LAUGHING AT LOVE

     I wrote this many years ago when I was young and callow. Unearthed in a recent files cleanup, I read it to someone who thought it still humorous. So, as Valentine's Day brings love messages to the fore once more,  I decided to let you judge whether it is too curmudgeonly or merely truth-telling.

     A man is like a lamp wick -trimmed many times before he finds the right flame!
     I remember the first time I was trimmed. It was my mistake to think grass widows are green. This one knew all the answers, because she had had a chance to answer all the questions.
     Things happened so fast I still don't know how they happened. We were out in the moonlight. I couldn't help thinking that this same moonlight made me think of a third degree, because it made me want to say things I was sure I would regret. And she led me on, into the parlor, being so confident of herself that she ensconced herself on the daveno, with one of the cushions on the floor at her feet.
     Catching my breath, I asked her, "You mean you want me to abrogate all I have learned, ignore the power of analysis, eschew reason, deny my psychology training and tell you that I love you?"
     She answered that all men were like corks, especially when it came to proposing to a lady. Some pop the question with just a little prying while others have to be drawn out. And her method of drawing out wasn't unique, but was effective. The sound of a kiss, I found, while not nearly as loud as a cannon report, still echoed a great deal longer.
     I don't know how the talk got around to the topic of diamonds. She thought diamonds with facets brought out a lady's assets and were perfectly beautiful, if only she didn't have to make such a silly promise to get one. She didn't want to appear over-anxious though, I guess, so she added, "If I say 'no' now, you won't get angry with me and never ask me again, will you?"
    She said it with a kiss, so I never really got to answer. But I knew an ending line when l heard it... and I've lived happily ever after.
   
 

A DOZEN BOLD PREDICTIONS

     Fast Company Magazine, only a recent discovery of mine, in its February issue, produced an intriguing article titled "World Changing Ideas", which foretells how a number of companies will impact on our lives in the near future. I bring them to you in synthesized form.
     This year the first vaccine for malaria (known as RTS,S by the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative & Glaxo-SmithKline) could come up for regulatory approval - a real lifesaver in Angola and Uganda. This would show it is biologically possible to make a vaccine for not just malaria.
     Drones, often thought of only as killing machines, are now being used by NASA to get more accurate hurricane warnings, by the Chinese to survey an earthquake region, and by RP SearchServices to help law enforcement agencies for jobs like finding lost persons by their infrared signatures.
     Idaho and Tennessee passed legislation approving computer science to fill math or science graduation requirements. Code.org and Association of Computing Machinery are working to spread this idea nationwide as a fundamental new literacy for all.
     Expect Labs will release an app that listens to your phone conversations and then serves up information needed before you even ask for it.
     O3b Networks is working to expand the Internet into developing countries via eight satellites delivering 3G networks to isolated areas. They foresee eight billion new users.
     The biometrics industry, with new hand-held scanners and automated sensors that can read eyes from 30 feet away, is expected to reach $14 billion a year as iris recognition systems aid or replace fingerprint scanners with ten times more efficiency.
     Desktop 3-D printers, like MakerBots Replicator 2, are becoming accessible for home and school use. As many as 5,000 could be in schoolrooms by the end of the school year. This three-dimensional imaging will allow us to take irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind  artifacts heretofore seen only in museums and, in a sense, put them into the hands of learners around the world. A mask of Abraham Lincoln is one of 20-plus objects from the Smithsonian collection that its digitization office has placed online as a demonstration of the potential of 3-D scanning, along with the Wright Flyer, a woolly mammoth skeleton, a supernova, a bee, and a sixth century Chinese statue known as the Cosmic Buddha.
     A growing number of states now allow benefit-corporation status, helping protect social-minded companies from "stock-price-is-everything" investor lawsuits. Next milestone: a public company adopting the status.
     Big medical centers will have to pull data from myriad wearable health-tracking tools, like Jawbone Up, the Fitbit Force and the AliveCor Health Monitor, into electronic health records, remove identifying information, and make it public.Cloud-based data is becoming an increasingly important medical tool.
     D-Central, a non-WiFi router used to create private NSA-proof networks, and Android apps, like Wickr, are proffering self-destructing texts with sophisticated encryption.
     Biotech company Proteus Digital Health plans to produce a "smart pill" with a pin-head sized sensor that will monitor the medications a patient takes, then deliver it to a smart phone.
     Google Fiber, technology that brings unheard-of speed levels to Internet service, could reach 7.5 million homes  by 2022.
     Not on such an international interest level, but mind-blowing for internet game fanciers is Oculis Rift, which allows game players to step nside their favorite games for the very first time.
   

