Well, I guess all of us have seen strange things in their lives. I know that I have. Looking back on some of those things, they either make me laugh, or they make me sad. Some of the things I have seen were so hysterically funny to me, that I just couldn't stop laughing. Some things were very sad, and other things were just amazing. Even when I look back on some of the things that happened to me personally, I am amazed. By now you're probably wondering what the heck is this guy talking about? I am just talking about events, all different kinds of events. They were all memorable for their strangeness and even those events that I found funny, may not have been thought of as funny by those that they happened to. I am not going to discuss the sad events, I am just not in the mood for that.

I remember being in a courtroom when an elderly judge came out to go sit up on the bench. His clerk was also elderly, and she was a spinster. You are probably wondering why I mention this fact, but it is a key element in this story, that I'm about to tell you. The judge was one of these people, that was very old-fashioned and he wore shirts that had extremely long tails on them that he would have tucked into his pants. For some unknown reason, he decided to leave his robe open when he came out. His clerk had a desk in the courtroom that was facing the audience. When he came out he was behind her, and she couldn't see him. It probably would've been nice, if he would've remembered to zip up his pants before he entered the courtroom and it would have been even nicer if his shirttail wasn't hanging through the open fly and hanging down to his knees and flopping in the breeze as he walked, but what are you going to do? He entered the courtroom and decided to stop right behind the clerk and make a statement to the people sitting down. As he did this, he began to gesture, swinging his body to and fro. The shirttail slapped the clerk behind the back of her head. When she turned around to see what was going on, she was staring right into his lower midsection. He was standing on a platform. The clerk let out a scream, that I am sure, could be heard for blocks away and ran out of the courtroom crying. Yes, this was a bit of overreaction on her part, but you had to know the woman, I think that the humilation was more than she could bear.

When I was a lot younger and just getting into my early 20s, I saw something that left an impression on me for the rest of my life. There was a young fellow who lived in the neighborhood and was extremely heavy. When I say heavy, I guess he must have weighed about 400 pounds and was about 5'10" tall. Some of the people used to tease him, I was not one of them. He never struck out against anybody, but one day he must've had enough of the harassment. In front of the whole crowd, he walked over to a car and lifted the rear end of it off the ground. To make matters even more incredible, this car had a rear engine. Now I don't know how much this guy lifted, but I know that I didn't know anyone else who could have done this and we were all in very good shape in those days, because many of us used to lift weights. Needless to say, the people that used to ridicule him, stopped.

In some ways, I seem to have led a charmed life. In the old days none of the playgrounds had any sand or protective coverings on the ground. If you fell off of anything, you just hit the cement, These were playgrounds for tough kids. In those days, what we called the monkey bars, was a sort of cage affair that went up pretty high. Only a jerk would climb to the top and stand on it with 1 foot on each side of the uppermost top open square. Well being a jerk, that is exactly what I decided to do. I climbed to the top, stood up past where the bars ended and immediately fell headfirst through the center of the bars onto the concrete. I want to tell you this, the distance from my head to the ground had to be over 20 feet. Just the force of the fall probably should have broken my neck. I got up off the ground and didn't have a scratch on me. To this day I look back on this event and think, someone or some thing had to be looking out for me.

I wonder if any of you out there, have a had a strange experience in time? No I'm not talking about UFOs, lost time, time travel, and such. I am talking more about a strange feeling that time, has sort of slowed down, for those around you, but not for you? This is exactly what happened to me one day years ago. I was in a situation where I was physically attacked. The funny part of this is that I felt I had all the time in the world to defend myself. It seems that I was able to make about 10 moves to every one that was made against me. It was such a strange feeling, that I am having a hard time describing it. It was like the other guy was fighting me in slow motion. Originally I thought that I was the only one that had ever felt this way, but in speaking to other people, I came across a person who had the exact same thing happen to him. Not only did the exact same thing happen, but the circumstances were almost exactly the same. He had also being attacked in the street and had this weird feeling come over him, when he felt that his attacker was fighting in slow motion. Needless to say you would not want to be the attacker in these situations. I still wonder about this today and so does he. Could our metabolism have been sped up by adrenaline, which in turn allowed us to move a lot faster, fooling our brains into thinking that the other guy had slowed down? Somehow I don't think that this is the case. The reason I say this, is that all of the motion around me seemed to be quite normal. Cars were going at the normal rate of speed, people seemed to be moving normally, except for the guy attacking me and I could not see any other changes with anything else. I guess I will never know the answer to this question and I will just have to chalk it up to a weird experience.

