HUMOUR
THE GHOST FOLLOWING PRESIDENT BUSH
Here is an interesting article from H D S Greenway of the ‘Boston Globe’, published last January: ‘On an autumn night over 300 years ago, Admiral Sir Cowdisley-Shovell, a hero of the British Navy, was approached on his quarterdeck by a sailor with a dire warning. According to the sailor’s calculations, the fleet was headed straight for disaster. But Sir Cowdisley was a bold leader unburdened by self-doubt. He was dead certain that he was headed in the right direction.
‘Such subversive navigation by an inferior was forbidden in the British Royal Navy, according to Dava Sobel in her brilliant book, ‘Longitude’ and so Admiral Shovell had the unfortunate seaman hanged for mutiny on the spot.
‘The 57-year-old Sir Clowdisley stayed the course, oblivious in his ignorance and upright in his optimism, until, one by one, his fleet of ships wrecked themselves on the shores of the Scilly Isles with great loss of life, including his own.
‘Sir Clowdisley kept coming to mind as I was reading Robert Draper’s ‘Dead Certain - the Presidency of George W Bush.’ Dissenters were not hanged in the Bush White House, but their exclusion from the quarterdeck was the bureaucratic equivalent of the long drop. At least Admiral Shovell had a man in uniform willing and courageous enough to bring him bad news.
‘But in the Bush administration, no one dared to say, ‘Hey! Let’s slow down and rethink this policy,’ Draper writes. “I made the decision to lead,” Bush told Draper. “And therefore there will be hard times when you make those decisions. One – it makes you unpopular; two – it makes people accuse you of unilateral arrogance. And that may be true. But the fundamental question is: Is the world better off as a result of your leadership?”
‘Sir Cowdisley might have made the same statement and asked the same question. For an essential part of leadership is not just dead certainty, but finding the right course, and being flexible enough to change it when circumstances warrant.
‘Iraq may be more stable now, but it was an unnecessary war in the first place and there is still no end in sight. It is destined to drag on long after Bush has left the world stage, perhaps even longer than the Vietnam War, radicalising another generation of Muslims, and immeasurably empowering Iran. And under Bush’s leadership, the war in Afghanistan may be lost also. It will be hard to argue that Bush has left the world in better shape than he found it in January 2001.
‘As for the American people; Bush, ‘the first optimist, made pessimists out of them’ Draper writes. A few Bush lieutenants sometimes wonder if, in the end, was his compulsive optimism worth the sacrifice of credibility? Draper poses the question: Was his plain speech just intellectual laziness, his strategic vision merely disrespect for the process; his boldness really recklessness; his strength of vision really an unreflective self-certainty? Draper does not answer the question.
‘The villain may be, however, Bush’s elemental compulsion to accomplish big things. Draper quotes Condoleezza Rice as saying, “This is a time when the US has unparalleled power, and you can try and sit on it and husband it and use a little bit here and there…or you can try to make big strategic plays that will fundamentally alter things in the way that the USA did after 1947.”
‘It is Bush’s big, strategic moves that have got us into so much trouble, making one look nostalgically upon the less ambitious, but infinitely more competent moves of his father’s administration of 1989-1993 which saw Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm when Saddam’s forces were thrown out of Kuwait.
‘There are some indications that this administration, in its 11th hour, is shedding some of the almost petulant heedlessness to the outside world that Draper ascribes to George W Bush. His letter to North Korea’s Kim Jong-il would not have been conceivable when the old ‘we-don’t-talk-to-evil’ theology reigned in the White House. Inviting Syria to the recent Middle East summit was another indication of this new vision. There is a new flexibility in the Bush administration that is helping to dispel some of the hubris of the last seven years.
According to Draper, Bush is thinking hard about his legacy. He is consuming history books with the same voraciousness with which he pounds back his favourite snack food of hot dogs. His presidency now all but consigned to history, Bush is immersed in the past, and gleaning from it portents of what the future would say about America’s 43rd President. Draper notes that Karl Rove recently gave Bush a biography of the young Winston Spencer Churchill; a very British hero. Bush read it voraciously.
‘Bush looks to the ghosts of Churchill, and Harry Truman too, as heroes who were at one time considered failures, and upon whom history now smiles. But, sadly, it’s too late. It is the ghost of Sir Clowdisley that now crowds the Oval Office.’
COMPLAINTS TO THE COUNCIL
These are some genuine clips from complaints to a council authority in England:
1) My bush is really overgrown round the front and my back passage also has fungus growing around it
2) He’s got this huge tool that vibrates the whole house and I just cannot take it anymore
3) It’s the dogs mess that I find hard to swallow
4) I want some repairs done to my cooker as it has backfired and burned my knob off
5) I wish to complain that my father hurt his ankle very badly when he put his foot in the hole in his back passage
6) And their 18-year-old son is continually banging his balls against my fence
7) I wish to report that tiles are missing from the outside toilet roof. I think it was bad wind the other night that blew them off
8) My lavatory seat is badly cracked; so where do I stand?
