JOKES OF THE DAY

What could cause such a sharp turnaround? High interest rates? Increased unemployment? Lower productivity? No, it's something much more economically debilitating - and permanent.

Three American lawyers have become the first foreign attorneys permitted to practice law in Japan. What's more, two of them are from New York!

The decline has begun.

Japan has one attorney for every 10,000 residents, compared to the U.S. ratio of one attorney for every 390 residents. For every 100 attorneys trained in Japan, there are 1,000 enginerrs. In the United States, that ratio is reversed.

But a law that became effective on April 1 permits foreigners to practice in Japan for the first time since 1955. Already, an additional 20 American and six British lawyers have applied for permission to open practices in Japan.

If anything can slow the Japanese economy, it's the presence of American attorneys. What better way to even our balance of trade than to send Japan our costliest surplus commodity?

A married couple were having a dinner party for some important guests. The wife was very excited about this and wanted everything to be perfect. At the very last minute, she realized that she didn't have any escargot for the dinner party, so she asked her husband to run down to the beach with the bucket to gather some snails.

Very grudgingly he agreed. He took the bucket, walked out the door, down the steps, and out to the beach. As he was collecting the snails, he noticed a beautiful woman strolling alongside the water just a little further down the beach.

He kept thinking to himself, "Wouldn't it be great if she would even just come down and talk to me?" He went back to gathering the snails.

All of a sudden he looked up, and the beautiful woman was standing right over him. They started talking and she invited him back to her place. They ended up spending the night together. At seven o'clock the next morning he woke up and exclaimed, "Oh no!!! My wife's dinner party!!!"

He gathered all his clothes, put them on real fast, grabbed his bucket, and ran out the door. He ran down the beach all the way to his apartment. He ran up the stairs of his apartment, but he was in such a hurry that when he got to the top of the stairs, he dropped the bucket of snails spilling them all down the stairs.

The door suddenly opens with a very angry wife standing in the doorway wondering where he's been all this time.

He looked at the snails all down the steps, then he looked at her, then back at the snails and said, "Come on guys, we're almost there!!"

A woman went to the beach with her children. Her 4-year-old son ran up to her, grabbed her hand, and led her to the shore where a dead seagull lay in the sand.

"Mommy, what happened to him?" the little boy asked.

"He died and went to heaven," she replied.

The child thought for a moment and said, "And God threw him back down?"