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Tell Me a Funny Story

So this one smart lawyer goes across the border to Cuba and buys like, 30 extremely expensive, rare, rare cigars. He comes back to America, and gets them insured for thousands and thousands of dollars. Well, being a smartass, he smokes them all...and then calls the insurance company and says he wants to collect the insurance money. According to him, the cigars were all burned in a series of small fires. Well, they went to court and the judge ordered the insurance company to pay up, since it was never stipulated in the contract that the cigars could not be burned. So the company payed up...and proceeded to sue him for 30 counts of arson. He is now serving 3 years in prison.
 
there once was a chick named stefka
whose breastsss i wanted to sex-a
i asked for a show
but the ho said no
so i stroked it to someone else-a
 
Always Trying to Escape

When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no
good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some
humanities courses to get more "culture." Besides the English classes
required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I
found astronomy -- as a humanities course! So that year I escaped with
astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French
literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest
thing to science I could find.
Before I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about
the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill
had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of
addressing myself to political liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty
in social occasions -- the problem of having to fake and lie in order to be
polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to
the "destruction of the moral fiber of society." An interesting question,
but not the one we were supposed to discuss.
Another essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, "On a Piece of Chalk,"
in which he describes how an ordinary piece of chalk he is holding is the
remains from animal bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so
that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is now
used to convey ideas through writing on the blackboard.
But again, instead of criticizing the essay assigned to us, I wrote a
parody called, "On a Piece of Dust," about how dust makes the colors of the
sunset and precipitates the rain, and so on. I was always a faker, always
trying to escape.
But when we had to write a theme on Goethe's Faust, it was hopeless!
The work was too long to make a parody of it or to invent something else. I
was storming back and forth in the fraternity saying, "I can't do it. I'm
just not gonna do it. I ain't gonna do it!"
One of my fraternity brothers said, "OK, Feynman, you're not gonna do
it. But the professor will think you didn't do it because you don't want to
do the work. You oughta write a theme on something -- same number of words
-- and hand it in with a note saying that you just couldn't understand the
Faust, you haven't got the heart for it, and that it's impossible for you to
write a theme on it."
So I did that. I wrote a long theme, "On the Limitations of Reason." I
had thought about scientific techniques for solving problems, and how there
are certain limitations: moral values cannot be decided by scientific
methods, yak, yak, yak, and so on.
Then another fraternity brother offered some more advice. "Feynman," he
said, "it ain't gonna work, handing in a theme that's got nothing to do with
Faust. What you oughta do is work that thing you wrote into the Faust."
"Ridiculous!" I said.
But the other fraternity guys think it's a good idea.
"All right, all right!" I say, protesting. "I'll try."
So I added half a page to what I had already written, and said that
Mephistopheles represents reason, and Faust represents the spirit, and
Goethe is trying to show the limitations of reason. I stirred it up, cranked
it all in, and handed in my theme.
The professor had us each come in individually to discuss our theme. I
went in expecting the worst.
He said, "The introductory material is fine, but the Faust material is
a bit too brief. Otherwise, it's very good -- B+ ." I escaped again!
Now to the philosophy class. The course was taught by an old bearded
professor named Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class, and
he would mumble along, and I couldn't understand a thing. The other people
in the class seemed to understand him better, but they didn't seem to pay
any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about one-sixteenth-inch,
and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers and
drill holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week.
Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went "wugga
mugga mugga wugga wugga..." and everybody got excited! They were all talking
to each other and discussing, so I figured he'd said something interesting,
thank God! I wondered what it was?
I asked somebody, and they said, "We have to write a theme, and hand it
in in four weeks."
"A theme on what?"
"On what he's been talking about all year."
I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term
that I could remember was a moment when there came this upwelling,
"muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmuggawugga," and phoom! -- it sank back into
chaos.
This "stream of consciousness" reminded me of a problem my father had
given to me many years before. He said, "Suppose some Martians were to come
down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually
active. Suppose they didn't have this crazy phenomenon that we have, called
sleep. So they ask you the question: 'How does it feel to go to sleep? What
happens when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop, or do they
move less aanndd lleeessss rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? How
does the mind actually turn off?"
I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the
stream of consciousness end, when you go to sleep?
So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme. I
would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep.
And I'd watch what happened, when I went to sleep.
Then at night, I'd go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when
I could make observations -- it was very good!
At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do
with falling asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking
by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually.
Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two
things at once. I discovered this when I was talking internally to myself
about something, and while I was doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes
connected to the end of my bed, going through some pulleys, and winding
around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn't aware that I was
imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch on
the other rope, and they wouldn't wind up smoothly. But I said, internally,
"Oh, the tension will take care of that," and this interrupted the first
thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at
once.
I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they
become less and less logically interconnected. You don't notice that they're
not logically connected until you ask yourself, "What made me think of
that?" and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember what
the hell did make you think of that!
So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is
that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they're completely
disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep.
After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and
explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out
that all of these observations were made while I was watching myself fall
asleep, and I don't really know what it's like to fall asleep when I'm not
watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which
pointed out this problem of introspection:

