OK, this site is fantastic. All the main campaign commercials for US presidential elections since 1952. Hear Gerald Ford’s voice break as he asks the American people to pray for him. Watch as President Johnson accuses Barry Goldwater of intending to kill children in a nuclear war. Cringe as George McGovern admits that one or two of Richard Nixon’s foreign policies are correct but he can’t understand the others. Fascinating.

Well, some of my entries from Friday seem to have been lost in the grand Chef 8 crash. One was a complaint about losing my lj’s style which had attracted comments from and , so presumably it will reappear in due course. The other was a books update, so I’ll replicate it here and delete the original if it ever rematerialises. All three books were from my infinity plus list so notes here are brief.

3) Newton’s Wake, by Ken MacLeod. ObLJ: dedicated to and . Enjoyed it, but not quite as much as I had hoped; the Balkan heat may have interfered with my concentration.

4) The Human Abstract, by George Mann. My expectations were low, but actually this is a good effort and my review will be largely positive.

5) Cartomancy by Mary Gentle. As it turns out I’d already read the two best stories here (one in another anthology and one on-line at infinity plus) but the others are at least acceptable and in some cases very good.

One of Saki’s last stories, “The Cupboard of the Yesterdays” shows him at his best and his worst. It’s a dialogue set in a London club during the 1912 Balkan War in a London club between the Wanderer, clearly meant to be the mouthpiece of the author himself, and the Merchant, representing the rest of society. The Wanderer loves the “picturesqueness and excitement” of war, regrets that “After every important war in South-East Europe in recent times there has been a shrinking of the area of chronically disturbed territory, a stiffening of the area of chronically disturbed territory, a stiffening of frontier lines, an intrusion of civilised monotony”, and fears that if the Turks lose (as they did) then the Balkans will no longer be “the last surviving shred of happy hunting-ground for the adventurous, a playground for passions that are fast becoming atrophied for want of exercise.” These are frankly horrible sentiments, and the best that can be said for the author in this respect is that he at least practiced what he preached, joined up in 1914, and was killed in action two years later.

But he gets two other aspects of the story exactly right. One is the difficulty of the Wanderer, who actually knows the region, in communicating what he knows about it to the Merchant, who does not. The unfortunate Merchant retreats further and further into incomprehension, as the Wanderer burbles on about the wild places he has been. It’s a scene I’ve seen (and, alas, perhaps participated in) all too often.

And the second point, oddly enough, is his vision of future history: “the Albanians, of course, we shall have with us still, a troubled Moslem pool left by the receding wave of Islam in Europe”; and his fear, which is my hope, that the Balkans will become boring: “Socialist Congress at Uskub, election riot at Monastir, great dock strike at Salonika, visit of the Y.M.C.A. to Varna” – Uskub is now Skopje, where yesterday I met with two leading members of the Social Democratic Union; Monastir is Bitola, where a friend of mine is a leading Liberal activist (and yesterday there was an election riot just down the road in Ohrid); Salonica is Thessaloniki, hub of northern Greece’s industrial politics; and Varna is indeed a centre for Bulgarian tourism (also the home town of our former au pair and my Bulgarian MP friend). The more the Balkans head that way, the better for all of us.

The Cupboard Of The Yesterdays

“War is a cruelly destructive thing,” said the Wanderer, dropping his newspaper to the floor and staring reflectively into space.

“Ah, yes, indeed,” said the Merchant, responding readily to what seemed like a safe platitude; “when one thinks of the loss of life and limb, the desolated homesteads, the ruined –”

“I wasn’t thinking of anything of the sort,” said the Wanderer; “I was thinking of the tendency that modern war has to destroy and banish the very elements of picturesqueness and excitement that are its chief excuse and charm. It is like a fire that flares up brilliantly for a while and then leaves everything blacker and bleaker than before. After every important war in South-East Europe in recent times there has been a shrinking of the area of chronically disturbed territory, a stiffening of the area of chronically disturbed territory, a stiffening of frontier lines, an intrusion of civilised monotony. And imagine what may happen at the conclusion of this war if the Turk should really be driven out of Europe.”

“Well, it would be a gain to the cause of good government, I suppose,” said the Merchant.

