Dave’s Joke Tree

Hello to all of you on the tree.

Here is a funny from Jim Smith here in Friday Harbor..Apologies to all who find it “politically or sexually incorrect”, but to paraphrase Lenin, the object of humor, is to humorize!
Last year a friend of mine upgraded GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it’s a memory hog leaving very little system resources for other applications. He is only now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child-Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomena was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application. Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such a way, that it is always lauched at system initialization where it can monitor all other system activity. He’s finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before).

At installation, Wife 1.0 provides no options for the installation of undesired Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 5.8 and the BrotherInLaw Beta release. Also, system performance seems to diminish With each passing day.

Some features he’d like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0:

A “Don’t remind me again” button

A minimize button

An install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 be installed with the option to uninstall at anytime without the loss of cache and other system resources.

An option to run the network driver in promiscuous mode which would allow the systems hardware probe feature to be much more useful.

I myself decided to avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 2.0. Even here, however, I found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 2.0 on top of Girlfriend 1.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 1.0 first. Other users say this is a long standing bug which I should have been aware of. Apparently the versions of Girlfriend have conficts over shared use of the I/O port. You think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now.

To make matters worse, The uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0 doesn’t work very well leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system.

Another thing that sucks — all versions of Girlfriend continually popup little annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0

***** BUG WARNING *****

Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete Money before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.

***** BUG WORK-AROUNDS *****

To avoid the above bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and never run any file transfer applications such as Laplink 6.0. Also, beware of similar shareware applications that have been known to carry viruses that may affect Wife 1.0.

Another solution would be to run Mistress 1.0 via a UseNet provider under an anonymous name. Here again, beware of the viruses which can accidently be downloaded from the UseNet.

Hello Out There,

Here are a couple of things that might put a smile on your face.

“It’s better to have loved a short person and lost, than never to have loved a tall”.

Or, if you are from Texas, ponder this…..

If an infinite number of rednecks riding in an infinite number of pickup trucks, fire an infinite number of shotgun rounds at an infinite number of highway signs, they will eventually produce all the worlds great literary works in Braille.

Hi you all,

This is a contribution from Carolyn in Saint Louis….Thanx, Enjoy….Dave

Top Five Reasons Computers Must Be Female:

5. No one but their creator understands their internal logic.

4. Even your smallest mistakes are immediately committed to memory for future reference.

3. The native language used to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.

2. The message, “Bad Command or Filename,” is about as informative as “If you don’t know why I’m mad at you, then I’m certainly not going to tell you.”

AND THE NUMBER 1 REASON:

1. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half of your paycheck on accessories for it.

Here is a “quote” that was included in a list that I monitor. Just too good to not “share” with all of you…Enjoy…Dave

— begin quote —

There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling, and technicians. The most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians.

Georges Pompidou 1911-1974

— end quote —

Things are getting hairy!!!!, but be of good cheer!!!! Enjoy,,,,drd

“Twas The Night Before Christmas”.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and Santa’s a wreck. How to live in a world that’s politically correct? His workers no longer would answer to “Elves”. “Vertically Challenged” they were calling themselves. And labor conditions at the North Pole were alleged by the union to stifle the soul.

Four reindeer had vanished, without much propriety, released to the wilds by the Humane Society. And equal employment had made it quite clear that Santa had better not use just reindeer. So Dancer and Donner, Comet and Cupid, were placed with 4 pigs, and you know that looked stupid!

The runners had been removed from his sleigh; the ruts were termed dangerous by the E.P.A. And people had started to call for the cops When they heard sled noises on their roof-tops. Second-hand smoke from his pipe had his workers quite frightened. His fur trimmed red suit was called “Unenlightened”.

And to show you the strangeness of life’s ebbs and flows, Rudolf was suing over unauthorized use of his nose and had gone on Geraldo, in front of the nation, demanding millions in over-due compensation.

So, half of the reindeer were gone; and his wife, who suddently said she’d enough of this life, joined a self-help group, packed, and left in a whiz, demanding from now on her title was Ms.

And as for the gifts, why, he’d ne’er a notion that making a choice could cause so much commotion. Nothing of leather, nothing of fur, which meant nothing for him, and nothing for her. Nothing that might be construed to pollute. Nothing to aim, nothing to shoot. Nothing that clamored or made lots of noise. Nothing for just girls, or just for the boys. Nothing that claimed to be gender specific. Nothing that’s warlike or non-pacific.

