Jokes and Stories from this months issue.

*THE BILLIONAIRE right-wing political gladfly, (Henry) Ross Perot from Texas was interviewed by CNN’s Larry King during the American general election in Autumn 2000. Perot (72) ran for President as an independent candidate in 1992 and 1996. Now he openly sang the praises of his nominated favourite, George W. Bush, and urged viewers to vote for the former governor of Texas. He also trashed Bush’s opponent; the former Vice President Al Gore, intimating that Gore was somehow diminished by his military service role in Vietnam as a non-combatant photographer. Perot also said that Gore had received bodyguard protection whilst in Vietnam which he described as coddling the son of an American senator. He did not comment on the non-existent Vietnam military service of his candidate, George Walker Bush Jnr, who avoided the draft in the 1960’s by serving in the National Guard. Some might describe that as coddling the son of an American President. Predictably, the fawning Larry King did not take him up on these points. Now if Perot been interviewed on BBC’s ‘Hardtalk’ programme, it would have been different. Britain’s Tim Sebastian has a reputation of going for the jugular, and we can be sure that Perot would not have been allowed to get away with those barbed comments. Shame that ‘Larry King Live’ no longer has any teeth. Ego-stroking and book plugs seem to have replaced real debate.
*MUSICAL QUOTE: “For me, the ‘Grateful Dead’ are aptly named. Anyone would be grateful to be dead after listening for any length of time to their discordant, pretentious garbage. I consider them to be the biggest frauds in modern rock music.” (Ray Manzarek, keyboard player of The Doors, in 1969).
*THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO took place on 18 June 1815. The actual battlefield was some miles away from the British headquarters at Waterloo in what is now Belgium. After Wellington’s historic victory, “Waterloo teeth” were sold in England as mementos of the battle. These macabre items had been ripped from the corpses of French soldiers.
*QUEEN VICTORIA inadvertently caused the death of her beloved spouse Albert when the effluent pipe from her chamber burst, flooding his with dirty, disease-ridden water.
*THE MAGNA CARTA, which gave great power to the Barons of England, was signed on 15 June 1215 at Runnymede. King John (1167-1216) didn’t actually put his name to the document because he could not read or write. England’s king, the youngest son of Henry II (1133-1189), had to place his seal on the parchment instead of a signature. As John lost all England’s lands in France during his reign, he became known as ‘John Lackland’, but he was the first Norman monarch to reside permanently in Britain.
*EVER FEEL LIKE thrashing your car, the way Basil Fawlty (John Clees) once famously did in the priceless TV series ‘Fawlty Towers’? Now you can. There is a place in Germany where you can smash the bodies of cars into heaps of junk – and get rid of all that pent-up anger boiling away inside you. In Templehof, Berlin there is a special wrecking yard, where for a donation of five German marks you are handed a pair of gloves, goggles and a 5-kilo hammer. Then you can swing away at any one of hundreds of car bodies. The owners report that they have a steady stream of visitors to their site, six days a week. All seem eager to donate the cash, and then beat whole cars into junk with their rented sledgehammers. They leave tired but happy. (BBC World Service)
*SAINT SIMEON STYLITES day is on 5 January. This fifth-century hermit (AD 390-450) showed his total devotion to God by spending over thirty years sitting on top of a huge flagpole praying and meditating. Not much of a family man, I reckon.
*JOSE OLMEDO (1798-1869), the Ecuadorian poet, has a statue in his honour in his home country. Because of limited funds, the government decided not to commission a sculptor for the task of shaping Olmedo’s likeness in stone. Instead, Ecuadorian government agents purchased a second-hand statue of the English poet Lord Byron (1788-1824) which was placed in the capital city of Quito and renamed ‘Jose Olmedo’. Well, who was to know?
*JEREMY BENTHAM (1748-1832) was an English political reformer who analysed natural rules of law and devised the theory of Utilitarianism. He gave the whole of his large estate to University College Hospital, London, on the condition that he be stuffed after his death and allowed to sit in on all future board meetings. Bentham’s wish was granted, and the tradition continued for 92 years after his death on 6 June 1832. The story goes that a new board member once turned to Bentham’s corpse sitting in a corner, and asked, “You’ve been pretty quiet so far. What do you think of this current motion to provide crèche facilities for nurses who are mothers?”
