Okay, okay....wait a second! The jokes are coming....
***********************************************
During an
international gynecology conference, an
English doctor
and a French doctor were discussing
unusual cases
they had treated recently.
"Only last
week" the Frenchman said "a woman came
to see me
with a clitoris like a melon!"
"Don't
be absurd" the Brit exclaimed. "It couldn't have
been that
big -- she wouldn't have been able to walk
if it
were."
"Aah,
you English, always thinking about size" replied
the
Frenchman. "I was talking about the flavor!"
Sean got home
in the early hours of the morning after a night
at the local
pub. He made such a racket hitting into the
furniture as he
weaved his way through the house, that he woke
up the missus.
"What on
earth are you doing down there?" she yelled down from
the bedroom.
"Get yourself up here to bed and don't wake up the
neighbors!"
"I'm
trying to get a barrel of Guinness up the stairs," he
shouted.
"Leave it
'till the morning," she shouted down.
"I
can't," he said, "I've drank it."
***********************************************
COLUMBUS'
MOTHER: "I don't care what you've discovered, you
still could
have written!"
MICHELANGELO'S
MOTHER: "Can't you paint on walls like other
children? Do
you have any idea how hard it is to get that stuff
off the
ceiling?"
NAPOLEON'S
MOTHER: "All right, if you aren't hiding your report
card inside
your jacket, take your hand out of there and show
me."
ABRAHAM
LINCOLN'S MOTHER: "Again with the stovepipe hat? Can't
you just wear a
baseball cap like the other kids?"
MARY'S MOTHER:
"I'm not upset that your lamb followed you to
school, but I
would like to know how he got a better grade than
you."
ALBERT
EINSTEIN'S MOTHER: "But it's your senior picture. Can't
you do
something about your hair? OY! Styling gel, mousse,
something...?"
GEORGE
WASHINGTON'S MOTHER: "The next time I catch you throwing
money across
the Potomac, you can kiss your allowance good-bye!"
THOMAS EDISON'S
MOTHER: "Of course I'm proud that you invented
the electric
light bulb. Now turn it off and get to bed!"
PAUL REVERE'S
MOTHER: "I don't care where you think you have to
go, young man,
midnight is past your curfew."
A businessman
boarded a plane to find, sitting next to him,
an elegant
woman wearing the largest, most stunning diamond
ring he had
ever seen. He asked her about it.
"This is
the Klopman diamond," she said. "It is beautiful,
but there is a
terrible curse that goes with it."
"What's
the curse?" the man asked.
"Mr.
Klopman."
Things You
Won't See On Hallmark Cards
OUTSIDE: As the
days go by, I think of how lucky I am...
INSIDE:
That you're not here to ruin it for me.
OUTSIDE: If I
get only one thing for Christmas...
INSIDE:
I hope it's your sister.
OUTSIDE: I've
always wanted to have someone to hold, someone
to love.
INSIDE:
After having met you, I've changed my mind.
OUTSIDE: I must
admit, you brought religion into my life.
INSIDE:
I never believed in hell 'til I met you.
OUTSIDE:
Looking back over the years that we've been together,
I can't help
but wonder...
INSIDE:
What the fuck was I thinking?
OUTSIDE: I
always wanted to be rich, powerful and well-respected.
INSIDE:
And while I'm dreaming, I wish you weren't so damn ugly.
OUTSIDE: Sex
with you is like using drugs:
INSIDE:
Lots of people do it, but nobody's stupid enough to
admit it.
OUTSIDE: When
we were together, you always said you'd die for me.
INSIDE:
Now that we've broken up, I think it's time you kept
your promise.
_
OUTSIDE: The
holidays are a great time to be with family.
INSIDE:
Of course, your family won't be with you, since I'm
taking the kids
and moving in with my sister, you cheating
bastard!
OUTSIDE: I'm so
miserable without you...
INSIDE:
It's almost like you're here.
OUTSIDE: If you
ever need a friend...
INSIDE:
Buy a dog.
OUTSIDE:
Congratulations on your new bundle of joy.
INSIDE: Did you
ever find out who the father was?
A woman was out
shopping one day with her son. The boy spotted a
man
who was bowlegged. The boy pulled on Mom's hand and said,
"Momma,
look at the bowlegged man!"
Mom was
mortified and told her son that it was not polite to
point to a
person and make that sort of comment. For punishment,
the boy had to
read a play by Shakespeare. He couldn't go
shopping again
until he finished reading the play.
