Thursday, May 29, 2014

Winter storm. (May 29)

I was driving down a lonely northern road one cold winter day when it began to snow pretty heavily. 


My windows were getting icy and my wiper blades were badly worn and quickly fell apart under the strain. 



Unable to drive any further because of the ice building up on my front window I suddenly had a great idea.



I stopped and began to overturn large rocks until I located two very lethargic hibernating rattlesnakes. 



I grabbed them up, straightened them out flat and installed them on my blades, and they worked just fine. 



Of course, that's because they were wind-chilled vipers.




The General. (May 28)

An ancient Serbian general was once involved in a plot to overthrow the king. His plot included a number of followers in the upper ranks of the army. However, his plot was uncovered, and the king threw him in jail. The king sentenced him to death without a trial. 


However, from the jail he was able to secretly contact his followers to arrange to escape, meet his followers, and attack the king's palace at night. So the night before his scheduled execution, the general managed to escape from prison. He fled to a ziggurat several kilometers away, where his followers would meet him. However, the ziggurat was one of several in the area, and he wasn't sure if his cohorts would find the right ziggurat. By this time it was twilight, so he lit a small fire and sent smoke signals to indicate in which structure he was hiding. 



However, the king's loyal soldiers saw the smoke coming from the ziggurat, and came to arrest him before he could meet his followers. He was executed later that day. 



The moral of the story? WARNING: The Serbian general has determined that smoking ziggurats can be extremely hazardous to your stealth. 




Jam Packed. (May 29)


Litre of the Pack. (May 28)


Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Patton. (May 27)

During the invasion of Sicily in World War II, General George Patton was preparing to take the city of Palermo. He checked with his meteorologists and learned the day he had chosen would be incredibly rainy. So he issued an order to place copies of the New York 'Times' immediately beneath the tailgates of the transports carrying his troops. In this way the men could keep their feet dry. 


His staff was mystified. Why the "Times"? Why not the New York "Daily News"? Patton was adamant, and one did not argue with the General. 



As five tons of old copies of the "Times" were being loaded, the General issued one of his greatest quotes to the assembled war correspondents: "these are the 'times' that dry men's soles." 






An Escape Goat. (May 27)


Monday, May 26, 2014

A New Economy. (May 26)

In the 1900s an English town had fallen on really hard times. For decades its primary industry had been its textile mills, but now the mills were all closed and unemployment was at an all-time high. 


Desperate, the town's mayor looked frantically around for other industries to bring to his town. He found that there was a man in Germany who waslooking for someone to take over his thriving hunting dog breeding business. The man had made a fortune raising the animals and was not willing to unload it for a fraction of its value, so that he could retire. 



The mayor used his influence to have the mills converted to kennels and all of the dogs transported to his town. Employment skyrocketed and the town prospered. Everyone was happy, even though, sometimes--especially on the nights with a full moon--the animals got a little noisy, keeping some residents awake. 



But, even these unfortunate few learned to sigh and say, "The mills are alive with the hounds of Munich".