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Airplane jokes:
Here are some actual maintenance complaints submitted by US Air Force pilots and the replies from the maintenance crews. "Squawks" are problem listings that pilots generally leave for maintenance crews.
Problem: "Left inside main tire almost needs replacement."
Solution: "Almost replaced left inside main tire."
Problem: "Test flight OK, except autoland very rough."
Solution: "Autoland not installed on this aircraft."
Problem #1: "#2 Propeller seeping prop fluid."
Solution #1: "#2 Propeller seepage normal."
Problem #2: "#1, #3, and #4 propellers lack normal seepage."
Problem: "The autopilot doesn't."
Signed off: "IT DOES NOW."
Problem: "Something loose in cockpit."
Solution: "Something tightened in cockpit."
Problem: "Evidence of hydraulic leak on right main landing gear."
Solution: "Evidence removed."
Problem: "DME volume unbelievably loud."
Solution: "Volume set to more believable level."
Problem: "Dead bugs on windshield."
Solution: "Live bugs on order."
Problem: "Autopilot in altitude hold mode produces a 200 fpm descent."
Solution: "Cannot reproduce problem on ground."
Problem: "IFF inoperative."
Solution: "IFF inoperative in OFF mode."
Problem: "Friction locks cause throttle levers to stick."
Solution: "That's what they're there for."
Problem: "Number three engine missing."
Solution: "Engine found on right wing after brief search."
Dave Barry on Hair
A dog-eared wonder potion that has baldness licked
I have here some very exciting scientific correspondence from William Yancey, who is a doctor and therefore legally allowed to park anywhere, give vaccinations, tell people to get naked, and make scientific observations.
Dr Yancey wrote to me about an observation he scientifically made regarding his Labrador retriever named Refrigerator.
Refrigerator recently underwent hip surgery. In preparation for the operation, the vet shaved his hind quarters.
Then, realising his mistake, he also shaved Refrigerator's hind quarters.
No, seriously, the vet's hind quarters have nothing to do with this and I am instructing the jury to disregard them.
The point is that Refrigerator had all the fur removed from his rear end (or, in medical parlance, his "bazooty").
If you know anything about dogs, you know how Refrigerator spent his recuperation period. He licked himself pretty much full time.
Dogs are very big believers in the healing power of licking.
If dogs operated a hospital, here's how it would work.
A patient would arrive in the emergency room and a team of doctor dogs would gather around to conduct an examination, which would consist of thoroughly sniffing the patient (they would also sniff the floor, in case anybody had left food lying around).
Then the doctor dogs would hold a conference and whatever the patient's symptoms - coughing, lack of pulse, a spear passing all the way through the patient's head - the doctor dogs would agree that the best course of treatment was - licking.
And we're talking about a lot of licking. Not just the patient licking himself or herself, but also the doctors licking the patient, licking themselves, and licking the other doctors.
This is state-of-the-art care for dogs. Their equivalent of a CAT scan machine would be a big tube filled with tongues.
So anyway, after his operation, Refrigerator was performing medical care on himself and Dr Yancey made a scientific observation; namely, that Refrigerator's hair "has grown fastest in the areas where he has spent significant time licking himself".
Using this observation, Dr Yancey was able to form a scientific hypothesis - a term that is formed from two Greek words, "hy", which means "something", and "pothesis", which means "that pops into your head while you are watching a dog lick itself after you have maybe had a couple of brewskis".
Dr Yancey's hypothesis is this: dog spit grows hair. In fact, Dr Yancey believes that unwanted hair, such as facial hair on women and nose hair on men, probably did not exist until the human race domesticated dogs and started getting licked all the time.
But the more important implication is that dog spit could be a revolutionary new hair-growth treatment for balding men.
Granted, we do not yet have actual laboratory proof of this.
But we do have a published report in the form of this column, which has been printed in a newspaper with professional-looking margins.
So I think it's time to move past the research phase of Dr Yancey's hypothesis and go directly to the phase where we unleash the power of this amazing discovery to benefit humanity, to make the world a better place, and most important - to make money.
