A farm boy accidentally overturned his wagonload of corn.
The farmer who lived nearby heard the noise and yelled over to the boy, Hey Willis, forget your troubles! Come in and visit with us. Ill help you get the wagon up later.
Thats mighty nice of you, Willis answered, but I dont think Pa would like me to.
Aw come on boy, the farmer insisted.
Well okay, the boy finally agreed, and added, But Pa wont like it.
After a hearty dinner, Willis thanked his host. I feel a lot better now, but I know Pa is going to be real upset.
Dont be foolish! the neighbor said with a smile. By the way, where is he?
Under the wagon!
Found in Maps of the Mind, by Charles Hampden-Turner:
A man was hitchhiking across the country just prior to a
presidential election and had hit upon a technique for getting
free drinks in bars by guessing which candidate was less popular
and then loudly badmouthing them. He went into a bar in Colorado
and yelled, Carter is a horses ass! To his surprise, he was
promptly thrown outside into the dirt. He picked himself up and
went into another bar, shouting, Reagan is a horses ass! Seconds
later, he was eating dust again.
Seeing a cowboy nearby, he called out, Hey, fella! If this aint
Carter country and it aint Reagan country, whose country is it?
The cowboy replied, Son, this is horse country!
On an airplane trip, I sat next to a woman and her five-year-old grandson. When I mentioned that I was a teacher, she proceeded to ask him to count backward. He rattled off 20, 19, 18, 17…
That was wonderful, I said. Did you learn that in school?
No, he answered. From the microwave.
Three guys are applying for job with the CIA. They got all the
way to the final test.
So the first guy walks into the directors office and sits down.
The director reaches in his desk and pulls out a pistol. Lays it
on his desk in front of the guy. Tells him, This test is to
test your loyalty. Take this gun and go up the stairs and go
into the first room on your right. Your wife will be in there.
Put a bullet in her head. The guy looks at him and says,no
way. So the director says, You fail.
The next guy comes in. The diresctor tells him the same thing.
Guy picks up the gun and head for the room. Comes back about 15
minutes later. Tells the director that he just couldnt go
through with it. The director says, you fail.
So now the third guy comes in, same scene. Guy heads up to the
room. The director hears 3 shots, followed by a whole lot of
ruckus(glass breaking, funiture getting smashed). Guy comes back
in all beat up and his clothes tore up. The director goes, What
happened to you? Guy replies, After three shots I realized
that there were blanks in the gun so I had to choke her to
death.
The first German serviceman killed in the war was killed by the Japanese (China, 1937), the first American serviceman killed was killed by the Russians (Finland 1940), the highest ranking American killed was LtGen. Lesley McNair, killed by the US Army Air Corps. So much for the allies.
The youngest US serviceman was 12 year old Calvin Graham, USN. He was wounded in combat and given a Dishonorable Discharge for lying about his age. (His benefits were later restored by act of Congress)
At the time of Pearl Harbor the top US Navy command was called CINCUS (pronounced sink us), the shoulder patch of the US Armys 45th. Infantry division was the Swastika, and Hitlers private train was named Amerika. All three were soon changed for PR purposes.
More US servicemen died in the Air Corps than the Marine Corps. While completing the required 30 missions, your chance of being Killed was 71%.
Not that bombers were helpless. A B-17 carried 4 tons of bombs and 1.5 tons of machine gun ammo. The US 8th Air Force shot down 6,098 fighter planes, 1 for every 12,700 shots fired.
Germanys power grid was much more vulnerable than realized. One estimate is that if just 1% of the bombs dropped on German industry had instead been dropped on power plants German industry would have collapsed.
Generally speaking there was no such thing as an average fighter pilot. You were either an ace or a target. For instance Japanese ace Hiroyoshi Nishizawa shot down over 80 planes. He died while a passenger on a cargo plane.
It was a common practice on fighter planes to load every 5th round with a tracer round to aid in aiming. This was a mistake. The tracers had different ballistics so (at long range) if your tracers were hitting the target 80% of your rounds were missing.
Worse yet the tracers instantly told your enemy he was under fire and from which direction. Worst of all was the practice of loading a string of tracers at the end of the belt to tell you that you were out of ammo. This was definitely not something you wanted to tell the enemy. Units that stopped using tracers saw their success rate nearly double and their loss rate go down.
When allied armies reached the Rhine the first thing men did was pee in it. This was pretty universal from the lowest private to Winston Churchill (who made a big show of it) and Gen. Patton (who had himself photographed in the act).
German Me-264 bombers were capable of bombing New York City but it wasnt worth the effort.
A number of air crewman died of farts.(ascending to 20,000 ft. in an unpressurized aircraft causes intestinal gas to expand 300%).