“But have you counted the loss?” said the other. “The Balkans have long been the last surviving shred of happy hunting-ground for the adventurous, a playground for passions that are fast becoming atrophied for want of exercise. In old bygone days we had the wars in the Low Countries always at our doors, as it were; there was no need to go far afield into malaria-stricken wilds if one wanted a life of boot and saddle and licence to kill and be killed. Those who wished to see life had a decent opportunity for seeing death at the same time.”

“It is scarcely right to talk of killing and bloodshed in that way,” said the Merchant reprovingly; “one must remember that all men are brothers.”

“One must also remember that a large percentage of them are younger brothers; instead of going into bankruptcy, which is the usual tendency of the younger brother nowadays, they gave their families a fair chance of going into mourning. Every bullet finds a billet, according to a rather optimistic proverb, and you must admit that nowadays it is becoming increasingly difficult to find billets for a lot of young gentlemen who would have adorned, and probably thoroughly enjoyed, one of the old-time happy-go-lucky wars. But that is not exactly the burden of my complaint. The Balkan lands are especially interesting to us in these rapidly-moving days because they afford us the last remaining glimpse of a vanishing period of European history. When I was a child one of the earliest events of the outside world that forced itself coherently under my notice was a war in the Balkans; I remember a sunburnt, soldierly man putting little pin-flags in a war-map, red flags for the Turkish forces and yellow flags for the Russians. It seemed a magical region, with its mountain passes and frozen rivers and grim battlefields, its drifting snows, and prowling wolves; there was a great stretch of water that bore the sinister but engaging name of the Black Sea — nothing that I ever learned before or after in a geography lesson made the same impression on me as that strangenamed inland sea, and I don’t think its magic has ever faded out of my imagination. And there was a battle called Plevna that went on and on with varying fortunes for what seemed like a great part of a lifetime; I remember the day of wrath and mourning when the little red flag had to be taken away from Plevna — like other maturer judges, I was backing the wrong horse, at any rate the losing horse. And now to-day we are putting little pin-flags again into maps of the Balkan region, and the passions are being turned loose once more in their playground.”

“The war will be localised,” said the Merchant vaguely; “at least every one hopes so.”

“It couldn’t wish for a better locality,” said the Wanderer; “there is a charm about those countries that you find nowhere else in Europe, the charm of uncertainty and landslide, and the little dramatic happenings that make all the difference between the ordinary and the desirable.”

“Life is held very cheap in those parts,” said the Merchant.

“To a certain extent, yes,” said the Wanderer. “I remember a man at Sofia who used to teach me Bulgarian in a rather inefficient manner, interspersed with a lot of quite wearisome gossip. I never knew what his personal history was, but that was only because I didn’t listen; he told it to me many times. After I left Bulgaria he used to send me Sofia newspapers from time to time. I felt that he would be rather tiresome if I ever went there again. And then I heard afterwards that some men came in one day from Heaven knows where, just as things do happen in the Balkans, and murdered him in the open street, and went away as quietly as they had come. You will not understand it, but to me there was something rather piquant in the idea of such a thing happening to such a man; after his dullness and his long-winded small-talk it seemed a sort of brilliant esprit d’escalier on his part to meet with an end of such ruthlessly planned and executed violence.”

The Merchant shook his head; the piquancy of the incident was not within striking distance of his comprehension.

“I should have been shocked at hearing such a thing about any one I had known,” he said.

“The present war,” continued his companion, without stopping to discuss two hopelessly divergent points of view, “may be the beginning of the end of much that has hitherto survived the resistless creeping-in of civilisation. If the Balkan lands are to be finally parcelled out between the competing Christian Kingdoms and the haphazard rule of the Turk banished to beyond the Sea of Marmora, the old order, or disorder if you like, will have received its death-blow. Something of its spirit will linger perhaps for a while in the old charmed regions where it bore sway; the Greek villagers will doubtless be restless and turbulent and unhappy where the Bulgars rule, and the Bulgars will certainly be restless and turbulent and unhappy under Greek administration, and the rival flocks of the Exarchate and Patriarchate will make themselves intensely disagreeable to one another wherever the opportunity offers; the habits of a lifetime, of several lifetimes, are not laid aside all at once. And the Albanians, of course, we shall have with us still, a troubled Moslem pool left by the receding wave of Islam in Europe. But the old atmosphere will have changed, the glamour will have gone; the dust of formality and bureaucratic neatness will slowly settle down over the time-honoured landmarks; the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, the Muerzsteg Agreement, the Komitadje bands, the Vilayet of Adrianople, all those familiar outlandish names and things and places, that we have known so long as part and parcel of the Balkan Question, will have passed away into the cupboard of yesterdays, as completely as the Hansa League and the wars of the Guises.

