The President of the United States knows how to fly Air Force One. Doctors can tell what virus you have and how to cure it by looking at it under a microscope. If you go to sleep with a loaded gun beside your nightstand, it will be used to kill you; or, it will be used to frame you for murder. Chimneys don't have dampers, thus allowing birds to swoop into your house. If somebody is chasing you, every door you encounter will be locked. If somebody writes on your bathroom mirror with lipstick, you're about to die. If you find a smoldering cigarette butt on the sidewalk, don’t stop to look at it—somebody is behind you and about to kill you! Run! All shower curtains are translucent. If you dump industrial waste into a river, it will make your own daughter sick, and you will repent. If you are a hick just arriving in the big city, and you happen to be sitting on a park bench playing a song you just wrote, you will be discovered by a talent scout who will sign you to a $1,000,000 record deal that very afternoon, but then you will get caught up in the lifestyle, get drunk, get dumped, then have second thoughts and go back to the country where your manager will show up and conspire with your family to get you back into the business.
If you cut yourself while in the water—any water—sharks will find you. If you put too much food into your mouth while at a banquet, you will choke and somebody will use the Heimlich maneuver to save you and your ribcage won't feel sore at all. If your name is James Bond, nobody will ever file a paternity suit, even though you've had sex with half the women in Europe. If a coke bottle falls out of the sky, don't pick it up! The worst player on the team will always get a home run with two outs in the bottom of the 9th inning. If you find strange metal on the ground, the professor at the local university will tell you that it doesn't come from Earth. No matter how much he fights, the handsome lead actor's hair doesn't get mussed. It's possible for grown men to roll 2,000 feet down the side of a mountain, then get to their feet and continue on their way without any sign of injury or dizziness. If you catch on fire, you should always run around and flail rather than dropping to the ground and rolling. When fishing, you will catch a 20 foot shark and reel the shark all the way to the edge of the boat despite the fact that you're only using a 10 pound test line.
If your boat ever hits rocks, it will explode! If you have a barrel on your boat, it will be loaded with fuel, somebody will shoot it, and it will explode. If you don't hit the rocks, first, that is!
DNA tests take only five minutes—max. If somebody does a home pregnancy test in the movies, it will never be negative. If you're away fighting a war, don't open that letter from Jane. That tramp is leaving you for the draft dodger back home. If it looks like you died, but we didn't see your body, you survived and will show up on a tropical island somewhere near the end of the movie, drinking a large tropical drink with fruit in it. If you're attacked by a pack of dogs, all they will do is bark at you until you have time to get away. All large manufacturing companies use dangerous chemical, which they happily dump into the water supply. In sword fights, you can only be stabbed in the chest. People go to restaurants to give each other upsetting news, so dinner never gets eaten. If you see a spider crawling in your bathroom sink, you're about to die. If you take pictures of a flying saucer, the negatives will mysteriously all be blank. If you try to record your boss confessing to a heinous murder, the tape recorder will malfunction. Everybody is an expert at horseback riding and can ride just about any horse, anywhere.
The one person who appears to be on your side actually is the one who's trying to kill you. The one you think is trying to kill you is trying to protect you. If a woman calls a man an idiot at the beginning of the movie, they will be hopelessly in love and married by the end of the movie. If you jog in a park while wearing headphones, you will be attacked and killed. All mayors are homicidal. All reporters do their own investigative research—they wouldn't dream of just writing something up from the wire service. If you're old and in a nursing home, a nurse is going to kill you. If you're in a difficult situation and you try something, but it fails because of one tiny oversight, you'll try something entirely different rather than rectify that one tiny oversight. If you try to cross the street, a car that isn't visible or audible will somehow arrive in time to run you down before you get to the other side. If the telephone rings late at night and you are all alone and paranoid to begin with, the call will be coming from inside your own house even though you have just the one phone line and cell phones haven't been invented yet.
