Hard Thinking

     It is Monday, and time for another old joke quiz.  The theme for this Monday is one which has perhaps changed its name with the new century.  Once these were known as moron jokes, or dumbbell jokes, or some such.  I prefer, as someone who has frequently decided to save time by washing the dinner dishes before making dinner, to think of these as Original Thinkers.  The answers, for those of you, er, original thinkers out there, will be found at the end.

J1.”I think this package is for this address, but the name is obliterated.”

     “Can’t be for me, then.  (          )”

J2.”This,” said the real estate dealer, “Is a house without a flaw.”

     “Heavens!” said Maggie, “(          )”

J3.”Can you help me look for a twenty dollar bill?  I dropped it on the corner of Walton and Clark.”

     “If you dropped it over there, why are you looking here?”

     “(          )”

J4.Pete stood on the corner of Dearborn and Oak, opening and closing an umbrella while shouting “Pro sec ter qua!”

     “What are you doing?” Jason inquired.

     “This is an old Scottish spell,” Pete told him. “It keeps tigers away.”

     “There aren’t any tigers for miles around here,” said Jason.

     Pete said, “(          ).”

J5.”I’d like two pounds of birdseed, please.”

     “Certainly, Madame.  What kind?”

     “Well, I’d like (         ).”

J6.”Gosh, Terwilliger, it’s been twenty years at least since I saw you!  You’ve changed.  You’ve gotten a hair transplant, and lost about forty pounds, and I guess it must have taken three or four surgeries to fic up that old nose, eh?”

     “My name’s not Terwilliger.”

     “Gosh!  (          ).”

J7.”You have your socks on inside-out.”

     “I know.  (          ).”

J8.”Those flashbulbs you sent for my old camera don’t work.”

     “Impossible!  (          ).”

J9.”Nice flowers.”

     “Yep, I bought ‘em for Ma.  I’m writing a note to go with them now.  ‘Dear Ma: HJere are….”

     “My mom likes roses, too.”

      “Huh!  You don’t know anything about biography.  Those are chrysanthemums.”

     “I know roses when I see ‘em.”

     “Well, they’re chrysanthemums.”

     “How will you write that in your note?””

     “Like anybody else.  C-R-I…C-H-R-I…C-K-H…hey! (          )”

J10.”Why did you knit three socks?”

     “They’re for my brother in the Army.  He wrote to say (          ).”

J11.Ty and Gar were rehabbing an old house.  As Ty measured the boards, Gar brought out the hammers and nails.  Studying the bucket of nails, he frowned, and then started to throw some on the floor.

     “What are you up to?” Ty demanded.

     “You got gypped,” Gar told him.  “Half these nails are pointing the wrong way!”

     Ty came over and looked.  “You sap,” he said.  “(          ).”

I know, I know.  Most of us don’t need to read the ANSWERS but any excuse to make Monday go faster.

     A1.My name’s O’Brien.

     A2.What do you walk on?

     A3.The light’s better here.

     A4.See?  It works!  (Scholars would insist on pointing out the set-up line “There are no tigers in Scotland” as a suitable alternative, but we’re not scholars.)

     A5.to grow robins and bluebirds

     A6.You’ve changed your name, too?

     A7.There’s a hole on the outside

     A8.I tried them all out before I sent them

     A9.What do you know?  They ARE roses!

     A10.He’s grown a foot since he signed up

     A11.These are the nails for the other wall!

GGA Rhyme Scheme

     ‘Tis Spring, or so they tell me.  Living in the Midwest, we all know it isn’t REALLY Spring until we have put our winter coats away for the season…for the fourth time.  (My personal record for winter coat wearing is June fifteenth, but they aren’t making summers the way they used to.)

     In any case, spring is a time for flowers and joy and poetry.  In the days when newspapers published poetry regularly, the staff poets as well as those who wrote in to the editor with verse would be filling column space with sonnets and odes which treated spring once again with rhymes and images exactly like the ones they’d used last year.  And the year before that.  (Spring is a time of rebirth.)

