Amazing untrue records

[Paul Beardsley]

Isn't that Quidditch?

Dunno but it's my favourite AUR in quite a while. It just flows. And you can hear the anger, the contempt, the disbelief and the smug superiority in the text without having a clue what it's on about.

I mean, who is this Cadmus Smith anyway? Does anyone honestly think he could so much as fletch a first rostrum without a lactose-intolerant subscription to Shirk Monthly? No, I didn't think so. People like him think they're disbanding the PTA when the truth is they're writing sycophantic overtures to Pope Thursday.

[mike alexander]

All I know is that when the Rickburners play the Chartists this weekend they'd better have their plums in a row, or someone's merkin is going to get combed but good.

[Paul Beardsley]

Amazing Records - True or Untrue?

Over the years many people in the music industry have attempted to get themselves back in the public eye, and make some money, by releasing a remixed version of one of their fondly (or otherwise) remembered singles from yesteryear.

Below are the titles of some amazing records. Can you tell which are real, and which ones I made up?

Gary Numan - E-type (remix of Cars)
John Foxx - Overpass (remix of Underpass)
Kate Bush - Agnes Grey (remix of Wuthering Heights)
New Order - Blue Monday 4 (third remix of Blue Monday)
Genesis - Silent Sun (remix of The Silent Sun)
Henry VIII - Chop My Boleyn Up (remix of Greensleeves)
Morecambe and Wise - Bring Me 28 Days Later (remix of Bring Me Sunshine)
The Moody Blues - Nights in Off-White Satin (remix of Ride My Seesaw)
Charles Darwin - Descent of Da Man (remix of The Darwin Rap)

[mike alexander]

WORLD'S GREATEST PROOF TEST

An investigation by the Occupational Health and Safety Adminsitration (OHSA) into the possibly job-related death of Mr. J Henry while working on the Big Bend Tunnel project of the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) railroad has been completed. Preliminary findings indicate that

a) Mr. Henry died of heat stroke (not cardiac arrest as originally believed) following a period of extended exertion in the Big Bend tunnel. Evidence from eyewitnesses indicate that he was 'sweating a river' and did not pause for necessary work breaks, nor did he adhere to elementary precuations pertaining to rehydration and/or electrolyte loss during prolonged manual exertion. The possibility of cardiac irregularity due to ion depletion cannot be ruled out, but his immediate family ("Polly Ann", aka "Lucy") refused to allow exhumation of the body to test for this variable. Mr. Henry, by ignoring the most basic precautions for working under such conditions, appears to have brought his demise upon himself.

b) The management of C&O is cited for allowing Mr. Henry to use a larger than approved sledge hanmmer in his work. Witnesses testified that he "was swinging fifteen pounds from his hips on down", when an eight pound hammer is the largest approved without special permit.

c) Mr. Henry appeared to exhibit signs of obsessive-complusive disorder, as evidenced by his 'competition' with an automated, steam-powered rock drill (he was heard to say, "Befoah I let that drill beat me I'l die wif my hammer in my hand, Lawd God."). This mental condition may have directly contributed to his inability to stop working before he had caused himself irremediable physical injury. C&O is not cited for this problem, but it is suggested that team captains be instructed to be alert for similar problems arising in the future.

d) While not forbidden, C&O should, in the future, consider the replacement of manual blast-hole drilling with automated equipment. The company has indicated it already plans to do this, so that workers like Mr. Henry can pound sand.

[mike alexander]

MOST UNUSUAL PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
Mr. Wyatt Earp of San Francisco, California, has declared his intention to run for President of the United States.

Citing his past success at 'Cleaning up Dodge', Earp says that problems such as Iran or oil prices are "Nothing compared to the Clanton gang, and look what I did to them." He noted that both crime and total population of Dodge City, Kansas declined significantly during his tenure as sheriff.

Unusually early in the campaign, he has named William 'Bat' Masterson as his running mate, saying that "Anyone who can wear a derby without being laughed at has some moxie in my book."

Mr. Earp tackled the question of his present dead state by noting the US Constitution does not require a candidate to be alive, but over thirty five years of age and a natural-born citizen. When a reporter noted that he had actually been born in Canada, Mr. Earp shot him.

There were no more questions.

