Please forgive me for not seeing the joke. [Lengthy defence/explanation follows. None of it is intended to offend anyone. Nor is it intended to be a major bit of thread-drift. Oh no.]

This may well sound rather ppo-faced, but there's a perpetual problem about joking online.

It takes time to get the hang of each person's character and mode of expression. Seeing that a stranger is joking is so often simply not self-evident [except to the joker and their acquaintances.]

On another talk site, I've been warned aainst 'taking notes.] And the drier a person's sense of humour, the harder it is to tell they're joking.

Also it's not a subject for which i have the best memory in the world, to keep track of each person's joking mode.

What also complicates matters is that there are plenty of posters all over the shop, some of whose views can seem some sort of odd to some others, [present company excepted :-)].

And some of us [i.e. me] can intermittently be rather thin-skinned.

A-a-a-a-a-and the chances in general of misunderstanding another, online and off-, are tremendously high.


Two chaps in a Budapest chess cafe were discussing the age of the universe.

One said the universe was 30 billion years old, at which point a nearby chess-player whipped round and snapped, "What did you say?"

The speaker repeated the assertion. The chess-player replied, "Thank goodness. I thought you said 3 billion years!!"