Moving Up Country Puns

He calls his son and says he wanted to tell him something for a long time.

Son Ant : What is it dad?

Father Ant : I cannot say that in this god forbidden country we have to move immediately to France or Italy before i am dead.

Confused,the Son Ant made arrangements to move to France.They boarded a spy ship which took them to south Korea.From there they boarded a flight to France.With great difficulty they finally reached France.The father ant's health became worse.The son ant was thinking what was so important that they had to move to another country, So when they settled in their new home he finally asked..

Son Ant : Dad, We are in France now you can tell whatever you were going to tell me. The Father could not speak up so he signaled his son to come closer.The son did.

Father Ant: Son, We are now Europeants.

Back a few decades, I was working in a program with a local college in the Middle East.

The name of the program for ExPats has the clever acronym of "IDEA" (hey, I said it was clever); which stands for "Inter-Departmental Educational Adjunct". It's interdepartmental because my particular specialty not only covers field geology but also paleontology and a bit of archeology thrown in for good measure. Everyone hopes to have a good IDEA...

ahem...

Well, we saddle up and head for the Dune Sea out in the west of the country, where the Precambrian, Cambrian, Silurian, Cretaceous, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene crop out and access is relatively easy and non-injurious.

Well, we caravan out, some 30 Land Cruisers, Nissan patrol, and the odd Mitsubishi Galloper strong. We all get our maps, compasses and split up into 5 or 6 special interest groups ("SIG's"); where each IDEA has his own GPS and LIDAR laser ranging apparatus. Reason being, that there are very few benchmarks out in the desert, and even those are constantly at the mercy of the shifting and ever-blowing sands.

Since we're split into groups and at any one time, ranging up to and including some 50 km2, when a real find is located, a device called the "DIME" (Digital-Interface Monitor Encoder) is attached and programmed into the GPS for location later; it is a digital sort of low-frequency transponder, developed from technology used by offshore drillers and jacket setters where benchmarks are even more transitory.

The way it works is rather simple. When something is to be marked for later retrieval, a series of wooden posts are pounded in a triangular manner around the find and the DIME is set, programmed with the GPS and attached to one or more of the posts.

That's the theory, at least.

Everything works well, especially all the hardened electronics and computer gizmos, but attaching the DIME to the stakes is the real problem. It can't be nailed, screwed or fastened with any sort of metal contrivance as that farkles the magnetic field and causes all sorts of goofy spurious signals. Zip ties don't last long in the heat and duct tape is right out. Many sites have been lost to the shifting sands this way.

Velcro doesn't work too well, as the sand fills the hooks of the receiving piece of velcro and soon renders it useless. String or fishing line work, but that's temporary (they melt). Glue or mastic are out as these are supposed to be temporary. Even plastic sleeves don't work due to the heat out

Stanley worked his way up from nothing in a third world country, saving enough to move to America and support his family. His loyal customer base grew by word of mouth, nobody argued with his results. Finally one day, a customer asked him how he managed to be so good at his work, and he merely responded, "I'm from Pakistan."

ba dum tss

I'll start with mine.

1. If you eat the seeds of the watermelon, a watermelon plant will grow in your stomach.

2. If you grow up in a foreign country your face will turn into one of a foreigner (as chinese immigrants to spain, my parents told me this to get me to go to school)

3. My grandpa used to tell me that if I moved too much after eating the food would leak into my blood veins and I would die. Needless to say that scarred me for a long period of my infancy.

4. My grandma, conversely, told me that if I slept face down I would crush my heart and die. Screw you, grandma...

5. One of the most cruel lies was from my uncle, in which every time we heard police sirens, he would hurry and exclaim that the police was going after me for having too many toys... Made me scared of cops for a long time.