HUMOUR
Cough! Splutter! This month cocky brings us news of an end to smog in England, plus a report on the amazing S.African double amputee athlete...and more.
SMOKED OUT!
From 1 July 2007, smoking was banned in all public places in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Smoking drinkers visiting public houses now have to huddle outside the premises in miserable groups, puffing on their gaspers and cursing the new law. Meantime drinkers who detested smoking gather in delighted wonder, quaffing their pints of ale without having to secondary inhale smoke and get the filthy stuff clinging to their clothes.
Smoking is an expensive habit in Britain. A pack of 20 cigarettes today costs around 5.40 pounds sterling (that’s about 360 baht). So a twenty cigarettes-per-day smoker will be spending 37.80 pounds per week on his/her fags. That works out to 1,965.60 pounds per year and 19,656 pounds sterling (1.36 million baht) over ten years! And he or she can now only smoke their cancer sticks in their own homes, though they can still buy the cigarettes from machines in pubs and purchase boxes of matches over the counter.
I knew a married couple who ‘economised’ by buying two cartons (200 cigarettes to a carton) once a month at the price of 36 pounds per carton (72 pounds/4,896 baht total) from their local supermarket. Those 400 fags were meant to last them the month; but inevitably they had smoked them all after two and a half weeks and so they then went back to buying packs of twenty at over 5 pounds a pack for the rest of the month. On their next payday, they again purchased two cartons for 72 pounds sterling. When I once asked them how much they spent on smoking per year; the man replied, “Don’t know. I’ve never bothered to work it out.”
Smokers NEVER tally up just how many cigarettes they smoke a day and what they spend on their habit over each month or year. Deep down they know that it would frighten them, and they really don’t want to know. That’s the truth of it.
The question is, will the smoking ban in the UK really encourage people to give up smoking? Hardened smokers argue that if everyone in the UK gives up smoking, the government will then lose millions in tax revenue. The counter argument from non-smokers is that if all smokers stopped smoking there will be far less patients in National Health Service hospital beds dying slowly from smoking-related lung cancer, thus saving the state millions in medical costs. I guess there are no ‘undecideds’ on this one: you are either on one side or the other.
PUNNY BUSINESS
Some old, some new; hopefully all funny:
I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.
Police were called to a day care where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.
Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He’s all right now.
The roundest knight at King Arthur’s round table was Sir Cumference.
To write with a broken pencil is pointless.
When fish are in schools they sometimes take debate.
The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.
A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.
A thief fell in wet cement and broke his right leg. He then became a hardened criminal.
Thieves who steal corn from a garden could be charged with stalking.
We will never run out of maths teachers because they always multiply.
When the smog lifts in southern California, U C L A.
The maths professor went crazy with the blackboard in the classroom. He did a number on it.
The professor discovered that her theory of earthquakes was on shaky ground.
The dead batteries were given out free of charge.
If you take a laptop computer for a run you could jog your memory.
A dentist and a manicurist once fought tooth and nail.
A backward poet writes inverse.
In a democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism, it’s your Count that votes.
If you don’t pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.
Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft and I’ll show you A-flat miner.
When a clock is really hungry it goes back for seconds.
You are stuck with your debt if you can’t budge it.
The karaoke guy broke into song because he couldn’t find the key.
A calendar’s days are numbered.
A boiled egg is hard to beat.
The historian had a photographic memory, which was never developed.
A plateau is a high form of flattery.
When Diana saw her first strands of grey hair, she thought she’d dye.
Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead to know basis.
Acupuncture is a jab well done.
And finally:
There was a man who sent out forty-two different puns to his friends, hoping that at least ten of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
THE BLADE RUNNER COMETH
Oscar Pistorius (aged 20) from South Africa made headlines with his sprinting last summer. He is a double amputee who races on specially made carbon fibre ‘blades’ or prosthetic legs fastened to each knee. And he can run fast by any standards, clocking close to 46 seconds for 400 metres, which is world class sprinting. He was allowed into a couple of track meetings at Rome and Sheffield last July where he ran against the best able-bodied athletes, and acquitted himself with mixed results.
But there is controversy over his competing directly against runners, as some experts feels that his ‘blades’ give him an unfair advantage. As Tim Hutchings of Eurosport points out, Pistorius is able to run ‘negative splits’ for 400 metres (that means running the second 200 metres faster than the first). Now top class sprinters cannot do that at full speed; they inevitably slow down as lactic acid builds up in their calves. For example: World and Olympic Champion Jeremy Wariner (USA) habitually clocks around 21.3 seconds for his first 200 metres and then slows down to 23 or 24 seconds for the second one. Pistorius, on the other hand, is able to run the first half in 24 seconds and then cover the second in 22 sec. As he trains harder over the years, it’s quite possible that will be able to ‘go out’ in 22 seconds and then ‘come back’ in 21 seconds; which could bring him close to (or under) the world 400 metres record of 43.18 seconds, set by Michael Johnson at Seville in 1999.
