Gary Monro’s blog

Life...June 29, 2005 5:23 pm

World’s funniest jokes - official

It never occured to me that you could study humour but, it seems, you can. And, because you can, someone did. The British Association for the Advancement Of Science to be precise.

Seems they carried out a survey a couple of years ago to find the world’s funniest joke. Here it is:

Famed fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and his gruff assistant Doctor Watson pitch their tent while on a camping expedition, but in the middle of the night Holmes nudges Watson awake and questions him.

HOLMES: Watson, look up at the stars and tell me what you deduce.

WATSON: I see millions of stars, and if there are millions of stars, and if even a few of those have planets, it is quite likely there are some planets like earth, and if there are a few planets like earth out there there might also be life.

HOLMES: Watson, you idiot! Somebody stole our tent.

The BAAS said the joke was the most popular among 10,000 submitted, being chosen as the best by 47% of the 100,000 people from more than 70 countries who took part.

Personally, I think it’s a bit of a children’s joke and not especially amusing. A year later The LaughLab experiment - conducted by psychologist Dr Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire - attracted more than 40,000 jokes and almost two million ratings. Now these jokes are much better:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services.

He gasps: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.”

There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: “OK, now what?”

Jokes were also split by their popularity in certain countries:

Top joke in Scotland: I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.

Top joke in England: Two weasels are sitting on a bar stool. One starts to insult the other one. He screams, “I slept with your mother!” The bar gets quiet as everyone listens to see what the other weasel will do. The first again yells, “I SLEPT WITH YOUR MOTHER!” The other says, “Go home dad you’re drunk.”

Top joke in USA: A man and a friend are playing golf one day at their local golf course. One of the guys is about to chip onto the green when he sees a long funeral procession on the road next to the course. He stops in mid-swing, takes off his golf cap, closes his eyes, and bows down in prayer. His friend says: “Wow, that is the most thoughtful and touching thing I have ever seen. You truly are a kind man.” The man then replies: “Yeah, well we were married 35 years.”

Top joke in Belgium: Why do ducks have webbed feet? To stamp out fires. Why do elephants have flat feet? To stamp out burning ducks.

Not sure about that Belgian one….

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Life... 4:59 pm

Conservative Party leadership already decided

Seems like someone actually bought it!

With thanks to The Liberty Cadre.

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Wisdom 4:40 pm

Thought for Today

You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them.

— Malcolm Forbes (1919-1990) American Publisher

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Education 4:34 pm

Too much education

The Daily Telegraph reports that politics students at Bristol are being ‘over-taught’ so their workload needs drastically reducing. So the number of lectures the students must attend is being slashed by a whopping 66%.

From three lectures per week to one.

The poor lovies should be able to cope with that. But if they’re still trembling with fear then there’s more good news on the way: first year exams are going to be phased out too.

And - if that were not enough - Bristol University has promised that a higher proportion of students will be awarded a first class degree. Now, correct me if I’m wrong but the only way you can promise more first class degrees is by messing with the exam marks or the pass mark. Either way, the idea stinks.

When you consider that the entry requirements to this degree will be relaxed if a person has “suffered from educational disadvantages” it seems to be that obtaining a politics degree at Bristol Uni is a cinch. Could I study for one during my lunchtimes perhaps?

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News roundup 11:03 am

News: Wednesday 29 June 2005

  • The deportation of Zimbabwean asylum seekers to their homelands has been halted. Fears for their safety under the regime of Robert Mugabe had led to protests from various groups and now Blair has called a halt - until after the G8 meeting. According to The Times today:

    Human rights groups described the policy shift as a cynical ploy to avoid embarrassing Tony Blair during the meeting.

    Ministers are also anxious to see an end to the hunger strike by Zimbabwean detainees as they do not want Britain’s treatment of refugees to dominate the summit agenda.

