Encyclopedia of Humor

FrameMaker and Interleaf are competing documentation products. When the spelling checker of FrameMaker 2.1 encounters the word Interleaf in a document, it flags it as a misspelling. What does it offer as the correct spelling? “FrameMaker”!

The song, “Yankee Doodle” was originally sung by British Soldiers to insult the colonialists ( which was typical of the British in those days). The Continental Army took to singing it to annoy the British (which was typical of the colonialists).

St. Paul, MN

The hit movie “Home Alone” about a boy thwarting burglars with imaginative mayhem, wasn’t total fantasy. Just ask the guy who tried to break in while 13-year-old Ryan Hendrickson was home alone.

Ryan was watching television Wednesday night when he heard a noise that sounded like a window screen being cut.

“I ran to the closet and grabbed a bat,” Ryan said Thursday. “I went…into the dining room, where I saw him cutting the window with a knife. He put his left hand in first and I was waiting for his right hand to come in…and I took the baseball bat and I hit him as hard as I could.”

The man ran. Ryan called 911.

Police, while cautioning Ryan to call 911 first next time, did enjoy the fact that the kid got in the first lick against a bad guy.

Wednesday, October 21, 1992 The local board of health closed down the Wing Wah Chinese restaurant in South Dennis, Mass., briefly in August for various violations. The most serious, said officials, was the restaurant’s practice of draining water from cabbage by putting it in cloth laundry bags, placing them between two pieces of plywood in the parking lot, and driving over them with a van. Said Health Director Ted Dumas, “I’ve seen everything now.”

Inverness, FL

A 71-yearl-old man fell off a dock and into the jaws of an alligator but said his knowledge of reptiles, gained from watching wildlife programs on television, helped him escape.

“I wasn’t a bit afraid. I knew what they usually do,” said George Blinn, who got away from the 7-foot gator by jabbing his thumb in its eye.

Blinn said he has long been a fan of such programs as Wild Kingdom and knew about alligators’ general behavior.

He got the chance to use that knowledge when he fell into the canal behind his house. Blinn said the alligator bit him on the left hand and then flopped him over in the water three times before Blinn escaped.