[mike alexander]

Henry VIII - Chop My Boleyn Up (remix of Greensleeves)

Now all I can think of is Sid James in "Carry on Henry". There was a great "Greensleeves" parody song that I can only remember bits of (my superpowers only extend to remembering commercials). VERY roughly

I gave my love a bracelet of gold
something something growing old
but the thing was false and did corrode
And now everyone's calling her greensleeves


Unless it was Flanders and Swan. Does anyone else remember?


I also enjoyed "Carry on Cleo"

"Infamy! Infamy! They all have it in fa me!"

"Oops! I was resting on me laurels."

"They must have milked those asses to a standstill."

[Senor Molinero]

LEAST CONCLUSIVE EXPEDITION

1953 was not a good year for Thor Haagen-Daaz. All other extremities of the Earth having already been reached, he decided to be the first explorer to reach the East Pole. In his specially constructed amphibious vehicle, the Fitzcarraldo, Haagen-Daaz set off from the fictional equatorial island of Sri Kanda with his trusty companion Virgil Tibbs. Following the logic of how to reach the North or South Poles (just follow the compass until it turns) they forged due East. After four years of fruitless travelling (they ate only vegetables on the journey) Haagen-Daaz and Tibbs got into an argument over whether the tomato was a fruit or a vegetable and split the party, Haagen-Daaz continuing East and Tibbs returning West by hire car in search of the West Pole. Their paths crossed again in Ecuador and Equatorial Guinea where invariably they would shout at each other "Fruit!" and "Vegetable!". The separate expeditions continue to this day without resolve.

[peteshimmon]

A DAY IN THE YEAR.

Chap got out of bed and opened the curtains.
A brillient blue cloudless sky was visible,
the trees were heavy with fresh spring leaves.
He found a thick envelope on the front doormat
containing 50 crisp new twenty pound notes.
He made some coffee. After a while he dressed
and set out for a short walk to the local shops
where he purchased a morning paper and some
blackcurrent juice cartons. The air was fresh
as a cool northern breeze was apparent. The
birdsong enlivened the mood. The sky remained
clear with wall to wall sunshine. Back home he
started reading the newspaper stories, one
about the national airports strike. The
political cartoon was especially sharp and
funny. Then he woke up.

[KaiYeves]

I also enjoyed "Carry on Cleo"
"Infamy! Infamy! They all have it in fa me!"
"Oops! I was resting on me laurels."
"They must have milked those asses to a standstill."

"Dead men tell no lies, but spiritualists sometimes do."

[Senor Molinero]

SHORTEST-LIVED RACING COLOUR

At the 1956 Absentia F1 Grand Prix, hels at the Burgerring circuit, the McWilliams team trialled the new colour British Racing Puce. After copious vomiting by all members of the team, it was soon discontinued in favour of the now universally accepted colour, British Racing Taupe.

[Maksutov]

GREATEST CONTRADICTION OF ACCEPTED KNOWLEDGE

Mr. Perth Amboy of Sandy Hook, NJ, while taking a class in solid geometry at the HoHoKus School of Business and Medical Sciences, realized that the shortest distance between two points is not always a line or a great circle or variations on these premises. Instead, in his term paper, Mr. Amboy proposed that for two points that share the same location, the shortest distance is not a two-dimensional feature. Instead he proposed it is a point.

Mr. Amboy received a failing grade on his term paper and is currently employed as a toll collector at Exit 14, a point on the New Jersey Turnpike, which is the shortest route between Philadelphia and New York City.

[peteshimmon]

BEST EVER AMENDMENT TO AN ANNOYING SONG.

Ten sticks of gelignite hanging on the wall
Ten sticks of ....

which quickly moves to no sticks of gelignite
and no effing wall! Thanks to the Army. Or it
might have been the Air Force!

[Paul Beardsley]

Just in case anyone was sad enough to wonder about these:

Amazing Records - True or Untrue?

Over the years many people in the music industry have attempted to get themselves back in the public eye, and make some money, by releasing a remixed version of one of their fondly (or otherwise) remembered singles from yesteryear.

Below are the titles of some amazing records. Can you tell which are real, and which ones I made up?

Here are the answers.

Gary Numan - E-type (remix of Cars)

True.

John Foxx - Overpass (remix of Underpass)

True.

Kate Bush - Agnes Grey (remix of Wuthering Heights)

Untrue.

New Order - Blue Monday 4 (third remix of Blue Monday)

Untrue, probably, but they did seem to release an awful lot of very slightly different versions of rapidly hammering a nail into a wall. "I see a ship in the harbour/I can and shall obey/ But if it wasn't for your misfortune/I'd be a heavenly person today." How catchy is that?

