I’ve been blogging now for more than fourteen years, and I’ve tried to be as interesting as possible as I spread as much useless informationthat I could find to as many readers as possible. Initially I spent my first four years writing a political blog that was interesting, but all of the lame and badly written death threats from either side of the aisle convinced that I was wasting my time. Since the changeover to a more easy-going and friendly blog, blogging has returned to being fun. Now it’s time for another sidestep from my normal routine to an even friendlier and more fun format. “HUMOR”. It’s probably one of the few areas that almost everyone can enjoy whether it’s from jokes (both clean or dirty), limericks (both clean or dirty), humorous trivia, or any other means to help you grin, smile, laugh, and lighten your day. I’ll give it a go for the remainder of this year with the hope it will keep you coming back for more.
“Joke of the Day”
A farmer sent his 15-year-old son into town and, as a birthday present, handed him a duck. “See if you can get a girl in exchange for this,” he said. The lad met a prostitute along the way and said, “It’s my birthday and all I’ve got is this duck. Would you be willing to fuck? “Sure,” she said, “I’m sentimental about birthdays. And besides, I’ve never owned a duck.” Afterwards, she said, “Do you know for a 15-year-old boy, you’re quite a good lay. If you’d like to do it again, I’ll give you back your duck.” “Sure,” said the boy. When his pleasurable work was through, he left the village to return home. While he was crossing the main street in the village, the duck suddenly flew out of his hands and was hit by a passing beer truck. The driver of the truck felt so sorry for the boy and gave him two dollars. When he got home, his father asked, “How did you make out?” The son said, “I got a duck, a fuck, a duck for a fuck, and two dollars for a duck.”
In keeping with the new format here is the “Limerick of the Day” which should pay homage to a former lecherous President and his BFF:
I’ve never really understood or cared why the Fourth of July is called Independence Day. I know it’s the celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence but in this day and age who really cares? It’s just become another excuse to have a long weekend and a day off and to drink and party and be foolish. It seems to me that only a very small percentage of the country really understands what is being celebrated on the Fourth of July.
Many years ago, while on a long weekend to Cape Cod I purchased a T-shirt in a shop in Provincetown. The minute I saw the shirt I knew I had to have it. I continued to wear it for years until it fell apart. I have since purchased another and wear it proudly. It’s a short statement of fact that I’m proud to wear across my chest, “I love my country and fear our government.” A simple yet true statement and even truer today than when I bought it. Mixing politics with patriotism is a dangerous thing and it still scares the hell out of me. Relying on our current crop of inept politicians to keep this county secure and on the right path is frightening at best. For me the Fourth of July is a bogus holiday. We should celebrate it on February 29 (Leap Year), every four years. Here is sample of how one of the Founding Fathers felt about it.
Did you know? John Adams believed that July 2nd was the correct date on which to celebrate the birth of American independence, and would reportedly turn down invitations to appear at July 4th events in protest.
It apparently wasn’t considered an American Holy Day back then. Those poor politicians hadn’t yet discovered the essentials needed to celebrate properly, charcoal brickettes, gas grills, and an endless supply of alcohol and weed. Mix all of that together with a few idiot politicians and you’ve got a real current-day Independence Day celebration.
I for one dislike the media as much as anyone. Not that they’ve ever had anything bad to say about me personally but I hate how they consistently mislead the public by slanting their stories either to the left or to the right. I think the leftwing as it currently exists is pitiful and vicious. What gets ratings pleases their corporate owners and their promotion of inhouse biases. The right wing is just as bad, and they never hesitate to pull the same lame stunts that the left wing uses. The victims in all of this are “We the People”. I thought I’d do a little research and look back through the records to see how other people thought and felt about the media in years past. Some of these posted opinions remain anonymous and with good reason. Many of the others are opinions about the media by some of their other victims, primarily celebrities and people of wealth. Let’s see what you think.
“The mission of the modern newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Anonymous
“I always said that when we don’t have to go through you bastards, we can really get our story over to the American people.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy – 1962
“The press is like the peculiar uncle you keep in the attic – just one of those unfortunate things.” G. Gordon Liddy
“Tabloids are fast reading for the slow thinking.” Anonymous
“The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.” Samuel Butler
“An editor should have a pimp for a brother, so he’d have someone to look up to.” Gene Fowler
“The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it.” Princess Grace of Monaco
“The most truthful part of a newspaper is the advertisements.” Thomas Jefferson
“The most guileful among the reporters are those who appear friendly and smile and seem to be supportive. They are the ones who seek to gut you on every occasion.” Mayor Ed Koch – 1984
“Mother (Bess Truman) considered a press conference on a par with a visit to a cage of cobras.” Margaret Truman
And here’s one of my all-time favorite quotes about the media. This is from the man who received the ultimate media related colonoscopy and deserved every minute and inch of it.
