{"id":597,"date":"2014-12-23T14:32:10","date_gmt":"2014-12-23T12:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joke-archives.com\/fun\/?p=597"},"modified":"2014-12-23T14:32:10","modified_gmt":"2014-12-23T12:32:10","slug":"a-brief-history-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joke-archives.com\/?p=597","title":{"rendered":"A Brief History of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>3050 B.C. &#8211; A Sumerian invents the wheel. Within the week, the idea is stolen and duplicated by other Sumerians, thereby establishing the business ethic for all times.<\/li>\n<li>2900 B.C. &#8211; Wondering why the Egyptians call that new thing a Sphinx becomes the first of the world&#8217;s Seven Great Wonders.<\/li>\n<li>1850 B.C. &#8211; Britons proclaim Operation Stonehenge a success. They&#8217;ve finally gotten those boulders arranged in a sufficiently meaningless pattern to confuse the hell out of scientists for centuries.<\/li>\n<li>1785 B.C. &#8211; The first calendar, composed of a year with 354 days, is introduced by Babylonian scientists.<\/li>\n<li>1768 B.C. &#8211; Babylonians realize something is wrong when winter begins in June.<\/li>\n<li>776 B.C. &#8211; The world&#8217;s first known money appears in Persia, immediately causing the world&#8217;s first known counterfeiter to appear in Persia the next day.<\/li>\n<li>525 B.C. &#8211; The first Olympics are held, and prove similar to the modern games, except that the Russians don&#8217;t try to enter a six-footer with a mustache in the women&#8217;s shot put. However, the Egyptians do!<\/li>\n<li>410 B.C. &#8211; Rome ends the practice of throwing debtors into slavery, thus removing the biggest single obstacle to the development of the credit card.<\/li>\n<li>404 B.C. &#8211; The Peloponnesian war has been going on for 27 years now because neither side can find a treaty writer who knows how to spell Peloponnesian.<\/li>\n<li>214 B.C. &#8211; Tens of thousands of Chinese labor for a generation to build the 1,500 mile long Great Wall of China. And after all that, it still doesn&#8217;t keep the neighbor&#8217;s dog out.<\/li>\n<li>1 B.C. &#8211; Calendar manufacturers find themselves in total disagreement over what to call next year.<\/li>\n<li>79 A.D. &#8211; Buying property in Pompeii turns out to have been a lousy real estate investment.<\/li>\n<li>432 &#8211; St. Patrick introduces Christianity to Ireland, thereby giving the natives something interesting to fight about for the rest of their recorded history.<\/li>\n<li>1000 &#8211; Leif Ericsson discovers America, but decides it&#8217;s not worth mentioning.<\/li>\n<li>1043 &#8211; Lady Godiva finds a means of demonstrating against high taxes that immediately makes everyone forget what she is demonstrating against.<\/li>\n<li>1125 &#8211; Arabic numerals are introduced to Europe, enabling peasants to solve the most baffling problem that confronts them: How much tax do you owe on MMMDCCCLX Lira when you&#8217;re in the XXXVI percent bracket?<\/li>\n<li>1233 &#8211; The Inquisition is set up to torture and kill anyone who disagrees with the Law of the Church. However, the practice is so un-Christian that it is permitted to continue for only 600 years.<\/li>\n<li>1297 &#8211; The world&#8217;s first stock exchange opens, but no one has the foresight to buy IBM or Xerox.<\/li>\n<li>1433 &#8211; Portugal launches the African slave trade, which just proves what a small, ambitious country can do with a little bit of ingenuity and a whole lot of evil!<\/li>\n<li>1456 &#8211; An English judge reviews Joan of Arc&#8217;s case and cancels her death sentence. Unfortunately for her, she was put to death in 1431. <\/li>\n<li>1492 &#8211; Columbus proves how lost he really is by landing in the Bahamas, naming the place San Salvador, and calling the people who live there Indians.<\/li>\n<li>1497 &#8211; Amerigo Vespucci becomes the 7th or 8th explorer to become the new world, but the first to think of naming it in honor of himself&#8230;the United States of Vespuccia!<\/li>\n<li>1508 &#8211; Michelangelo finally agrees to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but he still refuses to wash the windows.<\/li>\n<li>1513 &#8211; Ponce de Leon claims he found the Fountain of youth, but dies of old age trying to remember where it was he found it.<\/li>\n<li>1522 &#8211; Scientists, who know the world is flat, conclude that Magellan made it all the way around by crawling across the bottom.<\/li>\n<li>1568 &#8211; Saddened over the slander of his good name, Ivan the Terrible kills another 100,000 peasants to make them stop calling him Ivan the Terrible.<\/li>\n<li>1607 &#8211; The Indians laugh themselves silly as the first European tourist to visit Virginia tries to register as &#8220;John Smith&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>1618 &#8211; Future Generations are doomed as the English execute Sir Walter Raleigh, but allow his tobacco plants to live.<\/li>\n<li>1642 &#8211; Nine students receive the first Bachelor of Arts degrees conferred in America, and immediately discover there are no jobs open for a kid with a liberal arts education.<\/li>\n<li>1670 &#8211; The pilgrims are too busy burning false witches to observe the golden anniversary of their winning religious freedom.<\/li>\n<li>1755 &#8211; Samuel Johnson issues the first English Dictionary, at last providing young children with a book they can look up dirty words in.<\/li>\n<li>1758 &#8211; New Jersey is chosen as the site of America&#8217;s first Indian reservation, which should give Indians an idea of the  kind of shabby living conditions they can expect from here on out.<\/li>\n<li>1763 &#8211; The French and Indian War ends. The French and Indians both lost.