If you're stranded on a desert island, anyone called Professor will know how to mine and process the ores on the island and build a radio transmitter—but it won't work because some doofus will break it, and for some reason, the Professor won't be able to build another one. If you look away from your martini, even for a second, somebody will put something in it. If you're being followed, the car behind you will keep well back until you realize you're being followed, at which point the following car will now speed up and try to force you off the road and over a cliff. If you check a book out of a public library, that one book will contain the clues that solve a 40 year old murder mystery. If you have a dog on board your plane, you and the dog can survive any crash. All wills contain upsetting surprises. If you hear a voice on a television set in the background, it will always be a news bulletin that relates directly to the movie's protagonist.
If you knock on somebody's door and all you hear is a dog barking inside, call the coroner, because the person inside is dead. Law students make the best attorneys especially for complicated and important trials. Evil murderers always want to see you suffer, so they never kill you right away, but want to wait until just the right moment, which, of course, gives you time to escape or overpower them. When you turn a radio on, it will always be tuned to exactly the right frequency. If you try to get away from a crazed killer, your car will stall. If you go outside at night to investigate a strange noise, you will get locked out of your house... especially if you're naked.
If a body is lying in a pool of blood, the loyal dog will never start eating the body... unless it's a Stephen King movie, of course. Lights you see in the night sky are NEVER normal commercial aircraft. If you die early in a movie, your ghost will be around for the rest of the movie to haunt the murderer. If you stop for gas in a small, off-the-beaten-path town, everybody in that town will be dead.
There's the old story of a newspaper reporter making the rounds of the city's religious institutions for a feature article. One Sunday he attended the Quaker meeting; the next Saturday he went to the local Reform synagogue. Talking to the rabbi afterwards, he commented how surprised he was to have seen several of the same people at both services, and asked the rabbi if he wasn't concerned about losing members.
"Oh, not at all!" replied the rabbi. "Some of my best Jews are Friends!"
As part of an inter-departmental challenge, three graduate students--doctoral students in physics, mathematics and political science--were each given a barometer, and were told to use the barometer to determine the approximate height of the Sears tower in Chicago. Two returned with a nearly correct answer, but the political scientist had the exact answer.
The contest judge asked each how the answer had been determined. The physicist said that he had measured the air pressure at ground level and at the top floor of the building, and had used a standard formula to determine the difference in elevation. Since the top floor was actually about 40 feet below the top of the building, he added 40 feet to his answer.
The mathematician didn't even have to go into the building. At 12 noon, he placed the barometer on the ground near the building. He measured the height of the barometer and its shadow, then measured the length of the building's shadow. He then calculated the height of the building using the ratio of the barometer to its shadow.
The political scientist went into the building and proceeded to the superintendent's office. Upon being admitted, he said "Good morning. I'm a doctoral candidate from the University of Chicago. I have here a very fine barometer. If you will please tell me the exact height of this building, I will give you this barometer."
A boy was assigned a paper on childbirth and asked his parents "How was I born?"
"Well honey..." said the slightly prudish parent, "the stork brought you to us."
"OH," said the boy. "Well, how did you and daddy get born?" he asked.
"Oh, the stork brought us too."
"Well how were grandpa and grandma born?" he persisted.
"Well darling, the stork brought them too!" said the parent, by now starting to squirm a little in the Lazy Boy recliner.
Several days later, the boy handed in his paper to the teacher who read with confusion the opening sentence: "This report has been very difficult to write due to the fact that there hasn't been a natural childbirth in my family for three generations."
Descartes walks into a bar, the bartender asks, "Can I get you a drink?"
Descartes replies, "I think not."
--and he disappears.
Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame was exploring new ways to advertise. He spent several days thinking on the problem and came up with an idea. Leaning over to his phone, he called the Vatican and asked to speak to the Pope, indicating that he would like to make a sizable donation.
"Hello, my son?"
"Hello, your Grace, I am calling because I would like to make a sizable donation to the Roman Catholic Church."
"How nice! Why don't you send it in the mail?
"Would you like me to send one hundred million dollars in the mail?"
"One hundred million dollars! Bless you, my son. Why no, of course. My representative can visit you at your convenience!"
"But there is one little string attached..."
"Oh?"
