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Humor #76

Thanks to Jeff Lueck

Life in 2002
1. Your reason for not staying in touch with family is because they do not have e-mail addresses.  
2. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.  
3. You call your son's beeper to let him know it's time to eat. He emails you back from his bedroom, "What's
     for dinner?"  
4. Your daughter sells Girl Scout Cookies via her web site.  
5. You chat several times a day with a stranger from South Africa, but you haven't spoken with your next door
     neighbor yet this year.  
6. You check the ingredients on a can of chicken noodle soup to see if it contains Echinacea.  
7. Your grandmother asks you to send her a JPEG file of your newborn so she can create a screen saver.  
8. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home.  
9. Every commercial on television has a web site address at the bottom of the screen.  
10. You buy a computer and 6 months later it is out of date and now sells for half the price you paid.  
11. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 years of your life, is now
      a cause for panic and you turn around to go get it.  
12. Using real money, instead of credit or debit, to make a purchase would be a hassle and take planning.  
13. Cleaning up the dining room means getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of your car.  
14. You just tried to enter your password on the microwave.  
15. You consider second day air delivery painfully slow.  
16. Your dining room table is now your flat filing cabinet.  
17. Your idea of being organized is multiple colored Post-it notes.  
18. You hear most of your jokes via e-mail instead of in person.  
19. You get an extra phone line so you can get phone calls.  
20. You disconnect from the Internet and get this awful feeling, as if you just pulled the plug on a loved one.  
21. You awake at 2 A.M., use the rest room then check your E-Mail before returning to bed.  
22. You get up in morning and go on-line before getting your coffee.  
23. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. :-)  
24. You are reading this.  
25. Even worse; you're going to forward it to someone else. (as I did)

REMEMBER....
When the worst thing you could do at school was smoke in the bathrooms, flunk a test or chew gum. And the banquets were in the cafeteria and we danced to a juke box later, and all the girls wore fluffy pastel gowns and
the boys wore suits for the first time and we were allowed to stay out till 12 P. M.

When a '57 Chevy was everyone's dream car. . . to cruise, peel out, lay rubber and watch drag races, and people went steady and girls wore a class ring with an inch of wrapped dental floss or yarn coated with pastel frost nail polish so it would fit her finger. And no one ever asked where the car keys were 'cause they were always in the car, in the ignition, and the doors were never locked. And you got in big trouble if you accidentally locked the doors at home, since no one ever had a key.

Remember lying on your back on the grass with your friends and saying things like "That cloud looks like a..." And playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game. Back then, baseball was not a psychological group learning experience-it was a game. Remember when stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals 'cause no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger. And...with all our progress...don't you just wish...just once...you could slip back in time and savor the slower pace...and share it with the children of the 80's and 90's...

So send this on to someone who can still remember Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Laurel & Hardy, Howdy Doody and The Peanut Gallery, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow Knows, Nellie Belle, Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk as well as the sound of a real mower on Saturday morning, and summers filled with bike rides, playing in cowboy land, baseball games, bowling and visits to the pool...and eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar.

The following are purported to be actual comments made by NYC teachers on their report cards as part of their final narratives. All teachers were reprimanded, but these are great!   

1. Since my last report, your child has hit rock bottom and has started to dig.
2. I would not allow this student to breed.
3. Your child has delusions of adequacy.
4. Your child is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.
5. Your son sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them.
6. The student has a "full six-pack" but lacks the plastic thingy to hold it all together. 
7. This child has been working with glue too much. 
8. When your daughter's IQ reaches 50, she should sell. 
9. The gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn't coming. 
10. If this student were any more stupid, he'd have to be watered twice a week. 
11. It's impossible to believe the sperm that created this child beat out 1,000,000 others. 
12. The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.

 Latest Health Study 
(A) The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. 
 B) On the other hand, the French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or 
      Americans. 
 C) The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. 
 D) The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine, and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or
       Americans. 
 E) Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like.  It's speaking English that kills you.

  Thanks to Tin Sippeley  
An interesting bit of history -- from the 16th Century

 Next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be... Here are some facts about the 1500s:

 Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. 

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children-last of all the babies.  By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it-hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

Houses had thatched roofs -- thick straw -- piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof.  When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof -- hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence. The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying "dirt poor." 

The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway --hence, a "thresh hold."

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat.  They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while -- hence the rhyme, "peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special.  When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off.  It  was a sign of wealth that a man "could bring ! home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with a high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous. 

Most people did not have pewter plates, but had trenchers, a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl. Often trenchers were made from stale bread, which was so old and hard that they could be used for quite some time. Trenchers were never washed and a lot of times worms and mold got into the wood and old bread.  After eating off wormy, moldy trenchers, one would get "trench mouth."  Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of  the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up-hence the custom of holding a "wake."

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer."  And that's the truth... (Whoever said that History was boring?)

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