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Greetings, Quotaholics:
Every year about this time
we start to hear about the “war on Christmas”. One side
feels that Christmas is religion being forced on them, the other side
feels that one of their most holy holidays is being taken away.
At the center of this “war” are the retailers who try to
walk a fine line between offending one side or the other. It seems they
are damned either way. Too much Christmas symbolism and the non-Christians
are offended, not enough and the Christians are offended.
Of course, the retailers want to make as many sales as possible this
time of year, especially with the state of the economy. They try to
use the term “holiday” in place of Christmas, Santa and
reindeer instead of Mary and Joseph. Yet still some complain.
This year the war is heating up early in Utah. According to Channel
2 News in Salt Lake City, “State Sen. Chris Buttars is sponsoring
a resolution asking the Legislature to declare its opposition to what
he calls the war on Christmas.”
“Buttars, R-West Jordan, wants retailers to embrace Christmas
in their promotions, saying the United States is a Christian nation
and ought to use the holiday’s name.”
I wouldn’t think a law like this would be passed, but what if
it is? Is it fair for the state to legislate how a retailer advertises
his wares? Is it fair for the merchants to be told they will observe
a religious holiday?
What about local retailers who are part of national chains? Their advertisements,
and sometimes even store decor, are dictated by the corporate leadership.
“Jim Olsen, president of the Utah Retail Merchants Association,
says it would be difficult for retailers to stick to using just Christmas
if they are part of national promotions that don’t use the name of the
holiday.”
What about you? Are you in favor of laws requiring use of the name Christmas
for the upcoming holiday? Are you offended by seeing the religious nature
of the holiday displayed? Do you feel Christmas can be celebrated as
a religious holiday by Christians without offending non-Christians?
Should Christians fear that their holiday is in jeopardy if retailers
use the term “holiday” instead of “Christmas”?
Should people just “get over it” and live and let live?
Bah-humbug,
P.S. Wednesday Patti mentioned that she
doesn’t have a cute signature GIF like Bruce and I have. I checked
with Bruce and someone made these for him and he doesn’t remember who
it was. If any of you know how to do this I’d like help getting
one for Patti. Thanks.
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it worth $1 a month to you to keep RGQ going? Please click the
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"Growing old is better than the alternative. – Anonymous
"If you even dream of beating me you’d better wake up and apologize."
- Muhammad Ali
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Suspicious Wife
[Thanks to Bonnie in Louisiana]
A soldier stationed
in the South Pacific wrote to his wife in the States to please send
him a harmonica to occupy his free time and keep his mind off of the
local women. The wife complied and sent the best one she could find,
along with several dozen lesson & music books.
Rotated back home,
he rushed to their home and thru the front door. "Oh darling"
he gushed, "Come here… let me look at you… let me hold you
! Let’s have a fine dinner out, then make love all night. I’ve missed
your lovin’ so much !"
The wife, keeping
her distance, said, "All in good time lover. First, let’s hear
you play that harmonica."
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"Until lions have
their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter. –
African proverb
"Against logic there
is no armor like ignorance. - Laurence J. Peter
"Love is what is left over when being in love has burned away.
– John Hurt, as character Dr. Iannis, in the movie ‘Captain Correlli’s
Mandolin’
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E-Mail
the Imp
My father had a lot to say about everything and always had a “one liner”
to cover most situations. Some of them we heard so often we turned him
”off” as soon as they popped up, often missing something important that
followed. I think he knew that and used that fact to get away with a
lot of things, like announcing that he was broke and there would be
no Christmas presents. (Never happened, but you get my point.)
One of his favorites was, “The trouble with Chinese food is that you’re
hungry again in an hour, the trouble with German food is that in an
hour you’re hungry for power.” Ignoring the German reference, there
may be some truth in the reference to Chinese food, and Oriental and
Asian food in general.
Oriental food is generally heavy on vegetables and light on meat, and
thin soup or broth often makes up a fourth or more of a meals volume.
Nourishing to be sure,but not very “stick-to-the-ribs” as it were. For
those of us of northern European heritage, the portions of an Asian
meal are small and the number of calories it provides is picayune. For
Asians, after thousands of years adapting to such a diet, it’s adequate
and they can thrive on it.
The Asian diet can’t take much of a cut back in volume or calories before
you reach the point of constant hunger and not much further along, starvation.
North Koreans have hit that point and stayed there for years. North
Korea doesn’t produce enough food to feed itself and needs foreign food
imports for survival. In October 2008, the UN announced that North Koreans
were facing their worst food shortages in a decade. I suppose my father
would say, “The problem with North Korean food is that you’re hungry
again the minute you finish your meal.”
North Korea’s solution is not to divert money from building rockets
and nuclear plants and buying food, but rather to develop food products
that keep you from feeling hungry. That way you can starve to death
and feel as if you just ate two Thanksgiving dinners
back to back.
