Why farmers don’t need watches……

Please Note….no donkeys were harmed in the making of this video….

You have all probably heard it before but it’s one of those jokes that, like red wine, only matures with age because, as in Stalin’s USSR, jokes about the leader just aren’t made on the media….so they have to stay underground……

A doctor from France says: “In France , the medicine is so advanced that we cut off a man’s testicles; we put them into another man, and in 6 weeks he is looking for work.”

The German doctor comments: “That’s nothing, in Germany we take part of the brain out of a person; we put it into another person’s head, and in 4 weeks he is looking for work.”

A Russian doctor says: “That’s nothing either. In Russia we take out half of the heart from a person; we put it into another person’s chest, and in 2 weeks he is looking for work.”

The U.S. doctor answers immediately: “That’s nothing my colleagues, you are way behind us….in the USA , about 3 years ago, we grabbed a person from Kenya with no brains, no heart, and no balls….we made him President of the United States, and now……. the whole damn country is looking for work.”

h/t Peter Christie

When you’re my age you get to go to quite a few 70th birthday celebrations. The other day we went to one where the lady in question is part of a large Scottish Catholic family so we had a ceilidh with lots of reels and jigs. The Lovely Mrs P is a keen dancer whereas I have two left feet but a ceilidh is designed for family fun so the dances were easy to follow.

The food was good and the beer and wine free flowing but eventually one of the lady’s sons presented the toast with a loving speech interlaced with wry humour. The lady herself responded with gracious thanks and then said she was going to read out “Grandma’s Letter of Love”

Now although she does have a sense of humour she is also a deeply religious lady so we were expecting something fairly anodyne. Imagine our surprise when she came out with this…

Dear Friend,

The other day I went up to a local Christian bookstore and saw a “Honk If You Love Jesus“ car sticker. I was feeling particularly excited that day because I had just come from a thrilling choir performance, followed by a thunderous prayer meeting, so I bought the sticker and put it in the corner of my rear window.

Am I glad I did! What an uplifting experience followed!

I was stopped at a red light at some road works, just lost in thought about the Lord and how good He is…and I didn’t notice that the light had changed. It is a good thing someone else loves Jesus because if he hadn’t honked, I’d never have noticed! I found that LOTS of people love Jesus! While I was sitting there, the guy behind started honking like crazy, and then he leaned out of his window and screamed, “For the love of GOD! GO! GO! Jesus Christ, GO!”

What an exuberant cheerleader he was for Jesus! Everyone started honking! I just leaned out of my window and started waving and smiling at all these loving people. I even honked my horn a few times to share in the love. One man obviously mistook me for a lady friend because he called me “Millie Rich”….

I saw another man waving in a funny way with two fingers stuck up in the air. When I asked my teenage grandson in the back seat what that meant, he said that it was a Hawaiian good luck sign or something. Well, I’ve never met anyone from Hawaii, so I leaned out the window and gave him the good luck sign back.

My grandson burst out laughing; why even he was enjoying this religious experience.

A couple of the people were so caught up in the joy of the moment that they got out of their cars and started walking towards me.
I bet they wanted to pray or ask what church I attended, but this is when I noticed the light had changed so I waved and smiled to all my sisters and brothers and drove on through the roadworks.

I noticed I was the only car that got through before the light changed again, and I felt kind of sad that I had to leave them after all the love we had shared, so I slowed the car down, leaned out of the window, and gave them all the Hawaiian good luck sign one last time as I drove away.

Praise the Lord for such wonderful folks!

Love

Grandma

No need to worry – it went down a storm and I immediately ordered another pint of Spitfire to continue the toast….

Timing is of the essence when pride comes before a fall….

Another favourite from my BBC radio listening days in the late 40s/early 50s was the larger than life American singer/comedian Jimmy Durante who also had the most famous nose in the world.
The Schnoz cut a lot of well known songs but this was always my favourite.Great drive, great spirit and really clever lyrics….

Jimmy was a big star on stage,screen, radio and TV from the 1920s until he retired in 1972. What is less well known was he entered the world of music playing the piano in the Original New Orleans Jazz Band, one of the first popular jazz bands in New York, mainly made up of musicians from New Orleans. Durante was the only New Yorker in the band but had been invited to join because of his expertise at ragtime piano.

Durante’s lost chord comedy number referenced a song originally written by the British composer Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) in 1877. Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord” became one of the best known songs throughout the western world and was sung and recorded by Caruso as a benefit for the victims of The Titanic in 1912. As a musician not only Durante but also the general public would have been quite familiar with it – otherwise there would have been little purpose to the joke.

The sadness is that today most people’s knowledge of music outside the confines of media pap is so limited that few could make much sense of a phrase like “the Lost Chord”

A pity because the original Sullivan composition is deeply moving….

