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    Funnies, Upliftings & Wee-Wisdoms

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    by ronprice ·

    FUNNIES UPLIFTINGS AND WEE-WISDOMS

    Preamble:

    I wrote the following little bit of prose on Wee-Wisdoms Upliftings and Funnies: A Sub-Genre of the Email Industry due to the many humorous and not-so-humorous, wise and not-so-wise, uplifting and not-so-uplifting emails I’ve received in the last 20 years. My guess is that about 5% of all the emails I???ve received from 1991, when emails first began to enter my life, are of these types. I hope you enjoy the read. This little bit of prose which follows is a 5000 word updated digest of the twenty-one page, 10,000+ word, essay that did NOT make it into Dr. Funwisdum’s new book Human Communication in the Twenty-First Century, editor, Harry Funwisdum, Oxford University Press, 2002.

    Dr. Funwisdum rejected my contribution to his book, but encouraged me to try for his next collection so impressed was he with the quality of the short essay which follows. I trust you enjoy it, too, even if it is a little longer than my normal emails to you and even if it is a little too critical of the sub-genre with which it is concerned. If you don’t enjoy what you read here, I’m sure you will at least tolerate its presence. We must all, in and out of the world of emails, increasingly learn to tolerate each other’s eccentricities, thus making the world an easier place to live in.

    Recently, since my retirement from full-time, part-time and casual work in the years 1999 to 2005, I have been writing prolifically and, although I am neither famous nor rich, I like to think I am churning out some provocative, entertaining and intellectually stimulating stuff from my word-factory near the mouth of the Tamar River, at Port Dalrymple, here in northern Tasmania at the last stop on the way to Antarctica if you take the western Pacific rim route. Of course, what one likes to think and what the reality is about one???s writing or, indeed, anything else is often at significant variance.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania, Updated on 1 January 2011.

    To : All Senders of ‘Wee-Wisdoms and Funnies’
    From : Ron Price
    Date : 1 January 2011
    Subject : Funnies Upliftings and Wee-Wisdoms
    ___________________________________________________________
    I hope you enjoy this little piece of gentle satire, perhaps sarcasm is a more accurate word, analysis and comment. It will serve as a more detailed response to the many emails I have received over the last 20 years, 1991 to 2011, emails which were intended to be either funny, uplifting or wise or, occasionally, all three. In my first years in Perth Western Australia, while working at the Thornlie Campus, now part of the Swan Tafe system, my first contact with email systems began. There is virtually no one I am writing to now and from whom I received emails then(at least none I can accurately recall) in the years, say, 1991 to 1993, who is on my current email list, although I now have many email correspondents who have lasted nearly 20 years: 1993 to 2011.

    When one is not teaching sociology and the several social sciences and humanities, as I had been doing for so many years; when one is not having one???s mind kept busy by a hundred students a week and trying, at the same time, to be a father, husband, friend, neighbour and citizen; when one retires from the employment, the job-world which is at the centre of one???s life, other things come of necessity(if one is to be happily engaged with one???s existence) into the gap. For me, one of these things is writing and posting on the internet and responding to the inevitable emails that result from all this writing.

    Emails need to be given some sort of analysis, at least the sub-genre I am concerned with here, due to their frequency as a form of communication during these 20 years. This piece, this email, this essay/article is probably a little too long given the general orthodoxy of most personal email communication which tends to be shorter and shortest???before the intended readers/writers give up entirely and simply go off the email radar screen and are heard from no more.

    This tendency to brevity is not true of all my correspondents, though, some of whom send me many a long piece of print usually written by someone else and sent as an attachment or a cut-and-paste exercise. Not everyone is into writing any more than everyone is into gardening or cooking, washing the car or shopping, or dusting and vacuuming on a regular basis.

    Perhaps you could see this missive from yours-truly as one of the long articles on the internet that you need to copy for future reading rather than seeing it as one of those quick-hit-emails you receive as part of your daily or weekly quota. Then, with this alternative framework in mind, perhaps, your emotional equipment will be able to make a positive adjustment to this lengthy, some might say verbose, piece of communication which I send for your pleasure.
    12 PAGE(FONT-14) SUMMARY ARTICLE:

    Receiving so many funnies, upliftings and words-of-wisdom as I have month-after-month, week-after-week, for over some 20 years now, from a small coterie of people, a coterie which changes with the months and years, I thought I would try to respond more befittingly than I normally do with my perfunctory and usually brief set of phrases and sentences, if indeed I respond at all, to these sometimes delightful, sometimes funny, sometimes wise and wonderful pieces and sometimes tiresome in their frequency that are sent to me with regularity. It is a regularity that reminds me of my many days and years, especially the ones in Australia, as a teacher when I was the recipient of similar pieces of humour and wisdom on A-4 paper and not in cyberspace.