I wonder why. I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder!

We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor
reads one of them: "Mum bum wugga mum bum..." I can't tell what the guy
wrote.
He reads another theme: "Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga..." I don't
know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes:

Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh.
Uh wugga wugga wugga.
I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh
Uh wugga wugga wugga.

"Aha!" I say. "That's my theme!" I honestly didn't recognize it until
the end.
After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept
practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was
having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten
all the way down, into the sleep itself!
In the first part of the dream I'm on top of a train and we're
approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the
tunnel -- whoosh! I say to myself, "So you can get the feeling of fear, and
you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel."
I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you
dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color.
By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the
train lurching about. I say to myself, "So you can get kinesthetic feelings
in a dream." I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and I
see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are -- not
mannequins, but three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty
good!
I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead
as I go, when I say to myself, "Hey! It would be interesting to get excited
-- sexually -- so I think I'll go back into the other car." I discovered
that I could turn around, and walk back through the train -- I could control
the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window,
and I see three old guys playing violins -- but they turned back into girls!
So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly.
Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually,
saying things like, "Wow! It's working!" and I woke up.
I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking
myself, "Am I really dreaming in color?" I wondered, "How accurately do you
see something?"
The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and
she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see each hair. You know how
there's a little area of color just where the sun is reflecting -- the
diffraction effect, I could see that! I could see each hair as sharp as you
want: perfect vision!
Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a
doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the
tack. So the "seeing department" arid the "feeling department" of the brain
seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they don't have
to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and there's no thumbtack. I
run my finger down the doorframe, and I feel the tack!
Another time I'm dreaming and I hear "knock-knock; knock-knock."
Something was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not
perfectly -- it seemed sort of foreign. I thought: "Absolutely guaranteed
that this knocking is coming from outside my dream, and I've invented this
part of the dream to fit with it. I've got to wake up and find out what the
hell it is."
The knocking is still going, I wake up, and... Dead silence. There was
nothing. So it wasn't connected to the outside.
Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises
into their dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully "watching from
below," and sure the noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasn't.
During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of
waking up was a rather fearful one. As you're beginning to wake up there's a
moment when you feel rigid and tied down, or underneath many layers of
cotton batting. It's hard to explain, but there's a moment when you get the
feeling you can't get out; you're not sure you can wake up. So I would have
to tell myself -- after I was awake -- that that's ridiculous. There's no
disease I know of where a person falls asleep naturally and can't wake up.
You can always wake up. And after talking to myself many times like that, I
became less and less afraid, and in fact I found the process of waking up
rather thrilling -- something like a roller coaster: After a while you're
not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little bit.
You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped
(which it has for the most part; it's happened just a few times since). I'm
dreaming one night as usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in
front of me a pennant. I answer for the twenty-fifth time, "Yes, I'm
dreaming in color," and then I realize that I've been sleeping with the back
of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that
the back of my head is soft. I think, "Aha! That's why I've been able to
make all these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my
visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head, and
I can make these observations any time I want. So I think I'll stop making
observations on this one, and go into deeper sleep."
When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my
head soft. Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my
brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn't do it any more.
As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One
of the reasons that I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to
how you can see an image, of a person, for example, when your eyes are
closed, and nothing's coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve
discharges, but you can't get the nerves to discharge in exactly the same
delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at
something. Well then, how could I "see" in color, and in better detail, when
I was asleep?
I decided there must be an "interpretation department." When you are
actually looking at something -- a man, a lamp, or a wall -- you don't just
see blotches of color. Something tells you what it is; it has to be
interpreted. When you're dreaming, this interpretation department is still
operating, but it's all slopped up. It's telling you that you're seeing a
human hair in the greatest detail, when it isn't true. It's interpreting the
random junk entering the brain as a clear image.
One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife
was from a family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long
discussion about dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are
symbols in dreams that can be interpreted psychoanalytically. I didn't
believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an interesting dream: We're
playing a game on a billiard table with three balls -- a white ball, a green
ball, and a gray ball -- and the name of the game is "titsies." There was
something about trying to get the balls into the pocket: the white ball and
the green ball are easy to sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I can't
get to it.
I wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the
game gives it away, of course -- them's girls! The white ball was easy to
figure out, because I was going out, sneakily, with a married woman who
worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The
green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two nights before to a
drive-in movie with a girl in a green dress. But the gray one -- what the
hell was the gray one? I knew it had to be somebody; I felt it. It's like
when you're trying to remember a name, and it's on the tip of your tongue,
but you can't get it.
It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a
girl I liked very much, who had gone to Italy about two or three months
before. She was a very nice girl, and I had decided that when she came back
I was going to see her again. I don't know if she wore a gray suit, but it
was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she was the gray one.
I went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be right --
there is something to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my
interesting dream, he said, "No, that one was too perfect -- too cut and
dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis."
 