“They were the heritage that history handed down to us, spoiled and diminished no doubt, in comparison with yet earlier days that we never knew, but still something to thrill and enliven one little corner of our Continent, something to help us to conjure up in our imagination the days when the Turk was thundering at the gates of Vienna. And what shall we have to hand down to our children? Think of what their news from the Balkans will be in the course of another ten or fifteen years. Socialist Congress at Uskub, election riot at Monastir, great dock strike at Salonika, visit of the Y.M.C.A. to Varna. Varna — on the coast of that enchanted sea! They will drive out to some suburb to tea, and write home about it as the Bexhill of the East.

“War is a wickedly destructive thing.”

“Still, you must admit –” began the Merchant. But the Wanderer was not in the mood to admit anything. He rose impatiently and walked to where the tape-machine was busy with the news from Adrianople.

Right, almost done with this phase of the trip. Met with various Senior Officials ealier today, and tonight dinner with a number of old friends including the deputy prime minister (who is 32 and taking time out from her postgraduate studies in nuclear physics to serve in the government). Then tomorrow back north to Kosovo for another conference, and finally home on Saturday evening.

I must say it’s very heartening to be in a country where the peace process has been as successful as it is here; politicians from all sidesappear to have bought into it and even to win elections on it. So much more encouraging than certain other cases that come to mind.

So, we changed the schedule a bit and drove to Skopje from Pristina this evening.

There are a surprising number of teenagers in the outer suburbs of Skopje who know enough English to tell you the way to the Holiday Inn.

I’m going to bed now.

Hmm, maybe this is worth pursuing… (and then if I add some of these I might just do it again…)

Based on the lj interests lists of those who share my more unusual interests, the interests suggestion meme thinks I might be interested in
1. reading score: 15
2. writing score: 13
3. fantasy score: 12
4. music score: 11
5. books score: 11
6. computers score: 10
7. worldcon score: 9
8. anime score: 9
9. movies score: 9
10. dark fantasy score: 9
11. cats score: 8
12. comics score: 8
13. internet score: 7
14. conventions score: 7
15. ray bradbury score: 7
16. harry potter score: 7
17. photography score: 7
18. lord of the rings score: 6
19. london score: 6
20. horror score: 6

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Drove from Belgrade to Pristina yesterday. 360 km; I did 275, my colleague did 85 (though in fairness he did the worst bits of the road). Long stoppage at border as the guards were changing shifts.

Hot; slow internet connection; eight important meetings today, and the same tomorrow.

In Belgrade. Hot. Driving to Kosovo later.

So, my fourth capital in four days. At least tonight I will sleep in the same bed as last night…

SF NOVEL: Ilium, Dan Simmons – I liked this; I think it will also win the Hugo.
FANTASY NOVEL: Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold – liked it a lot.
FIRST NOVEL: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow – liked it a lot too.
YOUNG ADULT NOVEL: The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett – will wait for paperback.
NOVELLA: “The Cookie Monster”, Vernor Vinge – not so impressed but will probably win the Hugo.
NOVELETTE: “A Study in Emerald”, Neil Gaiman – much more impressed and it too will probably win the Hugo.
SHORT STORY “Closing Time”, Neil Gaiman – must look out for it.
COLLECTION: Changing Planes, Ursula K. Le Guin – liked this a lot.
ANTHOLOGY: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. – liked this too.
NONFICTION/ART: The Sandman: Endless Nights, Neil Gaiman, et al. – saw some less than overwhelmed reviews but maybe I’ll get it after all.

2) The Holy Machine by Chris Beckett. Another one of the books to review for infinity plus. A good one, too. Will save details for later, but I thought he got the Adriatic setting almost completely right and had a believable future world. Quite a different style from his short stories, but successful.