    Australia is a country where humour is just about compulsory and as much a part of the daily diet as the air???if one is survive happily???that is! What you find below is intended as a reflective piece that sets all these wisdoms, upliftings and funnies I receive from you–and others–in some perspective, a perspective that derives in large measure from my years, as I say, as a teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator. I am now a poet and publisher, writer and editor, journalist and independent scholar. For from well-nigh half a century now I have been imbibing funnies, upliftings and wisdoms from a multitude of sources. It is probably these years as a teacher, though, that have resulted in my habit, engrained after all these years, of responding if I can to any and all incoming mail/email.

    I enjoyed teaching but, as the years approached thirty-in-the-game(that is by 1999), I got tired of much of what was involved in the process. At the same time, as this fatigue was developing, I experienced a simultaneous life-enrichment from writing prose and poetry and a certain increase in sensory sensitivity and awareness. I???m not sure why this was but it was the case—and I just had to get out of the teaching game, a game I had been in since 1967. As the 1990s advanced and the new, the 3rd, millennium opened I retired from teaching and went on a new medication cocktail for my bipolar disorder(BPD). The positive processes of writing and sensory awareness that had begun in the 1990s increased many fold. Fatigue only now returns from time to time during the day and again at the end of eight to twelve hours of reading and writing. This fatigue is also a natural bi-product of the medication cocktail, my mood stabilizer and anti-depressant meds, for my BPD.

    The emails and the occasional letter as well as the assortment of incoming items I have summarized above—and which I receive now are somewhat like pieces of work I used to have to mark. It???s part of my life-work, my responsibility, my role and my task in life to respond. It is only courtesy; at least that is how I see it! It is my burden of duty. Like making comments on the work of students, I now respond to emails and letters with courtesy and with honesty. This is not always easy to make what is for me an appropriate response for courtesy and honesty do not sit easily together, especially if the content of the received material is, for me, neither funny nor edifying, as is the case with so much of the material I receive and have received over the years???again like much of the stuff I had to mark as a teacher and lecturer, a tutor and editor. It has been 20 years(1991-2011) since the email began to be part of my daily life, after several years of warm-up from, say, 1988 to 1991 while I was a Tafe teacher and the email system was making its entry into post-secondary educational systems if I recall correctly. Those earliest years of emailing, though, are somewhat vague now after the passing of those two decades.

    This short think-piece in which I am attempting to summarize the 20 years of experience with this sub-genre of emails is but a series of reflections. It is also a form of tribute, of celebration, of the many advantages of reading the products of this wonderful mechanism of technology???the world-wide-web–and its products which are, sadly, not always rewarding or intellectually engaging.

    I think I write this for me more than I do for you since the thrust of so much of this sub-genre of email communication does not, for the most part, require any reflection, or at least a minimum of reflection on the part of the sender of the material, although I???m sure some who send me material spend hours hunting stuff down. I get an average of two pieces a day and have now for about ten years from an octogenarian in Texas. Sending this sort of material is a central part of her life-work. She is unable to walk and nearly unable to breath but her persistence with this sub-genre of the email industry is staggering. She primarily means to entertain and, like so much of TV and the print and electronic media for millions, she/it generally accomplishes this task. Hence its popularity.

    Don???t get me wrong, I???m not against entertainment, especially when it is combined with information. The term has now been coined for these resources: infotainment. I’m sure that the entertainment function is the primary reason for the success of this sub-genre of communication. Quick hits as so many emails are, like jokes themselves-“affections arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing,” as the philosopher Emmanuel Kant once defined laughter, on occasion stir the mind or the heart, or both, or the eye which is often quicker than the mind.