Genesis - Silent Sun (remix of The Silent Sun)

True. Silent Sun (without a The) was a stereo version of The Silent Sun, and very slightly shorter.

Henry VIII - Chop My Boleyn Up (remix of Greensleeves)

Untrue.

Morecambe and Wise - Bring Me 28 Days Later (remix of Bring Me Sunshine)

Untrue.

The Moody Blues - Nights in Off-White Satin (remix of Ride My Seesaw)

Untrue.

Charles Darwin - Descent of Da Man (remix of The Darwin Rap)

Untrue.

[mike alexander]

They all sounded untrue to me, and I didn't recognize 2/3 of them, anyway. In fact I just counted instead of guessing and it was exactly 2/3.

Amazing.

[mike alexander]

WORST CANDY OR SNACK BAR
Marketed from 1959 through 1966, the Slag Bar achieved respectable sales in the Chicago metropolitan area. Using a cartoon figure of Joe Magerac in a pose reminiscent of James Montgomery Flagg's famous Uncle Sam, Joe pointed directly at the customer and asked, "Are you man enough to eat Slag?"

The bar itself was made from chocolate-covered open hearth slag and was available in plain or almond. Sales took off quickly following its introduction, but market penetration never got much east of Gary, Indiana or west of Schaumberg, Illinois, despite small pockets in Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

The company went out of business in 1966. A revival was attempted in 2002 under the name Slag Lite, but with the demise of the American steel industry domestic slag was unavailable and the cost of importing Chinese slag became prohibitive.

Currently, an investment group is looking into a Chinese import similar to Slag but derived from the nonferrous metals industry, called Red Lead.

[mike alexander]

MOST AMAZING POLITICAL DEBATE
The most amazing political debate ever held occurred on September 13, 1994 in the town of Buchtel, Ohio, during elections for the town school board. In answer to the question posed by Muriel deGreese ("Given the reluctance of the electorate in the past seven elections to pass a bond paid for by an increase in the property tax levy, how would you propose to purchase newer school books that include, for example, mention of heavier-than-air flight?"), candidate Philo T. Phangworthy answered by saying that the future of mankind is written in the stars, and that by prayerful supplication it was possible to cause books to materialize containg reliable facts up to and including World War II.

His position was immediately attacked by rival Millicent Spelt, who asked sarcastically whether Phangworthy believed in astrology, and said that any materialization would have to include the Vietnam war, "So that our children can learn what happens when a government lies to its people."

She was in her turn attacked by retired Maj. Arnold 'Hap' Beulahland, who noted that most people who have studied the matter now agree that the Vietnam war was in the process of being won when ideologically blinded peace activists and beatniks withdrew funding to the South Vietnam government, causing its collapse. Beaulahland was called out by Depmsey Jackson, who explained that the term 'beatnik' was a corruption of 'beat' coined by Herb Caen at the San Francisco Examiner in tart reply to Ginsberg, Kerouac and the like in the late 40's who first used 'beat' to indicate a complete openness to new experience.

Laura Dogwood then opined that 'Howl', far from being a senseless mishmash of random words, caught the Zetigeist perfectly with its "rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years." This brought a demurral from Allison Chalmers, who said she stood foresquare against cannibalism in any form, and was rebuked by Larry Pournelle who asked what she thought transubstantiation was?

At this point Mr. Phangworthy noted that transubstantiation was achieved by prayerful supplication, and the entire debate happened again, using exactly the same words and solving nothing.

Okay, this isn't so amazing, after all.

[peteshimmon]

Well you are not mined out yet Mike. Sounds
like you are covering the period the slang
word "cool" came into existance because some
kid in your mid west misspelt "good". Thats
my understanding anyway.

Cool means Good and sophisticated.

Good means spiritually OK.

Cool also means getting cold.

Cool means I take a dim view of an F, teacher!

[mike alexander]

Peteshimmon wrote:
Sounds like you are covering the period the slang
word "cool" came into existance because some
kid in your mid west misspelt "good". Thats
my understanding anyway.

