Roy Exum: The Saturday Funnies

  • Saturday, November 4, 2017
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

The costume that was the run-away winner in the 2017 Halloween Costume Award has just been announced, according to inside sources. This year’s winner was a child who wore a pants suit identical to those Hillary Clinton wore in last year’s presidential race. Actually, the costume wasn’t that great but the message sure was.

Somewhere in Iowa, it is now being said, a group of five or six kids politely knocked on a door and told the man and the woman “Trick or Treat.” As the man handed out candy, his wife asked each child about their costume. “Cinderella” said one. A boy in baseball togs said, “I’m a New York Yankee,” and so on until they came to the girl in the pants suit. “Hillary Clinton.”

Neither of the older two could guess ‘Why Hillary Clinton’ until about 30 minutes later when the man looked out the window to see little Hillary was still standing there. At this, his wife began to laugh hysterically. “What is wrong with you,” her perplexed husband said to which the woman answered amid her guffaws. “Don’t you get it ... the costume is based on the fact that ever since Hillary lost to Trump, she’s refused to leave!”

Politics aside, kindly remember very few of the jokes that are shared with me bear an author’s name but I am hardly as clever as the jokesters on the Internet and I’m merely passing along stuff I think is funny:

* * *

MORE FROM “THE SCHOOL OF FREE THOUGHT”

* -- What if my dog only brings back the ball because he thinks I like throwing it?

* -- If poison expires, is it more poisonous or is it no longer poisonous?

* -- Which letter is silent in the word "Scent," the S or the C?

* -- Do twins ever realize that one of them is unplanned? 

* -- Why is the letter W, in English, called double U? Shouldn't it be called double V?

* -- Maybe oxygen is slowly killing you and it just takes 75-100 years to fully work.

* -- Every time you clean something, you just make something else dirty.

* -- The word "swims" upside-down is still "swims".

* -- 100 years ago everyone owned a horse and only the rich had cars. Today everyone has cars and only the rich own horses.

* -- Your future self is watching you right now through memories.

* -- The doctors that told Stephen Hawking he had two years to live in 1953 are probably dead.

* -- If you replace "W" with "T" in "What, Where and When", you get the answer to each of them.

* -- Many animals probably need glasses, but nobody knows it.

* -- If you rip a hole in a net, there are actually fewer holes in it than there were before.

* -- If 2/2/22 falls on a Tuesday, we'll just call it "2's Day". (And it does fall on a Tuesday)

* * *

DO YOU FIND IT AMUSING THAT STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN IN AMERICA?

* -- In more than half of all states in the United States of America, the highest paid public employee in the state is a football coach.

* -- It costs the U.S. government 1.8 cents to mint a penny and 9.4 cents to mint a nickel.

* -- Almost half of all Americans (47 percent) do not put a single penny out of their paychecks into savings.

* -- Apple has more cash than the U.S. Treasury.

* -- The state of Alaska is 429 times larger than the state of Rhode Island. That said, Rhode Island has a significantly larger population than Alaska does.

* -- Alaska has a longer coastline than all of the other 49 U.S. states put together.

* -- The city of Juneau, Alaska, is about 3,000 square miles in size. It is actually larger than the entire state of Delaware.

* -- When LBJ's "War on Poverty" began, less than 10 percent of all U.S. children were growing up in single parent households. Today, that number has skyrocketed to 33 percent.   

* -- In 1950, less than 5 percent of all babies in America were born to unmarried parents. Today, that number is over 40 percent.

* -- The poverty rate for households that are led by a married couple is 6.8 percent.  For households that are led by a female single parent, the poverty rate is 37.1 percent.

* -- In 2013, women earned 60 percent of all bachelor's degrees that were awarded that year in the United States.

* -- According to the CDC, 34.6 percent of all men in the U.S. are obese at this point.

* -- The average supermarket in the United States wastes about 3,000 pounds of food each year. Meanwhile, approximately 20 percent of the garbage that goes into our landfills is food.   

* -- According to one recent survey, 81 percent of Russians now have a negative view of the United States. That is much higher than at the end of the Cold War era.

* -- Montana has three times as many cows as it does people.

* -- The grizzly bear is the official state animal of California.  But no grizzly bears have been seen there since 1922.  They are plentiful in Mississippi, Tennessee and other southern states, however.

* -- One recent survey discovered that "a steady job" is the number one thing that American women are looking for in a husband, and discovered that 75 percent of women would have a serious problem dating an unemployed man.

* -- According to a study conducted by economist Carl Benedict Frey and engineer Michael Osborne, up to 47 percent  of the jobs in the United States could soon be lost to computers, robots and other forms of technology.