"You know that part in the Lord's Prayer where you say 'Give us this day our daily bread'? I'd like that changed to 'Give us this day our daily chicken'."
"Oh, I see..."
The Pope covers the mouthpiece on the phone and says to the Cardinal attending him, "How long do we have left on the Wonder Bread Contract?"
Three turtles, Joe, Steve, and Raymond, decide to go on a picnic. So Joe packs the picnic basket with cookies, sodas, and sandwiches. The trouble is, the picnic site is 10 miles away, so the turtles take 10 whole days to get there. By the time they do arrive, everyone's exhausted.
Joe takes the stuff out of the basket, one item at a time. He takes out the sodas and says, "Okay, Steve, gimme the bottle opener."
"I didn't bring the bottle opener," Steve says. "I thought you packed it." Joe gets worried. He turns to Raymond. "Raymond, do you have the bottle opener?"
Naturally, Raymond doesn't have it, so the turtles are stuck ten miles away from home without soda. Joe & Steve beg Raymond to turn back home and retrieve it, but Raymond flatly refuses, knowing that they'll eat everything by the time he gets back.
After about two hours, the turtles manage to convince Raymond to go, swearing on their great-grand turtles' graves that they won't touch the food.
So, Raymond sets off down the road, slow and steadily. Twenty days pass, but no Raymond. Joe and Steve are hungry and puzzled, but a promise is a promise.
Another day passes, and still no Raymond, but a promise is a promise. After three more days pass without Raymond in sight, Steve starts getting restless. "I NEED FOOD!" he says with a hint of dementia in his voice.
"NO!" Joe retorts. "We promised."
Five more days pass. Joe realizes that Raymond probably skipped out to the diner down the road, so the two turtles weakly lift the lid, get a sandwich, and open their mouths to eat.
But then, right at that instant, Raymond pops out from behind a rock, and says, "Just for that, I'm not going."
As a Delta Air Lines jet was flying over Arizona on a clear day, the copilot was providing his passengers with a running commentary about landmarks over the PA system.
"Coming up on the right, you can see the Meteor Crater, which is a major tourist attraction in northern Arizona. It was formed when a lump of nickel and iron, roughly 150 feet in diameter and weighing 300,000 tons, struck the earth at about 40,000 miles an hour, scattering white-hot debris for miles in every direction. The hole measures nearly a mile across and is 570 feet deep."
From the cabin, a passenger was heard to exclaim, "Wow! It just missed the highway!"
An old farmer, never married, is approaching his 90th birthday. He announces to his friends that he's going to try to find a wife. Sure enough, after about 6 months, he tells his friends that he's engaged to marry a beautiful 28 year old woman. One friend quips coyly, "You'd better hire yourself a young farmhand, too, to help keep the farm going while you're busy with that new wife of yours."
So, he gets married and hires a farmhand. Six months go by, and a friend stops in to see how the old farmer is doing. "How's the new wife?" the friend asks.
"She's pregnant!" boasts the farmer.
"Oh... she is, is she? And, how's the farmhand doing?" asks the friend, with a little wink.
In a hushed voice the farmer says "The farmhand is working out great. She's pregnant, too!"
A man goes to see his doctor and says "I think my wife is going deaf. But, she refuses to come see you. What should I do?"
"Well" says the doctor, "You could give her the 'poor man's hearing test.'"
"What's that?"
"Well" says the doctor, "You stand about 30 feet away and say something to her. If she doesn't hear, move 20 feet away and say it again. If that doesn't work, move to 10 feet and try again. Keep getting closer until she hears you. Then come back and tell me how close you had to get."
So, the man goes home and from 30 feet away, his wife in the kitchen, asks "What's for dinner?"
Hearing no response, he moves 20 feet away, and repeats the question. Then he asks from 10 feet... 5 feet... and finally right next to her, he asks "What's for dinner?"
She says "I've answered you four times already. Are you going deaf?"
