Intellectual Jokes

Alexei Sayle told this one during an episode of The Young Ones back in the 1980s. Talking of his rebellious days, he said, "I used to have 'WAR' tattooed on this hand and 'PEACE' tattooed on the other hand and 'THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV' tattooed down me spine". I wonder how many of the audience actually got that one.

The are 10 kinds of people in the world; those that understand binary arithmetic and those that don't. Some people say you can't pronounce the 10 as "ten" if you tell this joke out loud but I disagree.

One atom says to another, "I think I've lost an electron", and the other says, "Are you sure?". The first one replies, "I'm positive".

Did you hear about the dyslexic, agnostic insomniac? He lay awake at nights wondering if there really was a dog.

A Buddhist monk goes into a burger bar and says, "Make me one with everything".

A programmer’s partner asks him to pick up a loaf of bread and, if they have eggs, get a dozen. The programmer comes home with a dozen loaves of bread.

More to follow when they come into my head...

Some of me poems

Not poems that I've written but ones that happen to be in my head right now.

Twas brillig
And the slithy toves
Did gire and gimble
In the mire

I think Edward Lear wrote that one. Or was it John Winston, sorry, Ono, Lennon, he who created the Rinkle Dinklebone character. And then there's this one:

Hitler has only got one ball
The other is in the Free Trade Hall
His mother sat on the other
And now he hasn't got any at all

This one came into my head while I was waiting for the traffic lights to change and I noticed that the car in front of me was a Mercedes, the make that Adolf Hitler used to get driven around in. I wonder if people who own Mercedes' cars know this or even care. Same goes for fashion person Hugo Boss. I heard on TV recently that he designed the uniforms for the soldiers of the Third Reich and even for Adolf and his entourage.

Moving along, this is the filthiest limerick I know:

There was a young man from Nantucket
Whose dick was so long he could suck it
He said with a grin
As he chewed his foreskin
If my arse was a cunt I could fuck it

This is a mathematical one:

There was a young man from Bengal
Who had an octagonal ball
The square of the weight
Of his penis plus eight
Was four fifths of nine tenths of fuck all

And this is my favourite, very politically correct:

There was a young lady from Bude
Who went for a swim in a lake
A man in a punt
Stuck a pole in her ear
And said, "Hey, you can't swim here, it's private"

Boom boom.

The only real poem I can quote is The Rainbow by William Wordsworth:

My heart leaps up
When I behold
A rainbow in the sky
So was it when my life began
So is it now I am a man
So be it when I shall grow old
Or let me die
And I would hope my thoughts to be
Bound each to each by natural piety

Or something like that. Check it on Wikipedia and tell me I'm wrong.

We had to learn that peom at school for English Literature. We also had to learn Samson Agonistes but I can't remember a word of that.

One of my favourite poems is Annabel Lee by Edgar Allen Poe. I particulary like this part:

And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee
It's a weird poem. Check it out. And check out The Bells, another of my favourites, not just because it is heavily onomatopoeic but because it includes the word, "tintinnabulation".

Max Bygraves - Reached the end of his lollipop

As you get older, each year brings a list of the deaths of the people you grew up listening to. Some are untimely like John Lennon and Minnie Riperton but this year was the turn of Max Bygraves. He had a good innings and brought us the likes of, "You need hands", "Tulips from Amsterdam" and the best of the lot, "When you come to the end of your lollipop". A classic if ever there was one. How did it go?

When you come to the end of your lollipop
To the end, to the end of your lollipop
When you come to the end of your lollipop
Plop goes your heart

Gilly oh golly how I love my lolly
Right down to the very last lick
When you are through with it
What can you do with it
All you have left is a stick

When you come to the end of your lollipop
To the end, to the end of your lollipop
When you come to the end of your lollipop
Plop goes your heart

Gilly oh golly how I love my lolly
Oh winter and summer and spring
When you are done it's about as much fun
As a yoyo without any string

When you come to the end of your lollipop
and so on....

They don't write them like they used to.

And that brings to mind Tommy Cooper.

Don't jump off the roof dad
You'll make a hole in the yard
Mother just planted petunias
The weeding and seeding was hard
If you must end it all dad
Then you can give us a break
Just take a walk to the park dad
And there you can jump in the lake

Max and Tommy, we'll miss you, not like that...like that.

Superstition in the 21st Century

I recently moved house and spent the best part of a day phoning various organisations to advise them of my change of address. Most of the time was spent listening to elevator music and being told that my phone call was valuable and I would be attended to by the next available operator. It was an experience I would not want to go through again in the near future.

So, I was quite surprised while walking the dog this afternoon to see that superstition is so powerfully alive and well in the 21st century that one person self inflicted the address changing ordeal on his or her self by changing the number of their address from 13 to 12A.

Why would you bother? The number on the door might be 12A but the house it still the 13th one in the block. All because 13 people were present at the Last Supper. The Greeks have a word for it: triskadekaphobia. That was the subject of a question at a quiz night I attended many years ago.

Fibonacci Redeemed?

They say that the numbers in the Fibonacci Sequence occur frequently in nature. For example the number of spirals in a sunflower head. I decided to test the theory by keeping track of the number of segments in the mandarin that I have for my morning break each day. It was anything but a Fibonacci number; it was one of 9, 10, 11 or 12. This went on for a few months until today when my mandarin contained 13 segments. It doesn't actually prove anything at all. Like black swans.

Here's a photo of the 13 segments:

One for the climate change deniers

Today, Hobart had its hottest day on record today and Tasmania is ablaze. This picture is from the Australian ABC web site.



I work with a number of recent graduates mainly from engineering disciplines. They all refuse to believe that climate change is happening and would like to convince me that weather patterns are cyclical (something to do with sun spots) and that we are currently going through the hot part of the cycle. When I ask them if that means the disputed island between India and Bangla Desh that disappeared in 2010 will soon reappear they don't have an answer. You can read about the disappearing island here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Moore_/_South_Talpatti

If young people don't believe that climate change is happening then what hope is there for the future?
It will be interesting to see how many more records are broken this year.

It's nice to see the people cooling off on the beach in the 41 degrees heat.

And the band played on.

Awesome Evolution

Isn't nature amazing? I found this little creature on my back doorstep recently and my first thought was, "I'm not eating that", and I would imagine many birds, lizards and little furry things hopping around my backyard might have thought the same thing. It wasn't so much the big cute eyes and the fact that it looked like it was smiling at me but that pointed thing on its rear end looked a bit dangerous.

But the best was yet to come. After we got tired of staring at each other, the creature decided to come out of the closet and reveal its true self. Its real head was actually tucked away with lots of legs inside the fake head with the big eyes. Its probably somewhere in my vegetable patch demolishing my lettuces right now.

I hope somebody can tell me what it is and whether or not it is poisonous.