<\/li>\n<li>1770 &#8211; The shooting of three people in the Boston Massacre touches off the Revolution. 200 Years later, three shootings in Boston will be considered just about average for a Saturday Night.<\/li>\n<li>1773 &#8211; Colonists dump tea into Boston Harbor. British call the act &#8220;barbaric,&#8221; noting that no one added cream.<\/li>\n<li>1776 &#8211; Napoleon decides to maintain a position of neutrality in the American Revolution, primarily because he is only seven years old.<\/li>\n<li>1779 &#8211; John Paul Jones notifies the British, &#8220;I have just begun to fight!&#8221; and then feels pretty foolish when he discovers that his ship is sinking.<\/li>\n<li>1793 &#8211; &#8220;Let them eat cake!&#8221; becomes the most famous thing Marie Antoinette ever said. Also, the least diplomatic thing she ever said. Also, the last thing she ever said.<\/li>\n<li>1799 &#8211; Translation of the Rosetta Stone finally enables scholars to learn that Egyptian hieroglyphics don&#8217;t say anything important. &#8220;Dear Ramses, How are you? I am fine.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>1805 &#8211; Robert Fulton invents the torpedo.<\/li>\n<li>1807 &#8211; Robert Fulton invents the steamship so he has something to blow up with his torpedo.<\/li>\n<li>1815 &#8211; Post Office policy is established as Andrew Jackson wins the Battle of New Orleans a month after he should have received the letter telling him the War of 1812 is over.<\/li>\n<li>1840 &#8211; William Henry Harrison is elected president in a landslide, proving that the campaign motto, &#8220;Tippecanoe and Tyler too&#8221; is so meaningless that very few can disagree with it.<\/li>\n<li>1850 &#8211; Henry Clay announces, &#8220;I&#8217;d rather be right than president,&#8221; which gets quite a laugh, coming from a guy who has run for president five times without winning.<\/li>\n<li>1859 &#8211; Charles Darwin writes &#8220;Origin of the Species&#8221;. It has the same general plot as &#8220;Planet of the Apes&#8221;, but fails to gross as much money.<\/li>\n<li>1865 &#8211; Union Soldiers face their greatest challenge of the war: getting General Grant sober enough to accept Lee&#8217;s surrender.<\/li>\n<li>1894 &#8211; Thomas Edison displays the first motion picture, and everybody likes it except the movie critics.<\/li>\n<li>1903 &#8211; The opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway enables passengers from Moscow to reach Vladivostok in eight days, which is a lot sooner than most of them want to get there.<\/li>\n<li>1910 &#8211; The founding of the Boy Scouts of America comes as bad news to old ladies who would rather cross the street by themselves.<\/li>\n<li>1911 &#8211; Roald Amundsen discovers the South Pole and confirms what he&#8217;s suspected all along: It looks a helluva lot like the North Pole!<\/li>\n<li>1912 &#8211; People with Reservations for the voyage of the Titanic get their money back.<\/li>\n<li>1920 &#8211; The 18th Amendment to the Constitution makes drinking illegal in the U.S. so everyone stops. Except for the 40 million who don&#8217;t stop!<\/li>\n<li>1924 &#8211; Hitler is released from prison four years early, after convincing the parole board that he is a changed man who won&#8217;t cause any more trouble.<\/li>\n<li>1928 &#8211; Herbert Hoover promises &#8220;a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,&#8221; but he neglects to add that most Americans will soon be without pots and garages.<\/li>\n<li>1930 &#8211; Pluto is discovered. Not the dog, stupid; the planet. The dog wasn&#8217;t discovered until 1938.<\/li>\n<li>1933 &#8211; German housewives begin to realize why that crazy wallpaper hanger with the mustache never came back to finish his work.<\/li>\n<li>1933 &#8211; Hitler establishes the Third Reich, and announces that it will last for a thousand years. As matters develop, he is only 988 years off.<\/li>\n<li>1934 &#8211; John Dillinger is gunned down by police as he leaves a Chicago movie theater. And just to make the evening a complete washout, he didn&#8217;t enjoy the movie either.<\/li>\n<li>1934 &#8211; As if the Great Depression weren&#8217;t giving businessmen enough headaches, Ralph Nader is born.<\/li>\n<li>1938 &#8211; Great Britain and Germany sign a peace treaty, thereby averting all possibility of WWII.<\/li>\n<li>1944 &#8211; Hitler&#8217;s promise of Volkswagens for all Germans as soon as they&#8217;ve won the war doesn&#8217;t prove to be as strong an incentive as he had hoped.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>3050 B.C. &#8211; A Sumerian invents the wheel. Within the week, the idea is stolen and duplicated by other Sumerians, thereby establishing the business ethic for all times. 2900 B.C. &#8211; Wondering why the Egyptians call that new thing a Sphinx becomes the first of the world&#8217;s Seven Great Wonders. 1850 B.C. &#8211; Britons proclaim [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[789,1289,1435],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collegeschool","tag-history","tag-school","tag-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joke-archives.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joke-archives.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joke-archives.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joke-archives.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joke-archives.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.joke-archives.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joke-archives.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joke-archives.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joke-archives.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}