Queues and pees.

One of my minor pleasures when I was still alive, and writing serious articles for scientific journals (well that's what I used to tell people), was trying to embellish a serious paper with a risque quip and somehow slip it past the Editor's blue pencil and into print.

For example, if a drug firm published a paper in a scientific journal claiming success for their only marginally useful product on the basis of some 'iffy' statistics, a common enough event, they would then train their drug reps. to visit health centres across the country and belabour the poor general practitioners with a flood of pseudo-scientific claptrap about the P (probablility) values which allegedly showed how extremely effective their product was. It is well-known that there are lies, damned lies and statistics and so my subsequent article demolishing their statistics and advocating the need to look at the number of patients in the study as well as the exact statistical tests used would perhaps be entitled 'Let's take the P out of sales talk'.

I rarely succeeded in getting that sort of thing past the fuddy-duddy old editors, and I began to think that I was the peculiar one. Hence I was pleasantly surprised to learn that 'Can I have a P please, Bob?'(from the ITV show Blockbusters) has just been voted the nation's favourite TV catchphrase.

With all this recent talk of deteriorating educational standards and annual inflation of exam. results, I had thought there would be few people left who could still recognize a double entendre when they heard one, but I was obviously mistaken.

Only last week I was in the local pub and this beautiful girl came in wearing a short skirt and a tight sweater, perched herself on a high stool, and said to the the barman 'Can I have a double entendre please?' The barman winked at me, and replied 'Yeah, I'll give you one'.