Amidstheroses

Yes - one had to write long essays about each subject..... you could not fluff through an exam. 

Now you are taking on my role - missing the joke!  
It is a list of impossible and absurd tasks designed to make you guffaw!  

MEDICINE: You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze and a bottle of scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until your work has been inspected. You have fifteen minutes.
                       What?!  Do you think we are suicidal maniacs?
PUBLIC SPEAKING: 2,500 riot-crazed aborigines are storming the classroom. Calm them. You may use any ancient language except Latin or Greek.
If you had only allowed either Ancient Greek or Latin, my daughter could have come up with something great… (professional author and college degree in Classics, Greek tract, but earning a living as a stock broker for Fidelity Investments. Knows several types of Greek and Latin.
Knows, but does not obey, Jehovah 💔

I received this joke today from my sister in Afrikaans - I hope it translates ok. 
Peter passed his driver's license and said to his father that he would like to have his own car.  His father said: "fine",  if you push up all your school marks from a symbol C to an average of B; read the bible daily; and have a haircut.
A few months later his son comes back and says that he had pushed up his school marks and read the bible daily.  So his dad said: what about the haircut? 
Peter started talking about his bible studies and mentioned all the Bible characters who had long hair: Samson, Absalom, Moses, John the Baptist and said that he is just about sure the disciples of Jesus also had long hair.....  so could he now have the car?
The father replied:  Did you notice in your bible studies that all of them walked where they wanted to go?🤣
 

MEDICINE: You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze and a bottle of scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until your work has been inspected. You have fifteen minutes.
                       What?!  Do you think we are suicidal maniacs?
PUBLIC SPEAKING: 2,500 riot-crazed aborigines are storming the classroom. Calm them. You may use any ancient language except Latin or Greek.
If you had only allowed either Ancient Greek or Latin, my daughter could have come up with something great… (professional author and college degree in Classics, Greek tract, but earning a living as a stock broker for Fidelity Investments. Knows several types of Greek and Latin.
Knows, but does not obey, Jehovah 💔

This is nuts! This is crazy! Who do you think we are…… Elon Musk?

Found a close version of it:
Instructions: Read each question carefully. Answer all questions. Time limit -- 4 hours. Begin immediately.
HISTORY: Describe the history of the papacy from its origins to the present day, concentrating especially but not exclusively, on its social, political,economic, religious and philosophical impact on Europe, Asia, America and Africa. Be brief, concise and specific.
MEDICINE: You have been provided with a razor blade, a piece of gauze and a bottle of scotch. Remove your appendix. Do not suture until your work has been inspected. You have fifteen minutes.
PUBLIC SPEAKING: 2,500 riot-crazed aborigines are storming the classroom. Calm them. You may use any ancient language except Latin or Greek.
BIOLOGY: create life. Estimate the differences in subsequent human culture if this form of life had developed 500 million year earlier, with special attention to its probable effect on the English parliamentary system. Prove your thesis.
MUSIC: Write a piano concerto. Orchestrate and perform it with flute and drum. You will find a piano under your seat.
PSYCHOLOGY: Based on your knowledge of their works, evaluate the emotional stability, degree of adjustment and repressed frustrations of each of the following: Alexander of Aphrodisias, Ramses II, Gregory of Nicea, Hammurabi. Support your evaluation with quotations from each man's work, making appropriate references. It is not necessary to translate.
SOCIOLOGY: Estimate the sociological problems which might accompany the end of the world. Construct an experiment to test your theory.
MANAGEMENT SCIENCE: Define management. Define Science. How do they relate?
COMPUTER SCIENCE: create a generalized algorithm to optimize all managerial decisions. Assuming and 1130 CPU supporting 50 terminals, each terminal to activate your algorithm; design the communications interface and all necessary control programs.
ENGINEERING: The disassembled parts of a high-powered rifle have been placed in a box on your desk. You will also find and instruction manual, printed in Swahili. In ten minutes a hungry Bengal tiger will be admitted to the room. Take whatever action you feel appropriate. Be prepared to justify your decision.
ECONOMICS: Develop a realistic plan for refinancing the national debt. Trace the possible effects of your plan in the following areas: cubism, the donatist controversy, the wave theory of light. Outline a method for preventing the effects. Criticize this method from all possible points of view. Point out the deficiencies in your point of view, as demonstrated in your answer to the last question.
POLITICAL SCIENCE: There is a red phone on the desk beside you. Start World War III. Report at length on its socio-political effects, if any.
EPISTEMOLOGY: Take a position for or against truth. Prove the validity of your position.
...
PHILOSOPHY: Sketch the development of human thought; estimate its significance. Compare with the development of any other kind of thought.
GENERAL KNOWLEDGE: Describe in detail. Be objective and specific.
EXTRA CREDIT: Define the universe; give three examples.
http://www.mit.edu/people/dmredish/wwwMLRF/links/Humor/The_Exam.html

