Friday's Funnies

A QUIZ FOR OUR VERY BRIGHT READERS  (answers at the end)

 

There are only nine questions. This is a quiz for people who know everything. These are not trick questions - they are straight questions with straight answers... 

 

1. Name the one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends.

 

2. What famous North American landmark is constantly moving backward?

 

3 Of all vegetables, only two can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons. All other vegetables must be replanted every year. What are the only two perennial vegetables?

 

4. What fruit has its seeds on the outside?

 

5. Only three words in standard English begin with the letters ' dw' and they are all common words. Name two of them.

 

6. There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar. Can you name at least half of them?

 

7. Name the only vegetable AND fruit that is never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form except fresh.

 

8. Name 6 or more things that you can wear on your feet beginning with the letter 'S.'

 

Bad Trip

 

My co-worker at the travel agency needed to send a letter of apology to a customer whose trip was a complete fiasco from start to finish. I reminded her of a similar situation a year earlier and dug out the letter I'd written then.  "All you have to do," I told her, "is to change the details, the date, and the name."  She looked it over and smiled, then said, "We won't even need to change the name."

 

Reasons You Should Buy a New Car

 

- Your passenger seat is on the National Register of Historic Places.

- Instead of an air bag, there is a whoopee cushion taped to your steering wheel.

- You lose the stoplight challenge to a 14-year-old on a moped.

- The 15-minute Jiffy Lube needs to keep your car for three days.

- When you gas up, the attendant asks, "Can I re-duct tape that windshield for you?"

- Thieves repeatedly break in to your car just to steal the "Club."

- While sitting at a stop light, people keep running up to you and ask if anyone was hurt.

- For the last five years, you've had to settle for making "vroom, vroom" noises while in the driveway.

- You keep losing dates on left turns.

 

Fitness Class

 

Concerned about fitness in my middle 40s, I enrolled in an aerobics class.  To my dismay I walked into a room filled with much younger women and decided to combat my nervousness with humor.  "I'm here to do my postnatal exercises."  The instructor gave me an appraising look. "How old is your baby?"  "Twenty-six," I replied.

 

HOW TO WRITE GOODER

 

Here are several very important but often forgotten rules of English:

 

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.

2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)

4. Employ the vernacular.

5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.

8. Contractions aren't necessary.

9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.

10. One should never generalize.

11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

13. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.

14. Be more or less specific.

15. Understatement is always best.

16. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

17. One-word sentences? Eliminate.

19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.

19. The passive voice is to be avoided.

20. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

21. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.

22. Who needs rhetorical questions?

 

ANSWERS TO QUIZ:

 

1. Boxing.

2. Niagara Falls ... The rim is worn down about two and a half feet each year because of the millions of gallons of water that rush over it every minute.

3. Asparagus and rhubarb.

4. Strawberry.

5. Dwarf, dwell and dwindle...

6. Period, comma, colon, semicolon, dash, hyphen, apostrophe, question mark, exclamation point, quotation mark, brackets, parenthesis, braces, and ellipses.

7. Lettuce & Watermelon

8. Shoes, socks, sandals, sneakers, slippers, skis, skates, snowshoes, stockings, stilts.

 

Today’s Thought

 

Last year I joined a support group for procrastinators. We haven't met yet.