Laughter is the best medicine.
A few favorite jokes...
About a century or two ago, the Pope decided that all the Jews had to leave Vatican City. Naturally there was a big uproar from the Jewish community. The Pope made a deal. He would have a religious debate with a member of the Jewish community. If the Pope won, the Jews would have to leave.
The Jews realized they had no choice. They chose a middle-aged man named Moishe to represent them. Moishe asked for one addition to the debate - to make it more interesting, neither side would be allowed to talk. The Pope reluctantly agreed.
The day of the great debate came. Moishe and the Pope sat opposite one another for a full minute before the Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers. Moishe looked back at him and raised one finger. The Pope waved his fingers in a circle around his head. Moishe pointed at the ground where he sat. The Pope pulled out a wafer and a glass of wine. Moishe pulled out an apple. The Pope stood up and said, "I give up. This man is too good. The Jews can stay."
An hour later, the cardinals were all around the Pope asking him what happened. The Pope said, "First I held up three fingers, representing the Trinity. He held up one finger to remind me there was still one God common to both our religions. Then I waved my fingers around to show him that God was all around us. He responded by pointing to the ground and showing that God was also right here with us. I pulled out the wine and wafer to show that God absolves us from our sins. He pulled out an apple to remind me of original sin. He had an answer for everything! What could I do?"
Meanwhile, the Jewish community had crowded around Moishe. "What happened?" they asked. "Well," said Moishe, "first he said to me that we had three days to get out. I told him that not one of us was leaving. Then he said the whole city would be cleared of Jews. I told him we were staying right here." "And then?" asked a woman.
"I don't know," said Moishe. "He took out his lunch, so I took out mine."
note:
I originally found this at http://dharmathecat.com
A Zen teacher saw five of his students returning from the market, riding their bicycles. When they arrived at the monastery and had dismounted, the teacher asked the students, "Why are you riding your bicycles?"
The first student replied, "The bicycle is carrying the sack of potatoes. I am glad that I do not have to carry them on my back!" The teacher praised the first student, "You are a smart boy! When you grow old, you will not walk hunched over like I do."
The second student replied, "I love to watch the trees and fields pass by as I roll down the path!" The teacher commended the second student, "Your eyes are open, and you see the world."
The third student replied, "When I ride my bicycle, I am content to chant nam myoho renge kyo." The teacher gave praise to the third student, "Your mind will roll with the ease of a newly trued wheel."
The fourth student replied, "Riding my bicycle, I live in harmony with all sentient beings." The teacher was pleased, and said to the fourth student, "You are riding on the golden path of non-harming."
The fifth student replied, "I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle." The teacher sat at the feet of the fifth student and said, "I am your student!"
(Following is an actual question from a Texas A&M class.)
Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?
Support your answer with proof.
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools off when it expands and heats up when it is compressed) or some variant. One student however, wrote the following:
"First we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving.
I think we can safely assume that once a soul gets into Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.
As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions. Some state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions, and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to Hell.
With birth and death rates what they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.
Now, we look at the rate of change in the volume of Hell, because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand as souls are added.
This gives two possibilities:
(1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter, then the temperature and pressure will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
(2) Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the rate at which souls are entering, then the temperature will drop until Hell freezes over.
So which is it?
If we accept the postulate given to me by Ms. Sheryl Atkinson during my freshman year, that "It will be a cold night in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having sexual relations with her, then (2) cannot be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic."
The student got the only "A".
Spoiler:
[This is NOT! an actual event... but it is still fun!]
Heaven is where:
Hell is where:
A man sees a sign in front of a house "Talking Dog for Sale."
He rings the bell and the owner tells him the dog is in the backyard.
The man goes into the backyard and sees a black mutt just sitting there.
"You talk?" he asks.
"Yep," the mutt replies.
"So, what's your story?"
The mutt looks up and says, "Well, I discovered this gift pretty young and I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA about my gift, and in no time they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies eight years running. The jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn't getting any younger and I wanted to settle down. So I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security work, mostly wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings there and was awarded a batch of medals. Had a wife, a mess of puppies, and now I'm just retired."
The man is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.
The owner says, "Ten dollars."
The man says, "This dog is amazing. Why on earth are you selling him, so cheap?"
The owner replies, "He's such a liar. He didn't do any of that stuff!"