Always loved this 1947 Phil Harris record – when I was a kid it was regularly being played on BBC radio…the henpecked husband being chased by an angry wife wielding a rolling pin was a staple figure of comedy in the 30s, 40s and 50s…hence the plaintive plea to the woodman.

What is less well known was that the song had originally been a massive hit in the early 1900s for Bert Williams, long forgotten now but a hundred years ago one of the most popular vaudeville stars in America. Williams was the first black artist to break out of the “coon” stereotype and appeal to all audiences and “Woodman” was one of his most popular songs, sung in a “talking blues” style that Harris also copied. It proved to be the big hit of the Ziegfeld Follies Of 1911.

Yet the distinction of the song’s pedigree is not limited to Williams – for it was composed by Vincent Bryan and the former singing waiter Irving Berlin in the same year that “Alexanders Ragtime Band” became a smash hit not just in America but throughout the world and propelled the previously unknown Berlin overnight from obscurity to international fame.

But it’s roots go even deeper for Berlin adapted the lyrics from a poem, “The Oak”, written by the American poet George Pope Morris in 1837. The English musician Henry Russell wrote a score for it later that year and, under the more familiar title, the sentimental ballad became a staple of concerts and musical evenings for the rest of the 19th century. In 1911 Berlin introduced the comedic elements to the story and altered Russell’s score. So, what initially appears to be a classic 1940’s piece of Phil Harris musical humour has a very distinguished provenance.

Sadly both Harris and Williams and that whole genre of comedy songs are rarely heard today – mores the pity…

Just can’t get enough of Eddie Izzards quirky, whimsical humour….only he could come up with the concept of Darth Vader getting annoyed with a wet tray…..sublime….

Throughout history I would guess the soldier’s response to the dark terror of war has been a sense of humour, often even in the grimmest of situations. One of the most famous cartoons ever drawn was created by Bruce Bairnsfather, a British artist who fought in the trenches on the Western Front. As an antidote to the “patriotic” sketches made by the staff artists in the London magazines, who had no experience of war, Bairnsfather’s observations of everyday life in the trenches became very popular with the soldiers themselves and this one, with it’s grim humour became the stuff of legend.

The descendants of those WW1 “old sweats” are now British squaddies serving in Afghanistan with the ever present shadow of the hidden bomb and the silent sniper. So, to blunt the edge of concern about what the next hours might bring, they use humour to alleviate the daily routine.

BTW the soldiers in the vid are ordinary squaddies, despite the youtube title. Although no doubt the SAS have their own outbursts of dark humour these, like their military activities, would be shrouded in secrecy – so, these men are not SAS..but, of course, they could well be…

Not certain if Warner would dare release something like this nowadays in our PC world for fear of being dealt the race card. Indeed, since Allan Sherman was Jewish it would almost certainly be tagged as a Zionist plot.

But what the hell – Sherman specialised in parodying well known songs and the wordplay in this pastiche of the famous Mexican dance is absolutely spot on. It was on his second album “My Son The Celebrity” which hit #1 in the album charts in March 1963.

Not vulgar, no swear words, just good natured fun…..echoes of an age long gone, I fancy…

Teachers at a Scottish high school have staged a flashdance in the middle of the canteen.

It was to say goodbye to students leaving Bell Baxter High School in Cupar, Fife.

At first Philip Black, the Rector (Headteacher), looks furious when the cheesy music starts blasting over the loudspeakers but then he strips off his jacket and does a routine with forty other members of staff.

Subsequent comments on YouTube about the performance describe the flashdancing rector as a ‘legend’. One says: ‘Mr Black you’re awesome!’ A surprised pupil at the school wrote: ‘Mr Black CAN dance!!! Go Mr Black hahahaha xx.’ Another says: ‘I loved every second. Great show from pupils and staff.’

Meanwhile an older spectator who watched the footage remarked: ‘Schooling has certainly changed since I was a lad.’ Mr Black is not the only member of staff coming in for praise – one fan declares on the website: ‘Mrs Livingstone lol, Legend.’

Mr Black said the dance – at lunchtime on Thursday – was a gift to this year’s school leavers, before they went on study leave on Friday. He said: ‘We are one of Scotland’s biggest schools, with 1,800 pupils, and we like to foster positive relationships with them.

Amen to that. After forty years of teaching I know one thing for sure. The most succesful teachers are those who set very clear boundaries but within those boundaries are not afraid to be at ease with their students.

As one veteran teacher said to me when I started my first job

Be firm with them and don’t stand any nonsense and they’ll do as you tell them. Be firm with them and don’t stand any nonsense but use your sense of humour to show your not a pompous asshole and they’ll do as you tell them without you having to tell them.