Finally he
finished and his mom took him once again to the mall.
Again he spied
a bowlegged man, but remembered what happened the
last time. So
he pulled on his mother's hand and said, "Lo, what
manner of men
are these, who wear their balls in parentheses?"
The farmer and
his wife had worked hard, scrimped and saved
to send their
son to college. As soon as he had enrolled, he
started to grow
a beard. Next he grew a large moustache and
sideburns.
Being pleased with his new hirsute adornment, he
had his picture
taken and sent it off to his parents.
On the back of
the photo he scrawled: "How do you like it?
Don't I look
like a count?"
Shortly after,
the son received this terse note: "You idiot,
it cost us a
fortune to send you to college, and you can't
even
spell!"
***********************************************
This is the
story of the night my ten-year-old cat,
Rudy, got his
head stuck in the garbage disposal. I
knew at the
time that the experience would be funny if
the cat
survived, so let me tell you right up front
that he's fine.
Getting him out
wasn't easy, though, and the process
included
numerous home remedies, a plumber, two cops,
an emergency
overnight veterinary clinic, a case of
mistaken
identity, five hours of panic, and fifteen
minutes of
fame.
First, some
background. My husband, Bill, and I had
just returned
from a five-day spring-break vacation in
the Cayman
Islands, where I had been sick as a dog the
whole time,
trying to convince myself that if I had to
feel lousy, it
was better to do it in paradise.
We had arrived
home at 9 PM, a day and a half later
than we had
planned because of airline problems. I
still had
illness-related vertigo, and because of the
flight delays,
had not been able to prepare the class
I was supposed
to teach at 8:40 the next morning. I
sat down at my
desk to think about William Carlos
Williams, and
around ten o'clock I heard Bill
hollering
something undecipherable from the kitchen.
As I raced out
to see what was wrong, I saw Bill
frantically
rooting around under the kitchen sink and
Rudy, or
rather, Rudy's headless body scrambling
around in the
sink, his claws clicking in panic on the
metal.
Bill had just
ground up the skin of some smoked salmon
in the garbage
disposal, and when he left the room,
Rudy (whom we
always did call a pinhead) had gone in
after it.
It is very
disturbing to see the headless body of your
cat in the
sink. This is an animal that I have slept
with nightly
for ten years, who burrows under the
covers and
purrs against my side, and who now looked
like a
desperate, fur-covered turkey carcass, set to
defrost in the
sink while it's still alive and
kicking. It was
also disturbing to see Bill, Mr.
Calm-in-any-Emergency,
at his wits end, trying to
soothe Rudy,
trying to undo the garbage disposal,
failing at
both, and basically freaking out.
Adding to the
chaos was Rudy's twin brother Lowell,
also upset,
racing around in circles, jumping onto the
kitchen counter
and alternately licking Rudy's butt
for comfort and
biting it out of fear. Clearly, I had
to do
something.
First we tried
to ease Rudy out of the disposal by
lubricating his
head and neck. We tried Johnson's baby
shampoo (kept
on hand for my nieces visits) and
butter-flavored
Crisco: both failed, and a now-greasy
Rudy kept
struggling.
Bill then
decided to take apart the garbage disposal,
which was a
good idea, but he couldn't do it. Turns
out, the thing
is constructed like a metal onion: you
peel off one
layer and another one appears, with
Rudy's head
still buried deep inside, stuck in a hard
plastic collar.
My job during this process was to sit
on the kitchen
counter petting Rudy, trying to calm
him, with the
room spinning (vertigo), Lowell howling
(he's part
Siamese), and Bill clattering around with
tools.
When all our
efforts failed, we sought professional
help. I called
our regular plumber, who actually
called me back
quickly, even at 11 o'clock at night
(thanks, Dave).
He talked Bill through further layers
of disposal
dismantling, but still we couldn't reach
Rudy. I called
the 1-800 number for Insinkerator (no
response), a
pest removal service that advertises
24-hour service
(no response), an all-night emergency
veterinary
clinic (who had no experience in this
matter, and so,
no advice), and finally, in
desperation,
911. I could see that Rudy's normally
pink paw pads
were turning blue. The fire department,
I figured, gets
cats out of trees; maybe they could
get one out of
a garbage disposal.