Going to have to correct you here. Since I grew up in the Midwest (not mid west) I can attest that 'cool' is not a mispelled (not misspelt, since we never grew spelt, either) version of 'good'. It is a misspelling (or perhaps misspelting) of 'coal', which was abundant in the Midwest at the time (and still is). Originally, coal miners would indicate a superlative with the phrase "That's sixteen tons worth of good!", since that was the per diem quota of coal dug by a miner. Eventually they got tired of saying the whole phrase and, since everyone knew what they were talking about, just substituted "Coal!" for the longer phrase. The single-syllable expression caught on among jazz artists in New York in the 1930's, and since they were overwhelmingly black, 'coal' came to mean 'black jazz player', associating 'coal' with 'hip'. During the Great Vowel Shift of the 1940's, as more black Americans migrated to big cities, giving them a badly-needed infusion of soul (which, I note, rhymes with coal), the Caucasian population began to pronounce 'oa' as 'oo', probably as a result of partial deafness caused by working in noisy defence plants. By the time the war was over the new pronunciation had become firmly entrenched in the popular culture.

An interesting sidelight of this linguistic change was the demise of the home coal heating industry (prior to WWII most American homes were heated with coal). Afterward, when a homeowner called and requested a 'load of cool' he got a jazz ensemble instead to two tons of anthracite. Eventually everyone switched to electricity or gas and jazz went back to the soulful, hip people it really belonged to in the first place.

[Paul Beardsley]

You don't just learn astronomy here - you learn history too!

[Maksutov]

[edit]Eventually everyone switched to electricity or gas and jazz went back to the soulful, hip people it really belonged to in the first place.

You forget that some of them switched to feuell earl, and spent the rest of their lives stalking the wild asparagus while duking it out with their local chandlers.

[mike alexander]

And I forgot Texas, where they used awl, use awl, and will use awl until awl the awl's used up.

[korjik]

And I forgot Texas, where they used awl, use awl, and will use awl until awl the awl's used up.

And after the awl is used up, we're switchin to nucular power!

[Siguy]

SECOND STRANGEST ANIMAL NOISE
The second stranges noise made by a non-lingual creature is the call of the Quodluxu Birds of the forest of Schletchervin on Xacherlando V. An onomatopoeia of the noise would infact, be the word onomatopoeia. They also have a rare mating call that coincedentally sounds like "tomcroooose, tomcroooose"
STRANGEST ANIMAL NOISE
The strangest animal noise is the mating call of the Galgaponi Rudophones in the desert of Galgaponi, which sounds almost exactly like "Excuse me sir, but is that a rocket in your pocket?". Passing travelers are often embarassed on hearing the call.

[Paul Beardsley]

An onomatopoeia of the noise would infact, be the word onomatopoeia.

I can't believe this joke hasn't been done before, but...

(Quickly scans the entire Internet.)

...nope, it definitely hasn't.

So we have an Amazing True Record for "newest recursive joke" in the Amazing Untrue Records thread!

[mike alexander]

Something new under the sun!

Take that, Koheleth!

[Paul Beardsley]

The second most recent recursive "joke" I heard was, "Political correctness is a euphemism for 'euphemism'."

I also came up with, "'Political correctness gone mad' is a synonym for 'political correctness'."

Shut up you silly man! You're not funny and you're not clever.

Yeah, but at least I exist.

Touche!

[mike alexander]

MOST LOGICALLY ILLOGICAL DEVICE
Dr. Koji McMullen of the Cetacean Research Center in Yoyomama, Japan has filed a patent for a device to help dispose of the nine hundred or so whales the Center captures every year for its delicious research on the animals. The Macrowave Oven is almost thirty meters long, intended to allow even a large whale like a humpback to be studied to tender perfection.

Unfortunately, Dr. McMullen increased the wavelength of the radiation used (hence 'Macrowave') to fit the oven cavity ("bigger animals need bigger microwaves," he was quoted), with the result that the whale is processed very slowly. On the other hand, this explains some very alarming whale songs heard by mobile telephone users.

[Paul Beardsley]

Most Recursive Instance of Advertising

In 2006, Dr Bert Self of Hayling Island sent out a load of spam urging people to buy Spam.

[mike alexander]

MOST USELESS SCIENTIFIC METHOD
In 1998 Dr. Gaylord Perry of The Ohio State University in University, Ohio, announced a new way to determine the age of ancient materials. Using his method of carbon-13 dating he was able to obtain amazingly precise and reproducible results.

He is still working on the problem of why all his samples seem to give the same date.

[KaiYeves]

Most Ironic Name
The Great Spamdini, escape artist who hales from Thisisso Ghetto, does not own a computer.