by Ian Black
Bus pass corner
An elderly lady went to the bar in a pub in Dumbarton and got a packet of potato crisps. She sat down at a nearby table and started to read a paper. Soon a young man came and sat down at her table. He lifted the potato crisps, opened them, and started to eat. The lady just watched the man eat the potato crisps, not wanting to cause any trouble. He noticed her watching him, then he offered her a crisp. She jerked it out of his hand and slowly started eating. She continued to stare. As soon the man was finished, he got up, put the empty bag on the bar, and walked away, staring back at her. She mumbled to herself, “Young people think they can do anything.” She finished reading the newspaper, rose, and then noticed that under her newspaper was her bag of potato crisps.
An elderly couple went doon the watter for the weekend. While on the boat, the man began to get a little seasick and leaned over the edge to throw up, losing his false teeth while doing so. He was pretty upset about the incident, but his wife couldn’t stop laughing about it. As a joke, she removed her own dentures and took them to her husband exclaming, “Hey, look what I caught!” Her husband put in the dentures and noticed that they didn’t fit. He took the teeth out and threw them overboard, shook his head and said to his wife, “Those wurny mine.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A mythcellany
At Glasgow airport the baggage handlers find a dead dog in a pet-shipping container. The airport employees decide to take up a collection and send one of the workers to buy a lookalike dog to replace it, as they think its death might be their fault. When the owner comes to claim it, she opens the pet container and the replacement dog jumps out and licks her face. The woman faints. She had been shipping her dead dog home for burial.
As part of an exam on solutions, a Strathclyde professor asks his students how to determine the height of a building using a barometer. Some of his students gave obvious answers like using formulas, timing the fall of the barometer from the roof to the ground, tying a string from the barometer and lowering it to the ground then measuring the string, measuring the side of the building in units of “one barometer”. The professor ruled all of these solutions unacceptable. The student that received the highest mark in the exam was able to answer the question in one sentence: “Give the barometer to the man who designed the building for the information.”
A professor who was famous for his creative exam questions handed out the final exam to his students. The exam had only one question: “What is courage?” The top mark given on that particular exam was to a quiet young man who wrote: “This is.”
A student in a very large class didn’t stop working on his exam when the professor called, “Time up.” When he went up to turn it in, the professor said he needn’t bother, he’d already failed. The student looked at the large stack of exams on the desk and asked “Do you know who I am?” The professor replied that he didn’t, and the student stuck his exam in the middle of the pile and said: “Good.”
A man who was tired of having his motors broken into specifically asked for no radio when he bought his new car. He put a sign in the windscreen that said in large letters: “NO RADIO”. One day he returned to it to find the window broken anyway. Beside his sign he found a note that read: “Just checking.”
A student stops by the prof’s office and finds that the professor has stepped out for a moment, leaving an unguarded pile of the next day’s final examinations on his desk. The student quickly steals one of the exams and disappears. Before issuing the exam papers, however, the professor counts them and notices that one is missing. He cuts an eighth of an inch off the bottom of every exam paper prior to distributing them to the class, then fails the student with the long one.
This next apparently really happened in Bearsden.
A golfer was angry at his poor playing. He’d hit several balls into the pond on the eighteenth hole. Crimson with frustration and embarrassment, he flung his golf bag into the pond and stormed off the course in front of a crowd of club mates trying not to snigger. A few minutes later, with the crowd watching, he returned to the pond, fished out his bag with the greenkeeper’s rake, retrieved his car keys from the bag and then threw the bag back into the pond.
A while back, during the construction of the Red Road flats, a worker was having a very hard day. He was being ordered to do work all over the place every second without a break. After eight straight hours of non-stop work, he was extremely tired. A Health and Safety nightmare. The foreman came up to him and told him that a piece of plywood needed to be removed from the roof. The worker grabbed the ladder and climbed to the roof. He had to be careful because the plywood was still in good condition. As he started walking back towards the ladder, he started to worry. He knew he was on a very tall building, and that if he fell it would kill him. So he started to pay more attention to his feet. The weight of the plywood shifted. The worker lost his balance, and fell off the roof. After a moment of panic, he noticed his fall had slowed. The plywood was acting like a parachute, and he was able to safely land on the ground.
A modern legend tells of a woman from Glasgow who visits Lourdes, famous for its stories of miraculous cures. Although in good health, the woman feels tired on the hot day of her visit, and she sits down in an empty wheelchair to rest, then falls asleep. Waking up when a priest arrives to bless the visitors, the woman jumps up from the chair and is immediately surrounded by a crowd screaming: “It’s a miracle!” In the excitement, the woman was knocked to the ground and her leg was broken.
A Newton Mearns resident called the fire brigade to request assistance in removing her cat from a tree. The fire brigade responded with a rescue van which had an extension ladder. The tree, however, was too tall and willowy, if a poplar can be willowy, to support the weight of the extension ladder. Rather than send men back to the fire station to bring the aerial ladder truck, one of the firemen suggested an alternative course of action. Two of the firemen supported the ladder while a third climbed high enough to tie a rope around the tree about halfway up.
The other end of the rope was tied to the tow bar, and the van was slowly driven forward, forcing the tree to bend over. One fireman was poised to grab the cat as soon as it was within his reach.
The knot securing the rope to the tow bar slipped free.
The cat was last seen, airborne and yowling, heading towards Prestwick.
And finally, the myth of bottled water.
Evian is “naive” spelled backwards, because people who pay two quid for a bottle of water are.
COPYRIGHT
First published 2006
by Black & White Publishing Ltd
29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL
www.blackandwhitepublishing.com
This electronic edition published in 2014
ISBN: 978 1 84502 862 6 in EPub format
ISBN: 978 1 84502 127 6 in paperback format
Copyright © Ian Black 2006
The right of Ian Black to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Ebook compilation by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay