Word: joking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Secretary of the Treasury William Simon's tasteless joke about selling New York City to the Shah of Iran can be charged to his Wall Street background. But Gotham is no item on the commodity market. You cannot barter the vision of Washington at the Treasury Building or at Fraunces Tavern. There can be no dollar value on the pride one feels passing the site on Grove Street, where Tom Paine spent his last days, or at the site of Stats Huys, where Peter Stuyvesant read the mandate making New Amsterdam a haven for all people for all time...
...friend of Messing's called Messing up and told him Viva wanted a pro athlete for its December foldout. Messing recalls the incident with a chuckle: "I had done some modeling while in college and I thought it would be good exposure (no pun intended). So partly as a joke and partly as a business venture...
...mild earthquake shake Lisbon one morning last week? "It was caused," according to a local joke, "by the general putting his big foot down on the political parties." The officer in question was General Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, the tough, outspoken boss of the military security force, and the earthquake occurred just as he was making his way to a special assembly of the ruling Armed Forces Movement (M.F.A.). There was only one solution to the party bickering that was "causing division and making the people suffer," declared the general, expressing a view that is increasingly accepted as the Armed...
However, for the record: "gules argent" and "bars sinister" are heraldic impossibilities; Nixon is called many other things in the book apart from "controversial"; there are at least twelve Kings in the book (see the "Royal Descents" in the appendices) apart from President Ford's father, so that joke is not so clever; and, above all, our books are scholarly records of social history, not "snob's bibles." If you do not believe this, try reading one-without prejudice. You will be surprised. Indeed, your flabber will never have been so gasted...
...they gained confidence, the Pythons embarked on ever wilder flights of fancy. Simple moments, such as a karate class being attacked by fresh fruit, grew to sequences like the Killer Joke that caused everyone to die laughing. Ultimately, the Joke was taken over by the War Office and launched against the Nazis in the Ardennes. Another Python classic was the case of the listless cat. "In a rut," declared its owners, who thereupon called in the Confuse-A-Cat team, men in white coats who stage a full-scale military review. The cat watches without twitching a whisker. Then...