Throw It Back Thursday – Better Late Than Never Edition

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 23231 – 1157

Here’s the haps:

To my dear and beloved fans, friends, fiends, foes, foundlings and frog-scrapers, greetings,

I have been busier than the proverbial one-armed paper hanger in a windstorm. As I sat down to write that sentence I began to do something I know I shouldn’t do. I thought about it. Thinking about stuff sends me down bunny trail after bunny trail until I am totally lost and forget what I actually meant to say. But really, now, what is a one-armed man doing being a paper hanger in the first place? I’ve never actually hung wallpaper but just trying to line up contact paper for a small project is hard enough. And isn’t wallpaper usually on the inside walls? What is this guy doing out in a windstorm anyway? And if this has been his lifelong profession and he tragically lost the arm in an accident somehow shouldn’t he be on disability or something? But maybe he loves hanging wallpaper. Maybe it’s a passion with him that he just can’t give up.

I know there are many other “busier than” jokes but I try to run a nice family-friendly blog. I have many friends and family members that I see on a regular basis and they include preachers, preacher’s wives, Sunday School teachers, along with many other high-class, highly educated people. Not that I am never lowbrowed. As Don Marquis said, “coarse jocosity catches the crowd shakespeare and i are often lowbrowed…” I mean, it’s like the guy who was picking midgets’ pockets. How could he stoop so low?

Anyway, life and busyness happen and my blog (and by extension, my audience) suffers for it. But on the plus side, life is good. Well, it kind of really is what you make it. Attitude is a big part of it. Anyway, instead of doing only a meme dump I thought I would also go through a few old email archives I have stored and share a couple of the jokes from there as well. And for long-time readers and a few people who amaze me because they have actually read every post I ever made here (which to me sounds like a strange and onerous task) today’s post contains some material you may have seen before.

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A man walked into a gift shop that sold religious items. Near the cash register, he saw a display of caps with WWJD printed on all of them. He was puzzled over what the letters could mean, so he asked the clerk. The clerk replied that the letters stood for “What Would Jesus Do” and were meant to inspire people to not make rash decisions but to imagine what Jesus would do in the same situation. The man thought for a moment and then replied, “Well, I don’t think Jesus would pay $17.95 for one of these caps.”

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(I’ve seen this one as a meme several times but this is from a newsletter I received in November of 2000)

“May I take your order?” the waiter asked.
“Yes, how do you prepare your chickens?”
“Nothing special, sir,” he replied, “We just tell them straight out that they’re going to die.”

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In my day, we didn’t have virtual reality. If a one-eyed, razorback, barbarian warrior was chasing you with an ax, you just had to hope you could outrun him.

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(This story was in an e-mail from January 2002 but the story is older and has been told with variations including postal mail and faxes.)

An Illinois man left the snow-filled streets of Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was planning to meet him there the next day. When he reached his hotel, he decided to send his wife a quick email. Unable to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her e-mail address, he did his best to type it in from memory. Unfortunately, he missed one letter in the address, and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher’s wife, whose husband had passed away only the day before.

When the grieving widow checked her e-mail, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor in a dead faint. At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:

      Dearest Wife,

      Just got checked in. Everything prepared for 
      your arrival tomorrow. Your Loving Husband

      P.S. Sure is hot down here.

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A man walked out into the street in New York and managed to flag down a taxi just driving by. He got into the taxi, and the cabbie said, “Perfect timing. You’re just like Dave.”
The passenger said, “Who?”
The cabbie said, “Dave Bronson. Now there’s a guy who did everything right. Like my coming along just when you needed a cab. It would have happened like that to Dave.”
The rider said, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

The cabbie said, “Dave was. He was a terrific athlete. He could have gone on the pro tour in golf. He could have played tennis with the best pros. He sang like an opera baritone and danced like a Broadway star. He had a memory like a trap. Could remember everybody’s birthday. He could fix anything. Not like me. If I change even a fuse, I black out the whole neighborhood.”

The rider said, “No wonder you remember him.”
The cabbie said, “Well, no, I never actually met Dave.”
The rider asked, “Then how do you know so much about him?”
The cabbie exclaimed, ” I married his widow!”

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