We picked about as many bad apple-related puns as we did apples that day. That's because there's always a cornucopia of corny puns to cope with. They're like low-hanging fruit. I do remember one really dumb "pear" joke I made on the hayride when we passed up the rows of out-of-season pears, and I saw one still on a tree:  I started singing:  ". . . And a Bartlett in a pear tree."  [wrong crowd?]
But I made an unrelated but even odder "pair" joke on the way back home. Unfortunately, it was kind of an off-color joke, for my wife's ears only, that I shouldn't repeat here.
So here goes: 😮
It was based on an actual experience from a couple of days earlier when my wife didn't have the cash at the time to tip the nail salon people and she sent me back there with the tip a couple hours later. I was to find two people, Tina and Lee-Lee, the owner and the "nail-doer," respectively. It was my first time in a nail salon, surrounded by women, and I played up that part of the story when my wife asked me if I had found everyone OK. (Wives won't always admit it, but there is a certain kind of tension when they've just send their husbands into a bevy of women to represent them.)
So all that background of the story had almost nothing to do with the joke. Almost. I thought it would be fun to tell my wife about a certain woman I saw in the nail salon who was just finishing up getting intricate designs put on her nails by the same nail-doer, Lee-Lee, and I had to interrupt them. In excruciating detail I described to my wife how the woman getting her nails done had these extreme upper body elements that reminded me of when Dolly Parton once described her bra with the words, "It's like trying to put 100 pounds of mud in a 50-pound gunny sack." 
But I also mentioned to my wife that, waiting out in front of the salon, was another woman in a car who had almost exactly the same figure, and the same mode of displaying it with a lower-than-low-cut blouse. (Or maybe it was a dress; I don't remember looking.)
I said to myself: I bet that woman in the car is waiting for the same woman I just interrupted. And I'll bet she is going to get in the same car with her. And sure enough, as I was getting back to my own car, that other woman left the salon and got in the car with her, right there in front of the salon.
"How do you think that I was able to predict that this was going to happen?" I asked my by-now-thoroughly-exasperated wife.
 

Oh, C’mon! Show a little backbone, why don’t you?
Next thing you know you’ll be agreeing with that anti-cult whack job Korelov who calls the United States “the spiritual garbage dump of humanity” and who paints Jehovah’s Witnesses foremost in advancing that cause. I distinctly remember in the 70s working with the tract “Jehovah’s Witnesses—Christians or Communists”—designed to counter just the opposite impression, that Witnesses were agents of Russian communism.
https://bitterwinter.org/russia-sensational-revelations-jehovahs-witnesses-prepare-an-anti-putin-coup/
 

The gruff German grandma down the road loaded me up with enough pairs from her tree to last weeks. I was just walking by with headphones on, the way I do, and greeted her as she was crossing the street. Turned out she had just returned from giving a load to people there, also. 
My greeting was enough. She pulled me into her yard and made me take some of her pairs. However many I took, it was not enough, and I left with a bag as heavy as I could carry. So I brought them to the congregation get-together where several young children who had never eaten pairs before dove into them, found them delicious, and probably had the runs for a week.
My wife has called on this women before in the course of her ministry. ‘I don’t think she’s interested,’ she says. ‘She’s gruff, but underneath pretty decent.’ So I told her my wife’s verdict, which I agree with. I’ve been back since for more pears and even some apples.
(I should have told her that city-slicker @JW Insiderwould pay her $40 a bag for whatever came off her trees, even $80 if she serenades him with an accordion band.)

I agree. Things that used to be simple, have been made ridiculously complicated and commercialized. That's why I like the former soviet countries, they haven't caught on to this rubbish yet, or at least they have bigger fish to fry for now.....OR they know they wouldn't get the customers because people aren't stupid enough, yet* 🤪😂 OR, these kind of enterprises are not the best type for money laundering
*they go to grandma's orchard and pick their free apples for free, or pick the apples that grow on trees lining country roads...
 