    Perhaps these emails they are a sign of “a mind lively and at ease,??? as Emma once said in Jane Austin’s book by the same name. These quick hits require quick responses, if any at all. Many of the emails, as I say above, the funnies, the upliftings and the wee-wisdoms–are uplifting, funny or wise and sometimes, as I say, all three. But given their frequency over the last two decades, I felt like making some statement about them. Perhaps it is the slight itch they have created in my sensory emporium that causes me to write this piece of expository reflection.

    I remember listening to the famous Australian author Tim Winton express his concern for what, from his point of view, was a wasted use of a wonderful technology, the technology in cyberspace. My feelings do not run as deep as Winton???s; I have little to no angst over this internet form, this ???I want to tickle your fancy??? type of communication. In Australia it???s part of a modus vivendi, part of a leg-pulling, pleasure-loving ethos with its cynical beneath surface mentality, downunder. It is a mode, a manner, I have come to enjoy for it has helped to give me a balance, a balance to the quite serious side of my life which I brought with me in 1971 when I moved to Australia from Canada after having been raised by religious parents who were in their forties and fifties when I was born.

    Some writers and analysts see these uplifting items, these funnies and wee-wisdoms as part of the trivialization of the human battle, the denial of tragedy, the dislike of authority, part of a defence mechanism to ward off real personal commitment. Such writers see the authors of this form of communication here in Australia as a form of communication based on the desire to escape and to dismiss all self-questioning as ratbaggery. Ronald Conway, Australia???s most famous clinical psychologist, puts it this way. Others see it as part of a chronically skeptical society as the literary critic Susan Langer once defined so much of the output of the electronic media factories?

    I hope you don’t find this little think-piece too heavy, too much thinking, too long without the quick-natural-lift, message or laugh that is part of this particular sub-genre of emails. In the end you may see me as too critical but, as I used to say to my students, that is the risk you take when you open your mouth or write or send items my way.

    Being nice is, for me, part of the great Canadian white-way and has been all my life; perhaps this epistle is just a means, a tool, for a man now in the evening of his life, to balance off all this niceness with some elements of my ego, my dark, my animalistic heritage which I have been struggling with successfully and unsuccessfully, at least with only partial success all my life. With my new, my fifth major medication package in more than forty years, though, I am gradually achieving a balance. Such are the advances in medicine for which I am truly thankful. I???d like to be able to put this all down to spiritual development but, sadly, this I cannot do. When I am without my medication, I descend into an abyss which seems to be some other person, a person I do not like and do not want to live with. But life, on and off the internet, has its perils for all of us, eh?

    GETTING TO THE POINT: CARRY ON GANG

    In a more general sense, I have been giving and receiving various forms of advice/wisdom for some 67 years now: 2011 back to 1943 when I was in my mother’s womb and she was imbibing, as she so often did, the earliest 20th century form of positive thinking and Christianity from Norman Vincent Peale’s radio program which my mother first heard in the years before she met my father circa 1940. The program was called “The Art of Living” which began in 1935. In 1952 Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking which has now sold over 7 million copies.

    By the early 1950s my mother began to read to me passages each morning from The Daily Word, a publication of the Unity School of Christianity with its world centre in Madison Wisconsin, if I recall correctly after all these years. I see those readings now as the experience of my first mantras. Then, in those same early fifties, when my mother began to take an interest in the Baha’i cause, I was exposed to Baha’i prayers. Baha’i was a religion that had been in Canada, then in those early fifties, for a little more than fifty years and the books my mother read from, English translations of Persian and Arabic Baha’i prayers, were just beginning to be published in prayer books. I found those words beautiful then and I still do after the slow evolution of nearly sixty years.

    Life began to assume a more serious aspect in the years of my late childhood(1953 to 1957) and, then, in my teens: school, sport, girls and entertainment found some competition in life’s round of activities from the more earnest side of life. I first imbibed wisdom as a student from the several founts of knowledge I was then exposed to or that I investigated as a youth, a period I have always defined as those years in their teens and twenties taking-in as that period did the years of early adulthood.

    Then wisdom came my way as a teacher and lecturer, tutor and adult educator in the social sciences and humanities???including such subjects as human relations, interpersonal skills, conflict resolution, negotiation skills, and working in teams as well as a list of subjects as long as your proverbial arm. During those years trying to communicate stuff to others I received and dispensed advice and wisdoms in a multitude of forms. I was clearly into the advice and wisdom absorbing and dispensing business right from the dawn of my life. It was part of the very air I breathed.

