Canberra why the joke is on those who leave

Your ad blocker may be preventing you from being able to log in or subscribe. Home News Health. Australian Associated Press. Ad blocker issue Your ad blocker may be preventing you from being able to log in or subscribe. A talk-show host by the name of Conny Jarson was preparing to introduce a famous Linguistics Professor. He was nervous in the week leading up to the show because her name was Professor Franny. He worried that he might forget the "r" in her name, leading to him introducing her as Professor in the American slang Female Genitalia.

So, for most of the week preceding the show, whenever he had spare time he would rehearse quietly to himself "She's Professor Franny, there's an R in it, She's Professor Franny, there's an R in it, She's Professor Franny, there's an R in it Come the evening of the show, he was confident he had licked the potential gaffe.

He proceeded with the introduction after Professor Franny had appeared on the stage. What is a Puritan or alternatively, a Christian or Muslim Fundamentalist? What is the operation needed to cure eternal cynics? It is the optorectomy , which severs the nerve connecting the eyeball to the arsehole to cut out the shitty outlook in life.

What is Chicken Teriaki? It is a gourmet dish named after the longest surviving kamikaze pilot. The Washington Post recently published a contest for readers in which they were asked to supply alternate meanings for various words. The following were some of the winning entries: Abdicate v. Carcinoma n. Esplanade v. Willy-nilly adj. Negligent adj.

Lymph v. Gargoyle n. Bustard n. Coffee n. Flatulence n. Balderdash n. Testicle n. Semantics n. Rectitude n. Marionettes n. Oyster n. Circumvent n. Frisbatarianism n.

The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are some recent winners: Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the reader who doesn't get it. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very high. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of obtaining sex. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously.

Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like a serious bummer. Glibido: All talk and no action.

Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a refund from the IRS, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with. And, best of all I will record here delightful displays of shamelessness. Alan Clarke was asked, "Is it true that your family has skeletons in the cupboard? At last, a chain letter with a point This chain letter was started in hopes of bringing relief to other tired and discouraged men.

Unlike most chain letters, this one does not cost anything. Just send a copy of this letter to five of your friends who are equally tired and discontented. Then bundle up your wife or girlfriend and send her to the man whose name appears at the top of the list, and add your name to the bottom of the list.

When your turn comes, you will receive 15, women. One of them is bound to be better than the one you already have. At the writing of this letter, a friend of mine had already received women, 4 of whom were worth keeping. One man's pit bull died, and the next day he received a Playboy swimsuit model. An unmarried Jewish man living with his widowed mother was able to choose between a Hooters waitress and a Hollywood supermodel.

One man broke the chain, and got his own wife back again. A competition was held among three police forces -- the American, British and Brazilian Police. They were told that for each team a rabbit would be released and they were given two hours to capture it. First to go was the British Police. The team went into a huddle, planned carefully how to divide the search area, set the bait, and lay in wait to trap the animal without hurting it.

Next, the Americans had a go. No problem! They called in Apache helicopters to carpet-bomb the area, and within 20 miunutes they produced the burnt cinders of the rabbit. Then it was the turn of the Brazilian Police. The team went into the bush. After a few minutes there were blood-curdling screams that went on and on. Half an hour later they emerged with a wild pig in tow.

The poor pig was bleeding all over, and yelling, "Stop beating me, oh, please stop! I confess I am a rabbit, I swear I am the rabbit! My friend John Sowa was the source of this delightful recounting of the travels of a linguist colleague who visited a part of India after a conference. He hired a taxi to take him into the countryside as he wanted to see villages, hills and lakes. The taxi driver was a Sikh. Sikhs, as you know, are the most fearless ethnic group in India.

As the linguist was being driven at high speed and cheerful abandon through villages -- chickens flying -- and around narrow mountain roads -- just avoiding strolling cows, the Sikh driver would keep turning his head to the back and conversing with the by now very nervous linguist. Being the concerned driver-host that he was, the Sikh was keen to allay his client's obvious nervousness. He turned around and assured him all the time still driving!

A short while later, he turns around again, "And sir, do you know why we Sikhs are the best drivers in India? Exercise: How do you punctuate the sentence "Fun fun fun worry worry worry"? One answer : "Fun, period; fun, period; fun, no period -- worry, worry, worry". Do our minds use diagrams or visual imagery to reason?

