Daily Dose - 010109 - Salvation Army, hemophiliac, It's your round Donkey, Urban Legends Debunked, DDL, Hey Martha

A drunk went into a telephone booth and dialed at random.

"Salvation Army," was the answer.

"What do you do?" asked the man.

"We save wicked men and women," came the reply.

"Okay, save me a wicked woman for Saturday night."

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A streetwalker was visiting her doctor for a regular checkup.

"Any specific problems you should tell me about?" the doctor asked.

"Well, I have noticed lately that if I get even the tiniest cut, it seems to bleed for hours," she replied. "Do you think I might be a hemophiliac?"

"Well," the doctor answered, "hemophilia is a genetic disorder and it is more often found in men, but it is possible for a woman to be a hemophiliac. Tell me, how much you lose when you have your period?" the doctor inquired.

After calculating for a moment the hooker replied, "Oh, about seven or eight hundred dollars, I guess."

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These two men walked into a bar.

"What do you want to drink, Donkey?" one of the men asked.

"A..A...A pa...pa..pi..pint o..of gi...gi..gi Guinness A..a pint of Guinness please."

The other man goes up to the bar. "Two pints of Guinness for me and my mate Donkey." The guy takes the drinks back. "Here you go,Donkey."

Later when they finished their drinks the guy says to Donkey, "It's your round Donkey. Go get us a pint o' Guinness."

Donkey goes to the bar. "T..T...T..two pa..pa...pa..pi..pints o..o..of gi.. gin..gi..Guinness. Two pints of Guinness please."

When the barman was sure Donkey's friend wasn't listening he said, "I think it's an awful cheek him calling you Donkey."

"Oh," Donkey replies, "He..aw he..aw he..aw he always calls me that."

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Urban Legends Debunked

Claim: A Social Security number "issued" by Woolworth was used by thousands of people.

Status: True.

Origins: If there were a prize for the most abused Social Security number, 078-05-1120 would win it hands down. What started out as an ordinary number originally issued to a middle-aged secretary in New York state was at the height of its popularity claimed by more than 40,000 people.

It's hard to now imagine a time without Social Security numbers because they've grown to be so much a part of everyone's identity. Yet indeed there was a time when what we now take for granted was brand-spanking new. The first SSNs were issued in November 1936. By the end of 1937, 37,139,000 of them had been handed out. Even so, they were still very much the new thing and not at all understood. Which set the stage for what was about to happen.

In 1938, a wallet manufacturer figured he could better promote his wares by showing how the new Social Security card would look in it. A sample card, meant strictly for display purposes, was inserted in each wallet. The number that appeared on it belonged to Mrs. Hilda Schrader Whitcher, secretary to the wallet manufacturer.

How could any reasonable person have guessed this card would be mistaken for the real thing? It was half the size of the real thing, was printed all in red, and had the word "specimen" written across the face of it. But it was. Either through stupidity or sheer bloody-mindedness, thousands of those who purchased wallets containing the specimen card adopted its number as their own. In the peak year of 1943, 5,755 people were using Hilda's number. Fathers passed it on to sons, and mothers to daughters, keeping it alive for decades.

In an effort to curb the abuse, the Social Security Administration voided the number (it gave Hilda a new one) and did what it could to publicize that it was incorrect to use it. To little avail, however -- the number continued to turn up as late as 1977. (In that year, 12 people were found to still be using the SSN "issued by Woolworth." The year previous, 40 had had that notion, so at least things were getting better) In all, over 40,000 people have reported the Woolworth number as their own throughout the years.

There have been other cases where numbers on mock Social Security cards have been preempted for widespread use, but never anything on the scale of the abuse 078-05-1120 was subjected to. Indeed, one embarassing episode was the fault of the Social Security Board itself. In 1940 the Board published a pamphlet explaining the new program. On the pamphlet's cover was an illustration of a card bearing the made-up number 219-09-9999. Sure enough, in 1962 a woman presented herself to the Provo, Utah, Social Security office complaining that her new employer was refusing to accept her SSN -- 219-09-9999. When it was explained that this could not possibly be her number, she whipped out her copy of the 1940 pamphlet to prove that yes indeed it was!

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DDL

There was a young lady named Nelly
Whose tits would jiggle like jelly.
They could tickle her twat
Or be tied in a knot,
And could even swat flies on her belly.

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If Labor Day means that I get a day off from my job, then....

Does Valentine's Day mean that I get a day off from my girlfriend?

__________________________

In order to discover who you are,...

first learn who everybody else is;

You're what's left!

__________________________

"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

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Hey Martha (true)

Monday, July 24, 2000

Politician quotes cockroach

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Politicians love quotations: Shakespeare, Lincoln, Churchill.

On the House floor, Rep. Dave Obey, D-Wis., quotes Archy the Cockroach -- a lot.

Archy is one of the great insects of letters, a bard in a bug's body created by late New York newspaperman Don Marquis more than 80 years ago.

Obey's Web site even features the roach. He uses him in correspondence, and totes a battered volume stuffed with notecards about Archy he calls his "philosophical bible."

"It's what I'm about," said Obey, who has served in the House since 1969. "Looking at the world from the viewpoint of a bug, you're bound to see things you don't see if you're sitting in a corporate boardroom or government office somewhere."

In an exchange three years ago, Obey quoted Archy as he argued against slashing the National Endowment for the Arts. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., responded: "I think Charlie the Cockroach, whatever his name, would feel better if he had the right to control his own destiny instead of other people controlling it."