Specifically, what I am thinking of is a franchised line of hair-growth salons, perhaps with a sophisticated name such as La Spitte Du Chien Pour Les Hommes.
Upon arriving at a salon, a client would undergo a pre-treatment interview, during which he would be asked a series of scientific questions. "Do you have money? How much?"
The client would then be ushered into the preparation area where his scalp would be coated with a scientifically designed, nutrition-enhanced, precision-balanced formulation consisting of Skippy brand peanut butter.
Finally the client would enter the treatment area where he would be instructed to lie down on the floor with his arms at his sides. A door would then be opened and a professional hair growth technician, barking loudly, would sprint into the room at 600-odd km/h, skid to a stop and begin enthusiastically treating the client's scalp.
I grant you that this procedure has a few wrinkles that need to be worked out, such as the issue of creamy versus chunky.
But basically I think it makes at least as much scientific sense as the baldness cures you see advertised in magazines.
I see no reason why we can't go ahead and start setting up franchise salons, and if any government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration have any questions, well, they can just send their inspectors around to meet with our board of directors, Big Boy and Fang.
They love inspectors. It's their favorite meal.
(If you don't get it the first time, read the punch line out loud...)
N.O.W. recently filed a complaint against the toy manufacturer of the Tickle Me Elmo dolls. Their objection was based on the fact that all Tickle Me Elmo dolls are boys. In the office of the CEO for the toy manufacturer, a NOW representative made an appeal for the company to produce female gender tickle dolls along side the Elmo line. However, the CEO responded bysaying that the dolls must all be boys. It wouldn't be possible to create a Tickle Me Elsie, for example. When asked "Why not?" by the NOW representative, the CEO answered, "Because the last thing we do when the doll comes of the production line is give it a test tickle."
1. Leave the copy machine set to reduce 200%, extra dark, 17 inch paper, 99 copies.
2. In the memo field of all your checks, write "for sensual massage."
3. Specify that your drive-through order is "to go."
4. If you have a glass eye, tap on it occasionally with your pen while talking to others.
5. Stomp on little plastic ketchup packets.
6. Insist on keeping your car windshield wipers running in all weather conditions "to keep them tuned up."
7. Reply to everything someone says with "that's what YOU think."
8. Practice making fax and modem noises.
9. Highlight irrelevant information in scientific papers and "cc." them to your boss.
10. Make beeping noises when a large person backs up.
11. Finish all your sentences with the words "in accordance with prophesy."
12. Signal that a conversation is over by clamping your hands over your ears.
13. Disassemble your pen and "accidentally" flip the ink cartridge across the room.
14. Holler random numbers while someone is counting.
15. Adjust the background color on your email so that all your email correspondence is in green, and insist to others that you "like it that way."
16. Staple papers in the middle of the page.
17. Publicly investigate just how slowly you can make a "croaking" noise.
18. Honk and wave to strangers.
19. Decline to be seated at a restaurant, and simply eat their complimentary mints by the cash register.
20. TYPE ONLY IN UPPERCASE..
21. type only in lowercase.
22. dont use any punctuation either
23. Buy a large quantity of orange traffic cones and reroute whole streets.
24. Repeat the following conversation a dozen times:
"Do you hear that?"
"What?"
"Never mind, it's gone now."
25. As much as possible, skip rather than walk.
26. Try playing the William Tell Overture by tapping on the bottom of your chin. When nearly done, announce, "no, wait, I messed it up," and repeat.
27. Ask people what gender they are.
28. While making presentations, occasionally bob your head like a parakeet.
29. Sit in your front yard pointing a hair dryer at passing cars to see if they slow down.
30. Sing along at the opera.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster, " he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?"
The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as an index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of you kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. The will need a breakfast cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.
"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.
"The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!). We should have a working prototype within the next 9 months to a year."
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
Subject: And The Winners Are
The 1996 Best Headlines are.....
Include Your Children when Baking Cookies
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers
Safety Experts Say School Bus Passengers Should Be Belted
Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
Survivor of Siamese Twins Joins Parents
Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
Is There a Ring of Debris around Uranus?