*THE ADVENTURER Giovanni Jacopo Casanova (1725-1798) is often referred to as the world’s greatest lover. He began his working life by taking minor orders in the Catholic Church, and then went on to sleep with hundreds of women and cause scandals throughout Europe. Similarly, Varouk Boulsara, better known as rock star ‘Freddie Mercury’ of ‘Queen’, boasted that he had enjoyed sex with over 2,000 men before his death in November 1991. Boulsara (born in 1943 on the Spice Island of Zanzibar) died from complications arising from AIDS. ‘Queen’s’ last public performance was an AIDS-awareness concert held in his memory at Wembley stadium in 1992.
*TWO FAMOUS entertainers both died on 16 August. Bela Lugosi (born in 1884), the famous horror actor and opium addict, expired on that day in 1956, and was buried wearing his famous ‘Dracula’ cape in accordance with his will. Elvis Presley (born 8 January 1935), Tennessee’s ‘King of Rock’, died whilst sitting on his toilet seat at his home in Graceland on 16 August 1977, aged only 42. Presley’s unhealthy diet of fast foods, drugs and booze saw his weight balloon to over 100 kilos during the last three years of his life. He had millions of British fans but his manager, ‘Colonel’ Parker, never allowed his star client to perform in Britain. Apparently the money offered was never enough, and then it was too late.
*REMEMBER THE ‘Fan Man’? He first hit the big time at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in 1993. Briton James Miller literally dropped into the middle of the Evander Holyfield v Riddick Bowe heavyweight title fight using a homemade flying parachute propelled by a giant fan strapped to his back. Cornermen for the boxers beat Miller senseless and the invasion caused a 21 minutes delay to the bout. “The chute hits the fan!” thundered a front-page headline in Britain’s ‘Sun’ newspaper the next day. After hostilities resumed, Holyfield regained his title on points. But ‘Fan Man’ was not finished. A few months later he buzzed the crowd strapped to his mechanised chute at an FA Cup soccer match between Bolton and Arsenal at Highbury, North London. Miller’s next stunt was to paraglide in the nude onto the roof of Buckingham Palace in London to deliver a personal message to the British Royal Family. It takes a crazy eccentric to brighten up our day sometimes. (Sydney Morning Herald)
*WHILST FOURTEEN million people died during Europe’s World War I (1914-1918); almost twenty million more died in an epidemic of influenza in 1919.
*JUAN ANTONIO SAMARANCH (86), President of the International Olympic Committee from 1980 until 2001, is not just a smart Spaniard. During his tenure of office in the autocratic Olympic movement, he acted like a head of state, always travelling on private aircraft, staying in luxurious hotel suites and presiding over IOC meetings boasting billionaires and royalty. His sanitised official biography, which virtually puts forward Samaranch’s candidacy for sainthood, neglects to mention one area of his past, however. When Juan Antonio was Mayor of Barcelona in the 1940’s, he was a good friend and supporter of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. During the Spanish Civil War in the 1930’s he was a staunch fascist, and in later years became great pals with the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler of Germany. Spain was neutral during World War II, but there was no doubt as to whom senor Samaranch supported during the great European conflict. There are even photographs in existence from that era, showing Samaranch making the Nazi facist salute alongside his uniformed pals Hitler and Mussolini. But you will not find any of these pictures in his official biography.
From 1950 onwards, when he became President of the Spanish Olympic Committee, Samaranch cleverly shed the skin of his murky past and re-invented himself. He eventually became the genial old Juan Antonio, the dapper little Catalan President of the IOC who traveled first class everywhere and was addressed by IOC staff as “Your Excellency”. Like all good con men, Samaranch knew just when and how to create a fresh myth. Lord Jeffrey Archer could take lessons from this guy.
*TRANSIT AUTHORITIES in New York City, USA have launched a special ‘singles carriage’ on the subway rail system so that unmarried people can mingle and give romance a chance to blossom. Lovelorn users can travel the system all day for $1.50 in search of new partners. It was however soon discovered that most users of the ‘Love Train’ were gay. Said one unhappy female; “I would expect this in San Francisco, but not in the Big Apple.”
*THOUGH IT WAS a huge worldwide hit for Jose‘ Feliciano in the 1970’s, the song ‘Light my Fire’ was actually written by Robbie Kreiger of ‘The Doors’ rock band in 1968. The legendary Jim Morrison (1943-1971) wrote the concluding verses.