     It has been a while since we have discussed postcard verse in this space, so I thought I’d see what new couplets and quatrains had appeared in my inventory since last time.  And I was shocked—SHOCKED, I say—by the number of poems which appeared simply as an excuse for another picture of a woman.  Postcard companies were run by people who knew what the market wanted and poetry ran a distant second to what is known to collectors as GGA, or Good Girl Art.  (I have never understood this, myself.  What’s Bad Girl Art then, I wonder to myself.  Bad poetry I can figure out, but…well, let’s move on.)

     I seem to recall there was a term for the sort of verse illustrated at the top of this column: verse that rhymes but follows no particular meter or rhythmic design.  I don’t THINK it was “crummy”, but it weas something like that.

     We have met this young lady and noted her rhymes before, but she was in the bathtub those other times, and here she is more securely clad, if only for a few more seconds.

     Here we have a postcard on which the picture and the poem perfectly match.  They are pretty and pleasant…and the more you look at them the more you notice they don’t quite work.

     But the postcard companies kept trying to give us women and song suitable to go with our wine.  Even the Dutch kids got in on the poems and pretty faces genre.

     Of course, the naysayers had their day, too.  Postcards describing the falsely fair were available as well.

     And here is an early attack on the health food industry.  (As well as another insult to those of us with natural beauty spots.)

     Romance, however, motivated most of these poems, which sometimes necessitated the presence of a man to contemplate the women involved.

     Occupying his mind even when they were not present and he had other things he ought to be working on.

     Timid and unsure, these men approached the objects of their affection with trembling knees and shaky verse.

     The truly timid had only pipe dreams of pretty faces to rely upon, waiting in sorry solitude for Leap year, when a woman could propose to them.

     The result, of course, was exquisite happiness, which the postcard poets were overjoyed to celebrate.

     Kind of a pity they went on rhyming after that.    

And What Became of Maa?

     It is always an accident when this column is insightful.  (Who invented that word, by the by?  Was there really no other word that could fill that space?  We could use…no, we are NO going to use this space being insightful about insightful.  It seems rather insightless.)

     In any case, I was just thinking about how much our lives are tied in with advertising.  There was a time, centuries ago, when things didn’t have brand names.  Oh, maybe Otto the butcher put more bread in his sausages than Maxwell the butcher, but that was as far as it went.  And even that was dependent on whether you lived in a town big enough to have two butchers, or any butchers at all.  (You’d have to make your own sausage.)  But nowadays, we are fixed in our brands.  Certain brands bring nostalgic memories to certain generations: Keds, red Goose, Nike, Buster Brown…each type of shoes brings around different images for different ages.  But we are not here to be insightful about shoes.  (That word again!)

     No, what brought on these thoughts was an inquiry from a relative who remarked that it was funny how some brands were associated with just one product, and a seasonal one at that.  Specifically, she inquired, “Does Paas make anything besides Easter egg dye kits?”

     This was something I need to know, and since I spent all of five or sizx minutes on this, I wanted to pass along what I learned.  No.  Paas makes only Easter egg dyeing kits.  It is, of course, now a part of a larger company, but once upon a time….

     William Townley was one of THOSE guys: a tinkerer looking to invent something to make people’s lives easier generally, and his own easier by making him a bunch of money.  He was of a chemical turn of mind, and was interested in home dyeing kits, since making and dyeing your own clothes was a laborious process.  He figured out a way to compress dyes into tablets, which could be awakened and used with the proper mixture of water and vinegar (and probably  in the beginning, other things.)  For some reason, however, the most popular use for these dye tablets was Easter eggs.  Maybe it was the colors he could produce, maybe it was the size of the tablet needed to dye a few shirts—I couldn’t find that out—but eggs seemed to be the easiest things to dye using his kits.

     As it happens, William ran a drugstore in New Jersey easily accessible to immigrants who came from countries where easter eggs were highly traditional.  The name “Paas” came about because it is the first syllable in the word easter in a number of languages, though the Dutch immigrants who celebrated Pasen get direct credit for Townley’s trade name.  Within eight years, just after the turn of a new century. He had 27 full-time employees in his plant making his dye tablets and/or producing egg dyeing kits.  He was also good at inventing advertising campaigns, and is said to be a motivating force behind convincing Americans of every ethnicity that Easter eggs were fun and Eastery.  (I could explain why eggs are symbolic of Easter, but chances are you can figure this out by yourself and, anyway, I don’t want to be accused of being insightful again.)

