General Humour

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Children's Books to Avoid

 From: yxk9@po.cwru.edu (Yury Khidekel)

Top 26 Children's Books not recommended by the National Library Assoc.

  1. Bob the Germ's Wonderous Journey Into and Back Out of Your Digestive System.
  2. The Little Engine that Could Becomes intoxicated and Kills Civillians.
  3. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer's Games of Revenge.
  4. Peter Rabbit's Frisky Adventures.
  5. Dick, Jane, and Spot Wander into The 'Hood'.
  6. Clifford the Big Red Dog Accidently Eats his Masters and is Put to Sleep.
  7. Valuable Protein and Other Nutritional Benefits of Things from your Nose.
  8. The Hardy Boys, the Barbie Twins, and the Vice Squad.
  9. The Tickling Babysitter
  10. A Pictoral History of Circus Geek Suicides.
  11. Charles Manson Bedtime Stories.
  12. Daddy Loses His Job and Finds the Bottle.
  13. Babar Meets the Taxedermist and Becomes a Piano.
  14. Controlling the playground: Respect through Fear.
  15. David Duke's World of Imagination.
  16. Curious George and the High-Voltage Fence.
  17. The Boy Who Died from Eating All His Vegetables.
  18. Legends of Scab Football.
  19. Teddy: the Elf with the Detached Retina.
  20. Tommy Tune: Boy Choreographer.
  21. Joe Garagiola Retells Favorite Fairy Tales But Can't Remember the Endings to All of them.
  22. Ed Beckley's Start a Real-Estate Empire with the change from your Mom's Purse.
  23. The Pop-up Book of Human Anatomy.
  24. Things Rich Kids Have, but you never will.
  25. Let's Draw Betty and Veronica without their clothes on.
  26. The Care Bears Maul Some Campers and are Shot Dead.

The Canonical Collection of Light Bulb Jokes

 Henry Cates III at Xerox maintains a mailing list of funny jokes. This posting has been forwarded to the net from that list. I have not edited this, but passed it on intact.

His email address is: xerox.com!cate3.osbu_north

Troubleshooting your new stereo

 by P. Harris
Problem: Does not work
Cause: Power plug in hand
Remedy: Place plug in socket and turn socket on
Problem: Not turned on
Cause: Turned off
Remedy: Turn on
Problem: Still does not work
Cause: Bought it from Tandy
Remedy: Take it back and get a real stereo
Problem: Lights up but no sound
Cause: No speakers
Remedy: Buy some speakers
Problem: Still no sound
Cause: Volume set to zero
Remedy: Set volume to ten
Problem: Too much sound
Cause: Volume set to ten
Remedy: Set volume to three
Problem: Raucous hiss
Cause: Radio turned on and no aerial
Remedy: Turn radio off, place record on deck, place stylus on record
Problem: Sounds too slow
Cause: HMV 78 written on record
Remedy: Discard record, replace with "Hells Bells" by ACDC, set volume to ten, place stylus on record
Problem: Can't hear anything
Cause: Gone deaf
Remedy: Turn stereo off and learn to say "eh?"
Problem: Don't understand what all the lights are for
Cause: Stupidity
Remedy: Turn stereo off, buy gramaphone and retrieve HMV 78
Problem: Record a little small and hole too big for spindle
Cause: Record is a CD
Remedy: If it cost over 10 pounds sent it to me else check for CD player on stereo: if there is one, insert into CD player and set volume to ten
Problem: No CD player
Cause: Not buying a CD player
Remedy: Buy a CD player or stop buying CDs
Problem: Too noisy
Cause: CD playing and volume set to ten
Remedy: Set volume to three
Problem: CDs don't fit in car stereo
Cause: Haven't got a car CD player
Remedy: Buy car CD player, place CD in player and set volume to ten
Problem: Car speakers broken
Cause: Volume of car CD player set too high
Remedy: Take CD player back to shop - it would have been stolen anyway!
Problem: CDs don't fit in car sterep
Cause: Car stereo only plays tapes
Remedy: Tape CDs
Problem: Don't understand the automatic sequencing compact disc, magneric media instant audio transposition mega wacko editing commands
Cause (a): Stupid
Remedy (a): Turn stereo off, buy gramaphone and retrieve HMV 78
Cause (b): Normal
Remedy (b): Nor does anyone else, just do it by hand like you used to
Problem: Reel to reel tapes don't fit in tape deck
Cause: You're still wearing purple flares
Remedy: Remove flares and reel to reel tape. Attach sign saying "Outdated Hippy" to forehead, place Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture in CD player, skip first 6 minutes, place head between speakers and set volume to ten
Problem: Profound deafness with persistent tinnitus
Cause: Placing head between speakers with volume set to ten whilst listening to cannon detonations
Remedy: None
Problem: Does not show Coronation Street
Cause: Not a television
Remedy: Buy Sex Pistols album, place on deck, place stylus on record and set volume to ten
Problem: Neighbour beats head in with a brick
Cause: Constant annoyance with loud music
Remedy: Go to hospital and learn to eat through a straw
Problem: Stereo not where you left it
Cause: Stereo has been stolen or repossessed by bailiffs
Remedy: Call police and/or pay Poll Tax demand
Problem: Records, tapes and CDs melt during play, only a buzz comes from stereo
Cause: Stereo is a microwave
Remedy: Place egg in microwave, rip glass and metal grille from door, look inside and turn on
Problem: Egg on face
Cause: Stupidity
Remedy: None
Problem: Stereo not good in bed
Cause: Stereo not girlfriend
Remedy: Unplug girlfriend from mains and take tape from her lips. Plug in stereo and turn on girlfriend
Problem: Pressing space bar causes a little click, but does not play recently purchased Paul Simon album
Cause: Bought typewriter
Remedy: Slam head in fridge door
Problem: Light in fridge does not go out
Cause: Door not shutting completely
Remedy: Slam harder!

