Jokes and Stories from this months issue.

SHERLOCK HOLMES and his faithful friend Dr Watson went camping one fine day in midsummer. They retired for the night after a good picnic of ham sandwiches and boiled eggs, washed down by an excellent bottle of red wine. Just after 4am, Holmes woke up suddenly and nudged Watson lying asleep beside him.
"Watson; look up at the sky and tell me what you see", he said as the good doctor opened his eyes.
"I see millions of stars, Holmes", answered Watson after a pause.
"And what, my dear Watson, do you deduce from that?" Asked Holmes.
Watson pondered on this for a minute. "Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo. Horologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day today. Theologically, I can see that God is all-powerful, and that we are but a small and insignificant part of the universe. What is your deduction, Holmes?"
Holmes stared at his old pal. "Watson, you idiot!" he shouted, "Someone has stolen our tent!"
THE FEMALE angler-fish weighs up to half a ton. The male, however, is only a few millimetres long, and spends his whole life attached to her nose. Hen-pecked husbands know the feeling, I suspect.
BIG BEN in London, England is not the name of the clock, but the bell inside it.
IN 1921, Clara Bow (born in 1905) won a national fame and fortune contest in California for which the prize was a role in a motion picture. She soon became one of the leading silent stars of her age, and earned a fortune with such classic movies as 'Mantrap" (1926) and 'It' (1927). A symbol of the 'Roaring Twenties', her sexual appetite was legendary: it is believed that she once 'entertained' the entire University of Southern California football team. Ms Bow died aged 60 on 27 September 1965.
SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939), the father of modern Psychiatry, was smuggled out of Germany in 1937. Friends paid the Nazi leadership £20,000 for his release, and he died eighteen months later.
THE SIEGE OF Mafeking, in which some 8,000 Boers surrounded a thousand British troops, was lifted on 17 May 1900. The commanding officer in Mafeking was Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who went on to found the Scout Movement in 1908. Note: Never refer to these guys as 'BOY Scouts'. They don't like it.
JOAN OF ARC (1412-1431), the famous ‘Maid of Orleans' was a teenage religious fanatic who amazingly became a military leader in 15th century Europe. Driven by her 'Voices from God' she organised the French resistance that forced the English to end the siege of Orleans in 1429. Soon after, she led an army of 12,000 to Rheims and had the French dauphin crowned King Charles V11. But the latter was a weak-willed man who soon became jealous of Joan's popularity. When she was captured by the Burgundians in 1430, he gratefully accepted the ransom of 10,000 gold crowns raised by French citizens for her release. But in one of the most treacherous acts in history, he kept the money and did nothing to have Joan set free. She was instead sold to the English who regarded her as politically very dangerous. After a show trial for heresy and sorcery, she was found guilty and burned at the stake in Rouen on 30 May 1431. Jeanne d'Arc was eventually declared a Saint by the Vatican in 1920. Recommended: 'The Messenger' starring the Ukrainian actress Milla Jovovich as the remarkable Joan. (Columbia pictures).
SOME OF the fiercest fighting of the Vietnam conflict (1965-75) occurred during the 1968 Tet Offensive. On 31 January 1968, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) in the north and Viet Cong insurgents in the south attacked over 50 cities and towns simultaneously whilst the entire country noisily celebrated the Chinese New Year (Tet) with rockets and firecrackers. Politically, this bold action cost the USA-backed South Vietnamese Government the war, because up till then, President Lyndon Johnson was continually informing the American public that this "Police Action" in South East Asia would soon be over and their boys could go home. The NVA and Viet Cong captured Hue City from ARVN (South Vietnamese) troops and held onto to it for 25 days before they were forced to retreat by units of the US Marine Corps after some bloody and unrelenting house to house fighting. When the Marines finally recaptured the citadel at Hue on 26 February, it was virtually the only building left standing in this once beautiful city. The victorious American troops replaced the Viet Cong flag fluttering over the citadel with the Stars and Stripes before wearily getting down to their well-earned chow. A furious General Westmoreland, just up from Saigon to inspect the battle area, angrily ordered them to take it down and replace it with the flag of the South Vietnamese Government. Stanley Kubrick's extraordinary 1988 movie, 'Full Metal Jacket' vividly portrays the inner-city warfare that destroyed Hue City in 1968, even though the battle scenes were cleverly shot (would you believe it?) on London's Isle of Dogs.
