Twice Bitten
[Author's note: The original is my favourite joke ever.]
Having lost his poetic touch, W. B. Yeats works at a corporate office. A popular tabloid, finding that his fame has survived, telephones him and wonders if he would be kind enough to participate in a photo-session for their pages. Thrilled, he writes to his manager asking for (i) a day off and (ii) permission to attend the picture-taking.
In response, the manager informs, 'Both your requests need to be approved by a panda in the upper floor, specifically recruited for the purpose.'
'What! Why?', says W B.
'Look it up', replies the boss.
The former poet thumbs through the office catalogue to get wind of the job description of his mammalian colleague. Which reads thus:
"Panda: Yeats' shoots and leaves."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A robin glides into a café. She orders a sandwich, eats it, then starts telling a joke over and over again till everybody dies of boredom.
'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter, as the robin gets airborne exitward. She produces a badly punctuated ornithology manual and tosses it over her shoulder.
'Well, I'm a robin', she says, at the door. 'Look it up.'
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
'Robin: Many-coloured species of bird. Native to Europe and North America. Eats, bugs and flies.'
Having lost his poetic touch, W. B. Yeats works at a corporate office. A popular tabloid, finding that his fame has survived, telephones him and wonders if he would be kind enough to participate in a photo-session for their pages. Thrilled, he writes to his manager asking for (i) a day off and (ii) permission to attend the picture-taking.
In response, the manager informs, 'Both your requests need to be approved by a panda in the upper floor, specifically recruited for the purpose.'
'What! Why?', says W B.
'Look it up', replies the boss.
The former poet thumbs through the office catalogue to get wind of the job description of his mammalian colleague. Which reads thus:
"Panda: Yeats' shoots and leaves."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A robin glides into a café. She orders a sandwich, eats it, then starts telling a joke over and over again till everybody dies of boredom.
'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter, as the robin gets airborne exitward. She produces a badly punctuated ornithology manual and tosses it over her shoulder.
'Well, I'm a robin', she says, at the door. 'Look it up.'
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
'Robin: Many-coloured species of bird. Native to Europe and North America. Eats, bugs and flies.'
posted by Marlin Jar at 1:06:00 pm
4 Obiter dicta:
Clever transformation!
Made, me laugh;I thought: annoying - you in return, would be , fun...
The HR who wrote the Panda's job description must certainly have come from TN.
Apropos of robins, here's a completely unrelated and irrelevant piece of gyan from AWAD:
"Your images of birds brings to mind an expression about the robin which consumes China berries in great quantities. After having been hit by a frost, the sugar content of these berries turns into alcohol and the birds soon become very intoxicated. They then have a hard time leaving the ground, fly in strange patterns, fall off limbs of the tree, run into buildings, all the things you might imagine a drunk bird would do. Unfortunately, cats take advantage of the incapacitated birds and there are feathers flying all over the yard. This brings about the expression drunk as a robin which means intoxicated to the point of risking severe harm."
While we're on the topic of drunk birds, Polya was the first one to prove that a random walk in 3 or higher dimensions wasn't closed . In his inimitable style, he quipped: "A drunk man will eventually return home but a drunk bird will lose its way in space."
Er, isn't "Yeats" pronounced "YATES"?
Post a Comment
<< Back to the big bad blog