Top 10 Oldest Jokes in the World

Yes, its been a while since I posted. I'm making sure that I at least have one entry in July. I'll explain what sorts of fun and not so fun things that have been distracting me later. For now, let's read the list of oldest jokes throughout the world as compiled by the University of Wolverhampton.

1. Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap (1900 BC – 1600 BC Sumerian Proverb Collection 1.12-1.13)

2. How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish (An abridged version first found in 1600 BC on the Westcar Papryus)

3. Three ox drivers from Adab were thirsty: one owned the ox, the other owned the cow and the other owned the wagon's load. The owner of the ox refused to get water because he feared his ox would be eaten by a lion; the owner of the cow refused because he thought his cow might wander off into the desert; the owner of the wagon refused because he feared his load would be stolen. So they all went. In their absence the ox made love to the cow which gave birth to a calf which ate the wagon's load. Problem: Who owns the calf?! (1200 BC)

4. A woman who was blind in one eye has been married to a man for 20 years. When he found another woman he said to her, "I shall divorce you because you are said to be blind in one eye." And she answered him: "Have you just discovered that after 20 years of marriage!?" (Egyptian circa 1100 BC)

5. Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his real name is nobody. When Odysseus instructs his men to attack the Cyclops, the Cyclops shouts: "Help, nobody is attacking me!" No one comes to help. (Homer. The Odyssey 800 BC)

6. Question: What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon and three at evening? Answer: Man. He goes on all fours as a baby, on two feet as a man and uses a cane in old age (Appears in Oedipus Tyrannus and first performed in 429 BC)

7. Man is even more eager to copulate than a donkey - his purse is what restrains him (Egyptian, Ptolemaic Period 304 BC – 30 BC)

8. Augustus was touring his Empire and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to himself. Intrigued he asked: "Was your mother at one time in service at the Palace?" "No your Highness," he replied, "but my father was." (Credited to the Emporer Augustus 63 BC – 29 AD)

9. Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, a pedant did not offer him any food. When the donkey died of hunger, he said "I've had a great loss. Just when he had learned not to eat, he died." (Dated to the Philogelos 4th /5th Century AD)

10. Asked by the court barber how he wanted his hair cut, the king replied: "In silence." (Collected in the Philogelos or "Laughter-Lover" the oldest extant jest book and compiled in the 4th/5th Century AD)

The accompanying article for this list can be found here.

New Crayola Color Names Lack Hue Description

I had to pass along this little gem, which I heard about first on the radio. I had to look up the articles online in order to discover all of the color names and find out which crayons they messed up. I was truly a fan of "turquoise blue" and I am a little sad to now hear that its name has been changed to such a bizarre name.

Crayola Changes Names of 8 Colors based on on-line poll of children.

Old Name - New Name
laser lemon - super happy
wild tangerine - fun in the sun
screamin' green - giving tree
beaver - bear hug (what kind of color is Beaver anyway?)
turquoise - blue happy ever after
hot magenta - famous
orchid - best friends.

One of the articles that came up in my search was called "Colorful new names for eight crayons". No, lady, these names are distinctly lacking in any sort of color what-so-ever. If I had seen colors named like this when I was still young enough to regularly use Crayons, I don't know what I would have thought. Now that I'm an adult, I find it hard to believe these names weren't concocted by stoners.

Fun Real Estate Post

Though I don't usually post stuff from the real estate blog I contribute to here, I had a lot of fun writing this post about unique home sale tactics. People are finding some pretty crazy ways of trying to sell their houses these days! I wonder if any of these people really sell their homes in this manner? I almost wrote an essay to try and win a 41 acre farm in Ohio once (hubby's homestate), I didn't have $100 extra dollars sitting around at the time to mail off into the ether. It would have been an expensive lark. They didn't receive enough entries, by far. The winner is receiving half of what they got in entry fees, though.

More to come soon!

Oldest Known Audio Recording Discovered

U.S. audio historians have discovered the oldest-known audio recording, created by a French inventor named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860 - 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Up until now, the oldest recorded sound still in existence has been from 1888. This predates it by 28 years.

The recording, which lasts a mere 10 second, is of a person singing a line of the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune.” It was created by an invention called the phonautograph. The device scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper which had been previously blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp. The phonautograph was incapable of playing the sound back, however. It was Edison’s breakthrough invention of the phonograph on August 12, 1877, that changed the course of history.

