Thought for the Day

Funny Friday

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The Fridays seem to be arriving faster.  It's time for some Friday fun and today it's a little different, a wealth of corn and a bit of Where's Wally.  Enjoy, readers . . .

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I went to pick the wife up from the local Weight Watchers. I was a bit early so I just joined them and sat in the circle. I had a massive bag of Maltesers so I thought I'd take the piss opening up right there in front of them all. Anyway, the bag split and they all went flying. Last time I witnessed a scene like that was when I played Hungry Hippos as a kid. 

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Where's Wally?
(Known as Waldo in the US and Canada).

Corn Corner: 

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Just been on a diabetes awareness website and it asked me if I accept cookies. 

Is that a trick question?? 

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I went to my mate’s funeral. It was sad, he was killed by a tennis ball . 

Still, it was a lovely service. 

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My friend and I were playing chess. I said to him "Let's do something interesting", so we stopped playing chess. 

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I finally realised my parents favoured my twin brother. 

It hit me when they asked me to blow up balloons for his surprise birthday party. 

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What do you call a fish that isn't moving? 

A dead fish. 

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I don’t watch Downton Abbey....... 

I get enough period drama with my girlfriend 

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A recent survey found that humans eat more bananas than monkeys. 

It’s probably true. I honestly couldn't tell you the last time I ate a monkey. 

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Somone stole a toilet from a police station in Burwood. 

Detectives are searching for clues, but at the moment they have nothing to go on.

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Imagine the Titanic with a lisp. 

It's unthinkable. 

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Two Muslims have crashed a speedboat into the barrier at Warragamba. 

Police think it might be the start of Ram-a-dam. 

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Breaking news, midget holds seance for charity and runs off with the takings. 

Small medium at large. 

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Scientists have discovered exactly how much sleep an average person needs. 

Just 5 minutes more. 

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How do you make a pirate angry? 

Take the 'P' out of him. 

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I read a history book about World War II that was only four pages long. 

It was abridged too far. 

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I went for a job interview today and the manager said, 'We’re looking for someone who is responsible.' 

'Well, I’m your man', I replied, 'In my last job, whenever anything went wrong, they said I was responsible.' 

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I tried to visit the house where the guy who invented toothpaste was born. 

Sadly, there was no plaque on it. 

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People often say "icy" is the easiest word to spell and, looking at it now, I see why. 

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My neighbours are listening to great music. 

Whether they like it or not. 

Quote for the Day

Yesterday during the weekly trivia competition in which our team takes part, I gently prompted team member Carol to proceed a little faster by paraphrasing the last words of Carl Panzram at his execution. Carol likes to chat. She would be able to talk for Australia and win gold if talking was an Olympic event. 

Carl Panzram (1891-1930), on the other hand, was an American serial killer who confessed to 21 murders but was convicted of only 4. He was sentenced to death by hanging for battering to death another inmate, the head of the prison laundry, whilst an inmate at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas. He refused to appeal and threatened to kill human rights groups that attempted to appeal on his behalf. 

His last words were quoted in Bytes back in 2010 but are worth a revisit. 

Asked by his executioner on the gallows whether he had any last words, he responded: 

"Hurry up, you Hoosier bastard, I could kill ten men while you're screwing around."

Te-lah-nay’s Wall:

Te-lah-nay: 

• Te-lah-nay was a Yuchi native American Indian, a tribe that lived along the Tennessee River in the 1800s. She and her sister Whana-le were sent to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma as part of the removal of native peoples from the southeast under the provisions of the Indian Removal Act, signed by President Jackson in 1830. Her name means Woman With Dancing Eyes, she and her sister had been orphaned by soldiers. They were part of the estimated up to 60,000 relocated Native Americans who made the journey known as The Trail of Tears. 

• Te-lah-Nay and her tribe called the Tennessee River the Singing River because they believed a woman who lived in the river sang to them. When Te-lah-nay arrived in Oklahoma she said the streams and rivers did not sing to her and she longed for home. 

• After spending one winter on the Oklahoma reservation she left for home, even though she was aged only about 16 to 18. She reportedly said that her sister, Whana-le, was like a wildflower and could grow anywhere, whereas Te-lah-nau felt that if she stayed there she would die. 

• The journey home took 5 years, Te-lah-nay enduring hardship, storms and the risk of capture and death. She eventually settled near Florence, Alabama and married Jonathon Levi Hipp and had three children, before dying at a young age. 

Tom Hendrix: 

• Tom Hendrix, the great-great-grandson of Te-lah-nay, the owner of a property near Waterloo, Alabama, was told the story of Te-lah-nay by his grandmother, who was Te-lah-nay’s granddaughter. Wanting to do something to honour her memory, he knew what to do after being told by an elder of the Yuchi tribe "All things shall pass. Only the stones will remain.” 

