Sunday, June 1, 2003 - And least, but not last, is the Ninth Law of Cartoon Physics which I’m sure you’ve already guessed — Everything falls faster than an anvil. While I’m cleaning house, here’s the four last alphabet phrases. VANISHING VIPERS VEX VOLUPTUOUS VENISON. WEATHERPROOF WALRUSES WALTZ WITH WILY WEASALS. YONDER YAWNING YAKS, YEARNING YELLOW YAMS, YIELDED. And ZEALOUS ZEBRAS ZIGZAG, ZESTFULLY ZOOMING. “What the deuce,” asks the ace, “do the alphabet aggregates signify?” Um, filler? I had used them as placeholders in Bane’s $100,000 Challenge until I knew what the real clues would be. Does this help solve the Challenge? No. What bother, then? Waste makes haste.

Monday, June 2, 2003 - There are three kinds of mathematicians: those who can count and those who can’t.What’s wrong with lawyer jokes? Lawyers don’t think they’re funny, and nobody else thinks they’re jokes.A chemist walks into a pharmacy and asks the pharmacist, “Do you have any acetylsalicylic acid?” “You mean aspirin?” replies the pharmacist. “That’s it, I can never remember that word,” says the chemist.Everyone considered the geologist a nice guy and, hearing of this, the man complained “Could I at least be a gneiss guy and be taken for granite?”The psychologist asked his patient “Which of the following words does not fit in: Anger, Greed, Jealousy, and Love.” The patient replied “And.”
Tuesday, June 3, 2003 - Off his head. Off his rocker. Off his trolley. Oscar Levant admits “There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.” Albert Einstein postulates “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” (much like computer programming). R. D. Lang decides that “Insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.” Nathaniel Emmons observes “Insanity destroys reason, but not wit.” Oliver Wendell Holmes offers “Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.” Sam Levenson states “Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.”
Wednesday, June 4, 2003 - As mad as a hatter. As mad as a march hare. As mad as a wet hen. As mad as a bear with a sore head. Note the subtle drift from mad as crazy to mad as angry. To the former, consider the nuances of not playing with a full deck versus not dealing from a full deck. To the ladder, 4 out of 5 firemen recommend them. A man visiting Las Vegas for the first time calls the fire department and shouts, “Help me, my hotel room is on fire!” The fireman asks “Which hotel is it?” The man shouts “I can’t remember! It’s my first night here!” The fireman asks “Then how do you expect us to get there?” The man shouts “What do you mean ‘how’? Don’t you have those big red trucks in Vegas?” — <rim shot>
Thursday, June 5, 2003 - A man was given the job of painting the white lines down the middle of a highway. On his first day he painted six miles; the next day three miles; the following day less than a mile. When the foreman asked the man why he kept painting less each day, he replied “I just can’t do any better. Each day I keep getting farther away from the paint can.” Steven Wright adds “It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.” Sean O’Casey ponders “All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.” And Art Linkletter states “The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence and obsolescence.”

Friday, June 6, 2003 - Checkout time at the supermarket. The cashier crumples the long-as-my-arm grocery receipt into my hand. Then she slaps the dollar bills on top of it. And then she dumps the coins on top of that. Now I have only one hand left to (a) grab my bags of groceries and flee to a safe area to figure this all out, or (b), stuff the handful into my shirt pocket and flee in a similar manner, using both hands to carry groceries. Note neither method allows me to count the change before I vacate the one spot where I might be able to readily contest the amount of the change. Or (c), stand there like Goober from Mayberry, frozen in the headlights, until the mob rule of everyone waiting in line heckles me on my way.

Saturday, June 7, 2003 - No digital trickery was employed in evoking the illusion of a shrunken skull. In 1917, the Eastman Kodak Company verified that there was absolutely no photographic trickery or retouching involved in the so-called Cottingley Fairies photographs taken by Elsie Wright, age 16, and her cousin Frances Griffiths, age 10. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle declared the photos to be genuine and wrote a book on the subject. Indeed, the girls had used no photographic trickery. They had simply posed with paper cutouts of their own making. A 1997 film FairyTale: A True Story retells the tale and mysteriously concludes that the fairies were real, employing state-of-the-art Hollywood special effects as proof of such.