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.
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.
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."
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".