No candy or sweets ….they were bad for the tooth. Nothing that seemed to embellish a truth. And fairy tales, while not yet forbidden, were like Ken and Barbie, better off hidden. For they raised the hackles of those psychological who claimed the only good gift was one ecological.

No baseball, no football…someone could get hurt; besides, playing sports exposed kids to dirt. Dolls were said to be sexist, and should be passe; And Nintendo would rot your entire brain away.

So Santa just stood there, disheveled, perplexed; he just could not figure out what to do next. He tried to be merry, tried to be gay, but you”ve got to be careful with that word today. his sack was quite empty, limp to the ground; nothing fully acceptable was to be found.

Something special was needed, a gift that he might give to all without angering the left or the right. A gift that would satisfy, with no indecision, each group of people, every religion; every ethnicity, every hue, everyone, everywhere…even you. So here is that gift, it’s price beyond worth… “May you and your loved ones enjoy peace on earth.”

Having a bad day? Check these…….Dave

* A fierce gust of wind blew 45-year-old Vittorio Luise’s car into a river near Naples, Italy, in 1983. He managed to break a window, climb out and swim to shore — where a tree blew over and killed him.

* Mike Stewart, 31, of Dallas was filming a movie in 1983 on the dangers of low-level bridges when the truck he was standing on passed under a low-level bridge — killing him.

* Walter Hallas, a 26-year-old store clerk in Leeds, England, was so afraid of dentists that in 1979 he asked a fellow worker to try to cure his toothache by punching him in the jaw. The punch caused Hallas to fall down, hitting his head, and he died of a fractured skull.

* Two West German motorists had an all-too-literal head-on collision in heavy fog near the small town of Guetersloh. Each was guiding his car at a snail’s pace near the center of the road. At the moment of impact their heads were both out of the windows when they smacked together. Both men were hospitalized with severe head injuries. Their cars weren’t scratched.

* George Schwartz, owner of a factory in Providence, R.I., narrowly escaped death when a 1983 blast flattened his factory except for one wall. After treatment for minor injuries, he returned to the scene to search for files. The remaining wall then collapsed on him, killing him.

* Depressed since he could not find a job, 42-year-old Romolo Ribolla sat in his kitchen near Pisa, Italy, with a gun in his hand threatening to kill himself in 1981. His wife pleaded for him not to do it, and after about an hour he burst into tears and threw the gun to the floor. It went off and killed his wife.

* In 1983, a Mrs. Carson of Lake Kushaqua, N.Y., was laid out in her coffin, presumed dead of heart disease. As mourners watched, she suddenly sat up. Her daughter dropped dead of fright.

* A man hit by a car in New York in 1977 got up uninjured, but laid back down in front of the car when a bystander told him to pretend he was hurt so he could collect insurance money. The car rolled forward and crushed him to death.

* Surprised while burgling a house in Antwerp, Belgium, a thief fled out the back door, clambered over a nine-foot wall, dropped down and found himself in the city prison.

* In 1976 a twenty-two-year-old Irishman, Bob Finnegan, was crossing the busy Falls Road in Belfast, when he was struck by a taxi and flung over its roof. The taxi drove away and, as Finnegan lay stunned in the road, another car ran into him, rolling him into the gutter. It too drove on. As a knot of gawkers gathered to examine the magnetic Irishman, a delivery van plowed through the crowd, leaving in its wake three injured bystanders and an even more battered Bob Finnegan. When a fourth vehicle came along, the crowd wisely scattered and only one person was hit, Bob Finnegan. In the space of two minutes Finnegan suffered a fractured skull, broken pelvis, broken leg, and other assorted injuries. Hospital officials said he would recover.

* While motorcycling through the Hungarian countryside, Cristo Falatti came up to a railway line just as the crossing gates were coming down. While he sat idling, he was joined by a farmer with a goat, which the farmer tethered to the crossing gate. A few moments later a horse and cart drew up behind Falatti, followed in short order by a man in a sports car. When the train roared through the crossing, the horse startled and bit Falatti on the arm. Not a man to be trifled with, Falatti responded by punching the horse in the head. In consequence the horse’s owner jumped down from his cart and began scuffling with the motorcyclist. The horse, which was not up to this sort of excitement, backed away briskly, smashing the cart into the sports car. At this, the sports car driver leaped out of his car and joined the fray. The farmer came forward to try to pacify the three flailing men. As he did so, the crossing gates rose and his goat was strangled. At last report, the insurance companies were still trying to sort out the claims.