Before people thought of recording sound and playing it back, many inventors such as Edison, Scott, even Alexander Graham Bell, were trying to create a visual representation of sound. When Scott’s scratchings were made, it was so he could visually study what sound “looked” like. The recording at the time of its creation was never intended to be played.

Earlier this month, experts made very high-resolution digital scans of the paper. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California then converted these scans into sound. The result is a ghostly sounding recording of a human voice singing "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot repondit" ("By the light of the moon, Pierrot replied").

The link to the recording in the Reuters article is broken. Here is a link to the correct page.

This article can also be found at The Bloggernews Network.

Wasteful Packaging: It Isn't Just Wal-Mart

Though I am no longer a smoker, I still receive offers, gifts, and coupons from both Camel and Marlboro cigarettes, as I have a significant other and several friends who smoke. Today, I received coupons in the mail from both of these companies.

From Marlboro, I received an envelope with the rules to a sweepstakes, as well as a promotion code to enter it. It also came with six coupons for cigarettes.

From Camel, I received what I believed to be a gift, as it was a 5” x 5” x 1” box wrapped in plastic. Inside the box was another box and inside that, another. The boxes were promoting a new type of cigarette in brand-spankin’-new packaging. In the last box was a fake, “new Camel” cigarette pack and inside that, a single coupon the size of a business card to buy this new smoke.

This type of wastefulness is ridiculous and I have e-mailed Camel regarding it. I doubt that they will care much, even though I bet they spent much more money on printing, packaging, and postage for their single coupon than Marlboro. I would have been more understanding if there had been a gift inside, but essentially, it was 4 layers of paper and cardboard for a tiny coupon.

If you have a similar experience, it is important that you speak up and tell the company how you feel. How ever will they know that this topic is important to consumers if we don't tell them?

This article can also be found at the Blogger News Network.

[EDIT: This is the response I received from Camel after voicing concerns regarding their waste:

I noted in your e-mail that the answer "no" was selected for smoker status and wanted to let you know that our offers and websites are restricted to legal-age consumers of tobacco products.

If this information was selected in error, please let me know. I will be glad
to assist you.

I see that I will have to change my smoker status in order for them to properly ignore me. :) ]

Highway 55 Pac Man 2.0

They said it wouldn’t last, but they were wrong. The Pac Man that had been spray-painted onto the pavement of Highway 55 in Buffalo, Minnesota, was fading, but he recently received a fresher, thicker coat of paint, seemingly making him a more permanent fixture on the road.

For the uninitiated, during the summer of 2006, the Minnesota Department of Transportation embarked on a $15,000 project to paint large white dots 225 feet apart in the middle of the lanes on a section of Highway 55 that has a high accident rate. The theory is that if every driver keeps two of these “Distance Dots” between themselves and the driver in front of them, there would be fewer incidents of tailgating and accidents, as this is how much distance you’re supposed to leave anyway. The project has apparently met with success in Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Last December, on one wintery Minnesota night, someone braved the elements and the traffic to spray-paint a giant Pac Man onto the road, strategically placed so that it appeared he was simply gobbling up the long line of white dots stretching down the highway. Officials in the county had hoped that the addition would wash away with the winter snows, and indicated as such in a Star Tribune Article that is no longer in the archives. However, they were stymied on repeated occasions, as whenever Pac Man’s shape started to fade, inevitably it seemed some unseen hand would re-apply yellow paint in the middle of the night.

This spring, however, there has been a dramatic change.

Previously, the yellow paint had been opaque and was not quite thick enough to block out the blackness of the pavement beneath it. Now it appears that whomever is painting the popular video game character has gotten serious about his or her craft, as quite recently a fresh coat of bright yellow paint has been applied, far thicker and more defined than before. It would take some cash, serious scrubbing, and lane closures to remove Pac Man from the pavement at this point, in fact.

The painting adds a bit of amusement to that stretch of Highway 55, and brings attention to the tailgating project. The project here is still young, so there were no statistics for Minnesota’s project available at the time of this article, but according to one Pennsylvania statistic the program resulted in a 65% drop in tailgating accidents in those areas from November 2000 to March 2001 compared to the previous year.

This article can also be found at The Bloggernews Network.