Silent Treatment
A man and his wife were having some problems at home and were giving each
other the silent treatment.Later, the man
realized that he would need his wife to wake him at 5:00 am for an early
morning business flight.
Not wanting to
be the first to break the silence, he wrote on a piece paper, "Please wake me
at 5:00 am." He left it where he knew she would find it.
The next morning
the man woke up, only to discover it was 9:00 am and he had missed his flight.
Furious, he was
about to go to see why his wife hadn't wakened him when he noticed a piece of
paper by the bed. The paper said, "It is 5:00 am. WAKE UP!"
BACK
Anger vs. Exasperation
A girl
who was writing a paper for school and asked her father, "What’s the
difference between anger and exasperation?"
The father replied, "It is mostly a matter of degree. Let me show you what I
mean." With that, the father went to the telephone and dialed a number at
random. To the man who answered the phone, he said, "Hello, is Melvin there?"
The man answered, "There is no one living here named Melvin" and hung up.
The father immediately dialed the same number again. "Hello, is Melvin there?"
he asked.
"Now look here!" came the heated reply. "You just called this number, and I
told you that there is no Melvin here! The receiver was slammed down hard.
The father turned to his daughter and said, "That was anger. Now I'll show you
what exasperation means."
He dialed the same number, and a violent voice roared, "HELLO!"
The father calmly said, "Hello, this is Melvin. Have there been any calls for
me?"
BACK
Last Minute Gift
It was Christmas Eve and Ron had still not bought anything for his wife. On
his way home, he stopped at a department store. Walking up to the perfume
counter, Ron said, "I'm looking for a nice perfume for my wife for Christmas."
The cosmetics
clerk said, "Certainly, we have several very fine perfumes." And she proceeded
to show him a bottle of "Elegance" for $75 an ounce. "That's a bit out of my
price range," Ron said.
The clerk
returned with another perfume for only $35 an ounce. "That's still quite a
lot," he grumbled.
So the clerk
brought out a bottle of "Smells Like Heaven", only $20 an ounce. At this, Ron
grew angry and exclaimed, "Can't you show me something cheap?"
The clerk handed
him a mirror. BACK
Davebarryisms 3
- It is a good
idea to "shop around" before you settle on a doctor. Ask about the condition
of his Mercedes. Ask about the competence of his mechanic. Don't be shy!
After all, you're paying for it.
- It is a
scientific fact that your body will not absorb cholesterol if you take it
from another person's plate.
- It is a
well-known fact that although the public is fine when taken individually,
when it forms itself into large groups, it tends to act as though it has one
partially consumed Pez tablet for a brain.
- Public Art is
defined as art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own
personal money.
- Karate is a
form of martial art in which people who have had years and years of training
can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the
history of the world.
- Life is
anything that dies when you stomp on it.
- Magnetism, as
you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items
to be attracted to refrigerators.
- My therapist
told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So
far today, I have finished two bags of M&Ms and a cake. I feel better
already. BACK
Dollars & Sense
Dear Dad,
$chool i$ really great. I am making lot$ of friend$ and $tudying very hard.
With all my $tuff, I $imply can't think of anything I need, $o if you would
like, you can ju$t $end me a card, a$ I would love to hear from you.
Love,
$on
Dear Son,
I kNOw that astroNOmy, ecoNOmics, and oceaNOgraphy are eNOugh to keep even an
hoNOr student busy. Do NOt forget that the pursuit of kNOwledge is a NOble
task, and you can never study eNOugh.
Love,
Dad BACK
Immortal Pun-ishment
A
research group was engaged in a study of mammal longevity. They discovered a
species of porpoise off the coast of Africa. They theorized that, if fed just
the right food, this porpoise could live forever.
They scoured the world for a food source that would fit the bill. It was
finally narrowed to a rare species of mynah bird found only in Tanzania. A
team of researchers was sent straight away to gather a specimen.
The team finally spotted the rare mynah perched in a baobob tree. As they
approached, they found the tree was surrounded by a pride of hungry lions
which precluded any attempt to approach and climb the tree.
A
suggestion was made that the lions might be manageable if they could be fed. A
couple of goats were sacrificed to the effort. The lions devoured the ms and
lay down to digest their meal.
A team member then gingerly tiptoed past the lions, climbed the tree, and had
little difficulty capturing one of the mynah birds. He climbed back down,
walked past the lions to rejoin the group when a park ranger appeared and
arrested him for "Transporting a mynah across sated lions for immortal
porpoises." BACK
Email Auto-Replies
1. I am
currently out of the office at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail
to get the position. Please be prepared for my mood.
2. You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the
office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn't have received anything at all.
3. Sorry to have missed you, but I'm at the doctor's having my brain and heart
removed so I can be promoted to our management team.