The Russians destroyed over 500 German aircraft by ramming them in mid-air (they also sometimes cleared mine fields by marching over them). It takes a brave man not to be a hero in the Red Army - Joseph Stalin
The US Army had more ships than the US Navy.
The German Air Force had 22 infantry divisions, 2 armor divisions and 11 paratroop divisions. None of them were capable of airborne operations. The German Army had paratroops that WERE capable of airborne operations. Go figure.
When the US Army landed in North Africa, among the equipment brought ashore was 3 complete Coca-Cola bottling plants.
Among the first Germans captured at Normandy were several Koreans. They had been forced to fight for the Japanese Army until they were captured by the Russians and forced to fight for the Russian Army until they were captured by the Germans and forced to fight for The German Army until the US Army captured them.
A malfunctioning toilet sank German submarine U-120.
The Graf Spee never sank. The scuttling attempt failed and the ship was bought as scrap by the British. On board was Germanys newest radar system.
One of Japans methods of destroying tanks was to bury a very large artillery shell with only the nose exposed. When a tank came near enough a soldier would whack the shell with a hammer. Lack of weapons is no excuse for defeat. - LtGen. Mutaguchi
Following a massive naval bombardment 35,000 US and Canadian troops stormed ashore at Kiska. 21 troops were killed in the fire fight. It would have been worse if there had been Japanese on the island.
The MISS ME was an unarmed Piper Cub. While spotting for the US artillery her pilot saw a similar German plane doing the same thing. He dove on the German plane and he and his co-pilot fired their pistols damaging the German plane enough that it had to make a forced landing. Whereupon they landed and took the Germans prisoner. I dont know where they put them since the MISS ME only had 2 seats.
Most members of the Waffen SS were not German.
The only nation that Germany declared war on was the USA.
During the Japanese attack on Hong Kong British officers objected to Canadian infantrymen taking up positions in the officers mess. No enlisted men allowed you know.
Nuclear physicist Niels Bohr was rescued in the nick of time from German occupied Denmark. While Danish resistance fighters provided covering fire he ran out the back door of his home stopping momentarily to grab a beer bottle full of precious Heavy Water. He finally reached England still clutching the bottle. Which contained beer. I suppose some German drank the Heavy Water.
This article is excerpted from the e-zine Ooze #4. Ooze is available in macintosh application, text, or nice graphical web version from http://www.io.com/user/ooze/ or from drbubonic@aol.com for subscription or back issue information. (include wether you want mac or text format)
THE BIG SURPRISE
It was a big night out. One of my friends had invited a group of her co-workers and me out to a bar. When I got there I was introduced to an ok-looking Asian girl. She was sort of kooky and had been slamming down the drinks. She entertained the party by demonstrating her ability to put lit matches into her mouth. Amusing, but nothing really out of the ordinary.
Until she grabbed my hand. What are you doing? I asked.
Trust me. She held my fist and extended my index finger, bracing it with both hands. She started guiding my extended finger towards her face.
I thought she was going to insert my finger into her nose to pick some boogers out, but she was guiding my finger towards her eye. Strange, I thought to myself as she poked my finger into her open eyeball, instead of being squishy it was sort of hard.
I thought that was a pretty neat trick to freak someone out by making them touch a hard contact lens. Those are thick contacts, I said.
No, no. Thats my glass eye, and demonstrated the fact by asynchronously twirling it around in her skull. A million questions filled my head.
Were you in the same accident as Sammy Davis Jr.?
Do you have any weird holiday colored eyes?
Are you available for bar mitzvahs?
But, for once, I was floored. I just stared at the wall. I had just touched a glass eye!
I bet soon, once piercing and branding are laughable old fads like bell bottoms, teens will line up to have their very own glass eye. How chic!
Heres a cool party trick you can use to cash in on the Glass Eye phenomenon. If you are at a party and someone drops some glass on the floor smashing it, quickly cover one of your eyes and yell, My Glass Eye! very loudly.
It makes some people really uncomfortable, but most chicks will eventually dig how hip you are to the glass eye phenomenon.
“If you step on a purple mushroom, you’ll be forced to marry the ugliest person in the world,” warned the old gnome, so the man continued carefully through the woods. He didn’t step on any purple mushrooms. Suddenly a beautiful woman walked up and said: “We have to marry.” “Why?” asked the man, smiling. “I just stepped on one of those pesky purple mushrooms!” she replied.
I once wrote a book called How to Keep an Idiot Entertained for Hours. It
went like this: To keep an idiot entertained for hours, read the next
sentence. To keep an idiot entertained for hours, read the previous
sentence.” It didn’t sell very well. I thought with the short attention
span of people these days it may have been too long, so I rewrote it. The
2nd edition went: “To keep an idiot busy for hours, re-read this sentence.”
It’s doing pretty good. I have a deal for the sequel. The 3rd edition is
going to go: “Re-read this line.” Now, if I could just find the time to
write it.