Manchester 2000 - An Olympic Bid

 In an attempt to influence the members of the International Olympic Commitee on their choice of venue for the Games in the year 2000, the organisers of Manchester's bid have already drawn up an itinerary and schedule of events. A copy has been leaked and is reproduced below.

Opening Ceremony

This is to be kept as brief as possible due to the low boredom threshold of the average Mancunian.

There will be no parade of athletes around the arena, because if they leave their rooms at the village for more than two minutes, they will be stripped bare by the time they get back.

Neither will there be any flags in the stadium, as any left unattended are likely to be stolen by the Doyles.

The Olympic Flame will be ignited by a petrol bomb thrown by a native of the city (preferably the Ordsall area), wearing the traditional costume of shell suit and balaclava mask and will burn for the duration of the Games in a large chip pan situated on the roof of the stadium.

The Events

In previous Olympic Games, Britain's competitors have not been particularly successful. In order to redress the balance, some of the events have been altered slightly to the advantage of local athletes.

100 Metres Sprint

Competitors will have to hold a video recorder and a microwave oven (on under each arm) and on the sound of the starting pistol a Police dog will be released from a cage 10 yards behind the athletes.

100 Metres Hurdles

The same as above with obstacles added (eg. car bonnets, hedges, garden fences and walls).

Hammer

Competitors in this event may choose which type of hammer they wish to use (claw, ballpane, sledge, etc.). The winner will be the one who can cause the most grevious bodily harm to members of the public within the time allowed.

Fencing

Entrants will be asked to dispose of as much stolen silver and jewellery as possible, in five minutes.

Long Jump/High Jump

These events have been amalgamated and will be referred to simply as 'A Jump'. Mixed teams only, in loose fitting clothing.

Shooting

A strong challenge is expected from local men in the shooting. The target firstly, will be a moving police van. In the second round competitors will aim at a Post Office counter clerk, a bank teller or an Armaguard style wages delivery van.

Boxing

Entry to the boxing will be restricted to husband and wife teams and will take place on a Friday night. The husband will be given 15 pints of bitter and the wife will be told not to make him any tea when he gets home. The bout will then commence.

Cycling - Time Trials

Competitors will be asked to break into the University bike sheds and take an expensive mountain bike owned by some Mummy's boy from the home counties on his first trip away from home. All against the clock.

Cycling - Pursuit

As above, but the bike will be owned by a visiting member of the S.A.S. Rugby team, who will witness the theft.

Modern Pentathalon

Amended events to include Mugging, Breaking and Entering, Flashing, Joy-Riding and Arson.

The Marathon

A safe route has yet to be decided but competitors will be issued with sharp sticks and bags with which to pick up Litter on their way round the course.

Swimming

Competitors will be thrown off a bridge on the Manchester ship canal - the first three survivors back will decide the medals.

Mens 4x100 Metres Relay

To be run according to the usual rules with the slight amendment of replacing the batons with handbags stolen from members of the public watching the event.

Mens 4x400 Metres Relay

As above but with a Police dog giving pursuit to ensure they run further.

Weightlifting

This will now be a pairs event. In the first round entrants will be required to smash a shop window and make their escape with a three piece suite/washing machine from the display. Medals will be decided by the first team to overturn and torch a Police armed response van, complete with Constables.

Gymnastics

Please note that the Ladies floor exercises have been replaced by a rhythmic clog dancing formation team event - competitors will also be judged for the difficulty of the Knots with which their shawls are tied.

Mens 50km walk

Unfortunately this will have to be cancelled as the police cannot guarantee the safety of anyone walking the streets of Manchester.

Proposed Exhibition sport

Following the success of other exhibition sports, Manchester proposes their version of the Modern Pentathalon - suggestions put forward have included Yard of ale contests, Whippet keeping, Pigeon racing, Tram spotting and Black pudding or Ferret Juggling.

The Closing Ceremony

Entertainment to include formation Rave dancing by members of the Hacienda health in the community anti-drug campaigners, Midget throwing and music by the Happy Mondays and Morrissey.

The Olympic flame will be be extinguished by someone dropping an old washing machine onto it from the top floor of the block of flats next to the stadium.

The stadium will then be boarded up before the local athletes break into it and remove all the copper piping and the central heating boiler.

And so on to Tyldesley in 2004.