4. I will be unable to delete all the emails you send me until I return from
vacation. Please be patient, and your mail will be deleted in the order it was
received.
5. Thank you for your email. Your credit card has been charged $5.99 for the
first 10 words and $1.99 for each additional word in your message.
6. The email server is unable to verify your server connection. Your message
has not been delivered. Please restart your computer and try sending again.
(The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see who did this over and
over and over.)
7. Thank you for your message, which has been added to a queuing system. You
are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in
approximately 19 weeks.
8. I'm thinking about what you've just sent me. Please wait by your PC for my
response.
9. I've run away to join a different circus.
10. I will be out of the office for the next two weeks for medical reasons.
When I return, please refer to me as "Lucille" instead of Jim. BACK
Insulting
With Class
There was a time when words were used beautifully. These glorious insults are
from an era when cleverness with words was still valued.
An exchange between
Churchill and Lady Astor: She said, "If you were my husband, I'd give you
poison." He said, "If you were my wife, I'd take it."
Gladstone, a Member of
Parliament, said to Benjamin Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the
gallows or of some unspeakable disease." "That depends, sir," said Disraeli,
"On whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."
"He had delusions of
adequacy." Walter Kerr
"He has all the virtues
I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
Winston Churchill
"A modest little person,
with much to be modest about."
Winston Churchill
"I have never killed a
man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
Clarence Darrow
"He has never been known
to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." William Faulkner
(about Ernest Hemingway)
"Poor Faulkner. Does he
really think big emotions come from big words?" Ernest Hemingway (about
William Faulkner)
"Thank you for sending
me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."
Moses Hadas
"He can compress the
most words into the smallest idea of any man I know."
Abraham Lincoln
"I didn't attend the
funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
Mark Twain
"He has no enemies, but
is intensely disliked by his friends."
Oscar Wilde
George Bernard Shaw to
Winston Churchill "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new
play; bring a friend...if you have one." Winston Churchill, in response,
"Cannot possibly attend first night. Will attend second night...if there is
one."
"I feel so miserable
without you, it's almost like having you here."
Stephen Bishop
"He is a self-made man
and worships his creator." John
Bright
"I've just learned about
his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
Irvin S. Cobb
"He is not only dull
himself, he is the cause of dullness in others."
Samuel Johnson
"He is simply a shiver
looking for a spine to run up"
Paul Keating
"There's nothing wrong
with you that reincarnation won't cure."
Jack E. Leonard
"He has the attention
span of a lightning bolt." Robert
Redford
"They never open their
mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge."
Thomas Brackett Reed
"He loves nature in
spite of what it did to him."
Forrest Tucker
"Why do you sit there
looking like an envelope without any address on it?"
Mark Twain
"His mother should have
thrown him away and kept the stork."
Mae West
"Some cause happiness
wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
Oscar Wilde
"He uses statistics as a
drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination."
Andrew Lang
"He has Van Gogh's ear
for music." Billy Wilder
"I've had a perfectly
wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." Groucho Marx BACK
Davebarryisms 4
Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for
example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.
People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you
to share yours with them.
Puns are little plays on words that a certain breed of person loves to spring
on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that
he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth
now that Benjamin Franklin is dead.
Sharks are as tough as
those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in
January, only more intelligent.
Software: These programs
give instruction to the CPU, which processes billions of tiny facts called
bytes, and within a fraction of a second it sends you an error message that
requires you to call the customer-support hot line and be placed on hold for
approximately the life-span of a caribou.
Some archeologists
believe that Stonehenge - the mysterious arrangement of enormous elongated
stones in England - is actually a crude effort by the Druids to build a
computing device.
Stuffwise, we are not a lean operation. We're the kind of people who, if we
were deciding what absolute minimum essential items we'd need to carry in our
backpacks for the final, treacherous ascent to the summit of Mount Everest,
would take along aquarium filters, just in case.
Talking about golf is always boring. Playing golf can be interesting, but not
the part where you try to hit the little ball; only the part where you drive
the cart.
Technically, Windows is an "operating system" which means that it supplies
your computer with the basic commands that it needs to suddenly, with no
warning whatsoever, stop operating.
Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on
virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I
got a good job in journalism.
The Democrats seem to be
basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they
have the management skills of celery.
The Internet is a giant
international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which
I mean, "people without lives." We don't care. We have each other.
The Internet is the most
important single development in the history of human communication since the
invention of call waiting.
The primary function of
the government is - and here I am quoting directly from the U.S. Constitution
- "to spew out paper."
The question is, why are
politicians so eager to be President? What is it about the job that makes it
worth revealing, on national television, that you have the ethical standards
of a slime-coated piece of industrial waste? BACK
|