The dispatcher
had other ideas and offered to send
over two
policemen. This suggestion gave me pause. I'm
from the
sixties, and even if I am currently a fine
upstanding
citizen, I had never considered calling the
cops and asking
them to come to my house, on purpose.
I resisted the
suggestion, but the dispatcher was
adamant:
"They'll help you out," he said.
The cops
arrived close to midnight and turned out to
be quite nice.
More importantly, they were also able
to think
rationally, which we were not.
They were, of
course, quite astonished by the
situation:
"I've never seen anything like this,"
Officer Mike
kept saying. (The unusual circumstances
helped us get
quickly on a first-name basis with our
cops.)
Officer Tom
expressed immediate sympathy for our
plight. "I
have had cats all my life," he said,
comfortingly.
Also he had an idea. Evidently we needed
a certain tool,
a tiny, circular rotating saw that
could cut
through the heavy plastic flange encircling
Rudy's neck
without hurting Rudy, and Officer Tom
happened to own
one. "I live just five minutes from
here," he
said; "I'll go get it."
He soon
returned, and the three of them, Bill and the
two policemen
got under the sink together to cut
through the
garbage disposal. I sat on the counter,
holding Rudy
and trying not to succumb to the
surreal-ness of
the scene, with the weird
middle-of-the-night
lighting, the rooms occasional
spinning,
Lowell's spooky sound effects, an apparently
headless cat in
my sink and six disembodied legs
poking out from
under it. One good thing came of this:
the guys did
manage to get the bottom of the disposal,
so we could now
see Rudy's face and knew he could
breathe. But
they couldn't cut the flange without
risking the
cat.
Stumped,
Officer Tom had another idea. "You know," he
said, "I
think the reason we can't get him out is the
angle of his
head and body. If we could just get the
sink out and
lay it on its side, I'll bet we could
slip him
out." That sounded like a good idea at this
point, ANYTHING
would have sounded like a good idea
and as it
turned out, Officer Mike runs a
plumbing
business on weekends; he knew how to take out
the sink! Again
they went to work, the three pairs of
legs sticking
out from under the sink surrounded by an
ever-increasing
pile of tools and sink parts. They cut
the electrical
supply, capped off the plumbing lines,
unfastened the
metal clamps, unscrewed all the pipes,
and about an
hour later, voila! The sink was lifted
gently out of
the countertop, with one guy holding the
garbage
disposal (which contained Rudy's head) up
close to the
sink (which contained Rudy's body). We
laid the sink
on its side, but even at this more
favorable
removal angle, Rudy stayed stuck.
Officer Tom's
radio beeped, calling him away on some
kind of real
police business. As he was leaving,
though, he had
another good idea: "You know," he said,
"I don't
think we can get him out while he's
struggling so
much. We need to get the cat sedated. If
he were limp,
we could slide him out." And off he
went,
regretfully, a cat lover still worried about
Rudy.
The remaining
three of us decided that getting Rudy
sedated was a
good idea, but Bill and I were new to
the area. We
knew that the overnight emergency
veterinary
clinic was only a few minutes away, but we
didn't know
exactly how to get there. "I know where it
is!"
declared Officer Mike. "Follow me!"
So Mike got
into his patrol car, Bill got into the
drivers seat of
our car, and I got into the back,
carrying the
kitchen sink, what was left of the garbage
disposal, and
Rudy.
It was now
about 2:00 a.m. We followed Officer Mike
for a few
blocks when I decided to put my hand into
the garbage
disposal to pet Rudy's face, hoping I
could comfort
him. Instead, my sweet, gentle bedfellow
chomped down on
my finger, hard, really hard and
wouldn't let
go. My scream reflex kicked into gear,
and I couldn't
stop the noise. Bill slammed on the
breaks,
hollering "What? What happened? Should I
stop?"
checking us out in the rear view mirror.
"No,"
I managed to get out between screams, "just keep
driving. Rudy's
biting me, but we've got to get to the
vet. Just
go!"
Bill turned his
attention back to the road, where
Officer Mike
took a turn we hadn't expected, and we
followed. After
a few minutes Rudy let go, and as I
stopped
screaming, I looked up to discover that we
were wandering
aimlessly through an industrial park,
in and out of
empty parking lots, past little streets
that didn't
look at all familiar. "Where's he taking
us?" I
asked. "We should have been there ten minutes
ago!"