Not just aid in reasoning, but actually arrive at a logical conclusion? My friend Aron Sloman, Prof of CS at Birmingham, makes a cogent case for it in his analysis of what people do when asked if it is possible to remove one's underpants without removing one's pants.

This is not a frivolous exercise! This planning exercise is lovingly and meticulously dissected by Aron for its default assumptions, in which the feat is successfully completed in several ways. One involves removing the underpants by looping it over one's head!

The evidence is very strong that people solve such topological tasks by visual imagery, "running a video in their heads". Aron's paper Diagrams in the Mind? Click this to get to his paper. I was privileged to attend the retirement dinner of Prof Peter Jarrett, founding profesor of computer science at the University of Birmingham, in December when I was on sabbatical leave there. He told this wonderful story of when he was Dean of Science and addressed a meeting of the mathematicians.

Now, anyone who has had to deal with academic mathematicians will know how jealous they are of their independence. As Peter rose to speak to the 80 or so assembled mathematicians, a loud hissing permeated the audience. Peter waited for it to abate a little, then said, "There is always hissing when the pure waters of heaven hit the fires of hell".

The audience dissolved in laughter, and the tension was happily discharged. Peter then told us that this most apt piece of humor was not original with him, but that he had heard it form a talk show host a few weeks before.

As chance would have it, the following week Peter met this personality and thanked him for providing him Peter with the picturesque humor. The personality replied, "It is not original with me either -- it was the Rev Ian Paisley who first said it!

The following is a report from the Malaysian newspaper Sun 19 Jan , entitled "20 year old Iranian man marries year-old virgin". Tehran, Wed: A year old Iranian man has married a year-old virgin in a village in the east of the country, newspapers said today.

They said the youthful groom, Hesam Khalili, had wed septugenarian Fatemeh Jamshidi Khakhi in the village of Gonabad in Khorasan bordering Afghanistan. Ali Pourhossein, a local civil servant responsible for registering marriages, approved the match between the young man and what newspapers called the "happy girl".

Weddings between aged grooms and youthful brides are relatively common in Iran, but seldom the other way around. The official IRNA news agency speculated the groom had wed his ageing bride so as to cut off his two years of military service.

Norman's comment -- IRNA officials clearly have no spark of romance in their souls. When we see a space shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The engineers who designed the SRB's might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad line to the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRB's had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the US standard railroad gauge the distance between the rails is 4 feet, 8. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English expatriates.

Why did the English people build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did "they" use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing, thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8. Specs and bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back-ends of two war horses.

So a major design feature of the shuttle, which is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's ass. Three men, a British, an American and a Malaysian were sitting together on a plane.

Nelson Mandela is sitting at home watching TV and drinking a beer when he hears a knock at the door. When he opens it, he is confronted by a little Chinese man, clutching a clip board and yelling, "You Sign! You sign! Nelson is standing there in complete amazement, when the Chinese man starts to yell louder. The next day he hears a knock at the door again.

When he opens it, the little Chinese man is back with a huge truck of brake pads. He thrusts his clipboard under Nelson's nose, yelling, "You sign! You've got the wrong man!

I don't want them! The following day, Nelson is resting, and late in the afternoon, he hears a knock on the door again. On opening the door, there is the same little Chinese man thrusting a clipboard under his nose, shouting, "You sign! This time Nelson loses his temper completely, he picks up the little man by his shirt front and yells at him; "Look, I don't want these! Do you understand? You must have the wrong name!

Who do you want to give these to? Who is the inventor of the jock-strap? Answer: Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense. The following exchange is between the mother of a newborn infant boy and the obstretic surgeon: Surgeon: Mrs Trump, I'm afraid your baby boy was born without eyelids.

But we can fix that problem if you permit us to circumcise him and and use that skin as a replacement eyelid. After all, we have very skillful plastic surgeons here. Mrs Trump horrified : But doctor! Won't that make him cock-eyed? Surgeon: Au contraire Mrs Trump! It will in fact give him great fore-sight. A Snail went to buy a car. He found the one he was looking for -- a racy white sports car -- but he asked the salesperson, "Can you paint big red "S's" on the sides?

Deal done. Two days later the Snail comes back, sees the car and is pleased as punch. He gets the keys, and is about to drive off when the salesperson could no longer contain herself. She asked, "Sir, if you don't mind me asking, why did you want the sides painted with big S's? When people see me driving this sporty car with the red S's, they will say Look at that S-car go! An old cowboy went to a bar and ordered a drink. As he sat there sipping his whiskey, a young lady sat down next to him.

