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Irony
Can’t you Read
English novelist William Golding tells with delight of the policewoman in a Wiltshire town near his home who gave him a parking ticket the day after he won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature. “Can’t you read?” she demanded.
R. W. Apple, Jr., in New York Times
Clint and Burt
A Universal executive dismissed both Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds at a meeting in 1959. To Burt Reynolds: “You have no talent.” To Clint Eastwood: “You have a chip on your tooth, your Adam’s apple sticks out too far, and you talk too slow.”
Source unknown
Ronald Reagan
A United Artists executive, dismissing the suggestion that Ronald Reagan be offered the starring role in the movie, The Best Man in 1964: “Reagan doesn’t have the Presidential look.”
From The Experts Speak, 1984, by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky
Report
Title of a New York State legislative document: “Sixteenth Annual Report of the Temporary Commission of Investigation of the State of New York. (The Washington Monthly)
Source unknown
Planning Directory
Announcement in the weekly journal Planning: “We are sorry that the Planning Directory has so far not appeared. This is because it is considerably bigger than originally anticipated and is taking longer to print.”
The Daily Telegraph, London
Quit Please!
A film studio painted a sign on the roof in letters eight feet high, reading QUIET PLEASE. Instead of keeping noisy airplanes away, the sign brought planes roaring down even lower so pilots could read what it said.
Funny Funny World
Lost Checks
In 1984, 300 postal workers received their paychecks three days late—because their original checks were lost in the mail. - AP
Source unknown
Alcohol
The list of papers to be read on alcohol and related diseases at a medical conference in England read as follows:
- 9:15 Alcohol in the blood
- 10:15 Alcohol in the liver
- 11:15 Alcohol in the pancreas
- 12:15 Alcoholism
- 12:45 Bar opens
(The Guardian, London)
Bird Watching
Ornithologist and artist Roger Tory Peterson once found that his eyesight was changing, so he went to an optometrist. The man told Peterson that his eyes needed a rest, and that he should take time out from close, detailed work to focus on objects in the distance. “What do you advise?” the ornithologist asked. “Bird watching,” was the reply.
Source unknown
Prison Escape
In a daring escape from a Sydney, Australia, jail, a prisoner climbed underneath the hood of a truck. At the trucks’ next stop, he clambered out and found himself in the yard of another prison four miles from the first. - UPI
Source unknown
Lincoln’s Bed
Alistair Cooke writes, “Adlai Stevenson once told me about a curious experience he had relative to Abraham Lincoln. It was 1952. Stevenson had just lost the election to Eisenhower, and had been asked by outgoing President Harry Truman to spend the night at the White House. He was put in the Lincoln Room. When he came to undress, he looked at the bed, shuffled around it, staring in awe. But he could not bring himself to lie in it. He bedded down on the sofa.
I don’t know if he was ever apprised of the irony: in Lincoln’s day the bed wasn’t there; the sofa was.”
Source unknown
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