100227- A joke

.....I'm sure many of you are a bit confused about why a huge powerful country like China throws a conniption fit whenever anyone mentions the Dalai Lama. The short, obvious answer is that he's a living testament to their half century effort at ethnic genocide of the Tibetan culture. If you're going to invade a country for completely illegitimate reasons, it would behoove you to make sure the leader was a thoroughly unsympathetic son-of-a-bitch whose subjects wouldn't dream of smuggling to safety at the risk of their own lives (what? I never mentioned Iraq; did I mention Iraq?) and not a pacifist who devoted his life to better understanding the human experience.
.....No, I believe China's apoplectic temper tantrums have something to do with koans. Koans have been described as zen riddles, questions that have no answers... or infinitely many answers. In fact they're intellectual disciplinary exercises. The eternal bane of dogmatic ideologies like Maoism and fundamentalist religions, koans aren't meant to be answered. They're meant as mental training for approaching any question no matter how difficult by posing one that can't be answered definitively. More is learned by the pursuit of the answer than would ever be learned by the actual answer, had one existed.
.....At some point, the Chinese communists became convinced that Buddhists were simply tricking everyone; that there were answers to all of those questions, and the Buddhists were hogging them all to themselves. By their reckoning, the slaughter and/or enslavement of millions was a small price to pay for knowing "how high is up". The clue that tipped them off was the lifestyle of the monks themselves. Many were brought to the monastery as young boys, got their heads shaved and wore a simple robe every day into adulthood. The communists refused to believe that anybody who spent their entire puberty in a remote temple surrounded by other boys didn't know what the sound of "one hand clapping" was.

100226- A joke

.....The next time you find yourself in an office building, just before you leave pick up a phone and say, " Hello, Security? I'm feeling insecure. Could I have a hug?"

100225- A joke

.....How come nobody remembers John Lennon as "the guy who broke up Fluxus"?

100224- A joke

.....A tour guide out at the wharf was playing up the area's colonial history, even affecting a period persona. "Aye", he said, "there be pirates on these shores even to this very day!" "Pirates?" cried one tourist incredulously. "They attack countries without coast guards or out in the middle of the ocean beyond jurisdiction. There haven't been organized pirates around here since the Civil War!" The guard squinted. "Err... oh, really? Well I says there is!" "All right", said the tourist, "prove it. Just show me a pirate." The crowd turned and looked at the tour guide, who was sweating but determined not to break character.
.....The guide looked around the large but sparsely populated docks and then pointed. "There! You see? That... rugged old gentleman with his hands shoved deep in his pockets? Well, you may think they're both hands, but one of them is solid, cold metal. That there is none other than Harry the Hook!" "Harry the Hook?" repeated the skeptical tourist. "Aye! Once while harpoonin' a... a... a narwahl," and the guide looked around to make sure the crowd was following him on this,"he was a-haulin' it up on deck when it lunged and swallered his prize telescope!" The tourist rolled his eyes. "Well, he weren't gonna stand fer that from no fish! He grabbed the horn with one hand and put one boot on its lower jaw and reached in... ah, but the boot slipped and the beastie bit his hand clear off!" Most of the crowd gave a startled jump and a look of concern. "Of course, medicine being what it is on a pirate ship, all they could for him was fashion the hook he wears to this day. And that's why they call him Harry the Hook."
....."Oh, come on!" pleaded the skeptic. "You can't expect us to believe that in this day and age... and anyway, you said there were 'pirates'-- that's plural, with an 's'. You got any more vagrants with their hands in their pockets?" The guide squinted again and thought, "I might, I might". He had to look a few more seconds this time but finally pointed and said, "Ah-ha! That gentleman you see limpin' over there. That limp doesn't come from the gout, oh, no. That's because that man there is none other than the notorious Peg-Leg Pete!" The crowd had all turned as one to stare at the disheveled drunk and together made a quiet 'ooooh' sound. "Oh, for the love of-- are you people serious?" shouted the skeptic. "Can't you see what he's doing here? The next thing you know, he's going to start telling you some phony-baloney story about him prying open a shark's mouth when his foot slipped and the shark bites it off! So, unless you're willing to go up to some totally skeevy-looking stranger and pull his boots off, he's free to say, 'there you go, that there is how he got the name Peg-Leg Pete'!" The guide was clenching his teeth when suddenly his face brightened and he straightened his back. "So you've heard of him?" said the guide. For the first time the tourist was speechless. "I must apologize," the guide continued, "I had no idea you were an expert. In fact, had I known I would have offered you the advanced tour we normally reserve for graduate students from the colleges." The guide began to lead the now totally confused skeptic past a boathouse they had been standing near. "You see, most people find it a bit stuffy and academic for their vacation, but you? Oh, I can see you're a man of learning, a man of real depth..." he continued as the two of them disappeared around the back of the boathouse, leaving the crowd silently perplexed. They stared at each other, the sky, their own feet, each other again, etc. Then there came a few minutes of shuffling, banging and clattering from behind the boathouse. It had stopped for a few minutes when the guide slowly emerged around the corner.
.....The crowd stared blankly at the guide until one of them asked the obvious question, "What happened to that other guy?" "Oh, him?" gasped the guide, "well, he got so caught up in our conversation, it inspired him to go off and become a pirate himself!" The members of the crowd looked at each other in pleasant surprise and there were a few 'oh, my's. "Of course," continued the guide, "you'll probably know him by his pirate name from now on. He'll be known as Woody Woodpecker."

100223- A joke

.....Today an exasperated George Lucas explained to reporters at a press conference-- for the third time-- that the various toy Yoda figures he has sold over the years are not defective and are not being recalled. "They're perfectly safe. My own kids play with them all the time. I can't understand where these stories are coming from. I never have problems like this in Japan."

100222- A joke

.....In the 1960's, when a television show ran the credits at the end they looked like they were printed on title cards; they were often in large block letters and would list four to six names at a time, and after one set of names had been on screen for a few seconds it would either switch to the next or quickly fade out as the next one faded in. Twenty years later television production became more complicated technologically and legally. In the 1980's you were more likely to see names scroll up the screen continuously as in a movie, but faster to get through quickly. Twenty years on they no longer bother having closing theme music. In the last decade it became standard procedure to shrink the credits down to the size of a bottle cap and shove them into one corner of the screen so that the rest of the screen can be used for advertising more shows. What names they do show zip by quicker than anyone could possibly read them. And I think I've finally figured out why: after shoveling crap at us for sixty years they've finally become too afraid to admit who's responsible.

100221- A joke

.....After several hours of heated debate in Congress over environmental regulations a brief break in the proceedings allowed several members to stretch their legs. A liberal congressman who had been arguing for tighter restrictions on pollution headed for the restroom but noticed a vocal right-wing opponent already at the urinals. Rather than provoke a conflict, the liberal congressman pretended to wash his hands until his right-wing colleague was finished. As they switched places, the right-wing congressman couldn't help but notice the liberal congressman moving towards the urinals from the sink and commented, "You know, in a conservative Christian household we're taught from a very young age to clean up after we've relieved ourselves." The liberal congressman snapped back, "The rest of us don't have to be told not to piss on our hands in the first place."