     The Townley family ran the company for several decades, but I cannot find out whether they are still involved, now that it belongs to a conglomerate.  Whatever marketing mind is behind it, there are about two dozen different kits now (some involving shrinkwrap designs you microwave around your hardboiled eggs instead of those messy dyes.)  And some ten million kits are sold every spring.

     We never bought those, by the way.  We used the non-branded alternative, as many people did, using water, vinegar, and drops of the liquid food coloring our mother bought for year-round use.  AND a white crayon, since the wax from the crayon repelled the dye, allowing you to write and draw on the eggs (we were seldom trusted with that job.  I’m surprised we were trusted with the dyes, since we learned early how to mix the red, yellow, and blue to make purple, orange, green, or, by mixing, as we always did, all the colors together, a muddy grayish brown that someone—possibly my mother—dubbed “blar”.  If you NEED to know how this worked, we would leave the finished eggs in the refrigerator so the Easter Bunny could take them out again and hide them, after first setting up those baskets filled with Peeps, Palmer bunnies, and jelly bird eggs.  I WAS going to discuss a history of Palmer (and Frankfort) chocolate bunnies, Peeps, and why the heck were they “jelly bird eggs”, but I think this is enough holiday-specific brand insightfulness for one day.)

The Animal Fair

     Monday again already?  That day of the week when this blog turns away from postcards I have for sale and reflects on a book I couldn’t sell?  Why, yes!  Yes, it is!  Prepare for another quiz filled with old jokes devoid of punchlines, extracted from that quizbook I could not convince any publisher to use thirty years ago.

     Hey, if I ever finish with these jokes, I have a LOT of other books which never got onto the bestseller lists.  You’d better hope there are plenty of these vaudeville chestnuts to go around.

     This week we revisit the chapter on animal jokes: tales of things with tails, whether pets, farm livestock, or wild creatures.  Hum “The Teddy Bear Picnic” (one of a number of pop hits which were composed without words, which were added later.  That’s a whole nother blog.)  The answers, which I know you won’t need, will be found at the tail end of the article.

     J1.”I’m sorry, Ma’am, but I drove around the corner too fast and hit your cat.  I’m completely responsible for your pet’s death and I’ll gladly replace it.”

     “Yeah?  (          )”

J2.Gerald went to an estate auction and was much taken with a handsome parrot.  He put in a bid and immediately someone toward the front of the room raised him a dollar.  Gerald raised his bid, and his rival immediately followed suit.  It became a matter of pride, and Gerald bid furiously as the other bidder kept topping him.  Finally, having paid a good deal more than he expected to, Gerald emerged the winner.

     He looked at his new parrot.  “For that much money, you’d better be able to talk.”

     “I can talk,” said the parrot.  “(          )”

J3.In days of yore, movie studios simply dumped old prints of motion pictures: who would ever want to watch those old things again?  A couple of goats in Hollywood came across a pile of discarded reels of film and started to chow down.  “How do you like this?” said one of them, overjoyed at the heap of munchables.

     “Well,” the other goat replied, “Frankly, (          ).”

J4.An amorous worm said to the worm of his dreams, “You’re what I’ve been looking for all my life!  Let’s run away together!”

     “You dope.” Said his companion, “(          ).”

J5.The golf ball landed on top of an anthill.  The golfer swung, missed the ball, and sent a pound of sand and a hundred ants into the air.  His next swing had the same result.  “If we want to survive,” said one of the ants still in the anthill, “We’d (          ).”

     J6.”I think weasels are cute.”

     “Not me.  A weasel killed my grandfather.”

     “How could a weasel kill your grandfather?”

     “He was crossing the railroad tracks and (         ).”

J7.”The kangaroo is a native of Australia.”

“Good lord!  My daughter (          )”

     J8.The zookeeper saw his prize kangaroo leap over the bars of his cage and bound off through the gate.  He rushed to the kangaroo enclosure and demanded of the only person there, “What happened?”

     “I’m sorry,” said the little old lady, “I just tickled him a little with the end of my umbrella.”

     “Well,” said the zookeeper grimly, “You’d better (          ).”

