Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!lll-winken!looking!watmath!maytag!watserv1!looking!funny-request From: funny-request@looking.on.ca Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny Subject: The "true news" digest Nov/90 (6 of 8) Keywords: various, true Message-ID: Date: 17 Nov 90 08:25:10 GMT Lines: 216 Approved: funny@looking.on.ca Here comes the "true news" digest. This is a collection of various submitted items of "found humour." True (or supposedly true) stories, cute sayings or quotes seen or overheard, that sort of thing. These were judged not quite appropriate for an individual posting, so they are collected here. This is posted in several parts ------------------------------------ Subject: Can you catch it falling down the front steps? From: eddins@eedsp.gatech.edu (Steve Eddins) I found the following paragraph in a brochure included with my homeowner's insurance bill, under the heading "Changes Made to Help You Better Understand Your Coverage." "Language has been added to the 'bodily injury' provision to clarify that certain communicable social diseases are not considered a bodily injury and therefore are not covered." ------------------------------------ From: Mike_Vandervelden@cc.sfu.ca Subject: Disk space problems I was on-shift tonight as a duty consultant in a micro-computer lab in our university when a user approached me with her life-or-death problem. She had been working with Microsoft Word on the MacIntosh for the past hour or so, and the time had come to save her document on her diskette. When the system told her that there was not enough room left on her disk, she looked at me and said, "I even reduced the line-spacing in my whole document, and it STILL wouldn't fit!" ------------------------------------ From: davida@umd5.umd.edu (David Arnold) Subject: This is an institute of higher education? I recently saw the form for enrolling in the University of Maryland, and noticed the following (on a fill-in-the-boxes form): Contact in case of emergency: --------------------------------------------------------- ------- Name Living? I can see it now: "... they might be a little hard to get ahold of; they've been dead for 5 years..." ------------------------------------ From: sall@floyd.att.com (Sam Saal) Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Subject: translation problems - a true story When my parents were in France, visiting family, they found that the cousins do a lot of their own canning and preserving of fruits and vegetables. Wanting to bring them a gift on this trip, they decided to have rubber stamps made so they could print their own labels for the various preserves the French cousins produce. They asked a local friend how to say "preserves" in French and were given the word "preservatif" by this French teacher. They made up several stamps (one for each family), bought some elegant labels and made up packages for each cousin. When they got to Paris, the cousins were pleased with the gift and decided to try out the stamps. The first person stamped a label, took one look at it and burst out laughing. "This is a joke," he said." Bewildered, my parents said it wasn't. "Who taught you this word?" he asked. My parents told them about their friend the French teacher. "She may know French," said my cousin, "but she isn't French." It seems that the French word for "condom" is "preservatif." Postscript: The cousins would not let my parents take the stamps back to be replaced. They loved the stamps and will keep them for the humor value. ------------------------------------ From: adam@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Adam Glass) Subject: MSG Found Safe! On a recent trip to an inexpensive Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood, I happened to notice a newspaper clipping, framed and mounted on the wall in the front of the store. The headline read "Scientists Find MSG Safe." Kinda makes you worry, huh? ------------------------------------ From: brodie@fps.mcw.edu (Kent C. Brodie) Subject: Only in Wisconsin... The following two slogans were recently seen on a sign advertising the American Breeder Service (located off of I-94 near Madison, WI) "Our genes fit everybody" (and on the other side of the sign...) "Our bull pen never strikes out" ------------------------------------ From: ewa%cs@ucsd.edu (Eric Anderson) Subject: Lotus 123 An advertisement on a local radio station for a local technical school claimed that classes were starting soon for "Lotus 1, 2, and 3." The same day, an anchor on Headline News claimed that Mitsubishi (?) had announced a new mainframe capable of executing 500 instructions per second. ------------------------------------ From: paulz@sco.com (W. Paul Zola) Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. Subject: Helpful compiler error message Here is my favorite compiler error: (from MPW C) Too many erors on one line (make fewer) ------------------------------------ From: nakamura%SOE.Berkeley.EDU@jade.berkeley.edu (Mark Nakamura) Subject: Exhibiting social restraint.... Posted in the Berkeley Police Department: SMOKING PROHIBITED BY LAW Scrawled underneath: Jacking off is out of the question. ------------------------------------ From: baj@travis.ssd.csd.harris.com (Barry Johnson) Subject: Help Wanted... Found in the July 2 Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinal want ads: CUSTOMER COMPLAINT DESK - Do you have that special talent and experience that allows you to work with hostile, screaming, ranting customers all day long and bring them back into the world of reality again? If you do, your salary is wide open. Call Ms. Ulcer at 555-5995. ------------------------------------ Subject: Programming Question of the Year From: XRARP@amarna.gsfc.nasa.gov (Aliza R. Panitz -- COBE Bug Lady) This happened to me about 2 years ago. I was working on a dBASE programming project. The senior programmer on the project, Bill, a very competent guy, was taking a beginning C class at night to expand his job skills. He asked me for help on his latest assignment. Bill was to write a C program to reproduce a decimal-to-binary conversion table that he had been handed. That seemed straightforward enough, so I quickly wrote down three or four variant loops that would produce the desired results, and a couple of print statements. I answered a few questions Bill had about the various techniques I'd used. His last question was: "Is there some pattern or algorithm to explain which binary numbers correspond to which decimal numbers, or are they just randomly assigned?" ------------------------------------ From: chi@tybalt.caltech.edu (chi-bo) Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena Subject: %#$!*# Traffic! A friend was driving to work down the 210 Freeway, when he ran into one of Los Angeles' world famous traffic jams. Sitting in his car, he grumbled and cursed out loud, when he noticed the 18-wheeler standing next to him. The driver was whistling and looking unbelievably cheerful. Leaning over to the other side of his car, my friend rolled down the window and asked, "How can you be so happy stuck here in this traffic?" The driver looked down from the cab and grinned. "Hey," he said, "I'm ALREADY at work." ------------------------------------ From: mmt@dretor.dciem.dnd.ca Subject: Rule 3 From "An Introduction to Chinese, Japanese and Korean Computing" in a section on rules for encoding Chinese characters, in its entirety: Rule 3: If the character is comprised of a container without another radical, then Rule 3 will not apply. ------------------------------------ From: miller@gabriel.llnl.gov (Patrick Miller) Subject: Computer Aided Editing... John Hughes of the Sacramento, CA Bee writes... An item in Thursdays's Nation Digest about the Massachusetts budget crisis made reference to new taxes that will help put Massachusetts "back in the African-American." The item should have said "back in the black." -- Edited by Brad Templeton. MAIL your jokes (jokes ONLY) to funny@looking.ON.CA Attribute the joke's source if at all possible. A Daemon will auto-reply. Remember: Always give your jokes a descriptive "Subject:" line. Not "joke."