North Korean scientists have developed
a new kind of noodle that delays feelings of hunger. The special
anti-hunger noodles are made from corn and soybeans. The new noodles
have twice as much protein and five times as much fat as ordinary noodles.
"When you consume ordinary noodles (made from wheat or corn), you
may soon feel your stomach empty. But this soybean noodle delays such
a feeling of hunger," states the Choson Shinbo newspaper.
That’s not the solution to hunger and starvation, but the idea is intriguing
to fat guys like me. The idea of pasta with no or very low caloric content
that has the lasting effect of delaying hunger pangs would definitely
find it a staple on my shopping list.
What North Korea needs to do is develop a world market for Diet Dinners
made with this type of noodle and divert the profits into imports of
food for their citizens. Oh, I forgot to add that they need to put their
military budget on a very lean diet too.
The Bad Sied 
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Speak
right up!
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On
this day in history, December
5, 1933: Utah ratifies the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution. Congress
proposed the Amendment on February 21, 1933. The first state to ratify
came on April 10 when Michigan approved adoption. Wisconsin was second
on April 25. Two more states were added in May and June saw the list grow
by five more. July brought the total to 15 and August added another 5
states. September, October, and November brought the total to 33. Thirty-six
states needed to ratify in order for the Amendment to pass. On December
5 first Ohio, then Pennsylvania, and finally Utah ratified the document.
The 21st Amendment repeals the 18th Amendment which was ratified on January
16, 1919 and certified on January 29. It went into effect on January 29,
1920. It prohibited the "manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating
liquors" in the US and all her territories. The 18th Amendment is
the only one to ever be repealed. The 21st Amendment repealed the 18th
and allowed States, Territories, or possession of the US to construct
laws regarding the beverages.
"Prohibition is better than no liquor at all." - Will Rogers
"Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you
the beer to cry into." - Don Marquis
"A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn’t care to drink with,
even if he drank." - H. L. Mencken
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Email Kirsten
“Love
is staying up all night with a sick child — or a healthy adult.”
~ David Frost ~
I’m afraid I have to chicken out of writing tonight, because of a very
simple equation:
Child-throwing-up-all-night = No-sleep-for-Mommy = Constant-brain-farts-the-following-day
In compensation for my numb state of exhaustion that is preventing me
from functioning like a normal human being, I present to you some extra
humour for the day: a list of blunders
on medical records.
1. The skin was moist and dry.
2. Rectal exam revealed a normal size thyroid. (Long fingers?)
3. The patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.
4. She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life until
1989 when she got a divorce.
5. Between you and me, we ought to be able to get this lady pregnant.
6. The patient was in his usual state of good health until his airplane
ran out of gas and crashed.
7. The lab test indicated abnormal lover function.
8.The baby was delivered, the cord clamped and cut, and handed to the
pediatrician, who breathed and cried immediately.
9. Exam of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized.
10. I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical
therapy.
11. The patient lives at home with his mother, father, and pet turtle,
who is presently enrolled in day care three times a week.
12. Bleeding started in the rectal area and continued all the way to
Los Angeles.
13. Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation.
(Excuse me, what are you doing with that pen light?)
14. She is numb from her toes down.
15. Exam of genitalia was completely negative except for the right foot.
(Anatomy review time!)
16. While in the emergency room, she was examined, X-rated and sent
home.
17. The patient was to have a bowel resection. However, he took a job
as a stockbroker instead. (An empowered patient.)
18. The patient suffers from occasional, constant, infrequent headaches.
19. Coming from Detroit, this man has no children.
20. Examination reveals a well-developed male lying in bed with his
family in no distress.
21. Patient was alert and unresponsive.
22. When she fainted, her eyes rolled around the room.
23. We will follow her eyes and nose with a foley catheter.
24. By the time he was admitted, his rapid heart had stopped, and he
was feeling better.
25. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.
26. On the second day the knee was better and on the third day it had
completely disappeared.
27. The patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in
1983.
28. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to
be depressed.
29. Discharge status: Alive but without permission.
30. Healthy-appearing decrepit sixty-nine-year-old male, mentally alert
but forgetful.
31. The patient refused an autopsy.
32. The patient expired on the floor uneventfully.
33. Patient has left his white blood cells at another hospital.
34. The patient’s past medical history has been remarkably insignificant,
with only a forty-pound weight gain in the past three days.
35. She slipped on the ice and apparently her legs went in separate
directions in early December.
36. The patient had a rash over his truck.
Kaleidoscopically yours,
Kirsten
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I had a meeting today. It was a scheduled meeting, not the kind of
meeting where a bunch of people barge into my office unexpected. We
were going to discuss how we were going to create accounts for our
new students. We try to use that same username for all computer access,
so the username for e-mail should match the username for my web page.