J9.”If you were lost in the jungle and saw a lion, what steps would you take?”

“(          ).”

     J10.”Is it true that if you carry a lighted torch, alligators won’t attack you?”

     “That depends (          )”

I hope you are properly armed with all these ANSWERS.  It’s a jungle out there.

     A1.How are you at catching mice?

     A2.Who do you think was bidding against you?

     A3.I liked the book better.

     A4.I’m your other end!

     A5.better get on the ball

     A6.didn’t hear the weasel.

     A7.wants to marry one!

     A8.tickle me in the same place.  I have to go catch him.

     A9.Long ones

     A10.on how fast you carry it

Reel Women Do Fish

     Well, here it is: April.  I am proud that you thought of my blog on April fool’s…okay, maybe it isn’t that much of a stretch.  Anyway, you may recall that some time ago, we discussed the Old World custom of sending your friends postcards with fish on them on April 1.  I can’t do that, but I can revisit a subject we worked over last year: the many postcards which center on piscatorial pursuits, the art of catching fish and/or explaining why you didn’t.

     While this is commonly considered a male passion (see above), postcards were always willing to grant women a role in the sport, even if it was occasionally just as an onlooker.

     An onlooker who was not necessarily clueless.

     Many, many postcards over the years confused the roles of onlooker and prey.

     Hooking something and taking it home as a trophy are two different things, of course.

     Some cards, alas, treat women as a mere distraction from a man’s true role in life.

     While others cannot dream of a true fishing trip without the company of women.

     As cards have acknowledged, though, at least since 1912, when this card was printed, women do go fishing, too.  And most of them are fishing for fish

     Though this young lady is apparently fishing for compliments, as well as for a letter.

     When encountering a rival in any sport, of course, sometimes a man can only sit back and admire the other person’s style.

     And, as a gentleman, never forgets his manners.

     And like any other person with a passion for piscatorial pursuits, a woman is happy to show off her catch and taking it for dinner.

Banker as Santa?

     I have been led down another rabbit hole by a mildly boring art postcard, and I am going to take you with me as I reflect on the trip.  But first, let me introduce you to a Chicago banker of a previous century.

     Lyman Gage made his mark in Chicago, where he started as a bookkeeper and finished as a bank president.  He was president of the Board of Director’s of the city’s world’s fair committee in the 1890s, and was part of a committee of businessmen that tried to clean up government.  (Asking a committee of businessmen to clean up government is like…well, that’s a whole nother blog.)

     He must be one of a modest number of people (You look it up; I can’t spend ALL my time on one postcard) who have been offered a Cabinet position by both a Democratic and a Republican President.  He turned down the job of Secretary of the Treasury under Grover Cleveland, but he accepted during the next administration, when William McKinley made the same offer.  As a financial illiterate, I cannot grade his work there, but I am told he was strong but cooperative, and if he made a few decision which backfired, well, what Secretary of the treasury didn’t?  Later he headed up a new York bank and was a power in setting up the 1915 World’s Fair.  His time in California had NOTHING to do with his less public side, which involved spelling reform, astrology, and psychic experiences.  (He had claimed to have “psychic flashes”, which might explain his success in banking and politics.)  He was eventually buried in Chicago.

     Well and good: an apparently genial footnote to American history was Lyman J. Gage.  And why do I expect you to care about this?

     I have this postcard for sale, you see, addressed to Lyman Gage and sent by Old Santa.  It was enclosed with something, or left by a chimney, so there is no postmark.  The card has an undivided back, however, which signifies that it was manufactured somewhere between 1901 and 1907.  Well, at that point in his life, he was in his sixties, so unless this was somebody’s idea of a joke, it can’t really have been addressed to him.  “Master” was a title generally awarded to a boy, technically any male under 21.

     But what are the chances that “Old Santa” was Gage himself, writing to his namesake?

     There are two possible candidates, and it all depends on when this card was sent.  People did not stop using undivided back cards in 1907, when the divided ones became legal.  He may have really liked this collection of heads by Sir Joshua Reynolds and put in a supply of them.  Or he may have sent this around 1901 (dang that missing postmark.)  Gage had four children, none of them named Lyman.  But one of his grandsons was Lyman J. Gage II, born in 1896.  If Old Santa wrote and addressed this card to Master Lyman when he was five or six, that fits in nicely.  There WAS another Lyman J. Gage, born somewhere during the 1910s, the result of OUR Lyman marrying his third wife, Frances (known universally as Gloria).  IF our Lyman saved these angel head postcards long enough….

