"I needed a new password eight characters long, so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". Or, how about "Crime in multi-storey car parks - that`s wrong on so many levels". These two top one-liners from 2011`s Edinburgh Festival are my kind of joke. You might be splitting your sides laughing as well, or maybe you just don`t think they are at all funny.
Clearly we all have our own eccentricities, as can be demonstrated quite readily by our chosen hobbies - some may be orthodox, like stamp collecting, but others are very unusual, and sometimes it might be a good idea not to mention them in your resume or when filling out a job application.
What is perfectly normal for some can appear quite mad to others. Some might wonder how anybody can get so incredibly bored that they have to come up with a particular hobby while others might be impressed with all the creativity that this implies. (The case of the guy who spent 15 years making a model of an oil rig out of four billion matchsticks springs to mind.) It all depends on you and just what it is that floats your boat. How, for example, should we judge Miss Ruth Wagner`s collection of antique buttons? I would think that building up the collection must have been personally rewarding to her and of charm to visitors when it was on display in the Cedar Key Historical Society museum. Again, you may understand my appreciation of E M Frimbo, pen name of Rogers Ernest Malcolm Whitaker (January 15 1900 to May 11 1981), an editor of the New Yorker magazine, otherwise known as the "World`s Greatest Railroad Buff"; he accumulated 2.7 million miles of train travel after his first solo train ride at the age of nine. But what should we make of the Englishman who collects rubber bands? (Postmen in England are still legally required to deliver the mail to each and every householder`s front door, and city sidewalks are strewn with the discarded pink rubber bands used to keep the letters together.) And most of us would wonder about the 46 years-old Dutchman who spent two decades collecting Ecstasy pills of all different colors and shapes; he had gathered an (illegal) 2,400-pill collection before it was stolen and he, somewhat foolishly, then decided to report the theft to the police. (Which certainly seems to put the crack in crackpot!) In Cedar Key, it is probably David Levy Yulee who best exemplifies this dichotomy. His dream of creating Florida`s first cross-State railroad must have appeared bizarre to many, considering that the hardly 20,000 people living along the 155 miles of hammock and swamp between the ports of Fernandina and Cedar Keys would provide only slim pickings for its investors. Indeed the railroad went into receivership, was taken-over and was reorganized on numerous occasions before it finally closed in 1932. But Levy, as the most influential Floridian of his era, was able at the outset to draw up the facilitating Internal Improvement Act and thence secure extensive grants of Federal and State lands (not to mention the help of a touch of creative accounting as well). So what are we to conclude? An unusual visionary, a great Floridian, whose crackpot idea actually helped the development of Florida`s commerce and industry? Or a buccaneer who tirelessly pursued the goal of private profit under the guise of bringing people together? | 