She turned to the cowboy and asked him, "Are you a real cowboy? I spend my whole day thinking about women. As soon as I get up in the morning, I think about women. When I shower, watch TV, everything seems to make me think of women. This is an almost true story. A renowned modal logician is also a dirty old man. He had a clever line at conferences which he used when he fancied some cute female graduate student giving her first paper. At 11pm he would knock on her hotel door and the conversation might go like this: Professor: Hello, can I come in?

Female Grad Student: Oh hello, professsor, what can I do for you? Prof: I was wondering if we could discuss an accessibility relation? FGS: I'm afraid I am not feeling transitive or symmetric tonight, so you will probably have to be reflexive. Another one was reported to me by Mark Ryan on the way in which the loss of the eminent logician Quine was announced in some quarters.

Quine proposed that the meaning of existential quantifiers be explained as follows: "To be is to be the value of a variable". His sad departure for the Logic Valhalla was announced as "I regret to inform you that Quine is no longer the value of a variable.

Apprarently Descartes went to a tavern with a friend. The friend asked Descartes, "Hey Rene, would you like a beer? At the meeting of Australian Labor Party that's the Social Democratic party for my European friends faithfuls to celebrate a century of left-wing commitment, ex-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was asked to recount his meeting with Chairman Mao just after Australia had recognized the Peoples' Republic of China. And, no, this act of the newly elected Labor Government did not cause the sky to fall, as was much feared by the Conservatives who, strangely, call themselves Liberals in Australia.

Whitlam said that when he arrived at Beijing, the Australian Ambassador cautioned him that he should be careful when meeting Chairman Mao as the latter is not known for small talk.

Mindful of this, Whiltlam's opening statement to the Chairman the next morning was, "Chairman, today is the th anniversary of the death of President Kennedy. How different do you think the world would be if it had been Premier Krushchev who had died then instead of Kennedy? The Chairman thought for a while, then smiled and said, "Well, I really don't know, but this much we can be sure -- Aristotle Onasis would not have married Mrs Krushchev instead.

A Horn clause is one that has at most one non-negative literal, and hance can be re-written as A they have only one atom in the head which is what the consequent of the implication is called. One day I happened over morning coffee to get carried away with the beauty of this property, repeating with unbridled glee, "Horn clauses have only one atom in their heads!

Henceforth, "Horn clause" shall be almost a synomyn for "Airhead" in our group, except that the former applies to unthinking politicians and extreme ideologs. Eric expects a lot from his students, but due to the "watering down" of the curriculum in terms of theory -- this is a world-wide phenomenon -- they are sinking in the mass of definition, theorem, proof that he expects them to master.

Tri, as a bright and conscientious TA, tried hard to rescue them. ALL yes, I mean that, no exceptions students of Logic past their second or third lecture would also know that implication written backward here. You all know what Decreasing Biodiversity and the Lowering of the Karma Hurdles My graduate students seem to fall into two categories.

All of them are witty and clever, but one lot is seriously religious and the other is scatalogical. Allen Courtney, one of the latter, worried aloud over lunch the other day about what the threats to biodiversity might be doing to the previously high standards for re-incarnation.

Let me explain his concern. By the Laws of Karma, if you were a baddie in this life you get re-born as, say, a stray kitty. If you were really bad , you get re-born as the cockcroach that will be baygonned. And if you were Maggie Thatcher or Augusto Pinochet, you will come back as a low-life ebola virus. Now, with decreasing biodiversity, Allen reckons that the worst mass extinctions are in the primitive life forms, then in species like the marsupials and the monotremes.

This will have the effect that the opportunities for being re-born low will be vastly diminished. It's like the "grade inflation" phenomenon we see these days -- even George Dubbya Bush got C's at Yale, nobody fails anything. Soon even the most heinous of inside-traders and junk bond dealers, and pyramid sellers, and rapacious capitalists may not have to be re-born as the leeches that was once their natural destiny!

Leeches may be have to be reserved for the Hitlers and Stalins and Maos, so rare they will soon become. It's drawing a long bow, unless you can think of a more appropriate expression and to be frank we don't want to hear about it if you can , but AAP reported yesterday that scientists believe Australian research into the amount of bacteria carried in flatulence could lead to long-term economic benefits.