It’s not a difficult process, I add the user to my web page which
automatically creates the username. I then send that to the department
that handles e-mail and they check their records. My new web page
might say John Smith gets a username of jsmith, but there could already
be a Jack Smith with an e-mail account, so John’s username would have
to be changed to jsmith1. Pretty simple, right?
The fact that the usernames of about 10% of our students have to
be changed wasn’t the issue. We were going to discuss when the usernames
will be created. Our admissions department has to mark the applicant
as a student in order for them to get access to my web page, but they
don’t want to do that until the student is on campus and ready to
register. If they make an applicant a student, they lose the ability
to send them all sorts of junk mail. However, we need time to create
the accounts. We can’t be waiting around all day for admissions to
call and say an applicant is on campus, we have to create the accounts
in advance. I suggested that we could have admissions send us a list
of appointments they have the next day, which would give us a day
to create the accounts. The meeting promised to be short and last
about half an hour at most. We were going to discuss how fast we could
create a username.
That is, until I got to the meeting. It was only then that I was
told Tony (not Tony’s real name) would be joining us. Tony has nothing
to do with e-mail or my web site, but he does create the accounts
for Blackboard, which allows for online classes. Those accounts aren’t
created until about a week before the semester begins, so there was
no reason for him to be at the meeting. Blackboard wasn’t on the agenda,
but they decided to add it without telling me because I run the reports
that Tony uses to create his Blackboard accounts.
Something you should know about Tony is that he is one of those people
that can turn a one hour meeting into a two hour meeting merely by
being there. I figured our half-hour meeting just turned into a one
hour meeting even if we didn’t discuss the Blackboard reports. But
I underestimated Tony. The half-hour meeting turned into an hour and
45 minute meeting before we even got to Blackboard accounts. Since
we use part of the Social Security Number as a temporary password,
Tony wanted to know what was going to happen when we started our program
in Israel. I told him we would cross that bridge when we came to it.
Then he wanted to know about our Brooklyn program. I told him they
are in New York City, which is in the United States, so they have
Social Security Numbers. And the meeting continued like that, with
him asking “what if” or “how will” questions about things we didn’t
have to deal with yet. That would get the other two people at the
meeting discussing a question that wasn’t pertinent to the meeting,
and I’d have to cut them off.
After the meeting lasted more than three times longer than it was
scheduled for, Tony asked if he could have five minutes to discuss
the reports I run for him. I agreed, since it would take me five minutes
just to walk across campus if he wanted another meeting. The then
handed me three pages of instructions on how to create a Blackboard
account, along with a forth page that contained a copy of the current
report. He then began to explain how he wanted it changed, and even
worse, why he wanted it changed. He made diagrams with arrows on his
copy of his handout, which I couldn’t see from across the room. I
didn’t care, all I had to do was change the report formatting, which
would take me a matter of minutes. Twenty minutes later he finished
his little presentation.
It took me about three seconds to tell him to send me an e-mail with
the exact format of the report he wanted. I was an hour late for lunch.
Tim a’Musing
Having a Ball with Yarns
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A simple way to sharpen kitchen shears: cut a piece of steel wool. -
Peggy in Tonawanda, New York
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Good turnout this time! One I missed from
last time too.
I
got a submission from Dora in Denver who said, “I don’t
know if these qualify as limericks or not (first time I have tried to
write any)…” I’ve included her limericks below, but
I thought I would take this chance to give a lesson to anyone else who
would like to join in.
I found a limerick lesson at this website
that explains it this way, “The rhyme pattern is a a b b a with
lines 1, 2 and 5 containing 3 beats and rhyming, and lines 3 and 4 having
two beats and rhyming. You will soon hear the distinctive beat pattern
of all limericks. The rhythm is just as important in a limerick as the
rhyme.”
Today’s opening line breaks down this way;
( I saw) - (a young man) - (on a boat) 3 beats.
One possibility would be,
I saw a young man on a boat,
who wanted to see what would float,
he threw in his oar
his money and more
and lastly his grey billy goat.
It’s just as important to learn to read them in the right rhythm
too. Hope this helps.
Next opening line, from Marian from Ellicott City…
December arrived cold and wet…
Hints:
Here’s a great new rhyming/composition tool. http://www.writerhymes.com/
There’s also a great rhyming dictionary at http://www.rhymezone.com/
Limerick rules. http://freespace.virgin.net/merrick.sheldon/limerickrules.htm
Submit
Opening Line
Submit
Limerick
I
saw a young man on a boat…
To and fro he was walking
At the cold he was balking.
