[at-l] JUST FOR FUN

[monadnockdee@juno.com (DEE C BOUCHER)]

                  The Dead Beethoven


A tourist in Vienna is going through a graveyard and all
of a sudden he hears some music.  No one is around,
so he starts searching for the source.

He finally locates the origin and finds it is coming from
a grave with a headstone that reads: Ludwig van Beethoven,
1770-1827.  Then he realizes that the music is the Ninth
Symphony and it is being played backward!

Puzzled, he leaves the graveyard and persuades a friend
to return with him.  By the time they arrive back at the grave, the music
has changed.  This time it is the Seventh Symphony, but like the previous
piece, it is being played backward.

Curious, the men agree to consult a music scholar.  When
they return with the expert, the Fifth Symphony is playing, again
backward.  The expert notices that the symphonies are being played in the
reverse order in which they were composed, the 9th, then the 7th, then
the 5th.

By the next day the word has spread and a throng has
gathered around the grave.  They are all listening to the
Second Symphony being played backward.

Just then the graveyard's caretaker ambles up to the
group.  Someone in the crowd asks him if he has an
explanation for the music.

"Don't you get it?" the caretaker says incredulously.
"He's decomposing!"

**********************************************************

 These epitaphs were taken from actual tombstones~~

 On the grave of Ezekial Aikle in East Dalhousie Cemetery, Nova Scotia:
  Here lies
  Ezekial Aikle
  Age 102
  The Good
  Die Young.

  In a London, England cemetery:  Ann Mann
  Here lies Ann Mann,
  Who lived an old maid
  But died an old Mann.
  Dec. 8, 1767

  In a Ribbesford, England, cemetery:  Anna Wallace
  The children of Israel wanted bread
  And the Lord sent them manna,
  Old clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
  And the Devil sent him Anna.

  Playing with names in a Ruidoso, New Mexico, cemetery:
  Here lies
  Johnny Yeast
  Pardon me
  For not rising.

  Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania   cemetery:
  Here lies the body
  of Jonathan Blake
  Stepped on the gas
  Instead of the brake.

  In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery:
  Here lays Butch,
  We planted him raw.
  He was quick on the trigger,
  But slow on the draw.

  A widow wrote this epitaph in a Vermont cemetery:
  Sacred to the memory of
  my husband John Barnes
  who died January 3, 1803
  His comely young widow, aged 23, has
  many qualifications of a good wife, and
  yearns to be comforted.

  A lawyer's epitaph in England:   Sir John Strange
  Here lies an honest lawyer,
  And that is Strange.

  Someone determined to be anonymous in Stowe, Vermont:
  I was somebody.
  Who, is no business
  Of yours.

 Lester Moore was a Wells Fargo Co. station agent for   Naco, Arizona in
the cowboy days of the 1880's.  He's  buried in the Boot Hill Cemetery 
in Tombstone, Arizona:
  Here lies Lester Moore
  Four slugs from a .44
  No Les No More.

  In a Georgia cemetery:
  "I told you I was sick!"

  John Penny's epitaph in the Wimborne, England, cemetery:
  Reader if cash thou art
  In want of any
  Dig 4 feet deep
  And thou wilt find a Penny.

  On Margaret Daniels grave at Hollywood Cemetery   Richmond, Virginia:
  She always said her feet were killing her
  but nobody believed her.

  In a cemetery in Hartscombe, England:
  On the 22nd of June
  * Jonathan Fiddle -
  Went out of tune.

  Anna Hopewell's grave in Enosburg Falls, Vermont has an   epitaph that
sounds like something from a Three Stooges   movie:
  Here lies the body of our Anna
  Done to death by a banana
  It wasn't the fruit that laid her low
  But the skin of the thing that made her go.

  More fun with names with Owen Moore in Battersea,   London, England:
  Gone away
  Owin' more
  Than he could pay.

  Someone in Winslow, Maine didn't like Mr. Wood:
  In Memory of Beza Wood
  Departed this life
  Nov. 2, 1837
  Aged 45 yrs.
  Here lies one Wood
  Enclosed in wood
  One Wood  Within another.
  The outer wood
  Is very good:
  We cannot praise
  The other.

  On a grave from the 1880's in Nantucket, Massachusetts:
  Under the sod and under the trees
  Lies the body of Jonathan Pease.
  He is not here, there's only the pod:
  Pease shelled out and went to God.

  The grave of Ellen Shannon in Girard, Pennsylvania is    almost a
consumer tip:
  Who was fatally burned
  March 21, 1870
  by the explosion of a lamp
  filled with "R.E. Danforth's
  Non-Explosive Burning Fluid"

  Oops! Harry Edsel Smith of Albany, New York:
  Born 1903--Died 1942
  Looked up the elevator shaft to see if
  the car was on the way down. It was.

  In a Thurmont, Maryland, cemetery:
  Here lies an Atheist
  All dressed up
  And no place to go.

  But does he make house calls?
  Dr. Fred Roberts,
  Brookland, Arkansas:
  Office upstairs



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