  You know the law:  
  I can't retail spirits after 2:00 AM."

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     Pat and mike were walking down the street when their old friendly-sort-of-nemesis
approached them.  He thought he'd have a good laugh at their expense because
they, reputedly, weren't too bright.  He said: "Hey Pat! Hey Mike!  Did you
hear the news?"  "The news?" asked Mike.  "What is it?" asked Pat.  "It's
incredible, I read in the papers this morning that the devil died!!!"  Said
the old nemesis.  "Is that so?" asked Mike.  "The truth is it?" asked Pat,
and they bogh dug into their pockets and each gave the man a coin.  Thinking
this teribly strange, "What on earth is this for?" asked the man.  Pat began
to explain:  "In the old country, when someone dies," and Mike finished:
"We all contribute a little something to help the surviving children."

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About five years ago the battery in my beat-up VW beetle  had died because
I left the lights on overnight . I was in a hurry to get to work on time
so I ran into the house to get my wife to give me a hand to start  the car.
 I told her to get into our second car, a prehistoric oversized gas guzzler,
and use it to push my car fast enough to start it. I pointed out to her that
because the VW had an automatic transmission, it needed to be pushed at least
30 MPH  for it to start. She said fine, hoped into her car and drove off.
I sat there fuming wondering what can she be doing. A minute passed by and
when I saw her in the rearview mirror coming at me at about 40 MPH, I realized
that I should have been a bit clearer with my directions. 

----------------------------------------------------

OK, my turn.  This happened to friends of my parent's friends (triple indirection)
but is true to the best of my knowledge.  So, the story of Art and Lil.

Art needed to do some repair work on his roof which had a fairly steep pitch.
 He was having a tough time bracing himself until he got a great idea: if
he could secure a rope to something in front of the house, throw the rope
over the roof to the other side and secure himself to it -- why yes, that
would work well.  And so it did.  But, in such situations, details are all
important and Art missed a big one.  Had he not secured the rope to the car,
or if he had bothered to tell his wife, the story would have had a different
ending.  But, Lil did get into the car, not noticing the rope stretched over
the house, and proceeded to run her errand.  Art was dragged up one side
of the roof, down the other, fell the ten feet to the driveway and was pulled
about a hundred feet down the street until his wife happened to notice. 
Although he didnt die (which was probably preferable to explaining this story
for the rest of his life), Art did spent several weeks in intensive care.

----------------------------------------------------

Bulwer-Lytton Contest Entries:

The jungle drums throbbed wildly in the distance, warning him away with a
brief but dire message: "The broccoli casserole is burnt!"
	-- Pat Walker, Garden Grove, Ca.

"I assume," said Brian, staring unhappily at the reserve chute's broken rip
cord, its free end flailing at his white knuckles and his body plummeting
to earth, "that they also lied about having a bus at the landing site."
	-- Bob Mooers, Bellingham, Wa.

"Calling all bunnies!" shouted Randy the Happy Wizard as he shook his carrot
out the window of his jolly house in Old Mr. Oak on the edge of the Peppermint Stick Garden.
	-- Bill Bignin, San Mateo, Ca.

"The toilet's stopped up again!" screeched Esmerelda Fnark in a voice that
had failed to endear her to over fifteen men in the past three years.
	-- Michael K. Young, Randalstown, Md.

There was only one time in my life when I was happy to find a hair in my milk.
	-- Anita Locke, Kensington, Md.

A conscience is a loathsome thing, God wot, so it wasn't more than an hour
later that I was wishing I hadn't slit Martin's throat.
	-- Marjorie Murch Stanley, Youngstown, Ohio

Nydia found one of the drawbacks of being a werewolf was coming into heat
during a full moon and giving birth to decituplets.
	-- R. W. O'Bryan, Perrysburg, Ohio

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A man was driving around the countryside in his new sports car, moving at
speeds that bordered on unsafe. When checking his rear-view mirror, he
noticed that a small object, followed by a trail of dust, was closing
fast. His curiousity piqued, he slowed a bit to get a better look. As the
object came into view, it was clearly a chicken. While the man watched in
amazement, the bird whizzed by him. He checked his speed as this happened:
could it really pass him when he was doing 35?

There was no way a chicken was going to make a joke of his $18,000 machine.
He slammed down the gas pedal and went screaming toward the offending fowl.
He grinned with satisfaction as he passed it, but a few seconds later, he
spotted it running even with him, staying in view. He studied the bird and
noticed that it had three legs! This was really strange. Suddenly, the
chicken zipped ahead of his car, took a sharp left turn and disappeared
behind a haystack.

The man had to check this out. He spun his wheel and barely made the turn.
As he came around the other side of the haystack, he had to stand on his
brakes to avoid the farmer, who stood complacently chewing a toothpick
and looking blankly at the car that nearly flattened him. The chicken
stood nearby, not even breathing heavily.

The man got out of his car. "This your chicken?", he asked.

"Yup."

"How is it possible that it has three legs?"

"Me and my wife, we raise 'em that way," the farmer droned.

The man looked puzzled. "Why?"

"Well," came the reply, "you sit down to dinner with your wife and a guest.
You like a drumstick?"

"Sure, but..."

"And your wife, she likes a drumstick?"

"Yeah, so?"

"Your guest might like one too, you reckon?"

Now it was clear. "Oh, I see!" He smiled. He couldn't wait to spring this
on his friends. "What does it taste like?"

"Dunno," said the farmer, "never caught one."

----------------------------------------------------

Heard a wonderful news report on the radio today:  Seems that there are some
folks, somewhere in the U.S., who are passing bank checks which are chemically
treated so that several hours after they've been passed they self destruct.

(No, I'm not talking about the U.S. government, they don't erode their money,
just its underlying value, and they do it much more slowly so as to not get
everybody too pissed off at them all at once.)

Anyway, back to the self-destructing checks:  The radio news report ended
by quoting a local law-enforcer as saying that it is difficult to nail somebody
for passing bad checks when the whole problem is that the checks in question
basically don't exist any more!

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MESSAGE FROM THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON TO THE BRITISH FOREIGN
OFFICE IN LONDON -- written from Central Spain, August 1812

Gentlemen,

Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the
approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been
diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by
H.M. ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our
headquarters.

We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles,
and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty's
Government holds me accountable.  I have dispatched reports on
the character, wit, and spleen of every officer.  Each item and
every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable
exceptions for which I beg your indulgence.

Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains
unaccounted for in one infantry battalion's petty cash and there
has been a hideous confusion as the the number of jars of
raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm
in western Spain.  This reprehensible carelessness may be
related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are war with
France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you
gentlemen in Whitehall.

This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request
elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty's Government so
that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over
these barren plains.  I construe that perforce it must be one of
two alternative duties, as given below.  I shall pursue either
one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both:

1.  To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for
the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or
perchance.

2.  To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of
Spain.


Your most obedient servant

Wellington