Jokes and Stories from this months issue.

*ON BEING BRITISH: (a) Only in Britain can you get a pizza to your house faster than an ambulance.
(b) Only in Britain do supermarkets make sick people walk all the way to the back of the shop to get their prescriptions whilst healthy (?) people can buy cigarettes at the front.
(c) Only in Britain do people order double cheeseburger, large fries and a DIET coke.
(d) Only in Britain do banks leave their doors open and chain the pens to the counters.
(e) Only in Britain do we leave expensive cars on the driveway and lock our junk and cheap lawn mower in the garage.
(f) Only in Britain do we use answering machines to screen calls and then have call waiting so that we don't miss a call from someone we didn't want to talk to in the first place.
(h) Only in Britain will you find disabled parking places in front of a skating rink.
(i) Three Brits die each year testing if a 9-volt battery works on their tongues.
(j) One hundred and forty-two (142) Brits were injured in 1999 by not removing all pins from their new shirts.
(k) Fifty-eight (58) Brits are injured each year by using sharp knives instead of screwdrivers in doing odd jobs around the house.
(l) Thirty-one (31) Brits have died since 1996 by watering the Christmas tree whilst the fairy lights were plugged in.
(m) British hospitals reported four broken arms in 2001 due to cracker pulling accidents during the festive season.
(n) Five hundred and forty-three (543) Brits were admitted to Accident & Emergency in the last two years after trying to open beer cans with their teeth.
(o) Five Brits were injured last year in accidents involving out-of-control scalextric cars.
(p) In the year 2000 eight Brits cracked their skulls whilst throwing up in the toilet after a night on the sauce. Rule Britannia!
*"WHY DID God invent liquor? Obviously to prevent the Irish from taking over the whole world." (Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900)
*SPOTTED DURING the Hutton Enquiry into the suicide of British scientist David Kelly in the summer of 2003. British Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon arrived at London's courts of justice to give evidence. On a poster were scrawled the words, "You ain't nothin' but a Hoon Dog; lying all the time." (Haunting the enquiry was the accusation that British politicians had "sexed up" the terrorist threat from Iraq).
*ON AVERAGE, an acre of green land anywhere in the world will contain around 50,000 spiders. According to experts, if spiders were the size of most dogs, they would have taken over the Earth long ago. And we would have been web fodder.
*IN EIGHTEENTH century England, laws had to be passed to curb the seemingly insatiable appetite for gin amongst poor people. The annual intake among the working classes was around five million (5,000,000) gallons. Gin was extremely cheap and nearly always drunk neat - an acquired taste, as any dedicated drinker will tell you. Little old ladies in London lived just for their daily 'nip' of the hard stuff. Hence the name - "Mother's Ruin".
*OVERHEARD EXCHANGE in a bar: "I hated Shakespeare in High School." "Why? Did he write something mean about you in your Year Book?"
*A BRITISH meat company enjoyed success with a new variety of meatballs called 'meat faggots'. The bosses decided to expand the market into the USA, beginning with an expensive sales campaign in the city of New York. Amazingly, no one in the sales team seemed to be aware that the term 'faggot' has an entirely different meaning to Americans. A huge billboard in Times Square bore a picture of two steaming meatballs on a plate, with the text, 'Feeling peckish? What you need to take care of that is a couple of big, juicy faggots'. Another poster read, 'We put the meat into our faggots. How about putting a faggot into you?' Locals in the Big Apple saw the billboards and just fell about laughing, and the campaign had to be swiftly abandoned. Advertising specialists suggested to the company top brass that they might consider renaming their prime product.
*QUOTES: "Telling like it is means telling it like it was and how it is now that it isn't what it was to the now people today". (Writer Jill Johnson in 'The Village Voice'.)
"To hell with the public - I'm here to represent the people!" (New Jersey state senator).
"If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive." (Movie mogul Sam Goldwyn).
"Some reporters say that I don't have vision. I don't see that." (US President George Walker Bush).
"The only way to prevent what's past is to put a stop to it before it happens." (Sir Boyle Roche).
"Line up alphabetically by height." (Baseball coach Casey Stengel).
"And now the sequence of events is in no particular order." (News anchor Dan Rather).
"If you give a person a fish, they'll eat for a day. But if you show a person how to fish, they'll be a fish for a lifetime." (Former US Vice-President Dan Quayle).
