| Cover story |
Just for fun
Three
tale tales we couldn’t resist passing along Counting
cattle The
old man in his overalls looks at the young man, obviously a yuppie in
his Brioni suit, Ray-ban
sunglasses and YSL tie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and
calmly drawls, "Sure, Why not?" The
yuppie parks his car, gets out, dusts his Gucci shoes, whips out his
Dell notebook computer, connects it to his AT&T cell phone, and
surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite
navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then
feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an
ultra-high-resolution photo. The
young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it
to an image processing facility in Finally,
he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized
HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the old Ozarker and says,
"You have exactly 158 cows and calves." “That's
right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the old
Ozarker. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on
amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then
the Ozarker says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you
exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?" The
young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why
not?" “Wow!
That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess
that?" "No
guessing required," answered the Ozarker. "You showed up here
even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I
already knew, to a question I never asked; and you don't know anything
about my business. Now give me back my dog." Purina Diet I
was waiting in line at Wal-Mart to buy a box of Moon Pies and a carton
of RC Cola, kind of dirty because I’d been out working. In front of me
was a well-dressed woman, obviously from the city. In front of here was
another old country boy like me. He had a big bag of Purina dog food. The
woman asked him if he had a dog. I could tell by the way she talked she
wasn’t from around here. Just
as solemn as an old judge without a smirk or a smile on his face, he
said, "No, I am starting The Purina Diet again, although I probably
shouldn't. I ended up in the hospital last time. But I did lose 50
pounds before I woke up in the intensive care ward with tubes coming out
of my nose and IVs in both arms." She
stood there stunned. I tried not to laugh, because I knew there had to
be a punch line. The
old boy continued, "It is essentially a perfect diet.
The way it works is to load your pants pockets with Purina
nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry.
The food is high fiber and nutritionally complete, so I am going
to try it again." Everyone
in the line, and the next line over, too, was by now enthralled with his
story. I wondered where he was going with this. Horrified,
the woman asked, "Were you poisoned... was that why you were in the
hospital?" Straight
faced, he said, "No, Ma'am. I was sitting in the street scratching
for fleas and a car hit me!" I
thought they were going to have carry me out the door. Smart
woman A
local woman was sitting in a
quiet Ozarks tavern, enjoying an after work cocktail with her
girlfriends when an exceptionally tall, handsome, extremely sexy
middle-aged man entered. They had never seen him before; he must have
been a traveler from the city who was making a rest stop. He was so
striking that the woman could not take her eyes off him. The
young-at-heart man noticed her overly attentive stare and walked
directly toward her. Before
she could offer her apologies for so rudely staring, he leaned over and
whispered to her, "I'll do ANYTHING, absolutely anything, that you
want me to do, if you know what I mean, for $20, on one condition." Flabbergasted,
the woman asked what the condition was. The city fellow replied,
"You have to tell me what you want me to do in just three
words." The woman considered his proposition for a moment, and then slowly removed a $20 bill from her purse, which she pressed into the man's hand along with her address. She looked deeply into his eyes, and slowly and meaningfully said, "Clean my house." |