    I’m sure even in those years of unconsciousness, in utero, and in the years of early childhood where no memories reside, I had my very earliest experiences of wee-wisdoms, although funnies were in short supply during the war and shortly thereafter, at least in my consanguineal family. My mother was one of those seekers, always willing to try on a new idea if it came into town. And now, more than thirty years after her passing, I have a small book of the wee-wisdoms she collected in her half a century of collecting from the late 1920s, in her early twenties, to her death in 1978. They were sent to me by my mother???s sister, an equally serious and religious person as my mother.

    I should by now be a fount of unusually perspicacious aphorisms from the wisdom literature of history or, at the very least, I should run ‘wisdom workshops’ for the lean and hungry. The funnies department of my life, though, as a child, as an adolescent or in the first decade of my young adult life from 20 to 30, was never as extensive or successful as the wee-wisdom section. Right from my first exposure to jokes about: Newfees, Polocks and the Irish or the genitals of males and females and their mutual interconnections, I generally found much of the humour distasteful. So it was back in my late childhood and adolescence; perhaps this was due to the gently puritanical and pious(perhaps religious is just the right word) upbringing I had, an upbringing I now appreciate to the full, although not in its entirety then.

    I must confess, indeed I am pleased to acknowledge, that 40 years of living in Australia(1971-2011) has taught me a rich appreciation of the funny side of life probably due to the humour that lurks both below the surface and at the surface of so much of Australian culture and inevitably bubbles to the surface in this essentially pleasure-loving people. Australian stoicism is strengthened by this ability to see the lighter side of life. In this dry dog-biscuit of a continent, with a beauty all its own and where fires burn up part of its landmass every summer from December to March, and droughts and floods also do their share of damage, humour is, as I say above, virtually compulsory.

    By now, I should have an accumulation of jokes-and-funnies to keep everyone laughing in perpetuity. And I did by 1999. By the time I retired and as I headed toward the new millennium and away from FT teaching, I had a whole section of my filing cabinet stocked with items, with funnies, received from my students, in their hope that I could see the funny side of life–and occasionally I did.

    Now, in the evening of my life, I feel a little like the marriage guidance counsellor who has been married six times. He has never been able to pull-it-off, marriage that is, but he has had a lot of experience trying. For some nine years, during the final part of my educative process as a full-time teacher(1990-1999)–and educative it was–I used to give out “a summary of the wisdom of the ages” on several sheets of A-4 paper to the approximately one hundred students I had every term or semester. One of the strong threads in this summary of wisdom literature were several quotations from Murphy???s Law, a set of sayings that contained many grains of truth and humour and which had gained a high degree of popularity in Australia. Thousands of intending students of leisure and life and I went through the material to see if we could come up with the ‘wisest of the wise’ stuff, practical goodies for the market-place and for the inner man or woman. For the most part I enjoyed the process. Giving and receiving advice was a buzz, particularly when it was sugar-coated with humour. Advice-giving can be a tedious activity and the advice can act as a weight even if it is good advice, unless the context is right. Humour often makes it right.

    Now that the evening of my life is in full swing, the wee-wisdoms, the upliftings and the funnies continue to float in or on cyberspace unavoidably, inevitably, at least the inevitability comes if one is open to human contact in that increasingly popular domain. From emails and the internet, among other sources, material is obtained from my interlocutors which they, in turn, obtain from:

    (i) the wisdom literature of the great historical religions;
    (ii) the wisdom of the philosophical traditions
    (outside traditional religions);
    (iii) the wisdom of popular psychology and the social sciences
    ???.usually from the fields of: (a) human relations, (b) interpersonal skills, (c) pop-psychology, (d) management and organizational behaviour and (e) endless funnies, upliftings and wee-wisdoms from known & unknown word and audio-visual factories; and
    (iv) the electronic media.

    The social sciences provide the disciplines in which so much of the wisdom literature I receive is now located. The social sciences are either old: like history, philosophy and religion; or young: like economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and human relations, inter alia. Unlike some of the other academic fields, say the biological and physical sciences, all these social sciences are inexact, highly subjective and infinitely more complex than the physical and biological sciences–or so I see them anyway. Everybody and their dog can play at dispensing their wisdoms, with the dogs sometimes providing the best advice in the form of close friendships, at least for some people with canine proclivities. Unlike the physical and biological sciences, too, knowledge and experience is not required.