On a phone he was talking-
Seems he had forgot his coat. - Dora in Denver |
I
saw a young man on a boat…
To the shore he did e-mote
In a voice loud and long
In the rhythm of a song
The cleanliness of the moat. - Dora in Denver |
I saw a
young man on a boat…
On calm waters did he float
His girl lounged in the prow
As love for her he did avow
From the Bard he did quote! - Dora in Denver |
I saw a
young man on a boat…
From the captain he did quote
“Shiver me timbers – ye goat
Why’d you eat my coat!?!” - Dora in Denver |
I saw a
young man on a boat
Next to him sat an old goat
He called to me: Hey you!
Have you seen Ellen’s gnu?
Without him we won’t stay afloat! - Maria in Illinois |
I saw a
young man on a boat,
Down the river he was trying to float.
But his boat had a hole,
And he had on board a pole
To which was tied a young goat. - Bonnie |
I saw a
young man on a boat
His wealth he wanted to promote
To attract the chicks.
But his offers they’d nix
For he flaunted an oily tugboat. - E. Cole Aye |
I saw a
young man on a boat
Who was every bit the dolt.
Though the boat he bought
Was a sixty foot yacht,
He’d only sail it in a moat. - E. Cole Aye |
I saw a
young man on a boat
He could sing just only one note
As he dance the hula. . .
He didn’t make much moolah.
He was the worst gondolier by vote. - Anne Onimous |
I saw a
young man on a boat
He was the handsomest dude afloat.
But sadly, as they say,
Turns out he was gay
And my chance of a date was remote. - Anne Onimous |
I saw a
young man on a boat
When he peeled off his shirt and coat
His chest was most ripped
My heartbeats then skipped
As he rowed away in his rowboat. - Anne Onimous |
I saw a
young man on a boat
I found him to be such a dreamboat.
I vowed to make him mine,
Not because he was divine,
But so around my friends I could gloat. - Anne Onimous |
It’s Monday,
I think what I’ll do…
Is go hiking to Katmandu
As I go up the slope
It is my real hope
That I meet an abominable gnu. - Lola |
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Re: Unemployment
Love your column, Patti! We couldn’t have asked for a better person to
replace Bruce’s Wednesday slot!
I am a contractor in the I.T. department of a large retailer. My contract
is up at the end of December, and I’ve been very concerned about whether
I would retain my job. Fortunately, my contract has just been extended
until the end of 2009. Some of my co-workers’ contracts are soon to expire,
and they have not heard anything about extensions yet. It’s nerve-wracking
stuff. A number of people have newly-acquired nail-biting habits.
The group of people who tend to not be mentioned in all of this are small
business owners, of which my husband is one. This economic crisis has
really knocked him into a tailspin. He is a manufacturer, and he is affected
because people just aren’t buying stuff. When they do, they buy stuff
manufactured in China. We are spending so much energy right now trying
to figure out ways to keep the business going. The business also incorporates
a charitable venture, so closing down would mean a lot of people could
miss out. - Kirsten
[Thanks Kirsten, Bruce left
some pretty big shoes to fill.]
Patti, congrats on the new position.
Now I can see up your skirt.  - Tim (yes, that one)
Re: Little Girls
Mike: I was a pervert
when I was young and I knew it. I really enjoyed playing with little girls.
I felt guilty about it for years. I really suffered with this guilt well
into early adulthood. Had I been arrested for playing with girls my own
age when I was a 12-year-old, I probably would have felt that severe punishment
would have been appropriate. Wow, I was an complete idiot! However, I
grew up.
I am glad that the government of my state is not being run by idiots like
the Licking County Assistant Prosecutor. Oh! I forgot, it probably is.
By the way, I enjoyed looking at pictures of naked girls back then and
my tastes have not changed a lot. I still enjoy playing with little girls
my own age. My real wish [As Kristen noted — "When I grow up I want
to be a little boy." ~ Joseph Heller] came true. - Mike from Florida
PS. I am very pleased you are there to help with this. Give my best wishes
to Bruce.
Reader Submission
To those of you in the "banking"
business - this is a joke!
Dear Sirs,
In view of what seems to be happening internationally with banks at the
moment, I was wondering if you could advise me correctly…
If one of my checks is returned marked ‘insufficient funds,’ how do I
know whether that refers to me, or to you? - Noella
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Disclaimer- All quotes printed in this publication are believed to be accurately
attributed, but no guarantees are made that some incorrectly attributed,
or even outright false quotes won’t get in here from time to time.
I assure readers that I will do my best to weed out incorrect quotes, and
will print a retraction as soon as I become aware of any errors. |
Click here to see the archives of past issues, or go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/reallygoodquotes/messages.
If you run across something really outstanding when perusing the archives,
I’d appreciate it if you’d mail me at TheBestOfRGQ@yahoo.com
and point it out to me. I’m in the process of compiling an e-book
called, not surprisingly, The Best of RGQ, and I’d like to hear from you
which pieces impacted you the most. |
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