Valentine's Day: Cupid's Annual Carnival

The birds and bees started all this folderall way back in 1476, research reports. The fable goes that on St. Valentine’s Day the birds and bees are supposed to mate.
But such reports leave me wondering. Valentine’s Day hadn’t yet been calendarized at that time and, though birds and bees are wondrously astute in birthing progeny every Spring, I have yet to see either a bird or a bee perusing a calendar to find out when it is time to mate.
Nonetheless we sheep-like homo sapiens thought this Valentines’ Day idea a good one, so have slavishly followed it since it was made into an international celebratory occasion. Being civilized, however, we made it into a festival. Womenkind wrote their names on slips of paper and the menkind drew lots to find their potential loves-of-the-moment. The men then pinned these temporary lovers’ licenses on their lapels, sort of like today’s fraternity sweetheart pins, and proceeded to treat their new-found valentine misses to gifts. Gifts of what, historians remain vague about.
In that early time, this festival lasted several days. Thus it was that the misses had a fair opportunity to work their womanly wiles, because stories have been handed down that this haphazard sporting genre actually on occasion resulted in love matches leading to marriage. Probably had something to do with the power of suggestion.
If the festival didn’t work out, the ladies still had other methods of foretelling their future mates. One of the more popular superstitions was the belief that the first man a girl glimpsed on St. Valentine’s Day was destined to be her intended. Thus, many were the misses who locked themselves in their rooms until notified by a trusted family member that the correct young man was either in her house or passing by. They didn’t even want to leave superstition to chance.
St. Val’s Day has progressed to become the third most gift-giving occasion of the year, next only to Christmas and birthdays. But on that day, a word to the wise bachelor may be sufficient. Don’t say “yes” to anything your female giftee/s may say or ask - before you analyze it. Ladies have ways of phrasing things so they sound soft and safe, like whipped cream on jello.
If you do get caught making promises you never intended, don’t worry unnecessarily. Valentines, so far, won’t hold up in court. And there are still ships sailing to the South Seas where Polynesian custom requires the woman to always take the initiative in matters of the heart.
Imagine a place where the men have to fight for a Leap Year in order to get a say in such matters -- just women fighting over you all the time!
What a way to die--not being able to satisfy them all. Right?

LAWS THAT HAVE BENT THE MIND

 

     The earliest law still preserved is that developed by Hammurabi, the ruler of Sumeria, about 2,000 years before the advent of Christ. Hammuarabi's code set forth a complete written system of law. But it wasn't universal, of course. Napoleon, ruler of France, also set up a later code of law - called Code Napoleon, also still working - which was a far greater triumph than the results of his battles.
     But in many places, like in the Isle of Man, laws dating back to the 7th century were merely handed down by word of mouth. In other places laws were merely what the current ruler, off the cuff, said they were. Calanus, a Greek leader suffering from colic, for instance, passed a law banishing all stomach aches from the Empire for a year.
     In the ancient kingdom of Pegu, even the slightest offense noted by the king was cause for any official to be laid on his face in the broiling sun, in front of the palace, with a heavy beam across his back. The length of the sentence was indeterminate.
     Korean King Kija, tired of settling family squabbles and tradesmen fighting, compelled his subjects to wear hats with large clay brims. This was his idea for preventing bodily contact during quarrels.
     Zaleucus, a strict legislator of Locri, Greece in 660 B.C., ordered his own son blinded for a criminal offense. When the populace appealed for mercy, Zaleucus spared his son one eye, but fulfilled the letter of the law by destroying one of his own eyes.

