"Why did the chicken cross the road?" has been a question most often used as an entre to a humorous answer in bits at the bottom of periodicals' pages, like in Reader's Digest. But my personal favorite collection - possibly because of my fling in exotic academe - comes from a University of Oregon Philosophy Department Web page of some time ago. Here are the answers those philosophers, more than somewhat tongue-in-cheek, came up with:
Plato: "For the greater good."
Karl Marx: "It was a historical inevitability."
Nietzsche: "Because, if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you."
B.F.Skinner: "Because the external influences, which had pervaded its sensorium since birth, had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will."
Jean-Paul Sartre: "In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road."
Albert Einstein: "Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference."
Pyrrho the Skeptic: "What road?"
The Sphinx: "You tell me."
Buddha: "If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken nature."
Emily Dickinson: "Because it could not stop for death."
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "It didn't cross the road, it transcended it."
Mark Twain: "The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated."
As a humor ploy, this question has become almost rhetorical - like a mere shilly-shally for someone unable to make up his or her mind toward a problematic decision. But the above answer group does point up the theme for this blog entry - the humor in rhetorical questions. Some of my choicest finds have been:
Did God invent time to keep everything from happening at once?
Why are so many of today's economic problems yesterday's solutions?
Why is it that, when you run into a man with real enthusiasm for hard work, he turns out to be your boss?
Why is it that the whisper of temptation can be heard farther than the loudest call to duty?
If there is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, what is at the beginning"
Why do we never hear father-in-law jokes?
How can banks charge a fee for "'insufficient funds'?"
Are children who act in R-rated movies allowed to see them?
How come Tarzan never had a beard?
Have you ever noticed that, on soap operas, they never watch soap operas?
How do they get "Keep off the grass" signs on the grass?
When Frenchmen swear do they say, "Pardon my English?"
Why isn't "palindrome" spelled the same way backwards?
Why isn't "phonetics" spelled the way it sounds?
Why is a package sent by land carrier called a shipment, while a package sent by ship is called cargo?
How do you write zero in Roman numerals?
Why do we say "TV set" when it's a single item?
Have you noticed that the things that come to those who wait are usually the things left by those who got there first?
Why do we call them "apartments" when they are attached to each other?
While astronauts are already weightless, how will a Slim-Fast diet affect them?
When dogs bark for hours on end, why don't they get hoarse?
When I walk my dog - considering he has twice as many legs as I do - is he getting twice as much exercise as I am or half as much?
Do fish ever sneeze?
What is the purpose of ear lobes, other than to hang things on?
In the extreme Northern and Southern Hemispheres, where it is light for half the year and dark for the other half, do roosters crow only once a year?
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
COMICAL REAL ESTATE CLASSIFIEDS
It's rather amazing what a bit of humor and imagination can do in business. Take, for example, a friend of mine starting his own small realty office. One of the first properties listed with him was a house really needing repairs. The ad he went with stated: "The ideal home for the do-it-yourselfer. Needs a little work, but the price is right." Then he listed the price and added, "Comes with a brand new hammer, free of charge." It sold quite quickly.
Even more of a smiler was the ad in a Texas paper in an air base town: "Five dollars reward for furnishing house or apartment for officer's family. Have twin boys, aged 3, but will drown them if you insist. Dial ,,,,".
On the other hand, there are more elite realtors. One ad from such a one awhile back in Greenwich Village stated, "Loveliest old house of West Fourth, $30,000, four floors filled with priceless antiques, furniture, drapes, china, etc. Shown only to Americans of class."
It never hurts to list those extras. Note the ad for a "Modern house with four bedrooms, 3 baths and rumpus room in the cellar. Extra attraction: the family next door is building a swimming pool."
It was only a short time after that ad appeared that a sign appeared on that property, stating only, "Too Late!"
Perhaps the oddest ad I've come across was listed by a Mr. Norman Pickersgill in Wakefield, England. He was trying to sell his bathroom. The catch was that - though it had modern equipment and was a neat little rustic brick structure with a red tiled roof - it stood all alone in the middle of a 3 1/2-acre field.
The realtor explained that Norman, a grocer, used to live in a trailer in that field and, since the trailer didn't boast a bathroom, he had spent 400 pounds ($1,200) building one adjacent.
