Altitude, Aptitude, Attitude

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost.  He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below.  He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."  

The woman below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."  

"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist.

"I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all.  If anything, you've delayed my trip."

The woman below responded, "You must be in Management."

"I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you're going.  You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air.  You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems.  The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."

received from David A. Miller

Surgeons Talk

Four surgeons were taking a coffee break and were discussing their work.  The first said, "I think accountants are the easiest to operate on.  You open them up and everything inside is numbered."

The second said, "I think librarians are the easiest to operate on. You open them up and everything inside is in alphabetical order."

The third said, "I like to operate on electricians. You open them up and everything inside is color-coded."

The fourth one said, "I like to operate on lawyers. They're heartless, spineless, gutless, and their heads and their ass are interchangeable."

provided by Fred Michel
Substitute the phrase "NYPL administrators" for the word "lawyers" and this joke works equally well, if not better.

Island Madness

An ambitious yuppie finally decided to take a vacation. He booked himself on a Caribbean cruise and proceeded to have the time of his life. Until the boat sank.

The man found himself swept up on the shore of an isla with no other people, no supplies, nothing ... only bananas and coconuts. After about four months he is lying on the beach one day, when the most gorgeous woman he had ever seen rows up to him.

In disbelief, he asked her: "Where did you come from? How did you get here?"

"I rowed from the other side of the island," she said, "I landed here when my cruise ship sank."

"Amazing," he said, "You were really lucky to have a rowboat wash up with you."

"Oh, this?." replied the woman "I made the rowboat out of raw material that I found on the island, the oars were whittled from Gumtree branches, I wove the bottom from Palm branches, and the sides and stern came from a Eucalyptus tree."

"But-- but, that's impossible," stuttered the man, "you had no tools or hardware, how did you manage?"

"Oh, that was no problem," replied the woman, "on the south side of the island there is a very unusual strata of alluvial rock exposed. I found that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. I used that for tools, and used the tools to make the hardware."

The guy was stunned.

"Let's row over to my place, " she said. As she docked, the man looked onshore, and nearly fell out of the boat. Before him was a stone walk leading to an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white. While the woman tied up the rowboat with an expertly woven hemp rope, the man could only stare ahead, dumbstruck.

As they walked into the house, she said casually "It's not much, but I call it home. Please do sit down. Would you like a drink?" "No, no thank you" he said, still dazed, "can't take any more coconut juice."

"It's not coconut juice," the woman replied. "I have a still. How about a Pina Colada?"

Trying to hide his continued amazement, the man accepted, and they sat down on her couch to talk. After they had exchanged their stories, the woman announced, "I'm going to slip into something more comfortable. Would you like to take a shower and shave? There is a razor upstairs in the cabinet in the bathroom."

No longer questioning anything, the man went into the bathroom. There in the cabinet was a razor made from a bone handle. Two shells honed to a hollow ground edge were fastened on to its end inside of a swivel mechanism. "This woman is amazing," he mused, "what next?"

When he returned, she greeted him wearing nothing but vines -strategically positioned-- and smelling faintly of gardenias. She beckoned him to sit down next to her.

"Tell me," she began, suggestively, slithering closer to him, "we've been out here for a very long time. You've been lonely. There's something I'm sure you really feel like doing right now, something you've been longing for all these months?" "You know... " She stared into his eyes.

He couldn't believe what he was hearing:

"You mean-- ?", he replied, "--I can check my e-mail from here?"

submitted by Susan Kerr

Conspiracy Quiz

Question: How do we know that there is no "vast right-wing conspiracy" out to get Bill Clinton?

Answer: We can be absolutely certain that there is no "vast right-wing conspiracy" out to get Bill Clinton because Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell, Richard Mellon Scaife, Donovan Campbell, John Whitehead The Rutherford Institute, Ken Starr, Linda Tripp, Tony Snow, Lucianne Goldberg, Phil Bunton, Gary Aldrich, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Regnery Publishing, Matt Drudge, Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard, Susan Carpenter McMillan, Matt Drudge, William Bennett, George Will, Bill Kristol, David Brock**, Cliff Jackson, Pat Robertson, Michael Rivero, Lauch Faircloth, Christopher Ruddy, The American Spectator, and R. Emmett Tryell, Jr. have all denied its existence.-

submitted by the Pope

*Lucianne Goldberg has given the exclamation, "Yikes, this is fun," to describe her reaction to listening to tapes of conversations illegally made by Linda Tripp.

**David Brock has now acknowledged the existence of the conspiracy
and apologized for his participation in it.