Berlin really gets to me. Walking across the Potsdamerplatz, I saw what I thought was a map board: but in fact it was a bit of Wall, placed on the line where the rest of it used to be. It´s extraordianry to realise that the Wall has been gone now for more than half as long as it was up – almost 15 years, compared to just over 28. I begin to appreciate what I didn´t when I was growing up and it seemed like a permanent fixture; that what hurt people was not so much that the Wall was there but that it hadn´t always been there. Someone who was my present age when the Wall came down would have been 9 years old when it was erected (and that was a full 16 years after the war ended).

If I´d had more time I´d have explored the new memorial usually referred to in English as the Holocaust Memorial but which the Germans more forthrightly describe as “The Monument to the Murdered Jews”. It´s round the corner from the “Topography of Terror” which combines a stretch of Wall with the remains of Gestapo headquarters. Unfortunately I won´t have time tomorrow but I must make time for it when I get back.

1) Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro, with six short stories never before collected, by A. J. Langguth.

H.H. Munro was born in 1870 and killed in the first world war in 1916. It´s striking that his best work was produced in a concentrated period between 1909 and 1913. (Unlike Douglas Adams, whose best stuff was written before he turned 30). The great short stories, “Tobermory”, “The Open Window”, “The Lumber Room”, “The Story-Teller”, and the two not-quite-so-great novels, The Unbearable Bassington and When William Came (set in a German-occupied England of the near future, say 1915 or so) all date from those years.

But Munro did a lot of other things too. He first achieved fame as a parliamentary sketch writer, poking fun at the Boer War, the Iraq of its day. But I’m obviously most interested in his two years as a Balkan correspondent from 1902 to 1904. He filed his first ever report from the town of Vučitrn, about the riots in Mitrovica, in October 1902. Oddly enough the first report I saw through to completion in my current job in June 2002 was also about riots in Mitrovica, and I expect to be in Vučitrn next Wednesday.

He doesn’t just cover the Balkans, but also Warsaw, St Petersburg and Paris, but I think it’s not just projecting my own sympathies to say that he liked the Balkans most. He liked Uskub, a very different place then from the Skopje I know and love and will be in again on Thursday. He got overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of intricate political information he was getting, to the point where he was unable to construct a coherent narrative; he became excessively reliant on official sources that took him into his confidence; he wasn´t so good on the graphic details or deeper social commentary. Of course I have always been immune from any such faults myself. Of course.

He notably drops the ball twice: when the King and Queen of Serbia are murdered in their bedroom, and their naked corpses flung out the palace window, he is in the next door country and only reaches Belgrade when it´s all over. (He can only report that people are still pointing out the window in question – as indeed they still do today.) Then on 31 July 1903 he decides that nothing much is happening in Macedonia, and goes on holiday. On 2 August the Ilinden rising begins, ending with the death of Goce Delčev in a blaze of glory and the crystallisation of Macedonian nationalism. Clearly his links with the local revolutionaries were not particularly good.

I remember hearing about this book when it was first published in 1981. It´s rather coy about Munro’s homosexuality, though I suspect it was probably rather daring for its time (immediately post Jeremy Thorpe). The biographer is fair I think to the two awful aunts who brought up Saki and his elder brother and sister after their mother was killed by a stampeding cow (in Devon, in 1872). I was also interested in the Irish connection – his brother Charles ended up as the governor of Mountjoy Prison in Dublin until 1922, and they used to have family holidays near Portstewart. And the biographer also manages to explain convincingly why someone of his particular talents and character should enlist in the army during the first world war and also resist promotion to the status of officer. His last words were “Put that bloody cigarette out!” Then a German sniper shot him.

The six new short stories are OK though not spectacular.

This evening: train to Paris, for conference tomorrow.

Tomorrow (Friday): plane from Paris to Berlin for conference on Saturday.

Saturday: plane from Berlin to Belgrade via Frankfurt.

Monday: drive from Belgrade to Pristina (in Macedonian-registered car)

Thursday: drive from Pristina to Skopje.

Friday: drive Skopje to Pristina

Saturday: Fly home from Pristina via Budapest.

Blogging may be slow.