“People in the media say they must look at the president with
a microscope. Now I don’t mind a microscope, but boy, when
It’s been said too many times that everyone is constantly looking for their fifteen minutes of fame. It probably explains the popularity of much of social media and especially Tik Tok. I’m not saying that it’s a good thing or a bad thing because who really cares what I think. True fame is achieved in other ways after you’ve proven yourself over a number of years or decades and the then almost certainly after your death. Here are a number of examples of delayed fame, for what it’s worth.
Jonas Bronck, a Swedish settler, lends his name to a section of New York City called the Bronx.
The dance called the Lindy Hop was named after famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh.
One of Florida’s most populous cities, Jacksonville, was named for its former territorial governor, Andrew Jackson.
Block Island in the state of Rhode Island was named for Dutch explorer Adrien Block.
The Metrodome in Minneapolis is named for Hubert Humphrey, a famous Minnesota senator and presidential candidate.
The city of Chicago has a natural history museum and a department store chain named for Marshall Field. It is the Field Museum of Natural History and the retail chain, Marshalls.
Kentucky’s favorite son, Davy Crockett, has a national forest appropriately named for the legendary frontiersman.
The city of Santa Anna, California, named their airport to honor the “Duke”, John Wayne.
Cleveland Ohio’s best-known city park was named for one of the city’s best-known and richest residents, John D. Rockefeller.
The Harvard School of Government in Boston was named for John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a Massachusetts-born president.
I’ve already established my fame hundreds and thousands of times all across this country and the world. Every time you say the words, “I’m going to the john”, you’ll be carrying on my legacy and fame forever.
I’m feeling especially nostalgic today and I’m not sure exactly why. I do enjoy looking back to times that make me smile or laugh out loud which brings me immediately back to the 1990’s. I’m going to relive a few things concerning the 42nd President, Wild Bill Clinton, and his charming yet annoying pant-suited wife Hilary. I admit that Joe Biden is something of an idiot but not in a good way. Clinton was up front about most of his idiotic proclivities because we all knew he was just a six-foot-tall penis looking for a place to play. Also, being married to Hilary garnered him a great deal of sympathy from both the Right and the Left. As a couple they were the best targets for ridicule in decades. Never let it be said that I didn’t give an appropriate mention of his favorite cigar toting pal, Monica Lewinsky (the human humidifier).
Here are a few interesting quotes that will bring back all of the memories of those disturbing years.
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Bill, referring to an excavated Incan mummy.
“You know, if I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out. That’s a good looking mummy!”
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Bill, after receiving the Romanian flag while visiting there.
“Thanks for the poncho.”
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Bill, on the UN operation in Bosnia.
“It has not worked. No one can say it has worked, so I decided that we’re either going to do what we said we’re going to do with the UN, or we’re going to do something else.”
***
Now for a couple pearls of wisdom from his loving yet understanding better-half.
“I’m not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the President.”
***
“Give Bill a second term, and Al Gore and I will be turned loose to do what we really want to do.”
Being stuck in this house and this bed is driving me crazier than usual. Now that the Cov-19 has come and gone I still have a twenty-pound cast on my leg. I’m still limited by some door sizes which are too small for this freaking wheelchair to get through. Let me apologize, I immediately start to whine and feel sorry for myself when things aren’t going my way. It’s just human nature I suppose. I decided I would find a few items of trivia to help breakup your day. These are a mish-mosh of items collected totally at random. I hope you enjoy them.
An Egyptian papyrus, dated at approximately 1850 B.C., gives us the earliest record of a method to prevent pregnancies. It required putting into the vagina a concoction of honey, soda, crocodile excrement, and some sort of gummy substance.
Between the mid-1860’s and 1883, the bison population in North America was reduced from an estimated 13 million to a few hundred.
Not a single bank existed anywhere in the thirteen colonies before the American Revolution. Anyone needing money had to borrow from an individual.
After twenty years as a faithful unpaid servant of the Duke of Windsor, Walter Monckton was rewarded with a cigarette case on which his name was engraved – and misspelled.
In the seventeenth century, and principally during the period of the Thirty Years War, approximately sixty million people in Europe died from smallpox.