The experiment was set up by microbiologist Luke Tennent, who enlisted the aid of a colleague's 8-year-old son who, in the name of science, pulled down his pants and farted on a petri dish from a distance of five centimetres. Overnight the petri dish, filled with a wide-spectrum growth medium, sprouted visible lumps of two types of bacteria usually found in the gut and on the skin.

The experiment was inspired by a nurse who phoned Triple J's science show to ask whether she had contaminated an operating theatre by farting in the sterile environment. Host Dr Karl Kruszelnicki a Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at the University of Sydney's Science Foundation for Physics , sponsored the experiment, saying: "Maybe some kid somewhere will think, 'Oh yeah, maybe science can be fun' and then go and study science and then further down the line make Australia fabulously wealthy by the research they do.

The U. Congress faction controlled by the religious right tried unsucessfully to stop genetic engineering of a new type of maize. Evidently, the aim of this engineering was to increase the size of the maize grain by inserting a gene from giant squashes, causing the tiny pores of the grain to stiffen and become tumescent. The Congressional faction was worried because the project was entitled Hard Pore Corn. One American lady: 'How long did it take you to train them to do this?

This is an expanding collection of improbable words, but they really exist, or should! Most definitions exceptions noted by courtesy of the Merriam-Webster On-line Dictionary. Eleemosynary : Function: adjective; Etymology: Medieval Latin eleemosynarius, from Late Latin eleemosyna alms, Date: circa of, relating to, or supported by charity Mondegreen : a mishearing of a popular phrase or song lyric. The word is too new 50 years new!

See John Carroll's Modegreen site for the legendary examples and the etymology. Michael row the boat ashore. A near Mondegreen is due to the granny who, while watching the sad funeral of Princes Di, complained when she saw Pavarotti sing in the Cathedral, "How can they let him sing after he chased her into the tunnel?

Hint: it blows in the wind. If you speak the Hokkien dialect of Southern China, here is a cross-lingual Mondegreen. A Hokkien lady went to cd shop to ask for a cd with the track "Ah Cheng beh loti" tr: Ah Cheng sells bread. She actually wanted "Unchained Melody". Near modegreens are the main feature in the collection of schoolboy howlers that is priceless. Ept : Antonym of inept. Does not exist yet, but damn well should. Proposed typical usage: "Clinton was very ept in making people feel that he cared about their opinions".

Cerumen : Earwax. How do you know if you have an earwax situation? Probably when it is too late and your cerumen is visible to all and sundry. This scenario could soon change as an Oregon inventor had been granted a patent for his ear mirror. Justin Letlow told the Ananova news service that his creation, which resmebles a dental instrument with two round, small adjustable mirrors, will prevent 'earwax embarrassment'.

Much like the angling of mirrors in a periscope, users can view their ear by holding one close to the ear and the other in front of their eye. Collegiate Dictionary This is also known in grammar as a subjunctive. In high school you were undoubtedly subjected to such boring examples of counterfactuals as: "If the Spanish Armada had succeeded, the English would today be Catholic". To liven things up in your grammar or logic classes, I suggest you use the example cited by Stephen Pinker in his book The Language Instinct of the Yiddish counterfactual: "If my grandmother had balls, she would have been my grandfather".

Hemorrhoid sufferers are massing in Portugal to moon a saint in order to cure their affliction, the Jornal de Noticias reports. The faithful are making a pilgrimage to a church kilometres north of Lisbon, to bear their behinds to a 13th-century priest, Saint Goncalo, who they believe can cure the condition.

The saint also does a line in curing acne and another in helping women find husbands. A doctor and practising Catholic, Antonio Amador, told the newspaper that when, several years ago, a young woman with severe acne wanted to pray nude, the local priest would not allow it, as he was "a bit conservative". But mooning the saint is OK? Malaysia's stability My country of origin, Malaysia, has been buffetted in the past by all kinds of turmoil like the race riots of and the Asian finance crisis badly mis-named, it was actually caused by western institutions, but that is another story.

However, it is very stable in other ways. Chinese Names in Malaysia I grew up in Malaysia which is like a huge melting-pot of races, and within each race there were dialects. The Chinese there many not so pure anymore, having Malay ancestry too spoke different dialects. A name that sounded auspicious in one can cause much amusement in another.