• For the next 30 years, finishing in 2013, Tom Hendrix constructed a wall on his 5 acre property in memory of a woman he had never met or known. Each day at 5.00am he drove his old truck to the Tennessee River to collect stones, as well as those discarded by farmers, to construct a dry stone wall. He said that in doing so, he "wore out three trucks, 22 wheelbarrows, 3,800 pairs of gloves, three dogs and one old man". 

• Particulars of the wall, which is also known as the Wichahpi Commemorative Stone Wall:

The wall is over 1600m (1 mile) in length.  

The wall is in two sections, one representing Te-lah-nay’s trek to Oklahoma and the other her journey home.  

The wall varies in height and width, like Te-lah-nay’s journey and a person’s journey in life, which is never straight.  

Anchoring the wall is a prayer circle, where Tom Hendrix prayed every morning. The four tiers of the prayer circle represent birth, life, death and rebirth. 

• In 2000 Tom Hendrix published a book, “If the Legends Fade”, about Te-lah-nay’s journey, which generated visits from people around the world. May of those people have brought with them stones and fossils to place on the wall, which now has stones from 127 nations, territories and islands. Tom Hendrix placed each such stone carefully when he was alive and catalogued where it came from, why it was special and what it represented. 

• Tom Hendrix passed away on February 24, 2017, ten days past his 83rd birthday. Te-lah-nay’s Wall remains open to visitors and is now in the care of his son, Trace Hendrix. 

“If the legends fade, who will teach the children?” 

- Tom Hendrix 

Gallery: 

Tom Hendrix with Te-lah-nay’s Wall. 

This section of the wall represents the end of Te-lah-nay's journey home. 

These rocks look like faces and are strategically placed to ward off evil spirits at sunset. 

Prayer Circle

Tom Hendrix has joined Te-lah-nay in the Great Circle.  The stones remain. 

Thought for the Day

QuickFacts: Music

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Michael Jackson’s Thriller, with its famous graveyard dance video, started the trend of group dance scenes in pop videos, forcing even non-dancers like Pat Benatar to front a group of dancers in their clips.

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Thriller is by far the best selling album in the world. In the United States, it was overtaken by The Eagles Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, but reclaimed the title after Jackson's death.

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Speaking of The Eagles, the lyric, "Warm smell of colitas" in Hotel California is not a sexual slang term or a reference to marijuana. Band member Don Felder has stated "The colitas is a plant that grows in the desert that blooms at night, and it has this kind of pungent, almost funky smell. Don Henley came up with a lot of the lyrics for that song, and he came up with colitas."  Nonetheless, colitis is also a slang term for marijuanha,

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It was reported in 2003 that the military commander of al-Qaeda, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was being interrogated at a secret US base known only by its CIA nickname, the Hotel California.  A US intelligence source said the name was taken from the Eagles' song which includes the lyric, "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave".  There was speculation that the base could be on the British Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia or even in Uzbekistan.  The intelligence source said "KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] will never come back to the United States or Guantanamo Bay. He will be held in a basement somewhere in a third country where, shall we say, they do not worry too much about humanitarian laws and he will not be protected by the US constitution."

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The lyrics to Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns N’ Roses came from a poem Axl Rose was working on. He wrote the song about his girlfriend, Erin Everly, who is the daughter of Don Everly of the Everly Brothers. They married in 1990 but divorced a month later.

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The real name of Lorde is Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O’Connor.

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Merle Haggard’s ode to rednecks, Okie from Muskogee, contains the lyrics:

We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee

We don't take our trips on LSD

We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street

We like livin' right, and bein' free

We don't make a party out of lovin'

We like holdin' hands and pitchin' woo

We don't let our hair grow long and shaggy

Like the hippies out in San Francisco do

I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee,

A place where even squares can have a ball

We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse,

And white lightnin's still the biggest thrill of all

Leather boots are still in style for manly footwear

Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen

Football's still the roughest thing on campus

And the kids here still respect the college dean

Funnily enough, though, the song began as a pisstake on the same people being honoured.  It started out as a joke making fun of small town rural folks, but took on new meaning when people took it seriously.  According to Merle Haggard: "We wrote it to be satirical originally. But then people latched onto it, and it really turned into this song that looked into the mindset of people so opposite of who and where we were. My dad's people. He's from Muskogee."

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In the March 2006 issue of Esquire magazine, Kris Kristofferson was asked where he was when he came up with the line, "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose" from his song Me and Bobby McGee” (a posthumous No 1 for Janis Joplin, the second in history.  The first was Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay”).

His reply: "I was working the Gulf of Mexico on oil rigs, flying helicopters. I'd lost my family to my years of failing as a songwriter. All I had were bills, child support, and grief. And I was about to get fired for not letting 24 hours go between the throttle and the bottle. It looked like I'd trashed my act. But there was something liberating about it. By not having to live up to people's expectations, I was somehow free."

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 On numerous occasions when Don McLean has been asked the meaning of his song “American Pie”, he has responded “It means I never have to work again.”

Thought for the Day