    Anyone can play the game. Often the untutored and apparently ignorant and those who have read nothing at all in the field, can offer humble wisdoms and funnies which excel the most learned, with or without their PhDs. So be warned: it’s a mine field, this advice and wisdom business. It???s highly democratic, individualistic, egalitarian. The result for many practitioners who would really like to be both wise and entertaining is the experience of a field that resembles a mud-pie, poorly constructed and not of much use to humanity, although lots of laughs are had and wisdom gets distributed liberally???which, as far as it goes, obviously has some use to us all in what very well may be the darkest hours in the history of civilization. Who would want to deny or prevent the liberal effusion of this new art form? The industry, the word factories, pour out their wisdoms and their humour with greater frequency at every passing day.

    I often wonder how that fountain of the Enlightment, Voltaire, would have coped Downunder. He said he never had one “ha ha” in his whole life. I think he would have gone home to France pretty fast on a boat with the whinging-poms, if he had ever come to Australia way back when in the years of the Enlightenment over two centuries ago.

    And so I begin or, should I say, end with apologies all-round to any who might take offence here. But I felt like having a little think about this sub-genre of emails at this 20 year mark(1991-2011) in my email-life. On what you might call my wisdom/advice-lifeline, I have just entered the middle years(65-75) of my late adulthood, the years form 60 to 80 as some human development psychologists call them. As I, and you, continue to imbibe the endless supply of resources available from the endless supply of word and audio-visual factories, we will continue to get both our laughs, our funnies, our wisdoms, our upliftings and the endless aphorisms. And we should thank the Lord for them! For who would want a life without laughs and/or without wisdom?

    I hope my satire, my sarcasm, here is gentle and does not bite too hard or at all. Canadians are, on the whole, a nice people who try to perform their operations on their patients in such a way that their patients leave the hospital without the suspicion that these patients have even been operated on at all, but with the new glands, the new body parts, fully installed for daily use. Like the pick-pocket and the burglar, I want to get in-there-and-out without alerting anyone to my work. A state of total anaesthesia is helpful during the process.

    The New Testament calls it, or so one could argue, the act of: ‘The Thief in the Night,’ or so one could render one possible interpretation. The phrase was applied to prophecy when Christ said He would come again. But, again, this is a prophecy capable of many interpretations, as all prophecies are. I send this communication your way in response to the many emails I’ve received in this sub-genre in recent months/years. There are, perhaps, a dozen people now who are ‘into this sub-genre’ and who send me this special type of material in the course of a year, some with a zeal bordering on the religious or should I say the fanatical. This dozen sends me many delightful pieces, more it seems as the years go by, including photos, images, attachments of various kinds and colours, to embellish the content of the wisdom and humour.

    I feel, after so many years of giving out my jokes as a teacher, that it is only fair that I now receive humour and wisdom as graciously as mine were accepted by my students over those many years. Like my in-class jokes, some of the material I receive is funny, some not-so-funny; some is wise, some not-so-wise. But, then, you can’t win them all. Both wisdom and humour are hopefully irrepressible quotients, at least in some people. And again, perhaps, we have the Lord to thank for that. So, carry on gang with your own particular brand of giving and receiving. Who am I to put a lid on your enthusiasms?

    I have noticed, might I add parenthetically, that some enthusiastic senders of these email goodies often drop off the radar-screen suddenly and their goodies are seen no more or, at least, far less than they once were in the hey-day of their goodie-sending life. There are, of course, many reasons for this that one might hypothesize: a change in their life???s role, a drop or a rise in their lifeline status, a desire to save downloading space in their monthly allocation from their internet provider, a desire to save money for the process can be costly, a simple fatigue with the process of getting and sending(by which as the poet Wordsworth once said ???we lay waste our powers???)– for one can only get overkill, overdone, overwork, overstate, overfully, so many times. Sometimes such enthusiasts completely drop-out of the email game. As their life goes in other directions their output moves to other domains.

    As Gore Vidal, a man of irrepressible humour and erudition as he criticizes American society from his home in Italy, once said, ???our whole society has laughing-gas pumped into its billions of lounge-rooms every night–as the world continues its mad, mad race and pace.??? Can one get tired of laughing? Who knows? But there is definitely a lifeline, a lifespan, a life-funny-line trajectory for each person who gets into the funny-uplifting-wee-wisdom sending and receiving business. It does not continue at the same pace year after year in perpetuity. And thank the Lord for that.