A conventional sign of virginity in Tudor England was a high exposed bosom and a sleeve full to the wrists.
If all of the water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere were condensed at the same time, there would be enough water to cover the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii) with twenty-five feet of water.
The British erected in London’s Trafalgar Square a statue of U.S President George Washington, whose armies overthrew British rule in the colonies.
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, it was not a federal felony to kill a President of the United States.
For fear he might conceal a joke in it was one reason why Benjamin Franklin was not entrusted by his peers with the assignment of writing the Declaration of Independence.
I’m a former vet who proudly served. Since then, I’ve maintained an interest in all things military. As much as all of the new high-tech equipment is interesting, I still lean towards the past history of wars and warfare. It’s always good to know all of the small details of warfare to give you an accurate picture of why wars occurred and what steps had to be taken to end them.
The Spartans used a staff and a coil of paper to keep military messages from being decoded if they fell into the hands of the enemy. Rolled around the staff, the words fit together and made sense. Unrolled, the paper was covered with gibberish. Each general had a carefully guarded staff of precisely the same diameter around which to roll the paper and read the message.
During World War II, the Federal Bureau of investigation secretly established a house of male prostitution in New York’s Greenwich Village. The house staffed multilingual agents for the purpose of extracting import shipping information from foreign sailors. The FBI later claimed it had been a very successful operation.
By the end of World War II, there wasn’t a German spy in Great Britain who was not under British control. All either were cooperating with the British while maintaining their German “alliance” or had been caught and “turned around”.
During World War II, the United States Navy had a world champion chess player, Reuben Fine, calculate on the basis of positional probability where enemy submarines might surface. Dr. Fine said, it worked out all right.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation captured eight German saboteurs shortly after they came ashore from a U-boat off eastern Long Island in 1942. Six were executed and two imprisoned. It turns out that one of those imprisoned, the expedition’s leader, was an anti-Nazi and had tipped off the FBI. He was promised that he be jailed for only six months, but he got instead, a 90-year prison term.
Bismarck tricked the French into the Franco-Prussian War by altering a telegram from the King of Prussia. He struck out the king’s consolatory words, so that the telegram sounded belligerent. The result was what the Iron Chancellor had intended, a French declaration of war, followed by a German victory.
Mata Hari, the Dutch-Javanese dancer who became the most famous spy of World War I, ordered that a suit be especially tailored for her for the occasion of her execution by a French firing squad. She also wore a new pair of white gloves.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”Socrates
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Welcome to installment number seven. These questions appear a little harder to answer simply. Only a frank discussion will bring the answers, both good and bad. Have fun . . .
Would you rather play a game with someone more or less talented as you? Would it matter who’s watching?
Is there something you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
While in the government, you discover the President is committing extortion and other serious crimes. By exposing the situation, you might bring about the President’s downfall, but your career would be destroyed because you would be framed, fired, and suffer public humiliation on other matters. Knowing you would be vindicated five years later; would you blow the whistle? What if you knew you would never be vindicated?
On a busy street you are approached apologetically by a well-dressed stranger who asks for a dollar to catch a bus and make a phone call. He says he has lost his wallet. What would you do? If approached in the same way by a haggard looking stranger claiming to be hungry and unable to find a job, what would you do?
If by sacrificing your life you could contribute so much to the world that you would be honored in all nations, would you be willing to do so? If so, would you make the same sacrifice knowing that someone you thoroughly disliked would receive the honor while you went unrecognized?
*****
Knowing you had a 50% chance of winning and would be paid 10 times the amount of your bet if you won, what fraction of what you now own would you be willing to wager?
What are your most compulsive habits? Do you regularly struggled to break these habits?
You know you will die of an incurable disease within three months. Would you allow yourself to be frozen within the week if you knew it would give you a modest chance of being revived in 1000 years and living a greatly extended life?
You are driving late at night in a safe but deserted neighborhood when a dog suddenly darts in front of your car. Though you slam on the brakes, you hit the animal. Would you stop to see how injured the animal was? If you did so and found that the dog was dead but had a name tag, would you contact the owner?
What do you most strive for in your life: accomplishment, security, love, power, excitement, knowledge, or something else?
*****
An eccentric millionaire offers to donate a large sum to charity if you will step completely naked from a car onto a busy downtown street, walk four blocks, and climb back into the car. Knowing that there would be no danger of physical abuse, would you do it?
How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people?
Is the fact that you have never done something before increase or decrease its appeal to you?