  • Also in The Times, another sickening example of the violence that blights the lives of ordinary people. A man is kicked to death outside a restaurant by teenagers as young as 14 years old. Four have been arrested. If they’re guilty will they be punished appropriately? Or will we hear the usual tripe about their young age, their poor backgrounds, the failure of schools/social workers/ police/society etc etc to prevent such things happening in the first place?
  • Amidst the madness, Mayor Ken Livingstone, advises not to flush the loo if we only pee - to save water. As usual, the south-east is running short of good ol’ H2O. Let’s get out of the EU, encourage some business to relocate to the north with attractive tax breaks, move government departments to unemployment blackspots out of the south-east area and so ease the pressure of an ever increasing demand for resources in this part of the world. Anything - but don’t tell me not to flush my loo. It’s disgusting.

  • Our authoritarian rulers moved a step further with their ID cards project. The Guardian reports:

    The government’s Commons majority was more than halved to 31 last night when leftwing MPs joined Tories, Liberal Democrats and other critics of Charles Clarke’s ID card bill to make clear that they want it radically improved - or dropped.

    There were 40 abstentions in the vote. If they had voted - and voted wisely - they would have been able to throw this thing out. Now it will get its second reading.

  • A wonderful piece of clarity in the lefty Guardian’s coverage of a 22 year old millionaire (he won it on the lottery) who has just been given an ASBO for the latest in a long string of offences - all committed while he was a millionaire. The Guardian has finally woken up to the fact that “the 22-year-old was proof that money does not change anything.” Really? So will you stop screaming ‘Poverty!’ every time some ne’er-do-well mugs an old lady, steals a kid’s mobile phone or drives off in someone else’s car? I doubt it.

    Anyway, his latest escapades are described in the paper thus:

    His offence was to cruise through Downham Market in a black jeep lit by blue neon lights taking pot shots at cars and shops with a ball-bearing loaded catapult. When he was arrested, Carroll admitted he had done the same thing on 29 other occasions, and wrote “sorry” on his police form. He was given 240 hours’ community service yesterday, ordered to pay £3,628.97 compensation and put on his first Asbo.

    His lawyer admitted he was lucky not to be sent to prison. Many others might think it’s not luck at all. Rather it’s just another example of Blair’s ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ being the empty sham that we all knew it would be.

    On Saturday 56 year old Terry Barrett was beaten to death by yobs he’d confronted after they’d thrown eggs at his house. And the week before (June 18) Peter Wareing, a 42 year old barrister, was beaten senseless by a gang of youths and has been in a coma for the last 10 days.

    The truth is, the yobs and criminals rule our streets, not the police. One day this might change but that day won’t be soon. In the meantime, we live in fear and god help you if you should tackle one of these yobs. If they don’t do for you you’ll probably be arrested for infringing his civil rights.

  • Apparently Saddam is going to sue us. So says The Guardian. But not for the war that has ravaged his country. Nor for the lies we were told in order to get us into the damned thing. But for The Sun’s pictures of him in his underpants.

    Granted, the pictures weren’t exactly flattering but what does the ex-dictator and all-round monster want? A spread in ‘Hello’ magazine? And exactly how does he intend to spend the money? Hasn’t he got other things to think about? Like a possible death sentence?

  • Last - and by no means least - the British Navy’s out-standing victory at Trafalgar was celebrated yesterday. According to the BBC:

    Thousands of spectators braved wet weather to watch a Battle of Trafalgar re-enactment off Portsmouth - the climax of bicentenary celebrations. Fusillades of gunfire, blasts from cannons and fireworks helped mark the 1805 victory over France and Spain.

    Earlier the Queen conducted a massive international fleet review.

    As any history buff will tell you, this was an historic battle between the blues and the reds and the blues won. Or, if he isn’t politically correct, he’ll tell you it was a battle fought by Britain against the expansionist French and their Spanish allies and we won one of our most decisive victories ever.