CNN's OFFICIAL estimate of America's financial involvement in Vietnam was 871 billion dollars. Three US administrations spent 236 billion dollars on weaponry alone.
MADAME TASSAUD (1763-1850) is a very popular tourist venue of famous waxworks in London. During the French Revolution in the 1790's her model-making skills were employed in making death masks for well-known victims of the guillotine.
AMERCIANS SPEND four times as much per year on pet food as they do on baby food. Now, why does that not surprise you?
DID YOU hear about the riot at Dublin Jail? The Prison Governor ordered the guards to evict the troublemakers.
AN IRISHMAN we know had a very bad start to the duck season. Everyone else was bagging ducks whilst he was not. Then he realised his mistake - he wasn't throwing the dog high enough.
THREE GERMAN lads are climbing a steep mountain. Leading is Ulrich with Jar and Hans below him. Suddenly Hans loses his grip and falls screaming to be dashed to death on the rocks below. Ulrich looks down and says, "Look Jar, no Hans!"
PRESIDENT GORBACHEV was once asked at a news conference in London what might have been the historical outcome if President Kruschev had been assassinated in 1963 instead of President JF Kennedy. Gorbachev thought for a moment and then replied, "I don't think that Aristotle Onassis would have married Mrs Kruschev."
CHAIRMAN MAO Tse-Tung once said, "Give them each a spoon, and a million Chinese people will build you a dam." He was not kidding, either.
HOW DO you get a racist to laugh on a Sunday? Tell him a racist joke on Friday.
HOW MANY racists does it take to change a light bulb? None, because racists hate to be enlightened.
THE HITLER DIARIES were the most famous and costly fraud in publishing history. The books were the work of Konrad Kujau; a cheery con man who forged the sixty volumes in his garage in Stuttgart and sold them to a journalist from 'Stern' magazine named Gerd Heidemann. The latter, a compulsive collector of Nazi memorabilia, was told that Kujau obtained the diaries from a relative in East Germany who was smuggling them over the border piece by piece. The books, along with other items belonging to Adolf Hitler, had supposedly been in a Junkers transport aircraft that had crashed near Boernersdorf in April 1945 whilst ferrying some of Hitler's property to safety. The German dictator committed suicide on 30 April 1945, nine days after his 56th birthday as the allies destroyed Berlin, the last bastion of the German Third Reich. Heidemann passed on this 'scoop' to his employers but kept at least a third of the cash, as he grew very rich from his role as middleman. Eventually, 'Stern' paid out 9.3 million marks on this literary disaster.
Once he had done the research, it took Kajau only four hours to forge a complete diary. His main source was an edition of 'Hitler's Speeches and Proclamations 1932-45', a daily chronology of the Fuhrer's activities, compiled in 1962 by the German historian Max Domarus. The forger copied hundreds of pages from Domarus. Most of this was a tedious recital of official engagements and Nazi party announcements. (The first experts who studied the documents were convinced of their authenticity largely because they were so dull). Kajau dressed up each diary by sticking a red wax seal in the shape of a German eagle on the cover, together with a label, signed by Martin Bormann, declaring them to be Hitler's property. He then bashed each book about to age it, and sprinkled some tea over a few pages. These crude forgeries would not have withstood the most basic forensic tests. Unfortunately the senior management of 'Stern' was so keen to make a fat profit from this historical scoop that, in the name of secrecy, tests were not carried out until serialisation rights had been sold around the world. In April 1983, several publications, including 'Newsweek' and 'The Sunday Times' commenced publishing the work. Many experts on the Nazi era were made to look extremely foolish when the dairies were quickly proven to be fakes.
The packed press conference at Hamburg to launch Stern's publication descended into chaos. David Irving, a right-wing British historian, leapt to the microphone and loudly demanded to know how Hitler had managed to write about the July 1944 bomb plot when he had been wounded in his right arm during the blast. Tempers flared, and a Japanese camera crew was knocked to the ground. As a fistfight swirled around him, Irving continued to rant, and somewhere in his cubbyhole in Hell, Adolf Hitler must have been laughing.