*THE VETERAN American actor James Garner was a huge international hit in such television serials as ‘Maverick’ and ‘The Rockford Files’. As the world-weary private eye Jim Rockford in the latter role, he had some wonderful one liners. My favourite was when he being roughed up by some slimy hoods outside his beachside mobile home. After being punched in the stomach, Rockford doubles up in pain, then looks up and asks his assailant, “Does YOUR MOTHER know what you do for a living?”
*T. E. LAWRENCE, known as Lawrence of Arabia, was born on 15 August 1888. After he was raped and beaten by Turkish soldiers in 1917, he developed a taste for sado-masochism and used to pay an admirer (appropriately named John Birch) to whip him unmercifully. He would also hold one hand over a lighted candle until the flesh burned. A colleague who also tried this asked him, “Ouch! That hurts. What’s the trick?” Lawrence replied, “The trick is not minding that it hurts.” Lawrence, who wrote his best-selling autobiography, ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ in 1926, was killed in a motorcycle accident at Clouds Hill, Dorset on 19 May 1935.
*DID YOU KNOW that a cheetah can reach a speed of 45 miles per hour from a standing start in under two seconds? Try to duplicate that acceleration in your car, if you can.
*THE MOA BIRD of New Zealand, which became extinct more than four hundred years ago, was over ten feet (3.05 metres) tall. They breed ‘em large in Kiwi-land.
*THE SKULL of the ancient ‘Piltdown Man’, said to be an invaluable link in the chain of human evolution, was discovered by Charles Dawson on 21 November 1912. Many scientists enthused about it, but the discovery was eventually declared a hoax, causing one of the greatest scandals of the decade.
*THE FIRST air raid in history occurred on 21 August 1849, when bombs with pre-set fuses were dropped from hot-air balloons onto the city of Venice, Italy.
*THAILAND’S HEDONISTIC resort city of Pattaya made it’s own attempt to get into the ‘Guinness Book of Records’ last September/October when a beautiful young lady, aged 30, sat in a glass enclosure at the Royal Garden Plaza. For over thirty-two days, 3,400 poisonous scorpions accompanied her. Kanchana Kataew was stung several times, but survived the ordeal without any major problems. Apparently she is used to being stung, having lived with these dangerous critters many times in the past.
*KING CAMP Gillette (1855-1932) invented the world’s first disposable safety razor in 1895. Two years after he had patented his invention, he had sold only 168 razors; but by the following year sales had jumped to an incredible 12.4 million blades.
*IN 2002, ONLY four British men ran a marathon faster than Paula Radcliffe’s time of 2 hours, 17 minutes and 18 seconds at Chicago on 13 October 2002. The female running machine from Bedford cut 89 seconds from the previous women’s world best for the 42.2 kilometres/26.2 miles distance. And when she won the 2002 London Marathon last April, Radcliffe became the first British female in athletics history to better a Commonwealth Games qualifying standard for MEN. As a language student at Loughborough University in the 1990’s few of the men there would train with her. After track training sessions, Paula always ran the ‘recovery’ runs on the roads and parks of Leicestershire at a hellish pace, and no one could keep up with her, not even her future husband Gary Lough, who was a British international at 1500 meters.
*STEVE GOUGH from Britain likes to shed his clothes. He recently entered a courtroom in Southampton, England in the nude to answer a charge of public nakedness, and was immediately re-arrested. Gough hung a sign around his neck, which stated “Being naked is not a crime”. The police disagreed with him, and he was once again charged with indecent exposure.
*AN ENGLISHMAN who visited Thailand for the first time recently learned a hard lesson. He had been warned that toilet attendants in bars and clubs are often pickpockets. “These guys can lift your wallet whilst giving you a neck massage”, he was told. Armed with this knowledge, he was enjoying himself in a well-known disco nightspot in Pattaya recently when he felt nature calling. Our happy tourist had been dancing with a lovely creature that he had met an hour earlier. His companion was tall, attractive, and spoke good English in a wonderfully husky voice. She was in fact so nice that he decided to trust her to mind his wallet for him whilst he went to the hong nam (toilet) for a tinkle. The “lady” looked astonished, then smiled happily as he handed his billfold over. Imagine his surprise two minutes later when he rejoined the dance floor to discover that his new friend was nowhere to be seen. The sultry ladyboy had vanished into the night, along with his wallet, credit cards and over 8,000 baht in cash.
davidcox@loxinfo.co.th

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