    George Bernard Shaw used to say that: “I can no more write what people want than I can play the fiddle to a happy company of folk-dancers.” So he wrote what he thought his readers needed. What people need and what they want are usually not the same. Many found George presumptuous. I hope that readers here will not find this essay in the same category as Shaw’s—presumptuous that is. I hope, too, that this somewhat lengthy read has been worth your while. If not, well, you now have……ten choices regarding what to do next:
    A FOLLOW-UP EXERCISE FOR READERS

    A.

    (i) delete the above;
    (ii) print and save the above for pondering because it’s wise, clever
    and something quite personal from the sender;
    (iii) read it again now, then delete it;
    (iv) save the very good bits and delete the rest;
    (v) none of the above;
    (vi) all of the above, if that is possible;
    (vii) write your own think-piece on this sub-genre of emails;
    (viii) send me a copy of your ‘writing on this sub-genre of emails’
    for: (a) my evaluation(1)and/or (b) my pleasure;
    (ix) don’t send your evaluation to me; and
    (x) don’t think about what I’ve written; just dismiss it as the meandering of a man
    moving speedily within the early years of his late adulthood.

    B.

    If time permits from your busy life rate the above piece of writing using either the scale:

    A+(91-100), A(81-90) and A-(75-80); B+(71-74),B(68-70) and B-(65-67); C+(60-64, C(55-59) and C-(50-54); D(25-49 hold and try again) and E(0-24 attend a workshop on ‘wisdoms and funnies’)—or

    C.

    You might prefer to provide feedback in an anecdotal form with: (a) commentary, (b) advice, (c) suggestions for improvement, (d) et cetera. Just forward it to Dr. Funwisdom via myself. And I will

    …..remain yours sincerely and, I hope, faithfully

    Ron Price
    6 Reece Street
    Pipe Clay Bay
    South George Town
    George Town
    Tasmania 7253
    ———————
    Updated On: 1/1/???11
    No. of Words: 5000

All Comments

  • Author
    Replies
    • #2811217

      D: WTF?

      by seanferd ·

      In reply to Funnies, Upliftings & Wee-Wisdoms

      Honest question.

      • #2811169

        Note To Self: Must cut-and-paste HitchHikers Guide to the Universe into TR

        by robo_dev ·

        In reply to D: WTF?

        seriously, that’s the longest post I’ve ever seen.

        It reminded me of what you would hear if you got a self-absorbed college philosophy professor really drunk and he just would not stop talking…..

        • #2811153

          War and Peace

          by gsg ·

          In reply to Note To Self: Must cut-and-paste HitchHikers Guide to the Universe into TR

          I thought about the same on the cut and paste, except I was thinking War and Peace, then I wondered if this person thought he was uploading his dissertation for peer review. Either way, that is seriously weird.

          On a side note, I now think it would be seriously fun to get a self-absorbed philosophy professor drunk. Note to self: We have 4 colleges in the area. Find philosophy professor, bring camera, and booze. Throw one or two “special recipe” brownies in for good measure.

        • #2811105

          Save the brownies

          by nicknielsen ·

          In reply to War and Peace

          A philosophy prof is probably used to them by now… 😀

        • #2435099

          Philosophy Discusses The Serious and the Weird

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to Save the brownies

          I remember going to a lecture in the early 1960s entitled: all chairs have 13/4 legs. There is much that is weird in the world.-Ron

        • #2435100

          Thanking you

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to War and Peace

          An ingenious reaction to my post. I agree, the post was far too long. I posted it, not after I was drinking since I am a tee-totaller. The last drink of alcohol I had was in the mid-1950s at Easter.-Ron

        • #2435101

          Thanking you

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to Note To Self: Must cut-and-paste HitchHikers Guide to the Universe into TR

          Thanks for your honest reaction.-Ron

    • #2811148

      And I thought…

      by puppybreath ·

      In reply to Funnies, Upliftings & Wee-Wisdoms

      that people who like to hear themselves talk were bad. Maybe we should just cut and paste an entire encyclopedia into a post. That way all of the information you’d ever need would be in one place.