Fortunately, living where I do I have no access to the UK’s Big Brother on TV, and better things to do on the internet than follow it there. But, from the little that I have picked up unintentionally from other sources, it sounds to me like this year’s series is very heavily manipulated by the producers, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that the contestants had been promised bonus payments for extreme behaviour, in order to get higher ratings. As far as I know the Flemish Big Brother stopped after the second series. (Is it still the case the the UK is the only country where they’ve had a Big Brother contest where no contestants have had sex with each other on the programme? If so, presumably the producers want to “improve” their record.)

A clique presumably being a group of people who have all friended each other. Slightly surprised and amused by this result:

I am a member of 2 cliques of size 7

• , , , , , ,
• , , , , , ,

So, I hope to see you all during the first three weeks of August, when I’ll be in Loughbrickland with my family!

I’ve been having great fun uploading all my mail archives from 2002 and 2001 onto my gmail account. Found a webpage advising how to do it from Eudora, and an actual application for Netscape. It will be a gradual process but I expect to complete, oh, this month. The one problem is that the transferred messages acquire the date you transferred them, not the original date of sending, but that’s less of a big deal than I thought – if an email message is old, it’s old, and it’s still possible to retrieve the orignal date with a little digging if you actually need it.

11) On Basilisk Station, by David Weber.

Another book that I read on my Palm Pilot in traffic jams over the last few days, then got to an exciting bit and finished it in bed last night and over lunch today. Not much more to say than that. Weber gets good marks for attempting to portray a gender-neutral society, good marks for thoughtful commentary on management styles, drastically off-set by very poor marks for a childish right-wing political perspective, also poor marks for flagging the climax of the final space battle in the second chapter, and very poor marks indeed for massacring the natives. I’m glad it’s free; I would have regretted paying money for it, but will now read the sequel to see if it gets any better.

Well, without doing invidious things like actually giving the full scores, the honours are equally shared between and with 11 correct answers each. Special mention to who was the only person to get the Azeri correct. Congratulations to all who took part. Full details:

1) Aide AIAI à attraper toutes les bananes. Bonne chance! – French. Everyone got this including one person who didn’t bother answering any others.
2) Hilf AIAI alle Bananen einzusammeln. Viel Glück! – German. Everyone who answered got this.
3) Help AIAI om alle bananen te verzamelen. Succes! – Dutch. Again, everyone who answered got this.
4) Aiuta AIAI a raccogliere tutte le banane. Buona fortuna! – Italian. Correctly answered by , , , , , , (who has an unfair advantage), , , and .
5) Ajutaţi-l pe AIAI să adune toate bananele. Succes! – Romanian. Correctly answered by , , , , and . A difficult one.
6) Hjálpaðu AIAI að safna saman öllum banönunum. Gangi þer vel! – Icelandic. Correctly answered by , , , , and .
7) Hjälp AIAI samla alla bananer. Lycka till! – Swedish. Correctly answered by , , , , and.
8) Ajuda AIAI a col.lectar els plàtans. Sort! – Catalan. Correctly answered by , , , , , and .
9) Ayuda a AIAI a atrapar todos los plátanos. ¡Buena suerte! – Spanish. Correctly answered by , , , , , , , , , and .
10) Ajuda AIAI colha todas es bananas. Boa Sorte! – Portuguese. Correctly answered by , , , , , and .
11) Tüm muzlan toplaması için AIAI-a yardım edin. Bol şans! – Turkish. Correctly answered by , , , , and .
12) AIAI-ə bütün bananları yığmağa kömək edin. Uğurlar! – Azeri. Correctly answered only by .
13) Hjælp AIAI med at samle alle bananerne. Held og lykke! – Danish. Correctly answered by , , and .
14) Hjelp AIAI fang alle bananene. Lykke til! – Norwegian. Correctly answered by , , , and .
15) დასმარება AiAi მოაგროვეთ ყველი ბანანი. აბა იცით! – Georgian. Correctly answered by , , , , and .

10) Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord Of The Rings, by Lin Carter, updated by Adam Roberts

The first of my latest review package from infinity plus. Alas, my review will not be a whole-heartedly enthusiastic one; the thirty-five years that have passed since original publication have made this a book more for the completist than for the casual researcher. Oh well, I will write about it at greater length elsewhere.

