The German magazine Die Tageszeitung had this as a cover recently. All hell broke loose and the accusations ranged from "condescending" to "politically incorrect" to even "blatant racism" and "racial prejudice". The obvious allusion to Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beacher Stowe has caused a transatlantic row. 
Loew and his players are talking in the dressing room. Loew says, “Have you heard boys? Austrians are bad. But, we have to play them, there is no other way…”
Jens Lehman says, “Let me make a suggestion. All of you go to a bar and I will play against them alone. What do you think?”
“Sounds sensible” says the team manager and all the players go to a bar, have beers and play billiards. After about an hour, Michael Ballack turns on the TV:
Satisfied, the players return to their beers and billiards. After an hour, they want to see the final score. The score board shows
“Damn”, cry the players and run back to the stadium, horrified.
There, they see Lehmann with his head buried in his hands.
“What the devil happened, Jens?”, shouts Loew.
“Sorry friends, the damned referee gave me a red card in the 11th minute", whines Lehmann.
A man is sitting in a "house full" football stadium waiting for a Euro2008 match to start. He finds an empty seat next to him. He asks the man on the other side of the seat if he is waiting for someone.
He says, "No, that seat is for my wife. She recently died and this is the first time I am watching a match without her, since we got married"
The man is all sympathy. "Oh! I am sorry. But you could have brought some relative of yours to the match".
"But they are all attending the funeral"
*******
After a football match, a man asks the referee, "Do you have three seconds?"
The referee is obliging and says yes.
"Then, please tell me all you know about football"
*******
A black clad man knocks on the pearly gates. St Peter opens the gate and asks "Have you done anything wrong in your life?"
I am a football referee. In a match between
"Hmmmmm, how long ago was that?"
"about 30 seconds ago"
*******
New school. New class. Teacher wants to break ice and asks students to say their name age and father's occupation.
I am Wolfgang, I am 11, my father is a mechanic
I am Heinrich, I am 12 and my father is a brick layer
I am John, I am 12, my father is a nude dancer in a bar.
The teacher is shocked and stops the exercise. At recess she asks the boy privately if what he said was true.
"No, Ma'm. I lied. But, my father is a player in the national football team of
*******
How could
They were too slow for human eyes.
*******
What does a Dutchman do after
Switches his play station off . . . . .
*******
Teacher: Tell me the names of three great men whose names start with B
Pupil: "Ballack, Basler, Beckenbauer!"
Teacher: Have you ever heard of Bach, Brecht or Brahms?
Pupil: I am not interested in substitutes
********
Two retired old men sit in front of the TV and wait for the match to start. One asks the other, "What match is on Today?"
"
********
From Der Spiegel
PS: There are a couple of more jokes. I did not understand them. It is because of my German or poor knowledge of football - I hope - and not because of my poor sense of humour.
Art Buchwald was once asked if it was not difficult being a humorist. He said “Not at all. Not when the whole government is working for you.”
I am certain that he would have found it difficult in America during the last decade. You can’t caricature cartoons, can you?
What do you say when Bush says that the rise in food prices (I was about to type it as price Rice…) is because Indians have started eating better and the rise in petrol prices is because the Chinese and Indians have started driving cars? Even Art would have become tongue-tied at this brilliance, don’t you think?
How insensitive of those slit eyes and we brown skins! Can’t we have just one meal a day and walk or ride bicycles as we are expected to? Damn nuisances, these bloody natives. No?
It is the God given right of the British to waste food worth £10 billion a year.
A: Hi Kitty1, heard that you are getting married. Congratulations! Who is the lucky girl?
K: Yes. Thanks. Her name is Radha.
A: I understand why you were searching for a house so desperately! Did you get anything good?
K: Yes, I did, in Gokulam2
A: Where in Gokulam?
K: Do you know that new apartment complex called Dwaraka? A first floor apartment
A: My goodness! What a set of coincidences!!
K: What coincidence?
* * *
1. Diminutive for Krishnamurthy
Pardon me for starting with a self-referential (if that is the word) sentence – I am an optimist and an incurable one. But the optimism of the ‘concerned’ people in
Take the road dividers or medians for instance. The concerned put them, quite often in the middle of the road, with the hope that traffic gets better or smoother or whatever. On road after road this is belied. Not that the traffic does not get any better, it actually gets worse. Life of drivers, and more so, that of the riders of two wheelers, gets riskier.
Wonder why? Pieces of the median are removed at places where people want to cross the road. So if you are driving with assurance that no one will take a right turn in front of you, some one will. (Sounds like a corollary to Murphy’s Law? Perhaps it is.) Or worse, someone from the right of the road will drive in and join the traffic right in front of you. If you successfully avoid all these, you are likely to involuntarily close your eyes in thanks giving to fate or your favourite god or goddess, and successfully hit someone.
Worse still, all those who used to take a right turn after entering a main road, now median-ed, continue to do so and ride on the right side of the road. They join the mainstream whenever there is a break, planned or unplanned but executed, in the median.
Another hazard is presented by medians that look like fences made of steel pipes. The medians also double as places for putting up advertisement boards. After some time and a few accidents later, many parts of these medians are jutting out where they are not expected. (The best example is the
Another example for optimism is what I call “Monuments to
Pardon me. Those monuments do serve some purposes, albeit not the intended ones. They provide great space for advertisement hoardings. They perhaps provide an opportunity for all the concerned ‘concerned’ to make some money. One hardy soul, attached to his mortal body of course, who once came very close to fulfilling the dreams of the concerned by using the foot-bridge, assures me that it serves another purpose, especially on a cold windy day, on which you have been lightly dressed and been trying to fit the description of a man about town…..
The other ‘proof for optimism’ are the white paint wasted on lines painted to separate the lanes on roads. If you are a true Bangalorean, you will ask me, or anyone near you, “Lanes? What the heck (or any other suitable four-letter word which reveals you dictional - to coin a word to rhyme with fictional - preferences) are they. Come, come. Be frank for once. You always thought that they were painted on the road to tell you where the road was, on a wet, dark night, right?
Even if that was the purpose, the concerned would have failed – where are roads in
Talking of roads, roads are the highways of
The roads represent the hope that they are not dug up before the last road-roller has moved away from the freshly laid road, by the electricity supply corporation, the Bangalore Water and Sewerage Supply Board (Oooops, that one slipped out, the original coinage of Murthy, the (alas, late) cartoonist of The Deccan Herald) I mean the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board and the various political parties and the various temples and their annual function organiser and the various wedding halls and their pandal erectors and …. The list is practically endless. The most amazing thing is that in spite of the best efforts of all these people, there are still some roads worth the name in
Long live