     I would like it best if Gloria was the “big doll” Santa was hoping for, but nothing in Mr. gage’s Memoirs suggest he ever talked like that.  (You may be a bit more formal in your memoirs, of course.)  AND, of course, there’s no real evidence that this was not written by his wife, his daughter-in-law, or anybody else who happened to know master Lyman wanted a hobby-horse.  And, if you want to be brutal about it, how much does anybody CARE about a postcard probably written to a grandson of William McKinley’s Secretary of the treasury?

     Well, anyway, it was an entertaining rabbit hole to venture down, and I got to skim through gage’s memoirs.  If you ever need entertaining anecdotes about William McKinley, or a few tales about psychics and spiritualists, you ought to look those up.  (Hey, and maybe buy this postcard to use as a bookmark?  Just a thought.)

Lime + Coconut

     Here it is, the first Monday of Spring, a season of newness: new leaves, new baby animals, new flowers.  BUT it is universally regarded as a spirit of rebirth: those new buds are on old trees which have seemed dead over the winter, and those old lawns are born again and will need mowing in no time at all (barring a couple of April blizzards.)

    Yes, oh yes, this is another way of breaking it to you that we have returned to Old Joke Quiz Monday, and we will see some really antique jests coming into view.  No, it is NOT like a Zombie Apocalypse.  It’s all because of Spring.  And we return once again to one of the longest chapters in this book I tried to get published thirty years ago, the section on Medical Jokes.  We’ll prescribe ANSWERS, if needed, below this pile of Spring blossoms.

     J1.”I’d like a refill on these, please.”

     “I’m sorry, Madame.  We can’t refill that without a note from your doctor, since those pills have been identified as addictive.”

     “Addictive!  That’s silly: they aren’t addictive.  And I should know.  I’ve (          ).”

J2.”I need a bottle of an acetyl derivative of salicylic acid, please.”

“You want aspirin?”

“That’s right.  (          ).”

     J3.”Doc, come over quick.  I broke my leg in three places.”

     “You should (          ).”

J4.”You should go to the hospital and have a kidney removed.  You are really sick.”

“If you don’t mind, Doc, I’d like to get a second opinion.”

“Okay.  (          ).”

     J5.Kurt woke up in the hospital, feeling terrible.  “Oh no!  Did you bring me here to die?”

     “No,” said the nurse.  “We (          ).”

J6.”What do you think, Doc?  Will I be able to play the violin after my operation?”

“After a week or so, certainly.”

“Wonderful!  (          ).”

     J7.”First I had appendicitis, cirrhosis, and cholera.    Then they gave me penicillin, azulfidine, and lomotil.”

     “Sounds like you had a rough time.”

     “I’ll say.  (          ).”

J8.”I hear you had Kramer as a patient.  What did you operate on him for?”

“Twenty thousand dollars.”

“No, I mean what did he have.”

“(          ).”

     J9.”Doc, will my scar show?”

     “Well, Ma’am, (         ).”

J10.”Dr. Krankheit told me he’d have me walking within a week of surgery.”

“Did he?”

“Oh yes.  (          ).”

     J11.There is a classic story about Will Mayo, one of the siblings who founded the Mayo Clinic.  He was confronted one day by a pushy patient who demanded, “Are you the head doctor here?”

     “My brother is the head doctor,” he replied, “I’m (          ).”

J12.Dr. Krankheit worked his way through medical school as a waiter.  The first time he walked into the operating room, the patient gasped, “There you  are!  Do you think you can help me?”

     “Sorry,” he replied, “(          ).”

I provide these ANSWERS, even though I’m sure you know them, just in case you’;ve been looking out the window at the tulips.  (No tiptoeing until you put your coat on.  Doctor’s orders.)

     A1.been taking them every day for twenty-five years!

     A2.I never can remember that word.

     A3.stay out of those places

     A4.You’re ugly, too.