Would you be willing to give up sex for five years if you could have wonderfully sensual and erotic dreams any night you wished?
At a meal, your friends start belittling a common acquaintance. If you felt their criticisms were unjustified, would you defend the person?
To quote an expert, Gary Rimmer, “Number freaking is the art of putting numbers where none existed before. It is an off-the-wall peek at how numbers rule our lives. Number freaking reveals the low drama, unexpected realities, unforeseen truths and even comic connections that emerge when numbers are tested to destruction . . . ” So let’s get started with a few examples.
If you would spend 80 minutes a night staying with your child, watching them fall asleep, for 7 1/2 years, your total number of hours would total approximately 3652.50.
It would take Bill Gates earning $55.05 a second – approximately 26 seconds to earn an average Americans weekly wage.
If your girlfriend weighed 152 pounds, in New York prices she would be worth $896,200 in gold.
On Tuesday, August 31, 2004, at 1 a.m. EDT, the United States was exactly 2,000,000 hours old.
Globally, life expectancy at birth, for men is 65 years. If we assume they start thinking about sex at puberty, that means they’ll think about sex approximately every 6 seconds for 52 years. If this is true, a man in his lifetime will think about sex 2.73 million times.
A pious Muslim is supposed to sport a beard at least the width of the fist. Assuming a man’s fist is at least 3 1/2 inches wide, it would take 233 days to grow a Sharia-compliant beard.
If a man spends an average of 5 minutes a day shaving, it computes to 1735 hours or 72.3 days in his lifetime.
According to Oxfam, 1000 people die each hour from hunger-most of them before their fifth birthday. 1200 children under the age of five die each year from preventable disease. In addition, a child dies every 15 seconds from lack of water and sanitation. The total number of deaths worldwide therefore every hour, from preventable disease, hunger and poor sanitation is 2,440. If 2,440 people were to die every hour, in a year there would be 21,389,000 dead from preventable disease, hunger and poor sanitation.
The average smoker in America smokes 13 cigarettes a day. One of the maxims of the antismoking lobby is that every cigarette smoked knocks 11 minutes. off their life. So, the average American smoker will lose 36 days, 6 hours, 30 minutes, and 45 seconds for every year of smoking.
How’s that for some off-the-wall statistics. As with most statistics, the numbers are approximations, but it doesn’t change the fact that the basic underlying rule is true. How sad is that? Maybe next time I’ll rant on the unscrupulous way in which our politicians use statistics to convince us of whatever they want.
I continue to be fascinated by history. American history is my favorite especially reading stories of the Founding Fathers. I’ve gathered together a few interesting historical facts that are not commonly known about them.
Not until 1826 were fireworks used to celebrate the Fourth of July. Coincidentally, it was the very day that two of the founding fathers died, but their demise did not interfere with the national celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It took four days for the news of John Adams death to reach Washington and two days for the capital to learn of Thomas Jefferson’s death.
British ships in the English Channel fired a salute of 21 guns when word reached them that the countries erstwhile great adversary, President George Washington, had died in the States.
Thomas Jefferson chose not to attend ceremonies marking the death of George Washington in 1799, nor did he write a note of condolence to Washington’s widow. This enmity stemmed from the last year of Washington’s second term as the United States President, when he suspected Jefferson of being responsible for scurrilous attacks in the press on him. Jefferson denied responsibility and Washington accepted his word, but there was a chill between them thereafter.
Ben Franklin wanted the turkey, not the eagle, to be the United States national symbol. He considered the eagle “a bird of bad moral character” because it lives “by sharping and robbing”.
Thomas Jefferson was a smuggler of sorts. He went into northern Italy, in 1787, to see the machines used there for cleaning rice seed and was able to filch and bring back to the United States samples of rice that he gave to planters in Georgia and South Carolina. He also picked up information about the olive tree.
A former US vice president, Aaron Burr, was charged with treason for trying, it was said, to separate the western lands from the United States and establish his own rule in the early 1800s. He was acquitted, but his image remained tarnished.
George Washington seldom slept more than three or four consecutive hours in any day during the Revolutionary War.
Signing a memorial to Congress for the abolition of slavery was the last public act of Benjamin Franklin.
I have to admit that after reading the many and varied facts about the founding fathers I appreciate them even more. A group of colonists, some with education but many without, had the will and fortitude to fight for what they believed and to create this country. I wish I had the power of time travel so I can go back to the 1700’s and bring all of those gentlemen to the present day. I’m fairly certain they wouldn’t be at all happy.
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