Stern's star 'Nazi expert', Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), who had been convinced that the dairies were genuine, suddenly recanted in public. The consequent severe discomfort of Sir Trevor-Roper, who was widely considered to be an arrogant snob, caused great glee among his colleagues at Cambridge University. A limerick was soon doing the rounds of Cambridge senior common rooms: "There once was a fellow named Dacre/ who was God in his own little acre/ But with Hitler's Diaries, he was quite 'ultra vires'/ and unable to spot an old faker." After a lengthy trial in 1985, Heidemann and Kajau were both sentenced to over four years in gaol for their roles in this amazing fraud. ('Selling Hitler' by Robert Harris, Arrow Books, 1986).
A TRAVELLER on a long rail journey through Tamil Nadu (formerly Madras) in India was assailed throughout his long trip by tiny insects that constantly bit him as he tried to read his paper or sleep in the narrow bunk. He wrote a letter of complaint to the railway management a few days later, and was soon gratified to receive a reply, which stated that his complaint was being treated seriously. This was the first such comment received, he was informed, and investigators would be looking into it. In the meantime, staff would be busy de-lousing and cleaning all railway carriages belonging to the company. He was thanked and further assured that his comments were valuable to the railway authority. The man felt quite pleased by this response until he put the letter back in the envelope. A small note fell out with a hand-written message scrawled on it: "Send this guy the bug letter!"
DID YOU know that the official name for Libya is the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and that the French town of Bayonne gave its name to the bayonet?
ON HIS first day as a member of the galley crew, a slave remarked to the oarsman beside him that it was a beautiful day to be sculling around the Mediterranean. "Won't be tomorrow", said his mate, "we're booked to take Anthony and Cleopatra waterskiing."
MEMBERS OF ANCIENT Egyptian royalty often married within the family to preserve the sanctity of the royal line. Cleopatra (69-30 BC) for example, was forced to marry her younger brother. I guess there's many a true word spoken incest.
SOME OF the world's shortest books: "The Maggie Thatcher Joke Book"; "Ronald Reagan's Bumper Book of Golden Memories"; "The Quality of Mercy" by Saddam Hussein; and "God Bless Highbury!" by Colin Devonshire.
HOW MANY President Bush's does it take to screw in a light bulb? Both of them. George senior to hold it in place, and then junior to screw it right up.
THE LIBERAL British Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898) had strong Puritan impulses. He kept a selection of whips in his cellar with which he regularly chastised himself for "impure thoughts".
THERE ARE more living organisms on the skin of a single human being than there are human beings on the surface of the earth. Even if you shower six times a day.
THE SLOWEST marathon runner in history is Briton Lloyd Scott. In 2002, he walked the London (April) and New York City (November) marathons dressed in a diving suit and lead diving boots. Each 'run' of 26.2 miles/42.2 kilometres took him almost a week to complete. As you can imagine, lead diving boots are about as forgiving as the Japanese commandant who put Sir Alec Guinness in the sweatbox. But Scott did raise thousands of pounds/dollars
for charity.
IN TENTH century England, the Anglo-Saxons believed Friday to be such an unlucky day that they ritually slaughtered any child unfortunate enough to be born on that day of the week.
SEEN IN a Thai beauty salon: "To peel the face - 5,000 baht." Hmm, sounds painful.
davidcox@loxinfo.co.th

Having a bad day?

There was a case in one hospital’s intensive care ward, where patients always died in the same bed, on Sunday morning at about 11 a.m. Regardless of their medical condition. This puzzled the doctors and some even thought that it had something to do with the supernatural. No one could solve the mystery . . . a worldwide team of experts was assembled to investigate the cause of the incidents. The next Sunday morning a few minutes before 11 am all the doctors and nurses nervously wait outside the ward to see for themselves what the terrible phenomenon was all about. Some were holding wooden crosses, prayer books and other holy objects to ward off the evil spirits. Jus when the clock struck 11, Pooch Johnson, the part time Sunday sweeper entered the ward, unplugged the life support system so that he could use the vacuum cleaner!
Thanks to John Miller for that one

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