"I'm not allowed to comment on lousy officiating." (New Orleans Saints manager Jim Finks on what he thought of official decisions during one game).
*ODD NOTICE: 'Danger - Quicksand! Any person passing this point will be drowned. By order of the District Council.'
*LIFESTYLE NOTE from Jasber Singh: To today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were children in the fifties and sixties probably shouldn't have survived because: (a) Our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint, which was promptly chewed and licked. (b)We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, or latches on doors or cabinets and it was fine to play with pans. (c) When we rode our bicycles, we did not wear helmets. (d) We would ride in cars without seat belts or air bags. Riding 'shotgun' in the passenger seat was a treat. (e) We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. (f) We ate dripping sandwiches, bread and butter pudding and drank fizzy pop with sugar in it; but we were never overweight because we were always playing outside. (g) We shared one drink with four friends from one bottle or can and no one actually died from doing this. (h) We would spend hours building go-karts out of scraps of wood and metal and then went top speed downhill in them, only to realise too late that we had forgotten to include brakes. After running into stinging nettles a few times, we learned to solve the problem. (i) We would leave home in the morning and play all day.
We did not return home until it was dark. No one was able to reach us all day and no one seemed to mind. (j) We did not have Playstations or x-Boxes. In fact, no video games at all. There were just three channels on television (for those of us that had TV). There was no surround sound, no mobile phones, no personal computers or Internet chat rooms. But we had friends - we went out into the world and met them. (k) We played elastics and street rounders, and sometimes that ball really hurt. We fell out of trees, got cut and suffered broken bones; but there were no lawsuits. They were accidents. We learned to cope with them. (l) We had fights, punched each other hard and got black and blue; but we always recovered. (m) We WALKED to friends' homes. (n) We rode our bikes in packs of seven and wore our coats by just the hood. (o) The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law and were caught was unheard of. Parents actually sided with the law. Imagine that! (p) The generation that grew up in the 1950's produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past fifty years has seen an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned to deal with it all. (q) And you are one of them. Congratulations! Pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow up as real kids - before lawyers and governments regulated our lives, for our own good.
*TV QUOTE: "Tony Blair (British PM) tries to pass himself off as a man of the people, but he is in fact an egocentric popinjay who will ruthlessly crush anyone that opposes him within his own Labour Party. I said as much in 1997 and that was not a popular view six years ago. But look at the man now." (Author Frederick Forsythe on 'Hardtalk').
*FORGET SADDAM HUSSEIN and his fabled weapons of Mass Destruction. Alexander (356-323BC) was the first military leader in history to make use of biological warfare. His army was besieging a city in the Hindu Kush in 328BC. The stout walls of this garrison withstood his siege engines and all attempts to storm the place by brute force of arms. Then he discovered that the surrounding villages had been struck by the plague, which Alexander knew to be airborne. He pondered on this, and then gave his orders. Brave Macedonian troops, wearing cloths over their noses and mouths, collected up several dead plague victims, cut them up and placed them in large catapults. The infected body parts were then shot over the city walls. Within hours, the defenders surrendered. No one in the besieged city actually died from the plague, but the threat was enough to create a massive panic among the population. Alexander somehow understood that biological (or germ) warfare is mainly psychological. The man was a military genius and perhaps centuries ahead of his time.
*THE ITALIAN city of Sienna plays host to the famous Palio horserace, which dates back to 1254. Horses ridden by jockeys race through the narrow cobbled streets of the city at great speed, and the event, held in July and September each year, has become a major tourist attraction. Inhabitants of districts of the city support their own riders, wearing distinctive colours, one for each district. Thousands of tourists from all over the world flock to witness the Palio each year and every hotel room in Sienna is booked up weeks in advance. The whole scene is very dashing, very colourful, very dangerous - and very Italian. If you are ever on holiday in the area the Palio is a must see.
