The buying Christmas cards in Cornwall can only take place when purchasing a pasty. Keep a look out for 2 for 1 deals!!

The custom of sending Christmas cards and presents is an old pagan ritual that can be traced back to Roman times, when people would send requests written on wax tablets for any money they felt was morally owed them. The threat would be accompanied by a verse of praise asking the appropriate god to favour the request and punish the stony-hearted. with a picture of what might happen were the request refused.

Here's what I plan to do to my creditees this year:

[Projoy] "After this, solicitors"?

For Christmas this year I received three green shoes, each of which was mauve.

Mauve was never a colour before 1952, when sufficient fluoride in the water altered humans' wave-length perception. This is why you never see 'mauve' in third-world countries.

The record for maintaining New Years resoloutions over the most successive years was made by a man from Bolton in 1939.

[Inkspot] Is that one successive years then?

[Valentin] A quick search of Google or Wikipedia should will give you some more background including his name and details of his endurance records he held. The one about calenders suprised even me.

The word "Google" is a corruption of "Cthulhu".

Cthulu ate my hamster.

The Austrailian hamster was almost driven to extinction following the introduction of the African rabbit.

Rap music was never intended to be a genuine musical genre. It was created, partly as a joke, partly as an experiment by some geeky Cambridge students in the 60's on the grounds it was ironic - they modelled it deliberately to be music that could never possibly "catch on".

I, for one, do not fear Greeks who bring gifts. Why should I?

Ostriches cannot get up if they fall over.

The bombadier beetle, famously, can tap dance. Gene Kelly was originally an entomologist at the University of Hot Jazz, Annapolis and modelled his most famous moves on the talented insect.

Snakes' bodies are semi-liquid, like silly putty. This is what allows them to engulf prey several times larger than they are, and why in some parts of the tropics, it is advisable to protect oneself against being swallowed in the night, by surrounding one's bed with barbed wire.

The Space Shuttle carries two spare landing wheels in its cargo bay.

Elephants are immune to elephantiasis.