Dear Sir:

I am writing to thank you for bouncing the check with which I endeavoured to pay my plumber last month. By my calculations some three nanoseconds must have elapsed between his presenting the check, and the arrival in my account of the funds needed to honour it.

 

I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my entire salary, an arrangement which, I admit, has only been in place for eight years.

 

You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account with $50 by way of penalty for the inconvenience I caused to your bank. My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial ways.

 

You have set me on the path of fiscal righteousness. No more will our relationship be blighted by these unpleasant incidents, for I am restructuring my affairs in 2002, taking as my model the procedures, attitudes and conduct of your very bank. I can think of no greater compliment, and I know you will be excited and proud to hear it.

 

To this end, please be advised about the following changes:

 

Have noticed that whereas I personally attend to your telephone calls and letters, when I try to contact you I am confronted by the impersonal, ever-changing, pre-recorded, faceless entity which your bank has become.

 

From now on I, like you, choose only to deal with a flesh-and-blood person. My mortgage and loan repayments will, therefore and hereafter, no longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank, by check, addressed personally and confidentially to an employee of your branch whom you must nominate. You will be aware that it is an offence under the Postal Act for any other person to open such an envelope.

 

Please find attached an Application Contact Status which I require your Chosen employee to complete. I am sorry it runs to eight pages, but in order that I know as much about him or her as your bank knows about me, there is no alternative. Please note that all copies of his or her medical history must be countersigned by a Notary Public, and that the mandatory details of his/her financial situation (income, debts, assets and abilities) must be accompanied by documented proof. In due course, I will issue your employee with a PIN number which he/she must quote in all dealings with me. I regret that it cannot be shorter than 28 digits but, again, I have modelled it on the number of button presses required to access my account balance on your phone bank service. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

 

Let me level the playing field even further by introducing you to my new telephone system, which you will notice, is very much like yours. My Authorised Contact at your bank, the only person with whom I will have any dealings, may call me at any time and will be answered by an automated voice. Press buttons as follows:

 

• To make an appointment to see me.
• To query a missing repayment.
• To transfer the call to my living room in case I am there.
• To transfer the call to my bedroom in case I am sleeping.
• To transfer the call to my toilet in case I am attending to nature.
• To transfer the call to my mobile phone in case I am not at home.
• To leave a message on my computer.
• To leave a message on my computer a password to access my computer is required. The password will be communicated at a later date to the contact.
• To return to the main menu and listen carefully to options 1 through 9.
• To make a general complaint or inquiry. The contact will then be put on hold, pending the attention of my automated answering service. While this may on occasion involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music will play for the duration. This month I've chosen a refrain from "The Best of Woody Guthrie: "Oh, the Banks are made of marble, With a guard at every door, And the vaults are Filled with silver, That the miners sweated for." After twenty minutes of that, our mutual contact will probably know it by heart.

 

On a more serious note, we come to the matter of cost. As your bank has often pointed out, the ongoing drive for greater efficiency comes at a cost which you have always been quick to pass on to me. Let me repay your kindness by passing some costs back.

 

First, there is the matter of advertising material you send me. This I will read for a fee of $20 per page. Inquiries from your nominated contact will be billed at $5 per minute of my time spent in response. Any debits to my account, as, for example, in the matter of the penalty for the dishonoured check, will be passed back to you. My new phone service runs at 75 cents a minute.

 

You would be well advised to keep your inquiries brief and to the point.

 

Regrettably, but again following your example, I must also levy an establishment fee to cover the setting up of this new arrangement.

 

May I wish you a happy, if ever-so-slightly less prosperous, New Year?

 

Your humble client, [ Name withheld ]

 

 

X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649

Forwarded-by: "Jack D. Doyle" [doylej@PEAK.ORG]

From: Doc@drscience.com

Forwarded-by: Peter Langston[psl@langston.com]

 

Dear Doctor Science,

Why can't you divide by zero?

 

-- Kitty Evans, Des Moines, Iowa

 

I can and often do divide by zero, but only after I've made the necessary preparations. First of all, I fast for 48 hours, consuming during that time only mildly fluoridated water. Next I don my special teflon division-by-zero suit. Then I put on my digitally recorded compact disc of Gregorian chants and begin with dividing very small numbers by other very small numbers. As the numbers get smaller, the sparks begin to fly. If all goes well, I take a deep breath and divide a very small number by zero. There's a flash of light, a muffled roar, and when I regain consciousness, the lab is filled with smoke and the scent of burning mylar. So, you see, you can by divide by zero if you really want to. Chances are....you just don't want to badly enough.

