The “anals” of human history

 The following article is a collection of extracts from student essays. The compiler pasted together the following “history” of the world from certifiably genuine student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States, from eighth grade through college level. Read carefully, and you will learn a lot.

The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pyramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain.

The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, once asked, “Am I my brother’s son?” God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Isaac, stole his brother’s birth mark. Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his twelve sons to be patriarchs, but they did not take to it. One of Jacob’s sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites.

Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw. Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He fought with the Philatelists, a race of people who lived in Biblical times. Solomon, one of David’s sons, had 500 wives and 500 porcupines.

Without the Greeks we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns – Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intollerable. Achilles appears in The Iliad, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath. The government of Athens was democratic because people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn’t climb over to see what their neighbors were doing. When they fought with the Persians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.

Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlics in their hair. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them.

Then came the Middle Ages. King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harold mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc was cannonized by Bernard Shaw, and victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. Finally, Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense.

In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote literature. Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son’s head.

The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences. He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull. It was the painter Donatello’s interest in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

The government of England was a limited mockery. Henry VIII found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee. Queen Elizabeth was the “Virgin Queen.” As a queen she was a success. When Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted, “hurrah.” Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He lived at Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies, and errors. In one of Shakespear’s famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy. In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the King by attacking his manhood. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe. Later, the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean, and this was known as Pilgrims Progress. When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they were greeted by the Indians, who came down the hill rolling their war hoops before them. The Indian squabs carried porpoises on their back. Many of the Indian heroes were killed, along with their cabooses, which proved very fatal to them. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. During the War, the Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls over stone walls. The dogs were barking and the peacocks crowing. Finally, the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis.

Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm. He invented electricity by rubbing cats backwards and declared, “A horse divided against itself cannot stand.” Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

George Washington married Martha Curtis and in due time became the Father of Our Country. Then the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the Constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. When Lincoln was President, he wore only a tall silk hat. He said, “In onion there is strength.” Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope. He also freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment gave the ex-Negroes citizenship. But the Clue Clux Clan would torcher and lynch the ex-Negroes and other innocent victims. It claimed it represented law and odor. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.

Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book called Candy. Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees.

Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was very large. Bach died from 1750 to the present, Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

France was in a very serious state. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened. The Marseillaise was the theme song of the French Revolution, and it catapulted into Napoleon. During the Napoleonic Wars, the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their shoes. Then the Spanish gorillas came down from the hills and nipped at Napoleon’s flanks. Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and was very tense and unrestrained. He wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since Josephine was a bareness, she couldn’t bear children.

The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West. Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. Her reclining years and finally the end of her life were exemplatory of a great personality. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

The nineteenth century was a time of many great inventions and thoughts. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Samuel Morse invented a code of telepathy. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species. Madman Curie discovered radium. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers.

The First World War, caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a surf, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.

2010 Ig Nobel Prizes

Britain lands a national record four wins at awards for whacky scientific research!

ENGINEERING PRIZE: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.

TRANSPORTATION PLANNING PRIZE: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.
[NOTE: THE FOLLOWING ARE CO-WINNERS BOTH THIS YEAR AND IN 2008 when they were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for demonstrating that slime molds can solve puzzles: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero]

PHYSICS PRIZE: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.

PEACE PRIZE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.

ECONOMICS PRIZE: The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP [British Petroleum], for disproving the old belief that oil and water don’t mix.

MANAGEMENT PRIZE: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial “achievements” in scientific research. The self proclaimed aim of the prizes is to “first make people laugh, and then make them think”. Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by a group that includes Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater.” The name is a play on the word ignoble (“characterized by baseness, lowness, or meanness”) and the name “Nobel” after Alfred Nobel. The official pronunciation used during the ceremony is /ˌɪɡnoʊˈbɛl/ “ig-no-bell”. It is not pronounced like the word “ignoble” (/ɪɡˈnoʊbəl/). The first Ig Nobels were awarded in 1991, at that time for discoveries “that cannot, or should not, be reproduced”. The awards are sometimes veiled criticism (or gentle satire).

A September 2009 article in The National, titled “A noble side to Ig Nobels,” says that although the Ig Nobel Awards are veiled criticism of trivial research, history shows that trivial research sometimes leads to important breakthroughs. For instance, in 2006 a study showing that the malaria mosquito (Anopheles gambiae) is attracted equally to the smell of Limburger cheese and the smell of human feet earned the Ig Nobel Prize in the area of biology. As a direct result of these findings traps baited with this cheese have been utilized in strategic locations in the nations of Africa to combat the epidemic of malaria. In 2010, Andre Geim became the first person to receive both the Nobel and an individual Ig Nobel prize for Physics.