* In a classic case of one thing leading to another, seven men aged eighteen to twenty-nine received jail sentences of three to four years in Kingston-on-Thames, England, in 1979 after a fight that started when one of the men threw a french fry at another while they stood waiting for a train.

* Hitting on the novel idea that he could end his wife’s incessant nagging by giving her a good scare, Hungarian Jake Fen built an elaborate harness to make it look as if he had hanged himself. When his wife came home and saw him she fainted. Hearing a disturbance a neighbor came over and, finding what she thought were two corpses, seized the opportunity to loot the place. As she was leaving the room, her arms laden, the outraged and suspended Mr. Fen kicked her stoutly in the backside. This so surprised the lady that she dropped dead of a heart attack. Happily, Mr. Fen was acquitted of manslaughter and he and his wife were reconciled.

* An unidentified English woman, according to the London Sunday Express was climbing into the bathtub one afternoon when she remembered she had left some muffins in the oven. Naked, she dashed downstairs and was removing the muffins when she heard a noise at the door. Thinking it was the baker, and knowing he would come in and leave a loaf of bread on the kitchen table if she didn’t answer his knock, the woman darted into the broom cupboard. A few moments later she heard the back door open and, to her eternal mortification, the sound of footsteps coming toward the cupboard. It was the man from the gas company, coming to read the meter. “Oh,” stammered the woman, “I was expecting the baker.” The gas man blinked, excused himself and departed.

Hi Out There,

What with the focus on the recent election, it is just possible that you may have overlooked this stunning story of the power of the computer revolution.

Enjoy, Dave

IBM Helps Create Global Village

KABINDA, ZAIRE–In a move IBM officers are hailing as a major step in the company’s ongoing worldwide telecommunications revolution, M’wana Ndeti, a member of Zaire’s Bantu tribe, used an IBM global uplink network modem yesterday to crush a nut.

Ndeti, who spent 20 minutes trying to open the nut by hand, easily cracked it open by smashing it repeatedly with the powerful modem.

“I could not crush the nut by myself,” said the 47-year-old Ndeti, who added the savory nut to a thick, peanut-based soup minutes later. “With IBM’s help, I was able to break it.” Ndeti discovered the nut-breaking, 28.8 V.34 modem yesterday, when IBM was shooting a commercial in his southwestern Zaire village. During a break in shooting, which shows African villagers eagerly teleconferencing via computer with Japanese schoolchildren, Ndeti snuck onto the set and took the modem, which he believed would serve well as a “smashing” utensil.

IBM officials were not surprised the longtime computer giant was able to provide Ndeti with practical solutions to his everyday problems. “Our telecommunications systems offer people all over the world global networking solutions that fit their specific needs,” said Herbert Ross, IBM’s director of marketing. “Whether you’re a nun cloistered in an Italian abbey or an Aborigine in Australia’s Great Sandy Desert, IBM has the ideas to get you where you want to go today.”

According to Ndeti, of the modem’s many powerful features, most impressive was its hard plastic casing, which easily sustained several minutes of vigorous pounding against a large stone. “I put the nut on a rock, and I hit it with the modem,” Ndeti said. “The modem did not break. It is a good modem.”

Ndeti was so impressed with the modem that he purchased a new, state-of-the-art IBM workstation, complete with a PowerPC 601 microprocessor, a quad-speed internal CD-ROM drive and three 16-bit ethernet networking connectors. The tribesman has already made good use of the computer system, fashioning a gazelle trap out of its wires, a boat anchor out of the monitor and a crude but effective weapon from its mouse.

“This is a good computer,” said Ndeti, carving up a just-captured gazelle with the computer’s flat, sharp internal processing device. “I am using every part of it. I will cook this gazelle on the keyboard.” Hours later, Ndeti capped off his delicious gazelle dinner by smoking the computer’s 200-page owner’s manual.

IBM spokespeople praised Ndeti’s choice of computers. “We are pleased that the Bantu people are turning to IBM for their business needs,” said company CEO William Allaire. “From Kansas City to Kinshasa, IBM is bringing the world closer together. Our cutting-edge technology is truly creating a global village.”