We went to McDonald’s for lunch, and the children got a nice little video game with instructions in thirty-four different languages. I was so amused by this that I’m going to turn it into a set of pages for my website, but in the meantime I thoght I’d try it out as my first ever livejournal poll (will give the answers in a few days):

In each case, the phrase roughly translates as “Help AIAI collect all the bananas. Good luck!”

I warn you, it gets more difficult as you go along…

It is not fair to laugh at people just because their names sound funny in English.

But sometimes restraint is very difficult.

early train to Paris aargh

I got six more. Anyone still interested?

Someone whose website I linked to from the Hugo reviews page just emailed to say that she doesn’t really read much science fiction but she would really recommend this related book called In Code by Sarah Flannery (see her review).

I had the immense satisfaction of being able to reply that since In Code is dedicated to my brother, I more or less had to read it. (And indeed, it is a good book.)

The Wall Street Journal has an article about things you find in second-hand books. I can’t quite manage that but I did once find a letter from Arthur Cayley (who invented group theory) to John Couch Adams (who nearly discovered the planet Neptune) about how they were going to rig that year’s elections to the Royal Astronomical Society (probably 1860 or so), tucked inside a journal in the University Library in Cambridge. I told the authorities and they filed it in the archives.

My reading habits this month have been a bit uncharacteristic. I decided to try and take a month off written sf, but have spent so long stuck in traffic jams in the morning that I read both Gather, Darkness! and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on my Palm Pilot while waiting for the car in front to move. In fact that is not all; I managed another three e-books in the last couple of weeks, and still hope to finish Plato’s Republic. The paper books I’m currently reading are Bruce Feiler’s Walking the Bible, Lin Carter’s Tolkien, and Dirk Jan Eppink’s Nederbelg, all three non-fiction. And the three paper books I’ve read this month are one literary biography, one contemporary history, and one classic (non-sf) novel.

Anyway, the three e-books I have read are:

6) A Turkey Travelogue, by Mark Leeper. Irritatingly formatted so that each day was a single huge long paragraph (the various web versions seem better). Reading about other people’s holidays, especially if you don’t know them, is less boring than reading about their dreams, but more boring than reading about their sex lives. I suspect that Evelyn Leeper’s diary of the same trip is more interesting (I’ve only skimmed it on the odd website). Mostly the observations are fairly standard, and the short sentences give the narrative a rather irritating staccato feel, but I got the feeling towards the end that he was waxing lyrical, in passages such as:

Years ago when we visited a place that no longer exists by the name of Leningrad we went to see a dance show. They were folk dances and at the height of the dance they brought a bear onto the stage. We really enjoyed the night. Since then my acid test for a dance piece is would it be improved by bringing a bear onto the stage. Few pieces of modern dance can stand up to the bear test.

7) Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki. Just fantastic. Starts off with “The She-Wolf”, in which a supposed practitioner of Siberian magic gets his comeuppance. Includes also such highlights as “The Open Window” and “The Story-Teller”.

8) Reginald In Russia, also by Saki. Apart from the title story, contains little information about Russia or Reginald. Not as good as the other collection. Does have one or two stories of interest for my work, eg “The Lost Sanjak” and “The Soul of Laploshka” (“Laploshka said nothing, but his eyes bulged a little and his cheeks took on the mottled hues of an ethnographical map of the Balkan Peninsula.”).

All three are available for free from Project Gutenberg.

I warn you, these are bad…

1. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, “I’m sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.”
2. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. The one turns to the other and says “Dam!”.
3. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.
4. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says “I’ve lost my electron,” The other says “Are you sure?” The first replies “Yes, I’m positive.”
5. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.
6. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. “But why?” they asked, as they moved off. “Because”, he said, “I can’t stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer.”
7. A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named “Ahmal.” The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him “Juan.” Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, “They’re twins! If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Ahmal.”
8. These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to “persuade” them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he’d be back if they didn’t close up shop. Terrified, they did so, thereby proving that only Hugh, can prevent florist friars.
9. Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him …(Oh, man, this is so bad, it’s good)….. A super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.
10. And finally, there was the person who posted ten different puns to his livejournal, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make the people on his friends list laugh. No pun in ten did!