X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649

Forwarded-by: Peter Langston[psl@langston.com]

 

[There is a disease that college freshmen (especially non-native speakers) get called "Thesaurusitis" -- it involves rewriting a paper by replacing all short words with long synonyms from the thesaurus. Unfortunately, the results are usually dreadful, if not amusing. The babelfish game of using computer programs to translate a paper from English into French ("It loses something in the original." -James Thurber) and then back again, can give equally atrocious results. And then there are the long unreadable articles with every word misspelled, but in such a way that spell-checkers can't tell. But this Fun-Item describes something else altogether... -psl].

 

Forwarded-by: "Jack D. Doyle" [doylej@PEAK.ORG]

[Mark Israel posted this in misc.education.language.english. He is the "I" in the following.]

 

I was correcting the English in a report written by my roommate (who is Swiss-German and is here doing postgraduate work in educational psychology). She had written: "Mike prevented William from working by putting his hand over William's keyboard. Mike found this very sparingly and did it again and again."

 

I asked her, "What do you mean by 'sparingly'?"

 

She replied that she had originally written "funny", but when she ran the report through the grammar-checker on her computer, it told her that "funny" was trite and suggested "sparingly" as a substitute.

 

Baffled, I crossed out "sparingly" and wrote "amusing".

 

The next morning, it hit me: the grammar-checker must have said something like: "The word 'funny' is trite. Use sparingly."

The Gettysburg address is available here.

Feudalism

You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.

 

Pure Socialism

You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else's cows. You have to take care of all the cows. The government gives you all the milk you need.

 

Bureaucratic Socialism

Your cows are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the government took from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs the regulations say you should need.

 

Fascism

You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.

 

Pure Communism

You have two cows. Your neighbors help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.

 

Real World Communism

You share two cows with your neighbors. You and your neighbors bicker about who has the most "ability" and who has the most "need". Meanwhile, no one works, no one gets any milk, and the cows drop dead of starvation.

 

Russian Communism

You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the black market.

 

Perestroika

You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the Mafia takes all the milk. You steal back as much milk as you can and sell it on the "free" market.

 

Cambodian Communism

You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.

 

Militarianism

You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.

 

Totalitarianism

You have two cows. The government takes them and denies they ever existed. Milk is banned.

 

Pure Democracy

You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets the milk.

 

Representative Democracy

You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.

 

British Democracy

You have two cows. You feed them sheeps' brains and they go mad. The government doesn't do anything.

 

Bureaucracy

You have two cows. At first the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not to milk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.

 

Pure Anarchy

You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fair price or your neighbors try to take the cows and kill you.

 

Pure Capitalism

You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

 

Capitalism

You don't have any cows. The bank will not lend you money to buy cows, because you don't have any cows to put up as collateral.

 

Enviromentalism

You have two cows. The government bans you from milking or killing them.

 

Political Correctness

You are associated with (the concept of "ownership" is a symbol of the phallo centric, war mongering, intolerant past) two differently - aged (but no less valuable to society) bovines of non-specified gender.

 

Surrealism

You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

 

Enronism

You have two cows. You borrow 80% of the forward value of the two cows from your bank, then buy another cow with 5% down and the rest financed by the seller on a note callable if your market cap goes below $20B at a rate 2 times prime. You sell the three cows to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so you get four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. This transaction process is upheld by your independent auditor with no negative balance sheet implications, followed by a press release that announces that Enron, as a major owner of cows may begin trading cows via a new internet site.

 "Knowledge is Power", "Time is Money", and as every engineer knows, "Power is Work over Time". So, substituting algebraic equations for these time worn bits of wisdom, we get:

 

K = P (1)

T = M (2)

P = W/T (3)

 

Now, do a few simple substitutions:

Put W/T in for P in equation (1), which yields: K = W/T (4)

Put M in for T into equation (4), which yields: K = W/M (5).

 

Now we've got something. Expanding back into English, we get:

Knowledge equals Work over Money.

What this MEANS is that:

1. The More You Know, the More Work You Do, and

2. The More You Know, the Less Money You Make.

 

Solving for Money, we get: M = W/K (6)

Money equals Work Over Knowledge.

From equation (6) we see that Money approaches infinity as Knowledge approaches 0, regardless of the Work done.

What THIS MEANS is:

The More you Make, the Less you Know.

 

Solving for Work, we get W = M K (7)

Work equals Money times Knowledge

From equation (7) we see that Work approaches 0 as Knowledge approaches 0.

What THIS MEANS is: The stupid rich do little or no work.

 

Working out the socioeconomic implications of this breakthrough is left as an exercise for the reader.

 

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go on a camping trip. After a good meal and a bottle of wine, they lie down for the night, and go to sleep.

 

Some hours later, Holmes wakes up and nudges his faithful friend awake. "Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."

 

Brearily, Watson replies, "Well, I see millions and millions of stars."

 

"What does that tell you?" Holmes asks.

 

Watson ponders for a minute. "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 deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful and that we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. What does it tell you?"

 

Holmes is silent for a minute, then speaks. "Watson, you idiot. Someone has stolen our tent."