As Pistorius does not have lower legs made of flesh, blood and bone, he does not experience the build-up of lactic acid that able-bodied athletes inevitably encounter as they race the closing metres. With years of hard training, they can only slightly reduce the lactic acid build-up in their lower limbs. It’s a matter of physiology, chemistry and body mechanics. The man who wins races over 400 metres is the one slowing down the least over the final 120 metres. He may appear to be kicking through, picking off his rivals as they race to the finish line, but this is an optical illusion. He is in fact passing them because they are slowing down more quickly than he is.
Now this is where Pistorius has an ‘unfair advantage’ say some experts. If a runner can really sprint through the closing metres, running much faster over the second half of the race, he is defying natural laws of physics. Says Ms Ceri Diss, Senior Sports Biomechanist at Roehampton University in southwest London, “Pistorius definitely has a mechanical advantage as well as a physiological one. His ‘legs’ are like springs where energy is stored at touch down and then released to project him into the air. Able-bodied athletes try to do the same but some of the stored elastic energy from touch down is lost in the form of heat before projecting into the air. The only problem Pistorius has is that he cannot race well in wet weather.”
The IAAF (World governing body of track and field athletics) has been conducting research into the carbon fibre legs worn by Pistorius in order to reach a decision regarding his continued participation in world-class track & field. It could be that he will be allowed to race against able-bodied athletes until he gets good enough to beat them and break established world records. At that point he will be banned, and confined to competing only in competitions for disabled athletes.
This is not as harsh and unfair as it sounds: in some events the best wheelchair athletes are much faster than world-class two-legged runners. For example: whilst the men’s world record for running the marathon is 2 hours, 4 minutes and 55 seconds; the best wheelchair men can cover the 42.2 kilometres distance in inside one hour and 20 minutes. Whilst wheelchair athletes obviously cannot be expected to hurdle, high jump, pole vault, long/triple jump or run the steeplechase, they often enjoy an ‘unfair advantage’ in some track events. Once they overcome inertia and get rolling in their specially adapted lightweight three-wheeled chairs, these men can move much faster than world class runners.
If Oscar Pistorius somehow makes it through to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, we can be sure that Hollywood film producers will be queuing up for the movie rights to his story. (And it will be nothing like Ridley Scott’s cult science fiction film ‘Blade Runner’ (1982) which was based on the short story ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?’ by Philip K Dick).
Pistorius was born in Pretoria, RSA, on 22 November 1986, weighs 80.5 kilos and stands 1.86m tall in prosthetics. He won gold medals at 200 and 400 metres at the 2004 Paralympics in Athens at the tender age of seventeen.
WILY POODLE
A WEALTHY old lady decides to go on a photo safari in Kenya, taking her faithful but aged poodle named Cuddles along for the company. One day the poodle starts chasing butterflies across the savannah. After chasing for miles, he suddenly realises that he’s lost. Wandering about, he notices a leopard heading rapidly in his direction with the obvious intention of having lunch, and lunch is certainly going to be him.
The old poodle thinks, “Oh, oh! I’m in deep doo-doo here! How am I going to get out of this one?” Noticing some bones on the ground close by, he immediately settles down to chew on the bones with his back to the approaching cat. Just as he senses that the leopard is about to leap on him, Cuddles exclaims loudly, “Boy that was one delicious leopard! I wonder if there are any more around here!”
Hearing this, the young leopard halts his attack in mid-strike, and slinks away into surrounding trees. “Whew!” says the leopard to himself, “that was close! That damn dog nearly had me there!”
Meanwhile, a monkey who had been watching the whole scene from a nearby tree, suddenly figures how he can put this knowledge to good use and trade it for protection from the leopard. So off he goes, leaping from tree to tree after the leopard. However Cuddles sees him moving off after the big cat and decides that something must be up.
The wily monkey soon catches up with the leopard, quickly tells him how the poodle fooled him, and strikes a deal for himself and the leopard. The young feline is furious at being tricked, and says, “Here monkey, hop on my back and see what’s going to happen to that conniving canine! I’ll finish him off and then we can share his flesh and bones between us!”
Now, the old poodle sees the leopard coming back with the monkey on his back and thinks rapidly, “Now, what am I going to do now?”
Instead of running, the dog sits down with his back to his attackers, pretending that he has not seen them as yet. Just as they get close enough to hear, Cuddles says loudly to himself, “Now, where’s that damn monkey? I sent him off more than an hour ago to bring me back another tasty leopard!”
The moral of the story: Don’t mess with old farts...age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill. Bullshit and brilliance only come with age and experience.
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