The world has gone insane....
Mundane stuff is being commoditized as never before as people are trying to attribute value to every single small iota of life amidst the foundational cash being devalued like never before in generations.
Stay tuned for more absurdities I'm sure.
Soon we will be asked to post $ in order to make posts online in forums etc.

“And I heard a voice as if in the midst of the four living creatures say: “A quart of wheat for a de·narʹi·us, and three quarts of barley for a de·narʹi·us; and how do you like them apples?”

Yesterday, I was at Wallkill and Warwick. And it wasn't what you might be thinking. It was to take the grandkids (ages 3 & 6) apple picking. When my own children were young, this was an easy thing to do. Load everyone in a car; drive at least 30 miles outside NYC; watch for signs; take your pick of places; end it with a simple hay-ride, and then take home your pick of apples. Now many of the farms that manage these things only take reservations for picking. They charge $40 for a half-bushel. The have expensive vendor stands creating a makeshift food court, a gift shop, a donut shop, a cider shop. The one we ended up at yesterday had about 500 cars when we arrived (and parking for only about 400). And live music. (?!?!)
Not quite the vibe I grew up with.

https://voiceforscienceandsolidarity.substack.com/p/it-is-5-past-12?r=1iysu3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
 
Dear Friends,
I just listened to this 45-min desperate plea by highly-esteemed vaccinologist/immunologist Geert Vanden Bossche. His reports are typically so medically/scientifically esoteric that I cannot understand them. (Transcript included, if you prefer).
He writes for educated professionals in those fields. Since he is unaware that “the whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one”, he cannot fathom WHY the medical world is remaining silent in the face of the humanitarian crisis that is the inevitable result of the current vaccine response to the SARS Covid-19 pandemic!! He explains that the unvaccinated are the vacuum cleaners of the pandemic (previous article) and the vaccine-response is an insult to science and exacerbating the pandemic and the infectiousness of the virus!!! He finds a further/escalated humanitarian health crisis to be inevitable. He states he can no longer send out diatribes/reports about this, because the situation is simply too stressful for him!
I plan to give him a witness today. Just bait with a small witness, then I will wait…see if he takes the bait, then I will provide more…
Since we are a geographically far-flung group, and come from all sorts of backgrounds, if some or even one of you,  would take pity on this man in his distress, and share the good news, in addition to my feeble attempt, we will have done a good deed and served our Master obediently.
 
I have lived & worked as a resort architect in 3 countries (US, Czech Republic, England) and recently have been working as a financial professional, licensed in Annuities & Mutual Funds. Nothing scientific/medical here. Some of you have a more scientific bent and perhaps would be more effective. However, we know that Jehovah & King Jesus can use any donkey to deliver the ‘gold’. 
Please consider perusing this article.
Note the desperation/distress of this scientist/vaccinologist. See if you feel compelled to give him a witness. 
Your fellow worker, 😉

https://voiceforscienceandsolidarity.substack.com/p/it-is-5-past-12?r=1iysu3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
 
Dear Friends,
I just listened to this 45-min desperate plea by highly-esteemed vaccinologist/immunologist Geert Vanden Bossche. His reports are typically so medically/scientifically esoteric that I cannot understand them. (Transcript included, if you prefer).
He writes for educated professionals in those fields. Since he is unaware that “the whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one”, he cannot fathom WHY the medical world is remaining silent in the face of the humanitarian crisis that is the inevitable result of the current vaccine response to the SARS Covid-19 pandemic!! He explains that the unvaccinated are the vacuum cleaners of the pandemic (previous article) and the vaccine-response is an insult to science and exacerbating the pandemic and the infectiousness of the virus!!! He finds a further/escalated humanitarian health crisis to be inevitable. He states he can no longer send out diatribes/reports about this, because the situation is simply too stressful for him!
I plan to give him a witness today. Just bait with a small witness, then I will wait…see if he takes the bait, then I will provide more…
Since we are a geographically far-flung group, and come from all sorts of backgrounds, if some or even one of you,  would take pity on this man in his distress, and share the good news, in addition to my feeble attempt, we will have done a good deed and served our Master obediently.
 
