Deceit

A medical student spent his summer vacation working as a butcher in the daytime and a hospital orderly in the evenings. Both jobs, of course, involved wearing a white smock. One evening he was instructed to wheel a patient on a stretcher into surgery. The patient, a woman, looked up at the student and let out an earthly scream. “Oh, no,” she wailed, “it’s my butcher!”

Joseph Papps had a problem. His homemade submarine wouldn’t function. He had worked for six years on it; he had spent all his savings building it. How then could he ever admit failure to his friends? He dreamed up a stunt. He spanned the ocean on the Dutch airline KLM, and went to Brest, France, where he told police he had crossed the Atlantic in some twelve hours in his submarine. Yet it was all a desperate and vainglorious attempt to save face. The London Daily Mirror says that the Hungarian-born Canadian, Joseph Papp, “confessed that his tale of crossing the Atlantic in a homemade submarine was a hoax.”

At one point in a debate, Abraham Lincoln was accused by his opponent, Douglas, of being two-faced. “I leave it to my audience,” replied Lincoln. “If I had two faces, would I be wearing this one?”

Paul Harvey tells how an Eskimo kills a wolf. He coats his knife with blood and lets it freeze. Then he adds another coat of blood and then another. As each coat freezes, he adds another smear of blood until the blade is coated over by layers of frozen blood. Then he buries the knife—blade up—in the frozen tundra. The wolf catches the scent of fresh blood and begins to lick it. He licks it more feverishly until the blade is bare. Then he keeps on licking harder. Because of the cold, he never notices the pain of the blade on his tongue. His craving for the taste of blood is so great that he licks the blade till he bleeds to death, swallowing his own life.

In Southend, England, dentists are fed up to the back teeth with a man who insists on emergency treatment, including a general anesthetic, for what he says is excruciating toothache. As they have subsequently discovered, the would-be patient has false teeth.