I don't know whether you thought that the story of the judge was funny or not? As I said before, I thought it was hilarious at the time. This was not the only time that I saw something in a courtroom that made me laugh so hard that I couldn't control myself. It turns out that in some of these places, maintenance is not the best. When you try and get things fixed, it could take months, or it might never be repaired. There are cases where even doorknobs have been missing for many years without ever being replaced. I only tell you this, to give you a little background into the repair situation. There was a lady judge, who was about 70 years old, weighed about 90 pounds soaking wet and had a broken judge's chair in her courtroom. I don't know if you have ever seen these chairs, but they have a very high back, are on wheels and are very heavy. It seems that a spring in the back of the chair, that allowed her to sort of reclined back had fallen out of the chair. The maintenance people had been called the day before and for some strange reason, everyone thought that the problem had been fixed. The next day, the judge was conducting trial. She walked into the courtroom, climbed up to the bench and sat in her chair. As the trial went on, she decided to recline. This is where all pandemonium broke loose. The chair flipped over, her legs went up into the air, her robe and dress went down toward her head and all you could see were bare legs forming the letter "V". I know that this was an extremely embarrassing event for the jurist, but I tell you it had to be one of the funniest sights that I have ever seen. I found myself laughing so hard that I almost couldn't breathe. This was not the end of the problem however. A very tiny lady who works for the judge decided to run up to the bench and try and lift the judge and the chair to an upright position. If this lady was capable of lifting 20 pounds, that would've been quite a feat for her. The only thing that she accomplished was to extend the comedy show. Finally, one of the court offices came to the judge's rescue. The only injury that the judge sustained was to her dignity, it was badly damaged. Peter Sellers could not have found a funnier scene to put into one of his movies.

One day I was standing outside of a public building. It was lunch time and there were perhaps a hundred people or more out there. Many of them had their eyes fixated on the front lawn. I decided that I wanted to see what was going on, so I walked over to the area. I saw a squirrel walking across the front lawn, which was quite large. The squirrel was being followed by a cat, who was quietly stalking it. This is what had drawn the attention of all those people. Now I too was watching to see how this drama would play out. Seemingly, the squirrel didn't realize that he was being followed and the cat was doing everything that you would see a jungle animal do that was stalking its prey, in one of those nature films. Just as the cat got to within five or 6 feet of the squirrel, the squirrel turned around, stood up on 2 feet, stretched its front legs out completely and made itself look huge. The squirrel now actually looked like a miniature bear. The cat seeing this, ran for its life. This squirrel went on with whatever it was doing and didn't look the least bit worried about anything. What we had here folks, was one tough squirrel.

Sometimes, we have no idea of what we are really capable of. I am talking about, athletic feats. I remember hiking through the woods with some friends, who were all much taller than I am. Being much taller, they should have been able to jump a lot further than me. We came to a stream. In the stream were flat rocks spaced pretty far apart, but you could jump from one to the other and make it to the other side. My friends suggested just that, jumping from rock to rock. I looked at the distances and felt that they were a little too far for me to make it, but my friends insisted that I could do it. I just didn't have that confidence, but I decided I would try anyway. I thought that I had better jump really hard, so that I wouldn't fall in the stream before I reached the rock. This sounds like a good plan, doesn't it? I can tell you this, it was a lousy plan. I made my jump and sailed far beyond the first rock and landed in the water between the first and second rock. This was in the fall and the stream was ice cold. All my friends had a good laugh at my expense and afterwards built a fire for me, .so that I could dry off. I know that this sounds like the end of the story, but there was one other part to it. Somehow, as I was drying some articles of my clothing over the fire, my socks burned up.

Have you ever been in an accident where you should have not survived? I was and I didn't even get hurt. While driving in the country, in my Honda automobile, I was hit by a car that was traveling in excess of 100 miles an hour. You couldn't see the car coming, because there was a dip in the road and you only first realized that the car was headed for you, as it flew over the top of a hill, which was only about 30 or 40 feet from the crossing of the road. Some may wonder how I know about the speed that this other car was traveling at. It is quite simple really, although the car was airborne coming over the hill, the driver saw me and she smashed on the brakes, creating huge skid marks that extended far beyond where I was hit, because my car was pushed upon impact, for quite a distance. The pushing effect is what saved my life. As the car was being pushed, much of the energy of the impact was being dissipated. What happened was that my car was hit sideways, in the area of the drive's door and the car that hit me had a very low hood, it was a Camaro or Firebird. The drivers door had been pushed in and the armrest stopped just at my side. I was actually able to drive the car home. No one, who saw the accident, thought that I would ever be able to survive it at those speeds.

My last story is one of my favorites, you might even have read about me telling it before. In the old days, some of the New York City subway cars being used were from many years before. They had porcelain covered polls that went from floor to ceiling, that you could hold onto, if there were no seats available. It just so happens that I was in one of these old cars, many years ago, when I was returning home from work. I had taken the subway line many times and because of this, I knew where the crowds got on. Well, it just so happened that when I got on, a subway workman also got on with me. He was carrying an extremely long florescent light that they used in the subway stations. I guess he was taking it back with him, or he was going to another station to install it, I really don't know and I suppose it doesn't matter. The point here is that he stood it up and he himself was standing holding onto it. I knew that at the next stop tons of people would get onto the train, as a matter of fact, the next stop was one of the busiest on the entire line. Well we got to the next stop, the doors opened and the train car completely filled with people and some of them ran over to the light bulb, thinking it was one of these floor-to-ceiling polls and grabbed it for support. Well you'd have to have seen the look on this guy's face. The train started off and the people holding onto the light bulb lurched back and the light bulb went with them. It was a sight for sore eyes my friends and could've been right off the set of candid camera.