I have lived & worked as a resort architect in 3 countries (US, Czech Republic, England) and recently have been working as a financial professional, licensed in Annuities & Mutual Funds. Nothing scientific/medical here. Some of you have a more scientific bent and perhaps would be more effective. However, we know that Jehovah & King Jesus can use any donkey to deliver the ‘gold’. 
Please consider perusing this article.
Note the desperation/distress of this scientist/vaccinologist. See if you feel compelled to give him a witness. 
Your fellow worker, 😉

I will try! (But I'm also in the United States).
You are like me, I also feel compassion for people who are upset over the situation in the world. I agree we should write to him. After all, Jehovah is looking for people like that!

https://voiceforscienceandsolidarity.substack.com/p/it-is-5-past-12?r=1iysu3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
 
Dear Friends,
I just listened to this 45-min desperate plea by highly-esteemed vaccinologist/immunologist Geert Vanden Bossche. His reports are typically so medically/scientifically esoteric that I cannot understand them. (Transcript included, if you prefer).
He writes for educated professionals in those fields. Since he is unaware that “the whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one”, he cannot fathom WHY the medical world is remaining silent in the face of the humanitarian crisis that is the inevitable result of the current vaccine response to the SARS Covid-19 pandemic!! He explains that the unvaccinated are the vacuum cleaners of the pandemic (previous article) and the vaccine-response is an insult to science and exacerbating the pandemic and the infectiousness of the virus!!! He finds a further/escalated humanitarian health crisis to be inevitable. He states he can no longer send out diatribes/reports about this, because the situation is simply too stressful for him!
I plan to give him a witness today. Just bait with a small witness, then I will wait…see if he takes the bait, then I will provide more…
Since we are a geographically far-flung group, and come from all sorts of backgrounds, if some or even one of you,  would take pity on this man in his distress, and share the good news, in addition to my feeble attempt, we will have done a good deed and served our Master obediently.
 
I have lived & worked as a resort architect in 3 countries (US, Czech Republic, England) and recently have been working as a financial professional, licensed in Annuities & Mutual Funds. Nothing scientific/medical here. Some of you have a more scientific bent and perhaps would be more effective. However, we know that Jehovah & King Jesus can use any donkey to deliver the ‘gold’. 
Please consider perusing this article.
Note the desperation/distress of this scientist/vaccinologist. See if you feel compelled to give him a witness. 
Your fellow worker, 😉

There are exceptions to any general request.  If everyone did as they pleased there would be chaos, so everyone usually obliges willingly ,,,,,,,   but congregations are always very willing to make exceptions for the elderly.  So I agree with Tom...... they are not orders but people willingly obey any request.....  big difference in attitude. 

Yes, I’m sure you care about your mother but you appear to care more about insulting her beliefs—and thereby her for being stupid enough to hold them. Try respecting her beliefs and stop carrying on about her being “ordered” to this or that because it is not the way she would phrase it, nor is it true.

Our congregation has hybrid meetings — both in person and zoom, plus we have KHCONF where you can listen audibly.  We elderly ones are not “forced” to attend in person but can take our pick on how to participate.  Presently 1/3 are attending in person and about 2/3 are on zoom and I might say are quite proficient in muting, unmuting, raising and lowering our hand for commenting. 

Sloppy sloppy. Where do you get your quotations? The above quote is a lie. Here's the actual quote:
*** w68 8/15 p. 499 par. 30 Why Are You Looking Forward to 1975? ***
Are we to assume from this study that the battle of Armageddon will be all over by the autumn of 1975, and the long-looked-for thousand-year reign of Christ will begin by then? Possibly, but we wait to see how closely the seventh thousand-year period of man’s existence coincides with the sabbathlike thousand-year reign of Christ. If these two periods run parallel with each other as to the calendar year, it will not be by mere chance or accident but will be according to Jehovah’s loving and timely purposes. Our chronology, however, which is reasonably accurate (but admittedly not infallible), at the best only points to the autumn of 1975 as the end of 6,000 years of man’s existence on earth. It does not necessarily mean that 1975 marks the end of the first 6,000 years of Jehovah’s seventh creative “day.” Why not? Because after his creation Adam lived some time during the “sixth day,” which unknown amount of time would need to be subtracted from Adam’s 930 years, to determine when the sixth seven-thousand-year period or “day” ended, and how long Adam lived into the “seventh day.” And yet the end of that sixth creative “day” could end within the same Gregorian calendar year of Adam’s creation. It may involve only a difference of weeks or months, not years.
 

Yes we do, we definitely think it all through.

Yes, I do wonder. Being irritated by something is no reason to go outside where there is chaos and where there are no answers. 

Note to readers: Almost all the above book covers shown are manufactured parodies of actual books of a more genteel nature.
Satire.
heh heh heh!