Here are some stimple seps to remember when you are writeing.

Enjoy, Dave

HOW TO WRITE GOOD (The Write Way) by Sally Bulford (reprinted without permission from somewhere)

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.

2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They’re old hat.)

4. Employ the vernacular.

5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

8. Contractions aren’t necessary.

9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

10. One should never generalize.

11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”

12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

13. Don’t be redundant; don’t use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.

14. Be more or less specific.

15. Understatement is always best.

16. One-word sentences? Eliminate.

17. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

18. The passive voice is to be avoided.

19. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

20. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

21. Who needs rhetorical questions?

22. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

Distinctive patterns are everywhere!

Enjoy, Dave

MATHEMATICIANS hunt elephants by going to Africa, throwing out everything that is not an elephant, and catching one of whatever is left.

EXPERIENCED MATHEMATICIANS will attempt to prove the existence of at least one unique elephant before proceeding to step 1 as a subordinate exercise.

PROFESSORS OF MATHEMATICS will prove the existence of at least one unique elephant and then leave the detection and capture of an actual elephant as an exercise for their graduate students.

COMPUTER SCIENTISTS hunt elephants by exercising Algorithm A:

1. Go to Africa.

2. Start at the Cape of Good Hope.

3. Work northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent

alternately east and west.

4. During each traverse pass,

a. Catch each animal seen.

b. Compare each animal caught to a known elephant.

c. Stop when a match is detected.

EXPERIENCED COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS modify Algorithm A by placing a known elephant in Cairo to ensure that the algorithm will terminate.

ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE PROGRAMMERS prefer to execute Algorithm A on their hands and knees.

HARDWARE ENGINEERS hunt elephants by going to Africa, catching gray animals at random, and stopping when any one of them weighs within plus or minus 15 percent of any previously observed elephant.

ECONOMISTS don’t hunt elephants, but they believe that if elephants are paid enough, they will hunt themselves.

STATISTICIANS hunt the first animal they see N times and call it an elephant.

CONSULTANTS don’t hunt elephants, and many have never hunted anything at all, but they can be hired by the hour to advise those people who do.

OPERATIONS RESEARCH CONSULTANTS can also measure the correlation of hat size and bullet color to the efficiency of elephant-hunting strategies, if someone else will only identify the elephants.

POLITICIANS don’t hunt elephants, but they will share the elephants you catch with the people who voted for them.

LAWYERS don’t hunt elephants, but they do follow the herds around arguing about who owns the droppings.

SOFTWARE LAWYERS will claim that they own an entire herd based on the look and feel of one dropping.

VICE PRESIDENTS OF ENGINEERING, RESEARCH, AND DEVELOPMENT try hard to hunt elephants, but their staffs are designed to prevent it. When the vice president does get to hunt elephants, the staff will try to ensure that all possible elephants are completely prehunted before the vice president sees them.

If the vice president does happen to see a elephant, the staff will:

(1) compliment the vice president’s keen eyesight and

(2) enlarge itself to prevent any recurrence.

SENIOR MANAGERS set broad elephant-hunting policy based on the assumption that elephants are just like field mice, but with deeper voices.

QUALITY ASSURANCE INSPECTORS ignore the elephants and look for mistakes the other hunters made when they were packing the jeep.

SALES PEOPLE don’t hunt elephants but spend their time selling elephants they haven’t caught, for delivery two days before the season opens.

SOFTWARE SALES PEOPLE ship the first thing they catch and write up an invoice for an elephant.

HARDWARE SALES PEOPLE catch rabbits, paint them gray, and sell them as desktop elephants.

PLEASE FORWARD/POST AS APPROPRIATE

The mini-Annals of Improbable Research (”mini-AIR”) Issue Number 1996-10 October, 1996 ISSN 1076-500X Key words: improbable research, science humor, Ig Nobel, AIR, the A free newsletter of tidbits too tiny to fit in The Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), the journal of inflated research and personalities

1996-10-04The 1996 Ig Nobel Prizewinners

Here are the winners of the 1996 Ig Nobel Prizes, presented at the Sixth First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, held at Sanders Theater, Harvard University on Thursday evening, October 3, 1996. The Prizes were handed out by genuine Nobel Laureates Dudley Herschbach, William Lipscomb, and others.

The Prizes honor people whose achievements “cannot or should not be reproduced.”

