Dave’s Joke Tree

Hi there!

Here are some little known facts about a well known artist…Enjoy,,,Dave

Even the most ardent art aficionados might not know that Vincent Van Gogh had a really large family. Some of his lesser known relatives were:

His grandfather who moved to Yugoslavia - U. Gogh. His great-great grandniece who wore a miniskirt and liked to dance - Go Gogh. His real obnoxious brother - Please Gogh. His dizzy sister - Verti Gogh. His brother who ate prunes - Gotta Gogh. His cousin who moved to Illinois - Chica Gogh. His uncle, the magician - Wherediddy Gogh. His cousin who lived in Mexico - Amee Gogh. His nephew who drove a stage coach - Wells Far Gogh. His aunt who loved ballroom dancing - Tang Gogh. His uncle, the ornithologist - Flamin Gogh. His cousin, the astrologer - Vir Gogh. His nephew, the Freudian psychoanalyst - E. Gogh. His brother, the alcoholic - Juan Mo T. Gogh.

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.

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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.

Hello all,

Here is some delightful trivia that was forwarded to me from my friend Don Yankovic….Little things you might have wonered about…..Enjoy…..Dave

Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.

If you toss a penny 10000 times, it will not be heads 5000 times, but more like 4950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom.

The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher.

The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F.

If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the horizon will be about three statute miles away.

The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is its plural, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses.

Hydroxydesoxycorticosterone and hydroxydeoxycorticosterones are the largest anagrams.

Los Angeles’s full name is “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula.”

Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than it’s brain.

Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots.

The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie “Barbarella.

Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono.

Ben and Jerry’s sends the waste from making ice cream to local pig farmers to use as feed. Pigs love the stuff, except for one flavor: Mint Oreo.

The company providing the liability insurance for the Republican National Convention in San Diego is the same firm that insured the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic.

Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer.

Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth…and whose shame created the expression for ignominy, “His name is Mudd.”

The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.

The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.

Wilma Flintstone’s maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble’s Maiden name was Betty Jean McBricker.

A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.

The Ramses brand condom is named after the great pharaoh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.

If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die, they need gravity to swallow.

Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra’s “Its A Wonderful Life.”

It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach’s contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.

Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute.

White Out was invented by the mother of Mike Nesmith (Formerly of the Monkees)

Sylvia Miles had the shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar with “Midnight Cowboy.” Her entire role lasted only six minutes.

Charles Lindbergh took only four sandwiches with him on his famous transatlantic flight.

Goethe couldn’t stand the sound of barking dogs and could only write if he had an apple rotting in the drawer of his desk.

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

Gilligan of Gilligan’s Island had a first name that was only used once, on the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy. The skipper’s real name on Gilligan’s Island is Jonas Grumby. It was mentioned once in the first episode on their radio’s newscast about the wreck.

In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.

Playing cards were issued to British pilots in WWII. If captured, they could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape.

The “L.L.” in L.L. Bean stands for Leon Leonwood.

Ivory bar soap floating was a mistake. They had been overmixing the soap formula causing excess air bubbles that made it float. Customers wrote and told how much they loved that it floated, and it has floated ever since.

Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax and correct itself.

The saying “it’s so cold out there it could freeze the balls off a brass monkey” came from when they had old cannons like ones used in the Civil War. The cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid formation, called a brass monkey. When it got extremely cold outside they would crack and break off…Thus the saying.

Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself.

The Sanskrit word for “war” means “desire for more cows.”

A walla-walla scene is one where extras pretend to be talking in the background — when they say “walla-walla” it looks like they are actually talking.

The phrase “rule of thumb” is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn’t beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.

101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don’t die throughout the movie.

‘Stewardesses’ is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

The Baby Ruth candy bar was actually named after Grover Cleveland’s baby daughter, Ruth.

Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex.

Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy.

To escape the grip of a crocodile’s jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs — it will let you go instantly.

Reindeer like to eat bananas.

A group of unicorns is called a blessing. Twelve or more cows are known as a “flink.” A group of frogs is called an army. A group of rhinos is called a crash. A group of kangaroos is called a mob. A group of whales is called a pod. A group of geese is called a gaggle. A group of ravens is called a murder. A group of officers is called a mess. A group of larks is called an exaltation. A group of owls is called a parliament.

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann named the sub-atomic particles known as quarks for a random line in James Joyce, “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”

Every time you lick a stamp, you’re consuming 1/10 of a calorie.

The phrase “sleep tight” derives from the fact that early mattresses were filled with straw and held up with rope stretched across the bedframe. A tight sleep was a comfortable sleep.

“Three dog night” (attributed to Australian Aborigines) came about because on especially cold nights these nomadic people needed three dogs (dingos,actually) to keep from freezing.