*A RECENT article in 'The New York Times' was entitled 'Thai Sex King Sees Staid New World'. The text: The sheer injustice. Nobody has worked harder to pay off the police with wine, women, wristwatches and sacks full of cash. "I'm like a mad dog now and I'll bite anyone", said Chuwit Kamolvisit, the owner of six industrial-size massage parlours who is proud to be known as Thailand's sex tycoon. "I used to buy whole trays of Rolex watches for police officers," he said in one of his daily news conferences. "I used to carry cash in black plastic bags for them. But they are still harassing me." In the dim netherworld of Thailand's black economy, it is hard to know just who is doing what to whom. But somehow Chuwit seems to have lost his immunity, and the tell-all ruckus he is raising has the country transfixed. All at once, after ten years of bribes that he says added up to 2.5 million dollars, Chuwit has been accused of involvement in the midnight bulldozing of a rival's entertainment plaza and of procuring underage girls to perform what is politely called 'massage'. That is not how it's supposed to work. If a corrupt society is to function smoothly, each party has to do his or her part. The protectors have to protect. Play fast and loose, and a sex tycoon with bright shirts, a thin moustache and darting eyes could start shaking out your pockets. "I have donated items for their comfort, including tables and chairs, not to mention computers and refrigerators", Chuwit told local reporters. "Also car maintenance, home repairs, boxing tickets, golf memberships, and, of course, free pleasure at my six luxury massage parlours."
The daily Chuwit show is not so much a scandal as an entertainment in Bangkok. Holding news conferences, waving his arms, kneeling in prayer, sealing his mouth with masking tape, saying he had been kidnapped by police officers and then rolling on the ground to show how it happened; Chwit, it turns out, is a one-man entertainment venue all by himself. There is the greedy police station commander whose name begins with T; the commander who owns stakes in two massage parlours, and the man named S who took five million dollars to gamble in Macao and wound up dead. There are Inspector T, Captain S and Deputy N, who took regular kickbacks, and there are four unidentified police colonels who visited 'Copacabana' where they enjoyed the free services of masseuse's numbers 107, 130, 137 and 299. And there are also three cabinet ministers, whose names begin with S, P and R who are regular visitors at the parlour and each receive expensive cases of wine after each visit. ("Not me!" the deputy interior minister, Pracha Maleenont, quickly said. He may have visited massage parlours in the past, but he gave that up long ago).
All of this was pocket change compared with Chuwit's dealings with a police station in District H, where he said monthly payoffs followed a regular formula. "About $2,000 went to the superintendent", he says, "another $1,250 to deputy superintendents in crime suppression, $500 to men in investigation and $250 each to men in the traffic division. Plus inspectors pocketed $85 and deputy inspectors took $50 each." Altogether, Chuwit says that he was paying the police 3000,000 dollars a month to stay in business. "I was willing to pay, and they gladly obliged." People don't write out receipts for this sort of thing and Chuwit admitted that, "I don't have any real proof." Among those most upset by Chuwit's allegations was Wichit Wongwiwat, director of the Excise Department. He said that he would assign teams of inspectors to investigate Bangkok's massage parlours, and as he put it, "try the services offered". He added, "I must admit that this is new for the department."

davidcox@loxinfo.co.th

FOR ALL YOU LEXIOPHILES

With thanks to Johm Miller for sending these in to us.

A bicycle can’t stand along, because it is two-tired.

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

A backward poet writes inverse.

A chicken crossing the road, is poulty in motion.

If you can’t pay your exorcist, you get repossessed.

With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.

Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft, and I’ll show you A-flat minor.

When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.

The man who fell in the upholstery machine is fully recovered.

You feel stuck with your debt, if you can’t budge it.

A lot of money is tainted. ‘Taint yours and ‘taint mine.

A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat.

He had a photographic memory which was never developed.

The short fortuneteller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

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