There's this magician working on a small cruise ship. He's been doing his routines every night for a year or two now. The audiences appreciate him, and they change over often enough that he doesn't have to worry too much about new tricks. However, there's this parrot who sits in the back row and watches him night after night, year after year. Finally, the parrot figures out how the tricks work and starts giving it away for the audience. For example, when the magician makes a bouquet of flowers disappear, the parrot squawks "Behind his back! Behind his back!" Well, the magician get really annoyed at this, but he doesn't know what to do. The parrot belongs to the Captain, so he can't just kill it.
One day, the ship springs a leak and sinks. The magician manages to swim to a plank of wood floating by and grabs on. The parrot is sitting on the other end of the plank. The just stare at each other and drift. They drift for 3 days and still don't speak. On the morning of the fourth day, the parrot looks over at the magician and says: "OK, I give up. How did you make the ship disappear?"
Based on what you know about him from history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today?
(1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War.
(2) Advising the President.
(3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
--David Letterman
One day a man comes home from work to find total mayhem at home. The kids were outside still in their pajamas playing in the mud and muck. There were empty food boxes and wrappers all around.
As he proceeded into the house, he found an even bigger mess. Dishes on the counter, dog food spilled on the floor, a broken glass under the table, and a small pile of sand by the back door. The family room was strewn with toys and various items of clothing, and a lamp had been knocked over.
He headed up the stairs, stepping over toys, to look for his wife. He was becoming worried that she may be ill, or that something had happened to her. He found her in the bedroom, still in bed with her pajamas on, reading a book.
She looked up at him, smiled, and asked how his day went. He looked at her bewildered and asked, "What happened here today?"
She again smiled and answered, "You know everyday when you come home from work and ask me what I did today?"
"Yes," was his reply.
She answered, "Well, today I didn't do it!"
A woman accompanied her husband to the doctor's office. After his checkup, the doctor called the wife into his office alone.
He said, "Your husband is suffering from a very severe disease, combined with horrible stress. If you don't do the following, your husband will surely die:
"Each morning, fix him a healthy breakfast. Be pleasant, and make sure he is in a good mood. For lunch make him a nutritious meal he can take to work. And for dinner, prepare an especially nice meal for him. Don't burden him with chores, as this could further his stress. Don't discuss your problems with him; it will only make his stress worse. Try to relax your husband in the evening by wearing lingerie and giving him plenty of back rubs. Encourage him to watch some type of team sporting event on television. And, most importantly make love with your husband several times a week and satisfy his every whim. If you can do this for the next 10 months to a year, I think your husband will regain his health completely."
On the way home, the husband asked his wife, "What did the doctor say?"
"You're going to die," she replied.
A veterinarian was feeling ill and went to see her doctor. The doctor asked her all the usual questions, about symptoms, how long had they been occurring, etc., when she interrupted him:
"Hey look, I'm a vet and I don't need to ask my patients these kind of questions: I can tell what's wrong just by looking." She smugly added, "Why can't you?"
The doctor nodded, stood back, looked her up and down, quickly wrote out a prescription, handed it to her and said, "There you are. Of course, if this doesn't work, we'll have to have you put to sleep."
1. Never raise your hand to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected.
2. I'm not into working out. My philosophy is, no pain, no PAIN.
3. I'm in shape. Round is a shape.
4. I'm desperately trying to figure out why Kamikaze pilots wore helmets.
5. Do illiterate people really get the full effect of alphabet soup?
6. I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.
7. Ever notice when you blow in a dog's face he gets mad at you, but when you take him in a car he sticks his head out the window?
8. Ever notice that anyone going slower than you is an idiot, but anyone going faster is a maniac?
9. They show you how detergents take out bloodstains. I think if you've got a T-shirt with bloodstains all over it, maybe your laundry isn't your biggest problem.
10. Future historians will be able to study at the Jimmy Carter Library, the Gerald Ford Library, the Ronald Reagan Library, the Bill Clinton Adult Bookstore...
A while back, there was a radio commercial that said:
"What would it be like to lose an entire hemisphere of your brain? Tune in to the Discovery Channel and find out!"
Now, that's a little harsh, don't you think?
There was once a young man who, in his youth, professed his desire to become a great writer. When asked to define "great" he said, "I want to write stuff that the whole world will read, stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level. Stuff that will make them scream, cry, and howl in pain and anger!" He now works for Microsoft, writing error messages.