This Louisiana game warden had been keeping an eye on the fishing docks, when after about a week he noticed that Boudreaux had been coming back every day with a boat full of fish. One day he starts to talk to Boudreaux as he's pulling his boat in. The warden says, "Boudreaux, I been watchin you. I notice every day dat you been comin' in wid a full load of fish. You must be havin some good luck? Eh?" Boudreaux answers, "Mais yah, dem fish is easy to catch." The game warden replies, "Well listen. I got me a day off comin next Saturday. I was wondring, maybe I could go an fish wid you?" Boudreaux replies, "Mais, dat be no problem. Jus make shore you be here at dat 6 a.m. sharp. Cause I gonna leave dis dock wid or widout you." "Mais, I'll be here, don't chu worry none about dat," answers the warden.
Saturday comes and the game warden is waiting at the dock when Boudreaux pulls up and puts his boat in the water. The game warden gets in and Boudreaux proceeds to drive the boat out to the middle of the lake. At this point, Boudreaux shuts off the engine and lets the boat glide to a stop. The game warden, who'd been curious anyway, says to Boudreaux, "Mais Boudreaux, I been lookin aroun dis boat, and I notice dat all you don brought was dis here ice-chest and dat little brown paper bag under your seat... you don't even got no fishin pole!" Boudreaux answers, "Mais, dat be because dats all I need." And Boudreaux proceeds to pull a stick of dynamite out of the brown paper bag, light it, and throw it in the water. Soon afterward the dynamite explodes, and all the fish in the area, being stunned, float to the top of the water.
The warden, by this time, can't believe his eyes. Half yelling, he says, "Mais Boudreaux! I know we been knowin each udder for a long time, but man, you can't be doing dat! especially wid me being a game warden n all. Mais, dat's agin de law in a big way dat is!" Boudreaux, without saying a word, calmly reaches down into the bag (with the warden still rattling off), pulls out another stick, lights it, and then hands it to the warden saying, "You gonna talk, or you gonna fish?"
expert (ek'spûrt) n. - "x" is an unknown factor, "spurt" is a drip under pressure.
A rather inhibited engineer finally splurged on a luxury cruise to the Caribbean. It was the "craziest" thing he had ever done in his life. Just as he was beginning to enjoy himself, a hurricane roared upon the huge ship, capsizing it like a child's toy. Somehow the engineer, desperately hanging on to a life preserver, managed to wash ashore on a secluded island.
Outside of beautiful scenery, a spring-fed pool, bananas and coconuts, there was little else. He lost all hope and for hours on end, sat under the same palm tree. One day, after several months had passed, a gorgeous woman in a small rowboat appeared.
"I'm from the other side of the island," she said. "Were you on the cruise ship, too?"
"Yes, I was," he answered. "But where did you get that rowboat?"
"Well, I whittled the oars from gum tree branches, wove the reinforced gunwale from palm branches, and made the keel and stern from a Eucalyptus tree."
"But, what did you use for tools?" asked the man.
"There was a very unusual strata of alluvial rock exposed on the south side of the island. I discovered that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. Anyhow, that's how I got the tools. But, enough of that," she said. "Where have you been living all this time? I don't see any shelter."
"To be honest, I've just been sleeping on the beach," he said.
"Would you like to come to my place?" the woman asked. The engineer nodded dumbly.
She expertly rowed them around to her side of the island, and tied up the boat with a handsome strand of hand-woven hemp topped with a neat back splice. They walked up a winding stone walk she had laid, and around a palm grove. There stood an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white.
"It's not much, but I call it home." Inside, she said, "Sit down please; would you like to have a drink?"
"No, thanks," said the man. "One more coconut juice and I'll throw up!"
"Oh! It won't be coconut juice," the woman replied. "I have a crude still out back, so we can have authentic Pina Coladas."
Trying to hide his amazement, the man accepted the drink, and they sat down on her couch to talk. After they had exchanged stories, the woman asked, "Tell me, have you always had a beard?"
"No," the man replied, "I was clean shaven all of my life until I ended up on this island."
"Well if you'd like to shave, there's a razor upstairs in the bathroom cabinet."
The man, no longer questioning anything, went upstairs to the bathroom and shaved with an intricate bone-and-shell device honed razor sharp. Next he showered -- not even attempting to fathom a guess as to how she managed to get warm water into the bathroom -- and went back downstairs. He couldn't help but admire the masterfully carved banister as he walked.
"You look great," said the woman. "I think I'll go up and slip into something more comfortable."