Parakeet Joke

 From: mike@kd3bj.ampr.org (Michael Hogan)

A fellow walks into a pet store and asks to buy a canary. The proprietor replies, "I'm fresh out, but I DO have a parakeet." The customer insists on a canary, until the shop owner informs him that a parakeet can be made to sound like a canary if one files the beak just so. "But be careful not to file too much off, or the parakeet will drown when he goes to take a drink of water." The potential customer decides that this is complete bullshit, but thanks the shop owner politely and leaves, sans parakeet. He goes into another pet shop and asks for a canary -- no luck. "But", says the shop owner, "I do have a parakeet, and if you file the beak just so, it can be made to sound just like a canary." He goes on to explain that filing off too much beak will jeopardize the bird's life, due to the potential for drowning when he takes a drink. The fellow finally decides that there is some merit to these claims and buys the parakeet. "Besides", he thinks to himself, "parakeets are much cheaper." His next stop is a hardware store, where he wanders into the file section, holding his recently purchased bird. The owner wanders by and asks of he needs some help. The new bird owner sheepishly explains how he intends to make his parakeet sing like a canary. The hardware store owner knowingly picks up a file and hands it to him. "Here, a Nichols #2 bastard file. But be careful not to file too much off, or the poor beastie might drown." The bird and file owner thanks the hardware store owner and leaves for home.

A few weeks later, the bird owner wanders into the hardware store. The owner, recognizing him, asks how he made out with the parakeet. The fellow looks down and sadly reports "Bird's dead". The hardware store owner shares his sorrow and asks "Filed off too much beak?" To which the former bird owner replies "Nah, he was dead when I took him out of the vice."

Rocks

 For those of you who don't study metallurgy, the Iron Carbon Phase diagram is full of phases such as Austenite, Martensite etc, Well here are a few new discoveries on that diagram The entire set of Phases of the Iron Carbon Diagram The above material is protected by a common phase known as copywrite

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| pe95009@ox.ac.uk | Martin Skilling, St. Peter's College, Oxford |
|------------------+------------------------------------+ England |

Is there a Santa Claus

 From: jamantle@maplesoft.on.ca (Jim Mantle)

This was sent to me by Stefan (who works here), who got it from Steve (who works at Hayes down the street), who evidently got it from somewhere that had SPY magazine in its ancestry....The rebuttal is all mine, however. Jim.

Proposition: IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?

(See below for my rebuttal..)

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from that renown scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

  1. No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
  2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
  3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second.
    This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
    This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
  4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
  5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

Rebuttal

(Jim Mantle, Waterloo Maple Software)

Come on, ya gotta believe! I mean, if you can handle flying furry animals, then it's only a small step to the rest.

For example;

  1. As admitted, it is possible that a flying reindeer can be found. I would agree that it would be quite an unusual find, but they might exist.
  2. You've relied on cascading assumptions. For example, you have assumed a uniform distribution of children across homes. Toronto/Yorkville, or Toronto/Cabbagetown, or other yuppie neighbourhoods, have probably less than the average (and don't forget the DINK and SINK homes (Double Income No Kids, Single Income No Kids)), while the families with 748 starving children that they keep showing on Vision TV while trying to pick my pocket would skew that 15% of homes down a few percent.
  3. You've also assumed that each home that has kids would have at least one good kid. What if anti-selection applies, and homes with good kids tend to have more than their share of good kids, and other homes have nothing except terrorists in diapers? Let's drop that number of homes down a few more percent.
  4. Santa would have to Fedex a number of packages ahead of time, since he would not be able to fly into Air Force Bases, or into tower-controlled areas near airports. He's get shot at over certain sections of the Middle East, and the no-fly zones in Iraq, so he'd probably use DHL there. Subtract some more homes.
  5. I just barely passed Physics and only read Stephen Hawking's book once, but I recall that there is some Einsteinian Theory that says time does strange things as you move faster. In fact, when you go faster than the speed of light time runs backward, if you do a straight line projection, connect the dots and just ignore any singularity you might find right at the speed of light. And don't say you can't go faster than the speed of light because I've seen it done on TV. Jean-Luc doesn't have reindeer but he does have matter-antimatter warp engines and a holodeck and that's good enough for me.
    So Santa could go faster than light, visit all the good children which are not uniformly distributed by either concentration in each home or by number of children per household, and get home before he left so he can digest all those stale cookies and warm milk yech.
  6. Aha, you say, Jean-Luc has matter-antimatter warp engines, Santa only has reindeer, where does he get the power to move that fast!
    You calculated the answer! The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. This is an ample supply of energy for the maneuvering, acceleration, etc, that would be required of the loaded sleigh. The reindeer don't evaporate or incinerate because of this energy, they accelerate. What do you think they have antlers for, fighting over females? Think of antlers as furry solar array panels.
  7. If that's not enough, watch the news on the 24th at 11 o'clock. NORAD (which may be one of the few government agencies with more than 3 initials in it's name and therefore it must be more trustworthy than the rest) tracks Santa every year and I've seen the radar shots of him approaching my house from the direction of the North Pole. They haven't bomarck'd him yet, so they must believe too, right?
Jim

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