9) I am writing on behalf of my sink, which is coming away from the kitchen wall
10) Will you please send someone to mend the garden path? My wife tripped and fell on it yesterday and now she is pregnant
11) I request permission to remove my drawers in the kitchen
12) Fifty percent of the walls are damp; fifty percent have crumbling plaster and fifty percent are just plain filthy
13) I am still having problems with smoke in my new drawers
14) The toilet is blocked and we cannot bathe the children until it is cleared
15) Will you please send a man to look at my water? It is a funny colour and not fit to drink
16) Our lavatory seat is broken in half and is now in three pieces
17) I want to complain about the farmer across the road. Every morning at 6 am his cock wakes me up and its’ now getting too much for me
18) The man next door has a large erection in the back garden which is unsightly and dangerous
19) Our kitchen floor is damp. We have two children and would like a third so please send someone round to do something about it
20) I am a single women living in a downstairs flat and would you please do something about the noise made by the man on top of me every night?
21) Please send a man with the right tool to finish the job and satisfy my wife
22) I have had the clerk of works down on the floor six times but I still cannot get any satisfaction
23) This is to let you know that our lavatory seat is broke and we can’t get BBC2.
DOOR SIGN HUMOUR
A sign over a gynaecologist’s office reads: ‘Dr Jones, at your cervix’
At a proctologist’s door: ‘To expedite your visit please back in’
In a podiatrist’s office: ‘Time wounds all heels’
On a septic tank truck in Oregon: ‘Yesterday’s Meals on Wheels’
On a septic tank in New York: ‘We are number one in the number two business’
On a plumber’s truck: ‘We repair what your husband fixed’
‘Don’t sleep with a drip. Call your plumber’
Pizza shop slogan: ‘Seven days without pizza makes one weak’
At a tyre shop in Milwaukee: ‘Invite us to your next blow-out’
On a plastic surgeon’s office door: ‘Hello. Can I pick your nose?’
At a towing company: ‘We don’t charge an arm and a leg. We want tows!’
On an electrician’s truck: ‘Let me remove your shorts’
In a non-smoking area: ‘If we see smoke, we will assume that you are on fire and will take appropriate action’
On a maternity room door: ‘Push. Push. Push.’
At an optometrist’s office: ‘If you don’t see what you are looking for, then you have come to the right place’
On a taxidermist’s window: ‘We really know our stuff’
On a fence: ‘Salesmen welcome! Dog food is expensive’
At a car dealership: ‘The best way to get back on your feet – miss a car payment’
Outside a muffler shop: ‘No appointment necessary. We hear you coming’
In a veterinarian’s waiting room: ‘Be back in five minutes. Sit! Stay!’
At the electric company: ‘We would be delighted if you send in your payment. However, if you don’t, you will be’
In a restaurant window: ‘Don’t stand there and be hungry – come in and get fed up’
In the front yard of a funeral home: ‘Drive carefully. We’ll wait’
At a propane filling station: ‘Thank heaven for little grills’
Sign at a radiator shop in Chicago: ‘Best place in town to take a leak’.
SMART ARSE ANSWERS OF THE YEAR 2007
Number 6: It was mealtime on a flight on Alaska Airlines. ‘Would you like dinner, sir?’ the flight attendant asked big John, seated in front.
“What are my choices?” John asked.
“Yes or no,” she replied.
Number 5: A smiling flight attendant was stationed at the departure gate to check tickets. As a male passenger approached her, she extended her hand for the ticket. The man promptly opened his trench coat and flashed her.
Without changing her friendly pose, she said, “Sir, I need to see your ticket; not your stub.”
Number 4:
A lady was picking through the frozen turkeys at the grocery store but couldn’t find one big enough for her large family.
She asked the stock boy, ‘Do these turkeys get any bigger?”
The lad replied, “No Madam, they’re dead.”
Number 3:
The policeman got out of his car and walked up to the kid who was stopped for speeding. The lad wound down his window, and looked up at the cop.
“I’ve been waiting for you all day”, said the traffic cop.
The kid shrugged and replied, “Yeah, well I got here as fast as I could, officer.”
Number 2:
A truck driver was driving along on the freeway until a sign flashes past that reads, ‘Low Bridge Ahead’.
Before he knows it, the driver finds the bridge right ahead of him and gets his vehicle stuck fast under it. Cars behind him quickly back up for miles. Finally, a police car gets through. The cop gets out of his car, walks up to the hapless driver, and says, “Got stuck, huh?”
The driver says, “No sir. I was delivering this bridge and ran out of gas.”
Number 1:
A college teacher reminds her class of tomorrow’s final exam. “Now class, I won’t tolerate any excuses for you not being here tomorrow. I might consider a nuclear attack or a serious personal injury illness, or a death in your immediate family; but that’s it – no other excuses whatsoever!”
A smart-arse male student sitting at the back of the classroom raises his hand and asks, “What would you say if tomorrow I said that I was suffering from complete and utter sexual exhaustion?”
The entire class is reduced to helpless laughter.
When silence is restored, the teacher smiles knowingly, shakes her head at the student, and sweetly says, “Well, Warren, I guess that you would have to write the exam with your other hand.”
NEOLOGISM CONTEST
Once again, ‘The Washington Post’ has published the winning submissions to its yearly ‘neologism’ contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. The winners are:
a) Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs
b) Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained
c) Abdicate (v.), to give up all further hope of ever having a flat stomach again
d) Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation whilst drunk
e) Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent
f) Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the front door dressed in your nightgown
g) Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp
h) Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavoured mouthwash
i) Flatulence (n.), emergency vehicle that picks you up after you have been run over by a steamroller
j) Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline
k) Testicle (n.), a humorous question in an examination
l) Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists
m) Pokemon (n.), A Rastafarian proctologist
n) Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms (Chupaz my boy!)
o) Frisbeetarianism (n.) the belief that, when you die, your soul flies onto the roof and gets stuck there
p) Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.
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