Worse, many Chinese names can be mortally catastrophic in English, or monumentally heroic. In case these sound too improbable, at least the second one has "Soh Kian Wee" is in fact a quite common name.

See the program notes of a SFS performance for the details. He is a truly fightening composer, so awesome in produtivity of great music that Tom Lehrer said on his Lehrer's birthday when he was 37 "It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.

When I was a little boy some would say I am still one My mom would warn me, "Norman, one day you will get stuck!

De-coding these is your exercise for the week The Number of the Beast Numerology, like palmistry and astrology, are marvelllous pseudo-sciences in which almost anything can be "predicted". But they are nothing compared with the ways in which some can detect the presence of the devil in the most innocuous of contexts. Mathematics, you would have thought, should be an exception. No such luck! Number theory, acknowledged by professional mathematicians to be the purest of their disciplines, is full of hidden satanic presence.

My ass! The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. I moved to Australia 10 years ago. I would only return to live in the UK if dragged, kicking and screaming by a naked Daniel Craig covered in honey and waving thousands of GBPs [British sterling] in my direction. And that isn't really going to happen, is it? I love the warmth here, the sunshine , the pace of life and the laid back, easy living.

It beats the cold North East! Sheila Deal, Mareeba, Australia. You think it is hard being British and trying to connect with Australia? Try being British-Asian. It's a hundred times more difficult! Having said that, I've always been glad my family moved us to Australia.

The standard of living and proximity to Asia - where the real adventure of travel still exists - make it perhaps the most desirable place to live. Poisonous snakes and spiders, however, are not so great. Sukhpreet Dhaliwal, Sydney, Australia. My wife and I left the UK in , when our children were 7 and 8 years old. We left behind a terraced house in Yorkshire for a house on five acres of land in the country about half an hour from Perth. We have a lifestyle that would simply never have been possible had we stayed in the UK.

Not one of us has any regrets about leaving the UK. Pete Wynne, Perth, Australia. I moved to Australia with my family in , when I was 21, due to my dad's job. I can't imagine having the life I have here back in the UK. I only work part-time and manage to afford a mortgage, something I could never dream of doing back home. Yes there are a lot of "pommy" jokes made, and I have to constantly check my vocabulary, but the friends I have made here have been exceptionally welcoming.

Of course, there are days that I miss my friends and other family members, it is hard to leave behind years of fun and shared history, but those days are getting further and further apart, especially with modern wonders such as Facebook and Skype.

I for one can't imagine there will be a time I will feel compelled to return. Amy, Launceston, Australia. I have wanted to live in Australia since I was eight years old so for me it was a childhood dream come true. Now I have celebrated my 40th year here. My situation is different because I married an Australian girl and my son was born here. I often watch Escape to the Country and sometimes that makes me a little homesick.

However, I won't go back. I would miss the laughter of the Kookaburra waking me up in the mornings and the kangaroos eating my roses. I think this wonderful country offers far more for the future of its young people. Dr Michael Selley, Turramurra, Australia. My wife and I moved to Sydney from Portsmouth nearly four years ago and have no intention of returning.

We have started a family and our children will be growing up in a beautiful, safe country full of opportunities. The lifestyle is fantastic, we live near the beach and work in the city. Sure it's expensive, but the salaries are good. I don't understand the "lack of culture" argument maybe because Portsmouth isn't exactly overflowing with galleries and museums. The people are friendly, they love sports and beer and barbeques We miss our family and friends, but we go home every year and we have regular visitors.

No way we're going back to gloom both economical and weather-wise of England. Stephen Spencer, Sydney. I first came to Australia in on a working holiday visa. I've also lived for years at a time in Sydney, Brisbane and on the Gold Coast. A larger number of my UK friends who came here temporarily to either visit or for their own reasons, ended up staying.

There are pros and cons to both countries, but for me it's a no-brainer. The unsafest streets in Australia in my opinion are safer than some of the safest in the UK. Yes, it is more expensive now but the prevailing weather and lifestyle forces you out of the shops and pubs and into the active outdoors.

There is a lot more to do that doesn't cost money. Although it does have great restaurants , the nightlife is comparatively dreadful, but after all things are said and done, it comes down to just one thing, you need expat friends.

Generally speaking, only they will truly comprehend or share your humour, mentality etc. Australians and Britons are light years apart in that regard.