Prostitutes Appeal to Pope
Panda Mating Fails; Veterinarian Takes Over
British Left Waffles on Faulkland Islands
Lung Cancer in Women Mushrooms
Eye Drops Off Shelf
Teacher Strikes Idle Kids
Clinton Wins on Budget, But More Lies Ahead
Enraged Cow Injures Farmer With Axe
Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash Probe Told
Miners Refuse to Work after Death
Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
Stolen Painting Found by Tree
Two Sisters Reunited After 18 Years in Checkout Counter
Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Times in 10 Years
Never Withhold Herpes Infection from Loved One
War Dims Hope for Peace
If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last a While
Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
Deer Kill 17,000
Enfields Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
Man Struck By Lightning Faces Battery Charge
New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
Chef Throws His Heart into Helping Feed Needy
Arson Suspect Held in Massachusetts Fire
Ban On Soliciting Dead in Trotwood
Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
New Vaccine May Contain Rabies
Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. Okay, here's something:
Reuters: The dazed crew of a Japanese trawler was plucked out of the Sea of Japan earlier this year clinging to the wreckage of their sunken ship. Their rescue was followed by immediate imprisonment once authorities questioned the sailors on their ship's loss. They claimed that a cow, falling out of a clear blue sky, had struck the trawler amidships, shattering its hull and sinking the vessel within minutes. They remained in prison for several weeks, until the Russian Air Force reluctantly informed Japanese authorities that the crew of one of its cargo planes had apparently stolen a cow wandering at the edge of a Siberian airfield, forced the cow into the plane's hold and hastily taken off for home. Unprepared for live cargo, the Russian crew was ill-equipped to manage a frightened cow rampaging within the hold. To save the aircraft and themselves, they shoved the animal out of the cargo hold as they crossed the Sea of Japan at an altitude of 30,000 feet
One sunny day a rabbit came out of her hole in the ground to enjoy the weather. The day was so nice that the rabbit became careless, so a fox sneaked up to her and caught her.
"I am going to eat you for lunch!", said the fox.
"Wait!", replied the rabbit, "You should at least wait a few days."
"Oh yeah? Why should I wait?"
"Well, I am just finishing my Ph.D. thesis."
"Hah, that's a stupid excuse. What is the title of your thesis anyway?"
"I am writing my thesis on 'The Superiority of Rabbits over Foxes and Wolves.'"
"Are you crazy? I should eat you right now! Everybody knows that a fox will always win over a rabbit."
"Not really, not according to my research. If you like, you can come to my hole and read it for yourself. If you are not convinced, you can go ahead and have me for lunch."
"You are really crazy!" But since the fox was curious and
had nothing to lose, it went with the rabbit into its hole. The fox never
came back out..
A few days later, the rabbit was again taking a break from writing and sure enough, a wolf came out of the bushes and was ready to eat her.
"Wait!", yelled the rabbit,"You can't eat me right now."
"And why might that be, you fuzzy appetizer?"
"I am almost finished writing my Ph.D. thesis on 'The Superiority of Rabbits over Foxes and Wolves.'"
The wolf laughed so heard that it almost lost its hold on the rabbit. "Maybe I shouldn't eat you; you really are sick in the head, you might have something contagious," the wolf opined.
"Come read for yourself; you can eat me after that if you disagree with my conclusions." So the wolf went to the rabbit's hole and never came out.
The rabbit finished her thesis and was out celebrating in the lettuce fields. Another rabbit came by and asked, "What's up? You seem to be very happy.."
"Yup, I just finished my dissertation."
"Congratulations! What is it about?"
"It's titled 'The Superiority of Rabbits over Foxes and Wolves'"
"Are you sure? That doesn't sound right."
"Oh yes, you should come over and read it for yourself."
So they went together to the rabbit's hole. As they went in, the friend
saw a typical graduate student's abode, albeit a rather messy one after
writing a thesis. The computer with the the controversial dissertation
was in one corner, on the right there was a pile of fox bones, on the left
was a pile of wolf bones, and in the middle was a large, lip-licking lion.
The title of your dissertation doesn't matter.
All that matters is who your thesis advisor is.
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