    Out-numbered 33 to 27 the British lost no ships, the enemy were left with just 16. Lord Nelson’s strategic brilliance and the unflinching courage of his captains and their crews inaugurated the beginning of Britain’s century of supremacy, an age when the Royal Navy dominated the seas. Our Navy has never been as large as it was then. Indeed, it is now smaller than it has ever been since the middle of the 18th century.

    Let’s hope we don’t need a navy in the near future…

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    Television 8:29 am

    Ladette to Lady

    Question: what do you get when you teach an ignorant, foul-mouthed, belching trollop how to dress in a corset and walk properly?

    Answer: An ignorant, foul-mouthed, belching trollop who, when required, can dress in a corset and walk properly.

    I’m not sure how these fly-on-the-wall documentaries normally work but the format for this one - the only one I’ve ever watched - is this: scrape up about 10 crude, low-rent trollops from some gutter somewhere and take then to a finishing school with the hair-brained intention of, in a few weeks, reversing years and years of degradation and creating the polar opposite of what you started with. Put them through a few hoops - speech lessons, cookery classes, flower arranging - and, to add a bit of spice, eliminate one a week until you’re left with the least awful one. Crown that one a ‘lady’. Job done.

    It’s not that these girls are common. There’s nothing wrong with being common - I sound like the Londoner I am, have no idea how to use a fish-knife, am totally unfamiliar with formal etiquette in polite company and as for dress-sense, well, just ask my wife. I am also totally uneducated. But there’s being common and there’s being horrible and these girls are just plain horrible.

    In tonight’s episode one of them got drunk in a pub and snogged some bloke she’d just met there. This is in full view of her friends - who cheered her on - and the other customers there. Oh, and a television crew. For the same audience she lifted up the front of her skirt for all the world to see.

    Next day they taught her flower arranging. Well, that should cure her, shouldn’t it? What she needs is a lobotomy.

    One of the central weaknesses of the whole exercise is that the teachers are trying to alter the girls’ characters simply by altering their behaviours. This won’t work. Behaviours - making a souffle, learning to walk up stairs with grace, elocution lessons and so on - follow character. When you’re of the right state of mind then you pick up the behaviours.

    And what is needed really is an engagement with their minds first of all. Someone needs to tell them that being a lady is first of all a state of mind, an attitude, a temperament. First and foremost whatever you are is a result of how you think, your beliefs and the attitudes these give rise to. So drinking, swearing, snogging and so on when out of sight of the instructors means that your ladylike behaviours are just a sham. Inside, you’re no different. You just went on a course, that’s all. And knowing which knife to butter your bread with is something you could teach a monkey. But it wouldn’t make the money a lady (or a gentleman).

    The truth is, turning any of these girls into ladies requires the skills of an alchemist. The finishing school’s teachers are trying to turn lead into gold. Whichever one ‘wins’ this contest won’t be a lady. She’ll be the one most skilled at suppressing her worst habits and excesses - helped, of course, by the relative inability of her fellow contestants to suppress theirs.

    One of the contestants was expelled yesterday. Her attitude all along was poor and she really couldn’t care less. One of her comments as she left was, There’s more to life than this. And I thought to myself, No, not for you there isn’t. The different things you were exposed to - which you could have made use of to expand your horizons a bit - are probably the last chances you’ll ever have of filling your life with something worthwhile. Now you go back to boozing, belching and ‘having a good time’ with your lousy attitude and low behaviour totally unaffected by the experience.

    It’s strangely compelling, watching these women - not bad women but simply light-years away form being the ladies they are trying to be - mess it up every week. I find myself pleading, silently, that they behave themselves, that they see the light and really set themselves a standard that they’ll live with even when there’s nobody around to check up on them. But it looks like a hopeless cause. They try - at times - to meet their teachers’ expectations but, in truth, they really need to be meeting their own expectations. But they have few, if any, expectations of themselves. So whatever they do learn in this charade will be quickly forgotten on the next Friday night binge session.

    As the saying goes: you can take a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.

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