Coffee Klatch

Two guys sat down for lunch in the office cafeteria.

“Hey, whatever happened to Pete in payroll?”one asked.

“He got this harebrained notion he was going to build a new kind of car,” his co-worker replied.

“How was he going to do it?”

“He took an engine from a Pontiac, tires from a Chevy, seats from a Lincoln, hubcaps from Caddy and, well, you get the idea.”

“So what did he end up with?”

“Ten years to life.”

Billy Mays, the pitchman for OxiClean, Kaboom, and Orange Glo, was found dead in his Tampa, FL, home today. Here’s a link to one of the many articles about him, this one from CNN.com.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted anything, but that’s been because I’ve been on the road. I took my two older boys (ages 15 & 12) and flew to Phoenix a couple weeks ago. We visited with my sisters and niece, took care of estate business, figured out who was keeping what of all our parents’ possessions, and all that kind of thing. We took five days to drive home and we visited the following parts of the U.S. National Park System (at each of which we got stamps in our National Park Passport Books):

Navajo National Monument
Old Spanish National Historic Trail
Natural Bridges National Monument
Canyonlands National Park
Arches National Park
Colorado National Monument
Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
Curecanti National Recreation Area
Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument
Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site
Santa Fe National Historic Trail
Fort Scott National Historic Site

Go ahead and click on some of these links. Some of our most memorable sites were Bent’s Old Fort, Canyonlands, and Fort Scott.

We also visited Monument Valley and Dodge City, and also got to drive on several roads that were twisty and climbed right up a cliff face. That was quite fun.

Now I have a couple days to regroup and rest before heading back to work on Monday. We’re also hopefully closing on a house tomorrow afternoon. If that works out, then this weekend we’ll also be getting the house ready to move into it.

A waiter approached the man who was carefully studying the menu at the fancy restaurant. “May I take your order, sir?” he asked.

“Well, I was wondering how you prepare your chickens,” the man replied.

“Oh, it’s nothing too special, sir,” the waiter confided. “We just tell them straight out that they’re going to die.”

Here are the Top Ten Signs that You’re at a Bad Zoo

1. When no one else is looking, you swear that the monkeys are mocking you.
2. The Bears exhibit is nothing more than the guys cut from the football team during training camp.
3. The stripes on the zebra tend to peel away in the heat.
4. The zookeeper always wants to take the rhino for a walk.
5. The lion in the lion cage closely resembles the one from The Lion King.
6. The alligator in the Reptiles exhibit is just the University of Florida’s Mascot.
7. If you deposit 50 cents, the giraffe will magically appear and talk to you.
8. Ask the tour guide too many questions and you’re suddenly dipped in some sort of sauce and placed in the tigers’ den.
9. The elephant appear to be two guys in a two-part elephant suit.
10. Two words: Hippo Dogs!

All these quotes are from Albert Einstein
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“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

“The must incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”

“Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.”

“Gravitation can not be held responsible for people falling in love.”

“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”

“The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.”

When asked how World War III would be fought, Einstein replied that he didn’t know. But he knew how World War IV would be fought: “With sticks and stones!”

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S RELATIVITY.”

“Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.”

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

Today the “classic” video game, Tetris, is 25 years old! I still remember the first time I saw a Tetris game. It was a sit-down arcade game that two people could play facing each other (taking turns, of course). What really astounded me was the music that played during your game. I was a freshman in college and I’d just finished a year of Russian in high school the previous year. So when I played Tetris and heard “Kalinka” and other Russian folk tunes, I was surprised and thrilled. I found myself singing along while I played the game, totally enjoying myself. Pretty cool!

If you’d like to have a little Tetris action, visit Tetris.com or FreeTetris.org.

Celebrate National Donut Day! Visit Krispy Kreme today and get a free donut! Or visit Dunkin Donuts and buy a drink to get a free donut. Pretty cool!

After it was all over and Noah lowered the ramp of the ark for all the animals to leave, he told the animals: “Go forth and multiply.”

All the animals left except two snakes who lay quietly in a corner of the ark.

“Why won’t you go forth and multiply?” demanded Noah.

“We can’t,” answered the snakes. “We’re adders.”

Every once in a while I get the urge to poke around Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg’s book, The Book of Ratings: Opinions, Grades, and Assessments of Everything Worth Thinking About. So many of those lists have really funny things in them, while taking categories of items and rating and grading them. Here’s an example:

The Seven Dwarves
Grumpy:
There seems to be a rule that every group of lovable anthropoids has to have a troubled brooder. Sesame Street has Oscar, Winnie-the-Pooh has Eeyore, the Smurfs–I apologize for knowing this–have Grouchy, and the Seven Dwarves have Grumpy. I suppose, if you get right down to it, this trend was started by the Apostles. It’s hard to imagine Grumpy leading the Pharisees to Snow White for thirty pieces of silver, then hanging himself at a crossroads, but it’s worth the effort. C

Doc:
Poor Doc, doomed forever to be a noun dwarf among adjective dwarves. I wonder how he got the name. Is it just that he’s the smartest one (not that any of them come across as Rhodes scholars) or does he have some sort of fantasy medical degree? Either way, it didn’t help him when Snow White literally bit the big one. If only he had read “Osculatory Revivification in Cases of Enchanted Narcolepsy” in the prestigious Journal of Fruit-Borne Curses. C+

Happy:
Happy may have been the most forgettable dwarf of the bunch. I can’t even conjure up his face in my mind, not that I’m complaining. My point is just that they could have saved on the animation budget by doubling up on dwarves. Dopey always seemed pretty happy. Sneezy would have had a good excuse to be grumpy, and if Bashful had been more sleepy, he could have been the dwarven Brian Wilson. Or maybe they should have just had one named Bipolar Hypochondriac and called it Snow White and a Dwarf. Catchy! C-

Bashful:
Bashful of what? He sleeps in a single room with six other guys he’s known for a couple centuries, if I know my fantasy dwarf life spans. You’d think in that time he’d have managed to loosen up a little. Sure, I can see how having a virgin princess move in would make him a bit tongue-tied with pent-up ardor, but he already had the name. D

Dopey:
Dopey is the only bald, beardless, mute dwarf in the bunch. I’m not sure what that indicates. Maybe he’s the dwarf equivalent of a toddler, in which case they’re kind of jumping to label the guy, or maybe it’s some sort of disorder in his animated chromosomes, in which case the name Dopey is kind of callous but rolls off the tongue better than Developmentally Disabledy. B-

Sneezy:
At this point I have to wonder how the whole dwarf-naming process goes. Was Sneezy called Sneezy from birth, or was he known as Wrinkled Diaper-Filler until his personal quirk became evident? If he started taking steroid inhalants for his allergies, would he have to change his name to Healthy or would he bear the traces of his former affliction forever? C

Sleepy:
I sympathize with Sleepy. I enjoy the sleep. I expect he had the weightiest cross to bear of all his, um, brothers? Cousins? Kin. It’s hard enough being sleepy, but being a sleepy miner must be a really tough gig. Not only do you have to get up early and work hard, but if you hit a pocket of poison gas, everyone will just think you’re passed out on the job again. I’m surprised he lived through the picture. A

Current music: Planet of the Apes (1968) - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack