Joke 31

Q. What do you call a line of rabbits walking backwards?

A. A receding hareline.

Another Favourite Number

After I made the prompt post yesterday, the Hub and I had the following conversation:

Me: My favourite number is 134 million.

Hub: Why?

Me: Because that’s how much I’m going to win in Friday’s Euro Lottery Rollover.

Hub: My favourite number is £1.90

Me: Why?

Hub: Because that’s how much you need to scrape together if you want to add it to the kitty to have enough to buy a ticket.*

We don’t have a lot of money but we have a lot of laughs.

*The Euro Lottery costs £2

The Ones I Couldn’t Bring Myself To Answer

What keeps you up at night?  Pegs.

 

 

What gets better with age?

My capacity for poking fun at myself.  And the Hub.  That goes without saying.  I don’t know why I said that.

   

Conduct an interview for your blog.

TLH: So, WordPress Prompter, would you characterise some of your prompts as naffnaffnaff?

TLH: Sorry, readers; the WordPress Prompter has stormed out of the room.

Madam & Eve: An Antidote To Sentiment

http://www.madamandeve.co.za/

I thought I would plug an old favourite.  The above cartoon is South African.  I have been a fan since it came out in 1992, poking fun at Apartheid and all kinds of South Africans, as well as world events.  My favourite cartoon is the one where Mother Anderson is stockpiling beans, water and candles before the first democratic election in 1994, so they can live in the cellar for three months in the event of civil war breaking out.  Eve, considering the beans, says, ‘If ever there was an argument for peace, this is it.’

 

http://www.madamandeve.co.za/cartoons/me004173.jpg

 

I have been buying the collections since the first one cost R30 in CNA.  They weren’t famous then and a good copy sells for about R300 now.  I wouldn’t part with mine; it’s a narrative of South Africa’s recent history.  And hilarious. 

 

http://www.madamandeve.co.za/cartoons/me001379.jpg

There’s a link to the right if you fancy a look.

http://www.madamandeve.co.za/cartoons/me003930.gif

And A Lighter Approach…

            

My Boxing Day

 

 

Some Snow Facts

Alexandra Park the day before it really snowed. That white bit in front is the frozen reservoir.

• The tops of clouds must be below 0 degrees Celsius/32 degrees Farenheit for snow. 
• Snow can come from any cloud that is layered.

 

• Technically, snow is a mineral, like iron and salt.
• Snow appears white because its crystals act as prisms, breaking up the light of the sun into the entire spectrum of color.  It is actually transparent.

•  A single snowstorm can drop 40 million tons of snow, carrying the energy equivalent to 120 atom bombs.
• Most snowflakes are less than one-half inch across. The largest snowflake recorded was fifteen inches in diameter.

 

 

• The most snow produced in a single snowstorm is 4.8 meters (15.75ft) at Mt Shasta Ski Bowl, California (USA) between 13 and 19 February 1959.
• It is a fallacy that no two snowflakes are alike (wouldn’t you hate to be the guy given the job of finding that one out?)

• According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest snowflake on record measured 38cm wide and 20cm thick. It was observed in Montana, USA in 1887 and described by witnesses as “larger than a milk pan”.
• Mt Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is the only permanent snow cap within sight of the equator.

I hate to be the one to say it, but snow is dull.  I Googled ‘interesting facts about snow’ and this is the best I could find.  I wanted to call this post ‘Interesting Facts About Snow’ (why waste a copy & paste?), but I was afraid I’d be prosecuted under the Trades Description Act. 

If you know anything about snow that actually is interesting, please share it with us.

 

Hee Hee Hee

Image via Wikipedia

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

To bring you down, here’s a haiku for Writer’s Island, where the theme is LAST REDWOOD: 

After Armageddon 

The last Redwood eyed
denuded earth; saddened, sighed,
‘Alas, I’m dead wood.’ 

