Monday, June 30, 2008

Two Jokes

An opinion piece in The Independent led off with this:

There was a New York bagel maker called Finkelstein. He was the most unfortunate of men. The day after the insurance policy ran out, his store burnt down, which did not persuade the health authorities to drop the charges over the mice in his basement: placed there, he was certain, by a rival. On Yom Kippur, his daughter and only child announced that she was going to marry a goy. Truly, his suffering exceeded Job's. He was so desperate that he shook his fist at the sky and shouted: "God, why are you so down on me?" To his astonishment, the clouds parted, and there was God, saying: "I don't know what it is, Finkelstein, but somehow you piss me off."

Then there's this City Journal excerpt from a book as part of a review:

“In some languages,” said the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin, “a double negative yields an affirmative. In other languages, a double negative yields a more emphatic negative. Yet, curiously enough, I know of no language, either natural or artificial, in which a double affirmative yields a negative.”
“Suddenly, from the back of the hall, in a round Brooklyn accent, came the comment, ‘Yeah, yeah.’”

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