Garth's Third Page of Jokes

Here are still more jokes. Enjoy.

ABORT, RETRY, IGNORE?

-To the meter of "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe...

Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bed sheets,
still I sat there doing spreadsheets.
Having reached the bottom line I took a floppy from the drawer,
I then invoked the SAVE command and waited for the disk to store,
Only this and nothing more.

Deep into the monitor peering, long I sat there wond'ring,
fearing, Doubting, while the disk kept churning,
turning yet to churn some more.
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token.
"Save!" I said, "You cursed mother! Save my data from before!"
One thing did the phosphors answer, only this and nothing more,
Just, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

Was this some occult illusion, some maniacal intrusion?
These were choices undesired, ones I'd never faced before.
Carefully I weighed the choices as the disk made impish noises.
The cursor flashed, insistent, waiting, baiting me to type some more.
Clearly I must press a key, choosing one and nothing more,
From "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

With fingers pale and trembling,
slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,
Praying for some guarantee, timidly, I pressed a key.
But on the screen there still persisted words appearing as before.
Ghastly grim they blinked and taunted, haunted, as my patience wore,
Saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

I tried to catch the chips off guard,
and pressed again, but twice as hard.
I pleaded with the cursed machine:
I begged and cried and then I swore.
Now in mighty desperation, trying random combinations,
Still there came the incantation, just as senseless as before.
Cursor blinking, angrily winking, blinking nonsense as before.
Reading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted.
Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor.
And then I saw a dreadful sight:
a lightning bolt cut through the night.
A gasp of horror overtook me, shook me to my very core.
The lightning zapped my previous data, lost and gone forevermore.
Not even, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

To this day I do not know the place to which lost data go.
What demonic nether world us wrought where lost data will be stored,
Beyond the reach of mortal souls, beyond the ether, into black holes?
But sure as there's C, Pascal, Lotus, Ashton-Tate and more,
You will be one day be left to wander, lost on some Plutonian shore,
Pleading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

- Anonymous

The bank manager noticed the new clerk was adroit at counting money and adding up figures.

"Where did you get your finance education?" he asked.

"Yale," replied the lad.

"And what's your name?" asked the manager.

"Yim Yohnston," he replied.

THE TRANS-PARADISIAC BRIDGE

Since there must be communication between heaven and hell, the Trans-Paradisiac Bridge was built eons ago under the co-sponsorship of the two regions, each supplying half the money required for its upkeep.

One day, the Archangel Gabriel came to God and said, "Lord, the Trans-Paradisiac Bridge is in pretty bad shape. I've looked up the records and I'm afraid Satan hasn't contributed one cent to its upkeep in the last two thousand years.

"Really?" said God. "It must be an oversight."

He waved his hand and a beautiful scroll appeared, along with a graceful feather pen, which moved of its own accord, and wrote in Spencerian handwriting:

Dear Satan Baby, It has come to my attention that you are somewhat remiss in your payments for the upkeep of this bridge of ours. Will you check your records and make up the missing sum at your earliest convenience? And by the way, lets do lunch together one of these day
Yours, God

The scroll disappeared and, in a very short order of time, an asbestos sheet appeared with charred letters on it that still exhalted sulfurious fumes.It read:

God: Nuts to you and nuts to the bridge. I don't intend to pay a cent.
Satan

When God read that, he swelled with fury and said to Gabriel, "How do you like that for insolence? After all I did for him, too. I gave him hell for his own, and a vast coterie of demons to rule over, and see how he treats me. If he thinks he's getting away with this, he's greatly mistaken."

And a scroll appeared. Again the feather pen wrote:

Satan: If you don't pay up instantly, I am going to sue you till your eyes bubble.
God

And at once another asbestos sheet came back, reading

God: Where will you find a lawyer?
Satan

 

MODERN DEFINITIONS

BEAUTY PARLOR: A place where women curl up and dye.

CANNIBAL: Someone who is fed up with people.

CHICKENS: The only animals you eat before they are born and after they are dead.

COMMITTEE: A body that keeps minutes and wastes hours.

GOSSIP: A person who will never tell a lie if the truth will do more damage.

HANDKERCHIEF: Cold Storage.

INFLATION: Cutting money in half without damaging the paper.

SECRET: Something you tell to one person at a time.

YAWN: An honest opinion openly expressed.

TOMORROW: One of the greatest labor saving devices of today.

RULES OF WRITING

  1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
  2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
  3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
  4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
  5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat)
  6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
  7. Be more or less specific.
  8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
  9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
  10. No sentence fragments.
  11. Contractions aren't necessary and shouldn't be used.
  12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
  13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
  14. One should NEVER generalize
  15. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
  16. Don't use no double negatives.
  17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
  18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
  19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
  20. The passive voice is to be ignored.
  21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
  22. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.
  23. Kill all exclamation points!!!
  24. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
  25. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth shaking ideas.
  26. Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed.
  27. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
  28. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
  29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.
  30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
  31. Even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
  32. Who needs rhetorical questions?
  33. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
  34. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

REAL CLASSIFIEDS

The following were actually taken from recent classified ads in newspapers:

HOW TO COOK A CHRISTMAS TURKEY

  1. Go buy a turkey
  2. Take a drink of whiskey (scotch)
  3. Put turkey in the oven
  4. Take another 2 drinks of whiskey
  5. Set the degree at 375 ovens Step
  6. Take 3 more whiskeys of drink
  7. Turn oven the on
  8. Take 4 whisks of drinky
  9. Turk the bastey
  10. Whiskey another bottle of get
  11. Stick a turkey in the thermometer
  12. Glass yourself a pour of whiskey
  13. Bake the whiskey for 4 hours
  14. Take the oven out of the turkey
  15. Take the oven out of the turkey
  16. Floor the turkey up off of the pick
  17. Turk the carvey
  18. Get yourself another scottle of botch
  19. Tet the sable and pour yourself a glass of turkey
  20. Bless the saying, pass and eat out

This page was made by gbjohnson@yahoo.com. If you have any suggestions, questions, comments, or you have a great joke, send them to me.

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