The event was reluctantly presented by The Annals of Improbable Research (which has been described as “the MAD Magazine of science”). This year it was also co-sponsored by the Harvard Computer Society, Tangents (the Harvard-Radcliffe mathematical bulletin), and the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association.

This year’s ceremony was embroiled in controversy — Sir Robert May, the science advisor to the British government, had asked the organizers to stop giving Ig Nobel Prizes to scientists, even when the scientists want to receive them. Nevertheless, this year’s Ig Nobel roster included yet another prizewinner from England.

This year’s ceremony also featured the world premiere of “Lament Del Cockroach,” a mini-opera starring mezzo-sopranos Margot McLaughlin and scientist/Supermodel Symmetra as cockroaches and the Nobel Laureates as insects eager to mate. At the opera’s conclusion, a meteorite from Mars eradicated the roaches while three plants sang Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus (”Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The roaches are gone!”) and Earth’s other life forms danced the macarena.

Here are the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize winners:

BIOLOGY Anders Baerheim and Hogne Sandvik of the University of Bergen, Norway, for their tasty and tasteful report, “Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches.” [The report was published in “British Medical Journal,” vol. 309, Dec 24-31, 1994, p. 1689.] Drs. Baerheim and Sandvik sent a videotaped acceptance speech, and watched the ceremony live on the Internet.

MEDICINE James Johnston of R.J. Reynolds, Joseph Taddeo of U.S. Tobaccco, Andrew Tisch of Lorillard, William Campbell of Philip Morris, and the late Thomas E. Sandefur, Jr., chairman of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. for their unshakable discovery, as testified before the US Congress, that nicotine is not addictive.

PHYSICS Robert Matthews of Aston University, England, for his studies of Murphy’s Law, and especially for demonstrating that toast always falls on the buttered side. [The report, “Tumbling toast, Murphy’s Law and the fundamental constants” was published in “European Journal of Physics,” vol.16, no.4, July 18, 1995, p. 172-6.] Professor Matthews sent an audiotaped acceptance speech.

PEACE Jacques Chirac, President of France, for commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the Pacific.

PUBLIC HEALTH Ellen Kleist of Nuuk, Greenland and Harald Moi of Oslo, Norway, for their cautionary medical report “Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable Doll.” [The report was published in “Genitourinary Medicine,” vol. 69, no. 4, Aug. 1993, p. 322.] Dr. Moi traveled from Oslo to Cambridge — at his own expense — to accept the Prize. During the trip, Dr. Moi also delivered a lecture at Harvard Medical School about his achievement.

CHEMISTRY George Goble of Purdue University, for his blistering, world record time for igniting a barbeque grill — three seconds, using charcoal and liquid oxygen. Professor Goble’s colleague Joe Cychosz traveled to Cambridge to accept the Prize.

BIODIVERSITY Chonosuke Okamura of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan, for discovering the fossils of dinosaurs, horses, dragons, princesses, and more than 1000 other extinct “mini-species,” each of which is less than 1/100 of an inch in length. [For details see the series “Reports of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory,” published by the Okamura Fossil Laboratory in Nagoya, Japan during the 1970s and 1980s.]

LITERATURE The editors of the journal “Social Text,” for eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist. [The paper was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Alan Sokal, “Social Text,” Spring/Summer 1996, pp. 217-252.]

ECONOMICS Dr. Robert J. Genco of the University of Buffalo for his discovery that “financial strain is a risk indicator for destructive periodontal disease.”

ART Don Featherstone of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for his ornamentally evolutionary invention, the plastic pink flamingo. Mr. Featherstone traveled to Cambridge to accept the Prize.

The ceremony also included an auction of plaster casts of the left feet of four Nobel Laureates, and several tributes to the concept of “Biodiversity.” Thirteen-year old Kate Eppers, spokesperson for the Committee for Bacterial Rights, said:

“We live in a diverse society. Our biggest ethnic groups are not the Asians, the Africans or the Caucasians. Our biggest ethnic groups are the Bacteria. I used to wash my hands every day. My mom made me. But then I learned about ethnic cleansing. Every time you wash your hands, you wipe out billions and billions of Bacteria. That’s not fair. Bacteria have rights, too. So let’s be grown-ups about this. When mom asks you to wash your hands, just say No.”

Further details — including shocking photos — will be posted in our web site (http://www.improb.com) during the coming months.