After All that Palava.......

.....Time for a bit of a larf.

Students, myself having been one,
make the oddest mistakes.

Here is an Homage to them
(the mistakes, not the students)


 'The World According to Student Bloopers'

                by Richard Lederer

                 St. Paul's School

(Verbatim, The Language Quarterly, Vol. XIII, No. 4)


The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies.
They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot.
The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants
have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the
dessert are cultivated by irritation.
The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge
triangular cube.  The Pramids are a range of mountains
between France and Spain.

The Bible is full of interesting caricatures.
In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses,
Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.
Oneof their children, Cain, once asked,
"Am I my brother's son?"  God asked
Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma.
Jacob, son of Isaac, stole his brother's birth mark.
Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his twelve
sons to be patriarchs, but they did not take to it.
One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the
Israelites.

Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves
to make bread without straw.
Moses led them to the Red Sea,
where they made unleavened bread,
which is bread made without any ingredients.
Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide
to get the ten commandments.
David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar.
He fought with the Philatelists,
a race of people who lived in Biblical times.
Solomon, one of David's sons, had 500 wives and 500
porcupines.

Without the Greeks we wouldn't have history.
The Greeks invented three kinds of columns --
Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic.  They also had myths.
A myth is a female moth.  One myth says that
the mother of Achilles dipped him in the
River Stynx until he became intollerable.
Achilles appears in The Illiad, by Homer.
Homer also wrote the Oddity,
in which Penelope was the last hardship
that Ulysses endured on his journey.
Actually, Homer was not written by Homer
but by another man of that name.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher
who went around giving people advice.
They killed him.
Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped,
hurled the biscuits and threw the java.
The reward to the victor was a coral wreath.
The government of Athens was democratic
because people took the law into their
own hands.  There were no wars in Greece,
as the mountains were so high
that they couldn't climb over to see
what their neighbors were doing.
When they fought with the Persians,
the Greeks were outnumbered because
the Persians had more men.

Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks.
History calls people Romans because
hey never stayed in one place for very long.
At Roman banquets, the guests wore
garlics in their hair.
Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the
battlefields of Gaul.
The Ides of March murdered him because
they thought he was going to be made king.
Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture
his poor subjects by playing the fiddle
to them.

Then came the Middle Ages.
King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur lived
in the Age of Shivery,
King Harold mustarded his troops
before the Battle of Hastings,
Joan of Arc was cannonized by Bernard Shaw,
and victims of the Black Death grew boobs
on their necks.
Finally the Magna Carta provided
that no free man should be hanged twice for the same
offense.

In midevil times most of the people were alliterate.
The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer,
who wrote many poems and verses and also
wrote literature.

Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow
through an apple while standing on his son's head.

The Renaissance was an age in which
more individuals felt the value of their human being.
Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at
Wittenburg for selling papal indulgences.
He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull.
It was the painter Donatello's interest in the
female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance.
It was an age of great inventions and discoveries.
Gutenberg invented the Bible.
Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure
because he invented cigarettes.
Another important invention was the circulation of blood.
Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world
with a 100-foot clipper.

The government of England was a limited mockery.
Henry VIII found walking difficult
because he had an abbess on his knee.
Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen."
As a queen she was a success.  When Elizabeth
exposed herself before her troops,
they all shouted, "hurrah."  Then her
navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

The greatest writer of the Renaissance
was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money
and is famous only because of his plays.
He lived at Windsor with his merry wives,
writing tragedies, comedies, and errors.
In one of Shakespear's famous plays,
Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself
in a long soliloquy.
In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth
to kill the King by attacking his manhood.
Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet.
Writing at the same time as Shakespear
was Miguel Cervantes.
He wrote Donkey Hote.
The next great author was John Milton.
Milton wrote Paradise Lost.
Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.

During the Renaissance America began.
Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who
discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic.
His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta,
and the Santa Fe.
Later, the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean,
and this was known as Pilgrims Progress.
When they landed at Plymouth Rock,
they were greeted by the Indians, who came
down the hill rolling their war hoops before them.
The Indian squabs carried porpoises on their back.
Many of the Indian heroes were killed,
along with their cabooses which proved very fatal to them.
The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers.
Many people died and many babies were born.
Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars
was the English put tacks in their tea.
Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the
post without stamps.  During the War,
the Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls
over stone walls.
The dogs were barking and the peacocks
were crowing.
Finally, The colonists won the War and no longer
had to pay for taxis.

Delegates from the original thirteen states
formed the Contented Congress.
Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin,
and Benjamin Franklin were two
singers of the Declaration of Independence.
Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes
in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm.
He invented electricity by rubbing cats
backwards and declared, "A horse divided against
itself cannot stand."
Franklin died in 1790 and is still
dead.

George Washington married Martha Curtis and
in due time became the Father of Our Country.
Then the Constitution of the United States was
adopted to secure domestic hostility.
Under the Constitution the people
enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent.
Lincoln's mother died in infancy, a
nd he was born in a log cabin which he built with his
own hands.
When Lincoln was President,
he wore only a tall silk hat.
He said, "In onion there is strength."
Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg
Address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg
on the back of an envelope.
He also freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation
Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment
gave the ex-Negroes citizenship.
But the Clue Clux Clan would
torcher and lynch the ex-Negroes and other
innocent victims.
It claimed it represented law and odor.
On the night of April 14, 1865,
Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat
by one of the actors in a moving picture show.
The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth,
a supposingly insane actor.
This ruined Booth's career.

Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a
reasonable time.
Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book
called Candy.
Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton.
It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when
the apples are falling off the trees.

Bach was the most famous composer in the world.
and so was Handel. Handel was half German,
half Italian, and half English.  He was very
large.  Bach died from 1750 to the present.
Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf.
He was so deaf he wrote loud music.
He took long walks in the forest
even when everyone was calling for him.
Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

France was in a very serious state.
The French Revolution was accomplished
before it happened.
The Marseillaise was the theme song of
the French Revolution, and it catapulted into Napoleon.
During the Napoleonic Wars,
the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their
shoes.  Then the Spanish gorillas
came down from the hills and nipped at
Napoleon's flanks.
Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and was very
tense and unrestrained.
He wanted an heir to inherit his power, but since
Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't bear children.

The sun never set on the British Empire
because the British Empire is in the East
and the sun sets in the West.
Queen Victoria was the longest queen.
She sat on a thorn for 63 years.
Her reclining years and finally
the end of her life were exemplatory of a
great personality.
Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

The nineteenth century was a time of
many great inventions and thoughts.
The invention of the steamboat
caused a network of rivers to spring up.
Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper,
which did the work of a hundred men.
Samuel Morse invented a code of telepathy.
Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis.
Charles Darwin was a naturalist who
wrote the Organ of the Species.
Madman Curie discovered radium.
And Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers.

The First World War,
caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a
surf, ushered in a new error
in the anals of human history.