Hello chaps, chapesses and others - sorry I'm late. Work interfered again!

Two men were down on their luck and decided to paint houses to earn some extra money. To start their business they asked the local parish priest if he would be interested in their service. He agreed and the men went out to buy the paint.
As they drove to the paint store, they decided that they would mix half paint and half water to try to increase their profits. When they finished the job they called the priest outside to look at their work.
"It looks wonderful," the priest said and as he started to hand them the check a small rain-cloud appeared. All at once there was lightning and thunder and the parish area was drenched with rain. As the rain hit the church the paint started running.
Suddenly, as the three of them stood there in absolute amazement, a voice from heaven said ... "Repaint and thin no more."

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Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his top advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with a control knob, a lever, and two slots in the top. "What do you think this is?" he asked.
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster my lord," he said.
The king then asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?"
The engineer replied, "Um, using a four-bit micro-controller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantifies its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."
The second advisor, a computer consultant, immediately recognised the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said: "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."
"With this in mind," he continued, "we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods and specialise this class into subclasses, namely grains, pork, and poultry. The specialisation process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, ham and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelette classes."
"The ham and cheese omelette class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself'. The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."
"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."
"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v. 12.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 12.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.
"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. A Pentium 4 Processor with 256 megs of memory and a 40-gig hard disk should probably be sufficient. If you select a multi-tasking, object-oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a doddle. Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit micro-controller!"
The king nodded knowledgeably, had the computer consultant beheaded, and everybody lived happily ever after.

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What did the inflatable teacher say to an inflatable boy who came into the inflatable school with a pin?
[Typical moany teacher voice]: "You've let ME down, you've let THE SCHOOL down, and, worst of all, you've let YOURSELF down..."

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Teacher: “Shane, give me a sentence starting with ‘I’”.
Shane: “I is...”
Teacher: “No, Shane. Always say, "I am."
Shane: “All right. I am the ninth letter of the alphabet."

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A fellow was doing work in his garden after a storm and realised that he couldn't find the rake. His wife was about to take a shower and he yelled up to her, "Where’s the rake?"
She couldn't hear him properly, so she shouted back, "What?"
He pointed to his eye, then he pointed to his knee and made a raking motion.
The wife wasn't sure what he meant and said, "What?"
So he repeated the gestures. "EYE KNEE -THE RAKE"
She waved that she understood and signalled back. She first pointed to her eye, next she pointed to her left breast, then she pointed to her arse, and finally to her crotch.
Well, there is no way in hell that he could even come close to understanding that one, so, exasperated, he went upstairs and asked her "What in the hell was that?"
She replied, “EYE - LEFT TIT - BEHIND - THE BUSH”.

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Twelve priests were about to be ordained. The final test was for them to line up in a straight row, totally nude, in a garden while a sexy and beautiful full-breasted nude model danced before them. Each priest had a small bell attached to his penis and they were told that anyone whose bell rang when she danced in front of them would not be ordained because he had not reached a state of spiritual purity.
The beautiful model danced before the first candidate, with no reaction. She proceeded down the line with the same response from all the priests until she got to the final priest. As she danced, his bell began to ring so loudly that it flew off and fell clattering to the ground. Embarrassed, he took a few steps forward and bent over to pick up the bell.
At which point, all the other bells started to ring.........




Remember I was asking (asking? Pleading, more like!) for an M400 Mellotron? Well.....

I'VE NOW GOT ONE!