     A5.brought you in yesterdie

     A6.I could never play it before

     A7.Worst spelling bee I’ve been through.

     A8.Twenty thousand dollars

     A9.That’s up to you

     A10.I had to sell my car to pay the bill

     A11.the belly doctor

     A12.This isn’t my table

Double Dutch

     When last we spoke, we were discussing the Dutch kids in love, those smiling, happy wooden-shoed children who, at least in American postcards of the 1910s, spoke a fluent Pennsylvania Dutch, to nag about why you haven’t written, to espouse certain positive philosophies, or to reflect on the course of love.  (As noted by the card above, the Dutch kids phenomenon was not limited to the United States.  This is a French new Year card featuring a boy and a girl who are apparently good friends.  I have seen Dutch kids in cards from other countries, where the Pennsylvania Dutch accent obviously can’t be the attraction.  These tend to go for the picturesque, emphasizing those windmills and wooden shoes, and generally very pretty.  For nasty caricatures of Dutch kids, you need to find cards from Holland, where Dutch kids are no great novelty, wooden shoes or not.)

     It was very much the vogue in postcards to use children to say things you might be shy of saying as an adult, and this was very handy when it came to romantic longings.  Here the cuteness of the girl and her accent combine to take any scandal away from what might, around 1910, have been considered a fairly forward suggestion.

     Like this one as well.  Temptation to be naughty was not something a grown-up would admit to so readily.

     And a young red-blooded American male would get all tongue-tied if he tried to say something shveet like this.

     Or come out with a straightforward proposal.

     Of course, the wide world will put up blockades to romance, and sometimes a couple is separated by distance.  Under these circumstances, the Dutch kids admit readily to something when an adult would be struggling to find the words.

     Such separations can cause misunderstandings, and a falling away from one’s love, and we witness this sort of thing among the Dutch kids as well.  You cannot make me believe, Gouda dumpling, that he really called the wrong number.  She’s the one who has decided to disconnect.

     Forlorn lovers admit their troubles in the world of the Dutch kids.

     Unhappiness can take over on both sides of the question.

     But the Dutch kids are willing to come right out and explain what they need to make them happy again.  (In this post-postcard age, we’re stuck with emojis for this.)

     And, depending on how one arranges the postcards, of course, one can find one’s way to a happy ending, all through wooden shoes, a nice smile, and a thick accent.  (Emojis, phooey.)

Wooden Shoe Know It

     It has been a little while since we checked in with the Dutch kids, and their postcards do keep rolling in.  For those of you who missed my earlier perorations on the subject, there was, in the 1910s, a mysterious (to me, anyhow) fascination with postcards featuring children who dressed in the folk costume of the Netherlands and spoke what was known as Pennsylvania Dutch (a German idiom found among those German settlers who minded their own business in rural Pennsylvania.)

     Their postcards are a combination of cuteness and acuteness.  Our humorists learned early on that a plain truth, dressed up in dialect, could make people admire and chuckle about what would have, in plain English, been flat and matter-of-fact.  There were thousands of postcards of cute kids, sometimes speaking plain English and sometimes speaking baby talk.  And I have pointed out cards which involved cute children using Italian dialect, and sometimes cute adults using Pennsylvania Dutch or, to a lesser extent, Irish, Italian, and German lingo.  (I have not had a chance yet to look at every postcard ever produced, so I can’t speak to other dialects.)

     But in the 1910s there was an explosion of postcards featuring Dutch kids.  Different companies and different artists indulged the fad, and what caused it all and what made it disappear, I couldn’t say.  (The Dutch kids seem to flourish even during World War I,)  The earliest card I have found is shown at the top, there, part of a series of ads for Utica Yarn which featured Dutch kids enjoying yarn.  This was around about 1906, but whether this started the fashion or just serving as a warning shot before the main melee I can’t say.  (Jow many people paid attention to yarn ads?)

     The Dutch kids spent their time dishing out cheerful advice, and were a mainstay of the nagging “Where’s that letter you promised me?” genre of postcard.  When they weren’t doing that, they were trying to sort out the complexities of romance.  The thought embodied in this postcard….

     ….is perennial.  It just seems cuter when it’s said with an accent.  The following thought is as old as “Rose are red, violets are blue.”