     Blue Law Solutions

     The laws in most places today are passed by elected bodies of one sort or another to fit and fix some sort of problem seen by that body. Perhaps the worst fit-and-fix was the South African 1960s ban on a book titled "Rape of the Earth", which was later discovered to deal with soil erosion.
     So many laws have been passed for so long everywhere that some get old and forgotten. Those, often remaining on the books years beyond their useful lives, are called "blue laws". For example, in California rarely, if ever, does a driver get hauled in for shooting a whale from his car. But that was on the books from 1972 for some 25 years.
     Citizens  in one early-day Greek city had the solution to curtail such dead files, though their solution might be considered a bit heavy-handed today. Its politicians who proposed new laws did so with a noose around their necks. If their laws failed to pass, they were hanged. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus also reported another solution, where an advisor to the state in India was permitted three errors. Following the third he was banished from public life.
     But blue laws are wonderful to browse and wonder at - wondering what in the world led to them since they make no sense in the present time and place. For example, a local law in Nova Scotia's Londonderry once made it illegal for a farmer to be seen in public "riding an ugly horse". Figure that one out.
     Law, if nothing else, should be logical, one would think. But even logic can be bent out of shape on occasion. Take the case of Michel Depre, 34, who caught his wife in bed with another man. Due to Gallic honor code in such matters, Michel took up a knife, but only wounded her paramour as he exited the premises.post haste. So what happened? Depre was arrested, fined $60 and given a one-month suspended sentence. It was then his lawyer told him about Article 234 of the French Criminal Code, which extends official sympathy for the crime passionnel. The simple wounding, it seems, showed he was not seeking, at whatever cost, to defend his honor and his home. Had that been the case, and he had killed the man, he would have saved himself $60.
      A young French lady named Marie-Ange also became embroiled in an unusual law. She refused to change her name, even though the law at the time stipulated transsexuals, which she admitted being, were only allowed to use three names: Claude, Camille or Dominique.
    The Fascists in Italy passed a 1931 law for the compulsory arrest of anyone wearing a mask or disguise in public. Originally aimed at political conspirators, it was still on the books and 0used in the early 1970s  for a crackdown on transvestites in Rome.
     Islamic law, as portrayed in Sana, Yemen,  has always been hard on humanity's offshoots too. There it required that a man convicted of homosexuality be thrown from the highest point in the city. But when 60-year old Ahmed a-Osamy, a municipal employee, was arrested, the court thought of throwing him from an airplane, since no building in town has high enough to kill him. That was found to be too expensive, so they decided he should be beheaded instead. When the executioner didn't show up on time, however, the judge asked Ahmed if he would consent to being shot instead. He nodded and a police officer executed him in the main square before 6,000 viewers.
     More recently (1982) the city council of Tropea, Italy, passed a law governing nude sun bathing at city beaches, limiting full exposure to "young women capable of exalting the beauty of the female body". It had been passed to discourage tourists from cultivating total tans, but it lasted only ten days before stouter local females stormed an acrimonious special hearing and forced cancellation. It turned out to be against national anti-discrimination laws anyhow.
     Paparazzi, working for Paris Pin-Up Magazine, were taken to court for snapping nude beach goers without permission. A Paris court ruling was a bit of a surprise, stating: "The photographic artist has the same right to make studies of the harmonic forms of the human body as the painter, sculptor or engraver, as long as they are done without an intent of immorality or obscenity".
     Peeping-tom paparazzi have been a pain to control for a very long time. It's reported the Persian tyrant Nadir Shaw (1688-1747) had perhaps the best cure-all for their problem. He punished a peeping tom by giving him the Shah's entire harem to care for - 33 wives!
     Sometimes superstition may have had something to do with the passing of one old English law. That's about the only thing that makes sense of the law that required a suicide "to be buried near a crossroads at midnight without religious rites".
     And sometimes the law just seems frivolous, like in the 1890 Stockholm, Sweden court case. A man, in desperate need for money, sold the ownership of his body after death to the Royal Swedish Institute of Anatomy for dissection study. Twenty years later he inherited a fortune and tried to buy back that contract. The institute wouldn't sell and the court backed it up. And because two of the man's teeth had been extracted without its permission, the institute requested and was awarded damages.
   