As she did, the man continued to sip his Pina Colada. After a short time, the woman, smelling faintly of gardenias, returned wearing a revealing gown fashioned out of pounded palm fronds.
"Tell me," she asked, "we've both been out here for a very long time with no companionship. You know what I mean. Haven't you been lonely, too... isn't there something that you really, really miss? Something that all men and women need? Something that would be really nice to have right now!"
"Yes there is!" the man replied, shucking off his shyness. "There is something I've wanted to do for so long. But on this island all alone, it was just... well, it was impossible."
"Well, it's not impossible any more," the woman said.
The man, practically panting in excitement, said breathlessly: "You mean... you actually figured out some way we can CHECK OUR E-MAIL HERE!!??!!"
Two engineering students met while crossing the campus when one said, "Where did you get such a great bike?" The second engineer replied, "Well, I was walking along yesterday minding my own business when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. She threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, 'Take what you want.'" The first engineer nodded approvingly, "Good choice; the clothes probably wouldn't have fit."
To the optimist, the glass is half full.
To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty.
To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
The US standard railroad gauge (the width between the two rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads. But why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge in England, then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons which used that wheel spacing. Okay! So why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if anyone tried to use any other spacing, their wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts. Then who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots first formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for (or by) Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.
Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.
Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, don't fret. It may just be that you are exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war-horses.
Now the twist to the story....
There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. Thiokol makes the SRBs at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site in Florida. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horses' behinds.
So, a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a Horse's Ass!
An Article from a London Newspaper (circa 999 A.D.)
Canterbury, England. A.D. 999.
An atmosphere close to panic prevails today throughout Europe as the millennial year 1000 approaches, bringing with it the so-called "Y1K Bug," a menace which, until recently, hardly anyone had ever heard of. Prophets of doom are warning that the entire fabric of Western Civilization, based as it now is upon monastic computations, could collapse, and that there is simply not enough time left to fix the problem.
Just how did this disaster-in-the-making ever arise? Why did no one anticipate that a change from a three-digit to a four-digit year would throw into total disarray all liturgical chants and all metrical verse in which any date is mentioned? Every formulaic hymn, prayer, ceremony and incantation dealing with dated events will have to be re-written to accommodate three extra syllables. All tabular chronologies with three-space year columns, maintained for generations by scribes using carefully hand-ruled lines on vellum sheets, will now have to be converted to four-space columns, at enormous cost. In the meantime, the validity of every official event, from baptisms to burials, from confirmations to coronations, may be called into question.
"We should have seen it coming," says Brother Cedric of St. Michael Abbey, here in Canterbury. "What worries me most is that THOUSAND contains the word THOU, which occurs in nearly all our prayers, and of course always refers to God. Using it now in the name of the year will seem almost blasphemous, and is bound to cause terrible confusion. Of course, we could always use Latin, but that might be even worse -- The Latin word for Thousand is Mille, which is the same as the Latin for mile. We won't know whether we are talking about time or distance!"
Stonemasons are already reported threatening to demand a proportional pay increase for having to carve an extra numeral in all dates on tombstones, cornerstones and monuments. Together with its inevitable ripple effects, this alone could plunge the hitherto-stable medieval economy into chaos.
A conference of clerics has been called at Winchester to discuss the entire issue, but doomsayers are convinced that the matter is now one of personal survival. Many families, in expectation of the worst, are stocking up on holy water and indulgences.
Why there are so few good engineers...
It is the height of the French Revolution and the powers that be are doing their usual daily beheading routine.
On the top of today's list to be led up to the guillotine is a priest, a prostitute, and an engineer.
They ask the priest if he wants to be face up or face down when he meets his fate. The priest says that he would like to be face up as he goes to meet his maker.
They raise the blade of the guillotine, trip the release, and it comes speeding down... suddenly stopping just inches from the priest's neck. Being devoutly religious, the executioners take this as divine intervention and release the priest.
Next the prostitute comes to the guillotine. She also decides to die face up, hoping that she will be as fortunate as the priest.
They raise the blade of the guillotine, release it, and it comes speeding down, also suddenly stopping just inches from her neck. The executioners, ever wary, decide to release the prostitute as well.
The engineer is next. Not wanting to buck convention, he too decides to die facing up.
After strapping him into the mechanism, as the executioner completes raising the blade of the guillotine, the engineer suddenly cries out: "Hey, I think I see what your problem is!"
:-)