Heh..good find. I've been looking for amoebic dysentry for ages..thanks!

I used to work for an advertising paper and I was always amazed by the immense amount of crap people would advertise. I was chatting to a guy there who did quality control and I asked him about his job. He would call up or e-mail ads and then check if they appeared as intended when the paper was printed. On one occassion he placed an ad for three eggs for five pounds - not ostrich eggs, or lizard eggs, just ordinary eggs you could make an omlette with - and put his home number in for a laugh. A guy actually called him up who was very interested. When he said that the eggs had already been sold the guy asked if he'd be getting any more in.

Now that's just insane.
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I'm reminded of this site someone posted to mefi last month or so. The personals are great.

This post reminded me of this guy in Lawrence Durrell's The Revolt of Aphrodite or was it The Alexandria Quartet...damn it, i forget. In the novel one of the characters uses the wanted ads as an art form and comes up with the most surreal things possible. I wish i could remember them... but I am far away from my books (11,000 kms approx.)

I remember going to college with a few jokers who'd concoct personals for The Village Voice and The Aquarian (especially the latter). What really caught my attention, however, were a score of (serious?) missives in the Voice from some guy named Xev, who'd launch into new-age conspiracy theories involving extraterrestrial clones. It was like a MeTa #9622 spin of Dr. Bronner's Soap labels.

Wonderful, dodgy. The only thing better than amusing-hoax personal ads are practical-joke telegrams, and we hardly get any of those any more. This is delightful. I also thoroughly enjoyed the post peacay speaks of.

Ah yes, funny telegrams. Spike Milligan was a great fan of telegrams. He was manic depressive and would often lock himself in his room for days on end unable to talk to anyone or do anything. During one of these spells he sent a telegram to his wife saying 'Toast please'. She sent one back to him: 'On it's way'.

I think some of these of these are placed by Jimmy Carr (ubiquitous UK comedian) and are used as part of his stand-up routine.

Excellent!

Joke telegrams! My grandfather used to send them back and forth with Chuck Jones (yep, that Chuck Jones -- he was a family friend since the '40s). I was sad to find after my grandfather died that they didn't seem to have been saved... would have loved to have one of their exchanges on hand. God. I hadn't thought of that in years! Do telegrams still even exist? And if so, do they still say "stop" for sentence breaks?

Were there spamgrams?

great post, thanks

scody: Western Union still has them, at ~$15 a pop.
I don't know if the "stop" anachronism's still in use...