I was recently in my local pub in Scotland, and it was pretty quiet. There were several people sitting at the bar with me, and the bar-lady was reading a paper. She looked at me, puzzled, and said "John, you do crosswords, don't you?" "Yes," I replied, truthfully. "I've got one here - 'Stranded, as on a desert island', 10 letters, and the first is 'M'. Any ideas?" "Marooned," I said. The other customers shouted out their orders: "A whusky," "a pint o' heavy", etc, etc. Delighted at this display of humour, I refused to pay for a drop.
When I was in college, a colleague at WTBS (no, not the Turner superstation, but the 14-watt campus radio station from which Turner later bought the call letters) _swore_ that he heard an announcer say "This is the Canadian Broadcorping Castration..."
Modern parents believe toilet training should be an easy and casual affair. Just let the child s*%# all over everything. This prepares him or her for a brilliant career as a talk show host. It used to be thought that children should act like "little adults". Like many things that used to be thought, this is true. In fact, now more than ever. Today's real adults are self-involved, impulsive, inarticulate, and spend as much time as possible out playing. They can't sit still, don't like to get dressed up, and hate every kind of activity that requires self-restraint. Adults are the children of today, and therefore children have to be adults because there's only so much room in the world for kids. --P.J. O'Rouke