   
   

LECTURERS VERSUS LISTENERS

     What is going on in the mind of listeners to lecturers, and vice versa? 

LECTURERS (from the viewpoint of  listeners):

The Sleep Walker: Is it possible his psychoanalyst forgot to bring this somnambulist out of his hypnotic trance at their last session? His monotones bore into listeners the same doped expression seen on sun-drugged toads.

Reactions:

     *What a great bedtime story teller this guy would make!

     *I wonder where he gets his barbiturates.

     *Guess I'll skip this one next time.

The Athlete: He strides about the room throwing his body into great contortions of masculine posing, waving his arms, pounding the desk to drive his points home. Tomorrow no one will remember a thing he has said because they were too engrossed in watching his calisthenics.

Reactions:

     *Oh, yeah, that's the one, the "pose that refreshes"! 

     *If you need the men's room, man, it's down the hall on the left.

     *Guess I'll skip this one next time.

The Comedian: He stops every few moments to look at his notes, snickers slyly to himself, then continues with a chicken grin on his face. This leaves listeners sitting on the edge of their seats, but the funny part never comes.

Reactions:

     *Okay, you laid it, now cackle!

     *You didn't used to write for TV sit-coms, did you?

     *Guess I'll skip this one next time.

The Star Gazer: He examines his fingernails, looks down at his shoes while wiping them on the backs of his pantlegs, speculates on the ceiling, stares out the window. He looks everywhere but at the listeners.

Reactions:

     *Well, you're not so easy on the eyes yourself!

     *I'd be embarrassed too if I didn't have more to say than that!

     *Guess I'll skip this one next time.

The Town Crier: He makes himself heard through listeners' ennui by shouting. But it seems to be all bark and no "bite"! 

Reactions:

     *Sir, you raise your voice when you should reinforce your arguments!\    

     *Oh, tie up, Jack, my hangover is killing me.

     *Guess I'll skip this one next time.

Delirium Tremens: This lad can't keep his hands still. He winds his watch, twirls his Fybate key, straightens papers on his lecturn, holds his watch to his ear and stares at it as if it has let him down, and so on and on ad infinitum.

Reactions:

     *I agree, pal, It's one helluva long lecture.

     *Wonder who he has the heavy date with. She sure must have trouble with those hands.

     *Guess I'll skip this one next time.

LISTENERS (from the viewpoint of lecturers):

Sleight-of-Mind: That one is drowning in a sea of education . Eyes are glazed, mouth is open trapping flies, breathing is hard as though in pain. No one is sure, in fact, that he hasn't been dead for some time.

Reactions:

     *Must be Monday all over again.

     *There must be an easier way to make a living!

     *Maybe I'd do better working with the mentally retarded. (Maybe I AM working with the mentally retarded!)

The Jitterbug: That kid must have ants in his pants. He twitches, he squirms. Step right up, ladies and gents, see the boy with the reflexes of a worm.

Reactions:

     *I hope you don't wear anything out squirming around in your seat like that.

     *Maybe it's some kind of new mating dance.

     *Oh, the money I could make on the carny circuit with this bunch of freaks!

The Lady Politician: Is she coming up here to polish the apple again? I note she's in a front row seat again too, with her skirt riding about C-level. Get over yourself, girl!

Reactions:

     *Forget it, sweet lips. I'm young enough to remember, but old enough to know better.