Bill was as
mystified as I was, but all we knew to do
was follow the
police car until, finally, he pulled
into a church
parking lot and we pulled up next to
him.
As Rich rolled
down the window to ask, Mike, "where
are we
going?" The cop, who was not Mike, rolled down
his window and
asked, "Why are you following me?" Once
Bill and I
recovered from our shock at having tailed
the wrong cop
car and the policeman from his pique at
being stalked,
led us quickly to the emergency vet,
where Mike
greeted us by holding open the door,
exclaiming,
"Where were you guys?"
It was lucky
that Mike got to the vets ahead of us,
because we
hadn't thought to call and warn them about
what was
coming. (Clearly, by this time we weren't
really thinking
at all.) We brought in the kitchen
sink containing
Rudy and the garbage disposal
containing his
head, and the clinic staff was ready.
They took his
temperature (which was down 10-degrees)
and his oxygen
level (which was half of normal), and
the vet
declared: "This cat is in serious shock. We've
got to sedate
him and get him out of there immediately."
When I asked if
it was OK to sedate a cat in shock,
the vet said
grimly, "We don't have a choice." With
that, he
injected the cat; Rudy went limp; and the vet
squeezed about
half a tube of K-Y jelly onto the cat's
neck and pulled
him free.
Then the whole
team jumped into code blue mode. (I
know this from
watching a lot of ER) They laid Rudy on
a cart, where
one person hooked up IV fluids, another
put little
socks on his paws ("You'd be amazed how
much heat they
lose through their pads," she said),
one covered him
with hot water bottles and a blanket,
and another
took a blow-dryer to warm up Rudy's now
very gunky
head. The fur on his head dried in stiff
little spikes,
making him look rather pathetically
punk as he lay
there, limp and motionless.
At this point
they sent Bill, Mike, and me to sit in
the waiting
room while they tried to bring Rudy back
to life. I told
Mike he didn't have to stay, but he
just stood
there, shaking his head. "I've never seen
anything like
this," he said again.
At about 3 AM,
the vet came in to tell us that the
prognosis was
good for a full recovery. They needed to
keep Rudy
overnight to re-hydrate him and give him
something for
the brain swelling they assumed he had,
but if all went
well, we could take him home the
following
night.
Just in time to
hear the good news, Officer Tom rushed
in, finished
with his real police work and concerned
about Rudy. I
figured that once this ordeal was over
and Rudy was
home safely, I would have to re-think my
position on the
police.
Bill and I got
back home about 3:30. We hadn't
unpacked from
our trip, I was still intermittently
dizzy, and I
still hadn't prepared my 8:40 class. "I
need a
vacation," I said, and while I called the
office to leave
a message canceling my class, Bill
made us a
pitcher of martinis. I slept late the next
day and then
badgered the vet about Rudy's condition
until he said
that Rudy could come home later that
day.
I was working
on the suitcases when the phone rang.
"Hi, this
is Steve Huskey from the Norristown
Times-Herald,"
a voice told me. "Listen, I was just
going through
the police blotter from last night.
Mostly it's the
usual stuff: Breaking and entering,
petty theft but
there's this one item. Um, do you have
a cat?" So
I told Steve the whole story, which
interested him.
A couple hours later he called back to
say that his
editor was interested, too; did I have a
picture of
Rudy? The next day Rudy was front-page
news, under the
ridiculous headline Catch of the Day
Lands Cat in
Hot Water.
There were some
noteworthy repercussions to the
newspaper
article. Mr. Huskey had somehow inferred
that I called
911 because I thought Bill, my husband,
was going into
shock, although how he concluded this
from my comment
that his pads were turning blue, I
don't quite
understand. So the first thing I had to do
was call Bill
at work. Bill, who had worked tirelessly
to free
Rudy--and swear that I had been misquoted.
When I arrived
at work myself, I was famous; people
had been
calling my secretary all morning to inquire
about Rudy's
health.
When I called
our regular vet (whom I had met only
once) to make a
follow-up appointment for Rudy, the
receptionist
asked, "Is this the famous Rudy's
mother?"
When I brought my car in for routine
maintenance a
few days later, Dave, my mechanic, said,
"We read
about your cat. Is he OK?" When I called a
tree surgeon
about my dying red oak, he asked if I
knew the person
on that street whose cat had been in
the garbage
disposal.
And when I went
to get my hair cut, the shampoo person
told me the
funny story her grandma had read in the