He Could Have Just Said "Loyzem gayne!"**

There are many kinds of Jews: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Messianic (Jews for Jesus), secular or, like me, secular humorist*.

With things pretty tight around here at work, travel approval for my upcoming trip to Germany had to go quite high in the organization. There was much time spent discussing the merits of the trip, whether we could do the same thing via email or NetMeeting, etc. Finally, I got this email (keep in mind this is for the Jewish guy's trip to Germany)

Travel approved by SS.

Interestingly, they only approved my outbound travel.


* - secular humorist Jew - Someone who is only Jewish for the jokes.

** - loyzem gayne

What Detergent Gets Out Sprouts?

About 10 years ago my parents were driving themselves around Europe. After several weeks in Austria, Germany and elsewhere, they stopped in Brussels. In a laundromat, my mom heard a little girl singing:

Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques
Dormez vous? Dormez vous?

My mom said to my dad, "It's nice to hear a little English for a change!"

So the question I ask myself is "Nature or nurture?"

This Title Is Blinking

I received in my mail one of those post office slips that let you know the post office has a package or something for you that they couldn't deliver. The slip indicated there were two certified pieces of mail...from the IRS.

The good news is that they weren't for me; they were for a previous tenant. Consider that I've been living at this place for a year and a half. Why doesn't the IRS know where the previous tenant is?

I imagine they've either died or gone underground. Working odd jobs for cash, they live outside the system. A fugitive from justice, they continue to try to prove their innocence and search for the one-armed man.

Or maybe those letters indicate that the IRS is trying to locate them to send them their refunds from a few years back. Who wants to play IRS lottery?

2000 years from now, when archaeologists dig up this area, they'll find that people sent money, huge amounts of money, to a god called IRS. They will infer that this was a very important god since His name was spelled with all CAPITAL LETTERS. They will wonder about the lesser gods, FBI, CIA, NSA and, of course, USPS. The last of these having many idols set about the country. 4' 2", painted blue and a giant mouth to feed it with letters of tribute.

Little Miss Muffet

I just finished reading Aztec by Gary Jennings. It is quite a shockfest and not for the faint of heart.

Despite all the gore and unimaginable things that go on in the book it was this line that almost caused me to lose my dinner (that's a warning, BTW):

Any woman would delight in having such a massive tepuli [I'll let you guess what that is] at her service...were it not so rancid with a lifetime's accumulation of curds that a woman might vomit at sight or scent of it.

I doubt that that would be considered the most memorable part by many people (that's another warning). I threw out the cottage cheese I had in the refrigerator.

Highly recommended (and that's my last warning).

This Post Sucks

Go to Google and search for failure. Or if you're too lazy, click here. (THANKS TIM!)

If text is not your thing, check out this picture of a truly stained glass window.(THANKS ZIMBO!)

He Was Planning A Little Turkey Basting

Maybe he said, "It's da bomb!"

I'm sure there's a lesson here but I'm laughing to hard to figure out what it is.

Neptune Is Not A Planet

No. That is no typo. I said Neptune. According to the story in USA Today

under the new rules for a planet: "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."

Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's.

So, Neptune has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. The planet formerly known as Pluto (wait a second, scratch that, reverse it) overlaps it. Now on to the jokes...

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who oversaw the proceedings cracked this one:

"It could be argued that we are creating an umbrella called 'planet' under which the dwarf planets exist," she said, drawing laughter by waving a stuffed Pluto of Walt Disney fame beneath a real umbrella.

That might have been funny if the Pluto was named Sneezy or Dopey or even Doc. Please Jocelyn, leave the jokes to us engineers.

But all of this is moot. Aside from these so-called "astronomers" the only people that care about this are the people that create mnemonics (mnemonimers?) and boys ages 5-13 who can now show up their uncles in more than just dinosaur name knowledge.