     *Okay, smile. So you got your own teeth. Just wait ten years!

     *Why oh why, didn't I go into the ministry like mother wanted?

The Eager Beaver: She writes everything down, even the jokes. Maybe she'll get them later. She must be practicing her shorthand. At least she'll get something out of the course that way.

Reactions:

     *Notes to you, too, chicken little.

     *Watch me bring her out of her trance by working the word "sex" into the next sentence.

     *Why do you come to class? Why not just send your tape recorder?

The Good-time Charlie: Our resident lady killer is sporting Brut lotion today. Must have bathed in it because I smell it clear up here. Looks like he pitched a bitch last night again, too. His hands are shaking so much his notes will look like hieroglyphics. And he hasn't moved his head since he sat down. Must hurt a lot.

Reactions:

     *That must be what is meant by "school ghoul" complexion.

     *I'll bet he never gets a haircut, just an oil change.

     *Why, in all that is holy, didn't we both stay home today and sleep off this lecture?

 The Hero Worshiper: I'm going to teach when I grow up too!

Reactions: 

     *In His infinite wisdom the lord would not allow it, I'm sure.

     *I'm sure you have just said that for effect but, just the thought of it makes me wonder where I went wrong.

     *By the time you're ready to teach it will be outmoded. Students will probably step into a telephone booth, be bombarded by audio-visual programs and step back out with a sheepskin.

    

PUN FUN

     It's been said puns are lowest type of humor on the laugh meter. But I'll still bet you get some chuckles out of the bunch collected here.

I tried to catch some fog. I mist.

When chemists die, they barium.

Jokes about German sausage are the wurst.

A soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned
veteran.

I know a guy who's addicted to brake fluid. He says he can stop any time.

How does Moses make his tea? Hebrews it.

I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Then it dawned on me.

This girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I'd never
met herbivore.

I'm reading a book about anti-gravity. I can't put it down.

I did a theatrical performance about puns. It was a play on words .

They told me I had type A blood, but it was a type-O.

This dyslexic man walks into a bra.

I didn't like my beard at first. Then it grew on me.

A cross-eyed teacher lost her job because she couldn't control her pupils?

When you get a bladder infection, urine trouble.

What does a clock do when it's hungry? It goes back four seconds..

I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me!

Broken pencils are pointless.

What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary? A thesaurus.

England has no kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.

I used to be a banker, but then I lost interest.

I dropped out of communism class because of lousy Marx.

All the toilets in London police stations have been stolen.

Police say they have nothing to go on.

I took the job at a bakery because I kneaded dough.

Velcro - what a rip off!

You Know It's Going to Be a Bad Day When.....

YOU KNOW IT'S GOING TO BE A BAD DAY WHEN.....

...the bird outside your bedroom window, that woke you up, is a vulture.

...your bed companion rolls over and asks. "Who are you?"

...you put your bra accidentally on backwards...and it still fits.
...You turn to put on the rest of your clothes and there aren't any.

...you absent-mindedly try to fit both contact lenses into the same eye.

...your pet rock sneers at you in the mirror as you are putting on your makeup.

...you make a donation for the Red Cross while shaving.

...your car horn gets stuck on the way to work, while driving behind a group of Hell's Angels bikers.

..you find the TV crew from "60 Minutes" waiting outside your office.

...you get to work only to have a co-worker tell you the hem of your dress is tucked into the back of your pantyhose.
...your boss tells you not to bother to take off your hat.

...your e-mail includes a notice your Internal Revenue payment check has bounced.

...you call your answering service and they don't answer.

...you call your twin sister and find she has forgotten your birthday.

...the frosting on the birthday cake your co-workers have arranged for melts from the heat of all those candles.

...you call the number a friend has given you for a blind date and it turns out to be your ex.
...you call the Suicide Prevention Hotline and they put you on hold.

...you turn on the TV news to find they are showing emergency routes out of the city.

And so you decide you have nothing more to lose by leaving, no matter what the emergency is!