After the only cow in a small Tipperary town suddenly stopped giving milk, the angry townspeople discovered they could buy a new cow in Cork for €200. So they raised the money and bought the cow, which produced milk continuously.
Happy with their success, the townspeople decided to buy a bull to mate with the cow and produce more cows like it. However, every time the bull tried to mount the cow, the cow would move away.
Confused and upset, the townspeople consulted with the local vet. “Whenever the bull tries to mount our cow, she moves away,” said a town elder. “If he approaches from the back, she moves forward. When he
approaches her from the front, she backs off. An attempt from the side, she walks away to the other side.”
The vet thought about this for a minute and asked, “Did you by chance,buy this cow in Mallow?”
The people were dumbfounded, since no one had ever mentioned where they bought the cow. “You are truly a wise vet,” they said. “How did you know that?”
The vet replied with a distant look in his eye, and said, “My wife is from Mallow.”
A man took his wife to the agrifair and one of the exhibits was that of breeding bulls. They went up to the first pen and there was a sign that said, “This bull mated 50 times last year.” The wife poked her husband in the ribs and said, “He mated 50 times last year.”
They walked a little further and saw another pen with a sign that said, “This bull mated 130 times last year.” The wife hit her husband and said, “That’s more than twice a week! You could learn a lot from him.”
They walked further and a third pen had a bull with a sign saying, “This bull mated 365 times last year.” The wife got really excited and said, “That’s once a day. You could REALLY learn something from this one.”
The husband looked at her and said, “Go up and ask him if it was with the same cow.”
The husband’s condition has been reduced from critical to stable and he should make a full recovery.
A farmer’s cow stopped giving milk one day. After a week he was at his wit’s end and called in the large-animal vet. The vet looked her over and said she appeared to be perfectly healthy. Then he called a professor from the local ag school. This guy came out, looked her over, looked at the premises, asked if there was any recent change in diet, then said he couldn’t see any reason the cow would stop giving milk. The farmer then called a chemist. The chemist took soil, water, and food samples. He got back to the farmer a week later and said everything appeared perfectly normal. Finall, the farmer turned to a physicist. The physicist took various measurements of the cow, the land, soil, food, water, air, everything you could imagine. He said he’d be back with an answer in one week.
Sure enough, a week later, he came back to the farmer, saying, “I’ve solved the problem.”
The farmer asked, “Well, what is it?”
The physicist said, “Let’s consider a spherical cow. . .”
I don’t think a physicist would refer to something as being “overly rotund”, so it wouldn’t be funny. “Overly rotund” wouldn’t be some precise theoretical shape that you could base your calcualtions on. It doesn’t have a precise definition like a sphere. So he is going to do all these calculations about the theoretical cow while the real cow is having a problem. Although since none of the other people could figure the problem out either I still wonder what is wrong with the cow?
“Overly rotund” isn’t a physical (as in physicist) ideal. In college we all learned everything possible about spherical bodies, frictionless surfaces, massless ropes, and all that stuff. I’m much happier doing stuff that actually improves people’s lives, although friction and imperfect surfaces are the bane of my existence these days.
Here’s a better physicist joke (I think I’ve posted this on the C&F, though at least a couple of years ago):
A young woman is walking on a path in a park, and a frog jumps out in front of her. She’s startled when he says, “Kiss me and I’ll turn into a physicist!”
She picks him up and takes him back to her apartment where she puts him into a box. Her roommate gets home a little while later, and the woman says to her roommate, “Look what I found on my walk!”
She opens the box, and the frog says, “Kiss me and I’ll turn into a physicist!”
The roommate asks, “Well, aren’t you going to kiss him?”
The woman responds, “Are you kidding? Do you know how much more a talking frog is worth than a physicist?”
In college we all learned everything possible about spherical bodies, frictionless surfaces, massless ropes, and all that stuff. I’m much happier doing stuff that actually improves people’s lives, although friction and imperfect surfaces are the bane of my existence these days.