      • #2811144

        naw

        by jaqui ·

        In reply to And I thought…

        get absolutely everything from wikipedia into one post, likely be easier. 😉

        • #2811137

          Naw

          by puppybreath ·

          In reply to naw

          because then some wise guy would just post a link to wiki and you’d lose the effect of having it printed out for you. 😉

        • #2435096

          Wise Guys

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to Naw

          Yes, there are many wise guys in cyberspace.-Ron

        • #2435097

          That is another option

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to naw

          Taker care, Jaqui. Ron Price, Tasmania

      • #2435098

        I think that is the purpose of Wikipedia

        by ronprice ·

        In reply to And I thought…

        I think that is the purpose of Wikipedia which is now the biggest encyclopedia in the world.-Ron

    • #2811131

      Response to WTF

      by ronprice ·

      In reply to Funnies, Upliftings & Wee-Wisdoms

      This piece is, as I said at the outset, too long for many. There is also a sense of sarcasm or humour which some just don’t get. Not to worry. As in life so on the internet—one can’t get it all.-Ron

      • #2811120

        I think it was more …

        by jaqui ·

        In reply to Response to WTF

        wtf? WHERE are these humorous gems you are going on about?
        The beginning of the piece you state it’s a collection of them, yet there seems to be a decided LACK of them in it.

        so, WHERE ARE THE QUIPS YOU COLLECTED?

        • #2811103

          Not there

          by nicknielsen ·

          In reply to I think it was more …

          But in his defence I quote: “I wrote the following little bit of prose…[b]due to[/b] the many humorous and not-so-humorous, wise and not-so-wise, uplifting and not-so-uplifting emails I’ve received in the last 20 years.” (my emphasis)

          I think he would have done better to have included them, too.

        • #2435094

          Too Long a Post

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to Not there

          A good idea but it would have made my post like that encyclopedia.-Ron

        • #2811028

          I Gave Them Away When I Retired

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to I think it was more …

          I Gave Them Away When I Retired. The entire piece of writing is a humorous piece. But not everyone finds it humorous. You are obviously in that category. It is the same with all humour. It appeals to some and not to others.-Ron

        • #2809599

          Thanks for posting

          by michael jay ·

          In reply to I Gave Them Away When I Retired

          this whatever it is, please do it again, this time make it short include only the really good stuff, but I did like it, just troubled that there was no belly laughs included.

          note: I seldom read long posts, so you get a thumb.

        • #2809574

          Funnies etc

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to Thanks for posting

          With appreciation for your honesty and good advice.-Ron

        • #2809283

          Not to sound like an upstart pup

          by ansugisalas ·

          In reply to Funnies etc

          But I think a man of your age should dare be what he is, and the same should go for your text.
          Take out all the self-referential (suitextual) bits. Don’t have the piece talk about what the piece is, nor about how the piece should/could/would/ought/pray be understood. Cut it into a shape that it can stand – naked – before the almighty.

        • #2435092

          A Thoughtful Response

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to Not to sound like an upstart pup

          I thank you for your thoughtful response.-Ron

        • #2435093

          No Need For Belly-Laughs

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to Thanks for posting

          The world provides more belly-laughs than are needed. Gore Vidal says that every evening laughing-gas is pumped into millions of lounge-rooms.-Ron

        • #2435095

          I Saved Them

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to I think it was more …

          I saved them and gave them to one of my fellow lecturers when I retired.-Ron

      • #2809407

        Thanks for the reply,

        by seanferd ·

        In reply to Response to WTF

        but not remotely in the ballpark of what I was hoping to learn.

        Length dissuades me not.

        Cheers!

        • #2435091

          Too Long for Most

          by ronprice ·

          In reply to Thanks for the reply,

          A post like mine is obviously too long for the conventions of cyberspace backs and forths.-Ron

    • #2809369

      Ouch, walked into wall of text

      by slayer_ ·

      In reply to Funnies, Upliftings & Wee-Wisdoms

      Who put that there?

    • #2435089

      A Final Note

      by ronprice ·

      In reply to Funnies, Upliftings & Wee-Wisdoms

      Well, I must say that this thread became much longer than I had originally thought it would be, I thank everyone for their contributions and bid you all good-bye for now.-Ron
      PS it will be winter in Australia in 6 days

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