     But who could resist it when it’s combined with that smile?  The hunt for romance is universal, even when one realizes the dangers.

     You get an innocent, adorable vibe when small children are flirting.  This would have looked distinctly sinister if it involved adults, even with an accent.

     And if this kid had tried this ten years later, he’d have been arrested, despite his bashful air.  But at that size, and with that accent….

     Don’t think for a moment the Dutch kids didn’t know what it was all about, either.

     And it was all desperately important, too, wondering if someone returned your regard.  That struck a responsive chord, beyond the accent and the dimples.

     The slow response on the part of the opposite number could be inexplicable. When one knew one’s own worth.

     And even a bright kid, confused by romance, could come up with the most ridiculous conclusions about what he meant to the opposite sex, not unlike older mem.

     NEXT TIME: The Course of True Luf

Cabbage Collection

     The city where I live does not want to let St. Patrick’s Day go by unobserved.  It has been the custom, even in the depths of the pandemic, when the holiday falls in the middle of the week, to observe two St. Patrick’s Day weekends.  In addition, there are plenty of people who add a celebration of St Joseph’s Day on or around March 19.  (St. Joseph covers a lot of ground, and is the patron saint of Bohemians and Italians.)

     So on the Monday after, we present these recipes to use up all the leftover corned beef, marinara, Guinness, and dill gravy.  That’s a joke: there IS no leftover Guinness.  If this were a food blog, we would help. out  But it is not, and this is Monday besides, so here is another Old Joke Quiz.  In the spirit of the Monday After, we are assembling odds and ends of jokes left over at the ends of previous chapters.  A hash of answers will be found at the end if you’re still hungry.

     J1.Do you know the difference between a mailbox and a lion?

     “No.”

     “(          )”

J2.”Do I look okay for the party?”

“Hang on.  There’s some snew in your hair.”

“What’s snew?”

“(          )”

     J3.Once upon a time, a suburban housewife opened her refrigerator and found a large rabbit inside.  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

     “Isn’t this a Westinghouse?” it replied.

     “Yes.”

     “Well, (          ).”

J4.These two coin collectors met at a bar so they could (        ).

     J5.The cruise ship was docking in Athens.  “What’s that stuff on the mountaintops?” asked one tourist.

     “Snow,” another told her.

     “That’s funny,” she replied.  “I thought it was (          ).”

J6.When Mr. Gotlots died, his relatives gathered in great excitement to hear the reading of the will.  The lawyer read the preamble about the sound mind and body, and then got down to the various bequests.  “Dirst,” he read, “To my nephew Rodney, whom I promised to remember in my will, (          ).”

     J7.”Can I put this wallpaper on myself?”

     “You can, but (          ).”

J8.”How can you charge six dollars a pound for corned beef?  I can get it for three dollars a pound at Super Value!”

     “Well, go buy it at Super Valu, then.”

     “They’re all out.”

     “Huh!  (          ).”

J9.”Those sausages you sold me were all meat at one end and bread crumbs at the other!”

“Well, nowadays (          ).”

    J10.Bob was visiting a small town and stepped into the grocery store to buy corned beef.  To his surprise, he found only a few boxes of cereal, a can or two of Cream of Mushroom soup, and row after row of salt.  Bags of salt, canisters of salt, and individually wrapped salt shake filled with salt sat on every shelf.  He said to the woman behind the counter, “You must sell a lot of salt.”

     “No,” the woman told him, “But (          .”

If you really need help with these ANSWERS, perhaps you’re the reason there’s no leftover Guinness.

     A1.Remind me never to send you to mail a latter

     A2.Nothing much; what’s snew with you?

     A3.I’m westing.  (Jokes based on old advertising slogans have their pitfalls; you may wish to avoid this one and, say, the joke about the kin you love to touch, and promise him anything but give him…okay, we’ll move on.  Whole nother blog.

     A4.catch up on old dimes

    A5.I thought it was Greece

     A6.Hi, Rodney!

     A7.It’ll look better on the wall

     A8.When I’m out of it, I sell it for ten cents a pound

     A9.It’s hard to make both ends meat

     A10.But the salesman who sells me salt, HE sure sells a lot of salt!