Entertainment

Once Horace Gold [my editor] went too far. He rejected a story of mine which he called "meretricious." The word is from the Latin meretrix, meaning "prostitute," so that the implication was that I was prostituting my talent and was writing a bad story that would get by on my name alone because I was too lazy to write a good one. (This was not true, by the way. This particular story was sold elsewhere and received considerable acclaim.)

Swallowing my annoyance, I said mildly, "What was that word you used?"

Obviously proud at knowing a word he felt I didn't know, Horace enunciated carefully, "Meretricious!"

Whereupon I said, "And a Happy New Year to you."

(By Isaac Asimov)

Although he was a qualified meteorologist, Hopkins ran up a terrible record of forecasting the weather for the TV news program.

He became something of a local joke when a newspaper began keeping a record of his predictions and showed that he'd been wrong almost three hundred times in a single year. That kind of notoriety was enough to get him fired.

He moved to another part of the country and applied for a similar job. One blank on the job application called for the reason for leaving his previous position.

Hopkins wrote, "The climate didn't agree with me."

A mechanic who worked out of his home had a dog named Mace. Mace had a bad habit of eating all the grass in the mechanic's lawn. So the mechanic had to keep Mace inside. The grass eventually became overgrown.

One day the mechanic was working on a car in his backyard and dropped his wrench losing it in the tall grass. He couldn't find it for the life of him, so he decided to call it a day.

That night, Mace escaped from the house and ate all the grass in the backyard. The next morning the mechanic went outside and saw his wrench glinting in the sunlight. Realizing what had happened he looked up to the heavens and proclaimed...

'A grazing Mace, how sweet the hound, that saved a wrench for me!'

Little Noah came into the house with a new harmonica.

"Grandpa, do you mind if I play this in here?"

"Of course not, Noah. I love music. In fact, when your grandma and I were young, music saved my life."

"What happened?"

"Well, it was during the famous Johnstown flood. The dam broke, and when the water hit out house it knocked it right off the foundation. Grandma got on the dining room table and floated out safely."

"But how did music save you?"

"Me? I accompanied her on the piano!"