Oscar was an unlucky sap. Having just spent megabucks on a skydiving class, he dove out of the airplane and pulled the ripcord. The chute emerged, tangled, and he cut it free. He then pulled the cord on the reserve chute, and it also was tangled. He prayed to his God and looked down to the ground below. To his amazement, a woman was coming up with equal velocity.
"Hey, you know anything about parachutes?" he shouted to her, as they passed each other.
The reply: "No... you know anything about Coleman stoves?"
A boy's teacher had told the boy that his homework was unsatisfactory and he was to do it again. The kid said to the teacher, "That sucks!"
Upon hearing this reply, the teacher called the kid's mother and told her that he was going to have her son do his homework over, and, he was giving him some additional work because the kid used unacceptable language. The mother replied, "Boy, that sucks. What did he say?"
Descartes walks into a bar, the bartender asks, "Can I get you a drink?"
Descartes replies, "I think not."
--and Descartes ceases to exist.
A little boy is leaving school at the end of the day. As he strolls along the sidewalk, a car pulls up to the curb, and a man winds down the window.
"Hey, kid, I've got candy in my car. Hop in and I'll give it to you."
"No. I'm not going to." The boy walks on. Further down the road, the car pulls over again.
"Hey there kid, if you get in my car, I'll give you all this candy, and a big bottle of cola. How about it?"
"No way! Now leave me alone!" The boy walks on, quickening his pace. The car again pulls over beside him.
"Look, kid, I've got a puppy at home you'd love to see. Get in and I'll take you there. You can have all the candy and the cola on the way. What d'you say to that?"
The boy is getting agitated. He stops walking, and leans down to the car window.
"Look, I don't care what you promise me Dad. I'm NOT riding in your Yugo!"
In a catalog a friend of mine recently received, there was a full page photo of a very pregnant woman wearing a maternity sweater (very fully cut in the lower areas). The description read:
Room for two. A sweater that just seems a natural for now. Soft. Comfortable. Uncomplicated. And unconfining by design. Our wool rollneck, shown here in loden, see page 82 for additional colors and photos. Unisex sizes. $78.
Uh... unisex sizes? Okay...
In the wake of the AOL/Time Warner deal, here are the latest mergers we can expect to see:
A number of years ago, a major meat packer wanted to do a promotional campaign on radio. The idea was to have call-in contests on radio stations throughout the country, and the winners would receive large supplies of sirloin steaks.
The researchers had to come up with a name for the contest. The report they submitted read something like this.
After conducting market research, we have reached the conclusion that the name "High Steaks" would be an appropriate name for the contest. We base this conclusion on interviews and surveys, and we are firmly convinced that the majority of radio listeners will understand the double entendre. The only city where we found a lack of sophistication was Little Rock, Arkansas, and there we recommend that you call the contest "Free Meat."
Never take a beer to a job interview.
Always identify people in your yard before shooting at them.
Don't take a cooler to church services, unless you have enough beer for everybody.
If you have to vacuum the bed, it is time to change the sheets.
Table centerpieces should never be anything prepared by a taxidermist.
Ears should be cleaned in private using one's OWN truck keys.
A physician told this story about her then-four-year-old daughter. On the way to preschool, the doctor had left her stethoscope on the car seat, and her little girl picked it up and began playing with it. 'Be still, my heart' thought the physician friend, 'my daughter wants to follow in my footsteps!' Then the child spoke into the instrument: "Welcome to McDonald's. May I take your order?"
There was this blond guy who saw an ad in the paper for double pane windows. He called and had the company install the windows for him. After a month they sent him a bill and he threw it in the trash. The second month they sent him another bill and he threw it in the trash. He kept doing this until the fourth bill came with a summons to court. When he got to court the judge asked him if the window company had installed windows for him and he replied yes they did. The judge asked if the windows were O. K. and he said they are wonderful. The judge then asked why he had not paid the bill they sent him. He replied "Their ad plainly stated that the windows would pay for themselves within a year."