   

* 

   

However, in the spirit of my blog’s name, here’s something to make you laugh: 

 

 

  

  

 

 

Cartoon Quotes

More from my clippings notebook (I’m running out now so I’ll have to blog about something original in future):

Dilbert quotes, from an old Sky TV magazine:

• Accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue
• Last night I lay in bed looking up at the sky and stars and I thought to myself, ‘Where the heck is the ceiling?’
• You’re slower than a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter
• Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience
• Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups

This next one is from Hagar the Horrible. It’s not that funny but it struck a chord with me because I read it when the Hub was travelling sub-Saharan Africa for weeks at a time and I was trying to think of reasons why that might be a good thing:

Helga: (Sigh) Being the wife of a traveling man is a trade-off…He gets to visit the great cities of Europe for three weeks…and I get a clean house for three weeks!

Only, the house was never clean for three weeks because I always re-arranged the furniture when he was away and it would take days at a time to do each room and the house would be upside down. He would come back and be walking into things and getting into the wrong side of the bed for ages afterwards. Served him right for leaving me alone with a baby and rubbish telly.

An old favourite from Hi And Lois. I can’t remember the characters’ names but it doesn’t really matter:

Mum (enters room where children are watching television): This program is awfully violent.

Boy: It’s just an animated cartoon, Mom, made up of thousands of drawings. The characters aren’t real so nobody gets hurt!

(Mum leaves)

Boy: That’s what I call my “Disney Defense.”

Some Peanuts quotes; these are from the website http://www.allgreatquotes.com :

Sally: I think I’ve discovered the secret of life – you just hang around until you get used to it.

Charlie Brown: Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.

Charlie Brown again: Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, “Why me?”, then a voice answers “Nothing personal, your name just happened to come up.”

My personal favourite, unattributed: If I were given the opportunity to present a gift to the next generation, it would be the ability for each individual to learn to laugh at himself.

Past Notes

I’m still busy with the Big Clean – hence the late post – but it has turned up a few gems, like a set of jewellery I thought I had lost, and an old notebook. It’s not a notebook like my present notebooks (no writing in it), but it has newspaper clippings stuck in that I collected over a couple of years. I thought I would share a few of them with you. Being uneducated at that point, I didn’t always think to quote the source, but I will do my best. I don’t think it’s plagiarism because I am telling you before I start that I did not write them.

Enjoy!

I’m starting with an apposite cartoon called Wright Angles, from a South African newspaper, probably the Johannesburg Star, in the early Nineties:

Toady: I hope you’ll excuse the way our kitchen looks. It’s a mess.

Friend: Well, you know what they say, Toady. “A woman’s work is never done.”

Toady: In my mother’s case, it’s because she never does it.

From The Star, 24/10/95:

HOW TO WRITE GOOD

• Don’t repeat yourself over and over again
• No verbless sentences
• Elliptical circumlocutions obfuscate substantive meaning
• Collective nouns is always a singular subject for the verb
• Tautology is a huge great big error
• Foreign language usage is de trop
• Classical allusions are as useless as the labours of Sisyphus
• Probably, generally speaking, the problem in most writing is, in the main part, the frequently encountered inability of most writers to make a definite point succinctly
• Journalese stinks
• Motivate leveraged-up empowerment with politically correct buzzwords

I think this next one might have come from The Sunday Telegraph, but I’m not certain of it and I don’t know the date or who wrote it. I kept it because the last bit makes me laugh out loud:

I hugely enjoyed the leading article in Thursday’s Guardian, entitled “Vote him out”. But who were the paper’s reader’s being advised to vote against? Why, Slobodan Milosevic. I was not aware that the newspaper had many readers among the Yugoslav electorate. And if it does, I wonder how they would respond to the advice from 119 Farringdon Road, EC1, which was that they should accept Mr Milosevic’s request for a second ballot in the presidential elections (he having failed to rig the first one properly). The Guardian‘s stern exhortation reminds me of the leader from a provincial Irish newspaper in 1914: “We give this solemn warning to Kaiser Wilhelm: The Skibereen Eagle has its eye on you.”