Poems by Prathap Suthan

http://www.poemhunter.com/prathap-suthan/poems/

A few samples here…

lovers of words, unite!

this is for all of us.

all of us,
whose words
express everything.

both written
and unwritten.
both said
and unsaid.

with words
we give lushness
to feelings.

when people listen
to our words,
they see emotions.
they touch warm corners.
smile.
cry.
think.
advance.

our fingers
drum up anger,
love, despair,
anguish, delight,
pathos and
everything else
imaginable
and inexplicable.

words reduce
distances.
they make enemies
friendly.
philosophies
simpler.

no subject
is alien.
no culture
too foreign.
stories, myths,
beliefs, traditions,
all unravelled.

sights and sounds
get captured in words.
so does colour.
black and white.
even invisibility.

envy, jealousy,
plight and lust
rise like reflexes.
we inspire them.
generate them
multiply them.
negate them.

we give life
different textures.
different layers.
different filters.

words bring varying
degrees of heat,
and changing
lines of intensity
to living.
like warps
and wefts.

there’s light in shade
and thickness in thinness.

there can be truth in lies,
and heaven in hell.

every pause,
and every phrase,
has a flavour, a taste,
an aftertaste.

some bitter,
others delicious.
some shout.
others whisper.

everything begins
and ends with words.

our little errand boys
and girls
who run around
building ideas
and bridging thought.

words aren’t alone.
they have other words for context.
some more for company.
and even more unseen
for a richness infinite.

think of love.
think of hate.
think of peace.
think of sex.
small words.
big worlds.

they are
vast volumes
of mankind.
they are tiny vials
of humanity.

no one ever
quarreled with pictures.
and no baby was
born holding a photo.

yet most of the world
thinks a picture is worth
a thousand words.

i think not.

it could be one word.
or a billion words.

whoever said that,
was a dull painter
and not a bright writer.

maybe

maybe
it made adam walk a bit taller
it made ulysses perhaps more cunning
it made socrates find wisdom in ethics
it made galileo peer deeper into space
it made magellan explore unknown seas
it made da vinci come through as eternal
it made darwin add a tail to mankind
it made shakespeare quill those classics
it made ivan more terrible when he raged
it made marx look a true Marxist
it made lincoln extra presidential
it made crusoe live among coconut islands
it made alexander ring more than a bell
it made brahms discover genius inside piano
it made buffalo bill a deathless legend
it made che guevara define revolutionary
it made lennon definitely imagine

maybe

it makes castro photogenic with his cigar
it makes rogers anything but a coward
it makes spielberg an extraordinary terrestrial
and then I wonder
maybe my straggly beard alone
isn’t enough to get me into the list
of great men with beards. 

little blue marble
 
i was walking
down the steps
of my office
and i saw a little
blue marble.
lonely.
fresh dropped.
i thought.
maybe the ceo
lost one.
or maybe the
cfo lost his.
a wicked
smile i could feel
played naughty
on my lips.
the top management
seems to be
losing it.
funny anecdotes
formed within.
funnier repartees
bubbled inside.
my mind was
on full boil.
it was going hither
and thither.

and then someone
tapped me
from behind
and said,
excuse me,
but is this your nut?

prathap suthan

To unfriend or not to unfriend: That is the Facebook question

(CNN) — We’ve all done it — surfed on over to the book of faces, our hearts racing and pupils dilating with excitement, let our cursors linger over those oh-so-powerful words, “Remove From Friends,” and clicked away with the maniacal glee of a serial killer.

Still, there aren’t that many among us who have the skill — the expertise — to cut ties without cutting deep.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/01/netiquette.unfriending/index.html?hpt=Sbin#fbid=lNR8WNNcPRQ&wom=false

Once Nandan Nilekani gets the Fully integrated ID card system for us…

When we all have the UID card this could be one such conversation… .

Operator : “Thank you for calling Pizza = Hut . May I have your…”

Customer: “Heloo, can I order..”

Operator : “Can I have your multi purpose ID card number first, Sir?”

Customer: “It’s he…, hold…….. ..on….. .889861356102049 998-45-54610”

Operator : “OK… You’re… Mr Singh and you’re calling from 17 Jal Vayu. Your home number is 22678893, your office 25076666 and your mobile is 09869798888. Which number are you calling from now Sir?”

Customer: “Home! How did you get all my phone numbers?

Operator : “We are connected to the system Sir”

Customer: “May I order your Seafood Pizza…”

Operator : “That’s not a good idea Sir”

Customer: “How come?”

Operator : “According to your medical records, you have high blood pressure and even higher cholesterol level Sir”

Customer: “What?… What do you recommend then?”

Operator : “Try our Low Fat Pizza. You’ll like it”

Customer: “How do you know for sure?”

Operator : “You borrowed a book entitled “Popular Dishes” from the National Library last week Sir”

Customer: “OK I give up… Give me three family size ones then, how much will that cost?”

Operator : “That should be enough for your family of 05, Sir. The total is Rs 500.00”

Customer: “Can I pay by! Credit card?”

Operator : “I’m afraid you have to pay us cash, Sir. Your credit card is over the limit and you owe your bank Rs 23,000.75 since October last year. That’s not including the late payment charges on your housing loan, Sir..”

Customer: “I guess I have to run to the neighbourhood ATM and withdraw some cash before your guy = arrives”

Operator : “You can’t Sir. Based on the records, you’ve reached your daily limit on machine withdrawal today”

Customer: “Never mind just send the pizzas, I’ll have the cash ready. How long is it gonna take anyway?”

Operator : “About 45 minutes Sir, but if you can’t wait you can always come and collect it on your Nano Car…”

Customer: ” What!”

Operator : “According to the = details in system ,you own a Nano car,…registration number = GZ-05-AB-1107. .”

Customer: ” ????”

Operator : “Is there anything else Sir?”

Customer: “Nothing… By the way… Aren’t you giving me that 3 free bottles of cola as advertised?”

Operator : “We normally would Sir, but based on your records you’re also diabetic…. … “

Customer: #$$^%&$@$% ^

Operator : “Better watch your language Sir.. Remember on 15th July 2010 you were = convicted of using abusive language on a policeman… ?”

Customer: [Faints]