An American is having breakfast, in Paris, one morning (coffee, croissants, bread, butter and jam) when a Frenchman, chewing bubble-gum, sits down next to him The American ignores the Frenchman who, nevertheless, starts a conversation.

Frenchman: "You American folk eat the whole bread??"

American (in a bad mood): "Of course."

Frenchman: (after blowing a huge bubble) "We don't. In France, we only eat what's inside. The crusts we collect in a container, recycle it, transform them into croissants and sell them to the states." The Frenchman has a smirk on his face.

The American listens in silence.

The Frenchman persists: "Do you eat jelly with the bread??"

American: "Of Course."

Frenchman: (cracking his bubble-gum between his teeth and chuckling).

"We don't. In France we eat fresh fruit for breakfast, then we put all the peels, seeds, and leftovers in containers, recycle them, transform them into jam, and sell the jam to the states."

After a moment of silence, The American then asks: "Do you have sex in France?"

Frenchman: "Why of course we do", he says with a big smirk.

American: "And what do you do with the condoms once you've used them?"

Frenchman: "We throw them away, of course."

American: "We don't. In America, we put them in a container, recycle them, melt them down into bubble-gum, and sell them to France."
 
One more and I'm going to bed.


> > > A gentleman asked a waiter to take a bottle of Pinot Noir to an
> > > attractive woman he spotted dining alone. The waiter took the
Pinot to the woman and said, "This is from the gentleman seated over
> > > there," indicating the sender.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > She regarded the wine coolly for a second, not looking at the
man, and decided to send a reply note to the man. The waiter, who was
lingering for a response, took the note from her and conveyed it to the
gentleman.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > The note read:
> > > "For me to accept this bottle, you need to have a Mercedes in
your garage, a million dollars in the bank, and 7 inches in your pants."
> > >
> > > After reading the note, the man decided to compose one of his own
in return. He folded the note, handed it to the waiter and instructed
him to return this to the woman.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > It read: "For your information, I have a Ferrari Maranello, a BMW
Z8, a Mercedes CL600 and a Porsche Turbo in my garage. There is over
twenty million dollars in my bank account. But, not even for a woman as
beautiful as
> > >
> > > you, would I cut three inches off. Just send the bottle back.....
 
avidinternet said:
One more and I'm going to bed.


> > > A gentleman asked a waiter to take a bottle of Pinot Noir to an
> > > attractive woman he spotted dining alone. The waiter took the
Pinot to the woman and said, "This is from the gentleman seated over
> > > there," indicating the sender.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > She regarded the wine coolly for a second, not looking at the
man, and decided to send a reply note to the man. The waiter, who was
lingering for a response, took the note from her and conveyed it to the
gentleman.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > The note read:
> > > "For me to accept this bottle, you need to have a Mercedes in
your garage, a million dollars in the bank, and 7 inches in your pants."
> > >
> > > After reading the note, the man decided to compose one of his own
in return. He folded the note, handed it to the waiter and instructed
him to return this to the woman.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > It read: "For your information, I have a Ferrari Maranello, a BMW
Z8, a Mercedes CL600 and a Porsche Turbo in my garage. There is over
twenty million dollars in my bank account. But, not even for a woman as
beautiful as
> > >
> > > you, would I cut three inches off. Just send the bottle back.....

was that Matt the skywalker?
 
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