* -- The only place in the United States where coffee is grown commercially is in Hawaii.

* -- The original name of the city of Atlanta was "Terminus".

* -- The state with the most millionaires per capita is Maryland.

* -- One survey of 50-year-old men in the U.S. found that only 12 percent of them said that they were "very happy".

* -- The United States has 845 motor vehicles for every 1,000 people.

* -- 48 percent of all Americans do not have any emergency supplies in their homes whatsoever. Even fewer have fire extinguishers.

* -- There are three towns in the United States that have the name "Santa Claus".

* -- There is actually a town in Michigan called "Hell". (I wonder how far down the road from Detroit that is?)

* -- If you have no debt and also have 10 dollars in your wallet ... you are wealthier than 25 percent of all Americans.

* -- By the time an American child reaches the age of 18, that child will have seen approximately 40,000 murders on television.

* * *

HERE’S ANOTHER SERVING OF JUICY TIDBITS

* -- More people live in New York City than in 40 of the 50 states.

* -- the word “Pennsylvania” is misspelled on the Liberty Bell.

* -- There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover all of North and South America in one foot of liquid.

* -- There's a town in Washington with treetop bridges made specifically to help squirrels cross the street.

* -- In 1872, Russia sold Alaska to the Unites States for about 2 cents per acre.

* -- It would take you more than 400 years to spend a night in all of Las Vegas's hotel rooms.

* -- Western Michigan is home to a giant lavender labyrinth so big you can see it on Google Earth.

* -- There’s an island full of wild monkeys off the coast of South Carolina called Morgan Island, and it's not open to humans.

* -- There's enough concrete in the Hoover Dam to build a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York City.

* -- Arizona and Hawaii are now the only states that don't observe daylight savings time. (This Sunday morning we’ll “fall back” an hour.)

* -- Boston has the worst drivers out of the nation's 200 largest cities. Kansas City has the best drivers.

* -- Kansas produces enough wheat each year to feed everyone in the world for about two weeks.

* -- Oregon's Crater Lake is deep enough to cover six Statues of Liberty stacked on top of each other.

* -- The Empire State building has its own zip code.

* -- The Los Angeles Coroner’s Office has its own quirky gift shop called Skeletons in the Closet.

* -- The Library of Congress contains approximately 838 miles of bookshelves—long enough to stretch from Houston to Chicago.

* -- At 46 letters, Massachusetts’s Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg has the longest place name in the U.S. (even though it's based on a joke).

* -- In 1922, a man built a house and all his furniture entirely out of 100,000 newspapers. The structure still stands today in Rockport, Massachusetts.

* -- The entire Denver International Airport is twice the size of Manhattan.

* -- In 1893, an amendment was proposed to rename the country to the "United States of Earth."

* -- A highway in Lancaster, California plays the “William Tell Overture” as you drive over it, thanks to some well-placed grooves in the road.

* -- The total length of Idaho's rivers could stretch across the United States about 40 times.

* -- The town of Centralia, Pennsylvania has been on fire for 55 years.

* -- The one-woman town of Monowi, Nebraska is the only officially incorporated municipality with a population of 1. The sole, 83-year-old resident is the city's mayor, librarian, and bartender.

* -- The entire town of Whittier, Alaska, lives under one roof.

* -- The number of bourbon barrels in Kentucky outnumbers the state’s population by more than two million.

* -- Montana's Glacier National Park has a canine "bark ranger" that helps herd wildlife away from high-traffic areas.

* -- You can watch more than 100 ponies swim to Chincoteague Island every year in Virginia.

* -- In 1943, the temperature in Spearfish, South Dakota jumped 49 degrees in two minutes (-4°F to 45°F), one of the most drastic changes on record.

* -- The world's tiniest park is in Portland, measuring a mere two feet wide.

* -- The inventor of the Ouija board lived and died in Baltimore; his tombstone stands as a reflection of his achievement.

* -- The biggest signature in human history belongs to Texas farmer Jimmie Luecke. The two-mile landmark can be seen from space.

* -- There are around 5,000 commercial airplanes flying over the United States at any given time.

* -- Only one-third of all $100 bills are actually inside the United States. (It is the only currency universally recognized by crimals throughout the world.)

* -- In Colma, California the dead outnumber the living by nearly 1,000 to 1.

* -- The smallest county in the U.S., Kalawao County on the Hawaiian island of Moloka'i, is also a leprosy colony where a few former patients still live.

* -- South Florida is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles coexist in the wild.

royexum@aol.com

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