But the previous month Norman had moved into a house and he wanted to sell the field - but whoever buys it has to take the bathroom too.
Another offbeat ad was in the Stanford University daily newspaper: "Wanted: large house for 47 young men. Must have 16 different addresses." Responses were to be directed to the house manager of a fraternity group who had been forbidden, after an unusually boisterous long-lasting party, "to allow more than three members to live at the same address".
Sometimes the most simple-seeming ads have the wildest background stories. A soft sell ad from the real estate page of London's Observer listed: "Victorian residence in fashionable Chelsea. Lease 51 years. Bargain: 7850 pounds." Some scamp on the staff visited the site and was moved to josh the rest of the story.
"This squat, rather repellent early Victorian lower middle class residence offers to the dull and comfortably off an interesting background of squalor previously available only to the very poor. The decor, where it is not garish cheap wallpaper, is a fashionable mud brown - or is it only dirt? The intercommunicating doors of the two rather mean living rooms have been torn away, giving one a 26-foot room for parties, with a lavatory basin conveniently placed at one end where one can wash one's hands after greeting the dirtier guests. Six other rooms. The kitchen sink, in the corner of most of them, lends a touch of social realism. A particularly foul subterranean bathroom, with antique bath, coal-fired clothes broiler. I could find only one lav, but there is a small foul patch of earth behind house, which only an English Estate Agent would call a garden, wherein, as Swift put it, a woman could "pluck a rose".
Idt takes all kinds, even in the realtor profession!
Even more of a smiler was the ad in a Texas paper in an air base town: "Five dollars reward for furnishing house or apartment for officer's family. Have twin boys, aged 3, but will drown them if you insist. Dial ,,,,".
On the other hand, there are more elite realtors. One ad from such a one awhile back in Greenwich Village stated, "Loveliest old house of West Fourth, $30,000, four floors filled with priceless antiques, furniture, drapes, china, etc. Shown only to Americans of class."
It never hurts to list those extras. Note the ad for a "Modern house with four bedrooms, 3 baths and rumpus room in the cellar. Extra attraction: the family next door is building a swimming pool."
It was only a short time after that ad appeared that a sign appeared on that property, stating only, "Too Late!"
Perhaps the oddest ad I've come across was listed by a Mr. Norman Pickersgill in Wakefield, England. He was trying to sell his bathroom. The catch was that - though it had modern equipment and was a neat little rustic brick structure with a red tiled roof - it stood all alone in the middle of a 3 1/2-acre field.
The realtor explained that Norman, a grocer, used to live in a trailer in that field and, since the trailer didn't boast a bathroom, he had spent 400 pounds ($1,200) building one adjacent.
But the previous month Norman had moved into a house and he wanted to sell the field - but whoever buys it has to take the bathroom too.
Another offbeat ad was in the Stanford University daily newspaper: "Wanted: large house for 47 young men. Must have 16 different addresses." Responses were to be directed to the house manager of a fraternity group who had been forbidden, after an unusually boisterous long-lasting party, "to allow more than three members to live at the same address".
Sometimes the most simple-seeming ads have the wildest background stories. A soft sell ad from the real estate page of London's Observer listed: "Victorian residence in fashionable Chelsea. Lease 51 years. Bargain: 7850 pounds." Some scamp on the staff visited the site and was moved to josh the rest of the story.
"This squat, rather repellent early Victorian lower middle class residence offers to the dull and comfortably off an interesting background of squalor previously available only to the very poor. The decor, where it is not garish cheap wallpaper, is a fashionable mud brown - or is it only dirt? The intercommunicating doors of the two rather mean living rooms have been torn away, giving one a 26-foot room for parties, with a lavatory basin conveniently placed at one end where one can wash one's hands after greeting the dirtier guests. Six other rooms. The kitchen sink, in the corner of most of them, lends a touch of social realism. A particularly foul subterranean bathroom, with antique bath, coal-fired clothes broiler. I could find only one lav, but there is a small foul patch of earth behind house, which only an English Estate Agent would call a garden, wherein, as Swift put it, a woman could "pluck a rose".
Idt takes all kinds, even in the realtor profession!
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