By Cynthia MacGregor [CynMacG@aol.com] via PUNY [puny@egroups.com]

A friend of mine told me he recently went to Turkey, but I think that’s just a load of Istanbul. He’s a mathematician, and he was conferring with other scientists, trying to find something called a constant. He thought he might find the constant in Nople.

He met with a Turk who offered him the Turk key to a tricky equation. “Wait a minaret!” my friend said. “Look at how grimy you’ve gotten that piece of paper. I can barely read the writing. When you get up every morning, don’t you wash your hands and fez?”

His Turkish host apologetically bowed low, but my friend said, “You don’t have to salaam me.”

“With mustard?” asked the Turk.

The Turk lived in an old, run-down castle, with towers and parapets (two cats and dogs). But there’s no moat–you can get into it moat any time you want to.

My friend gave up on finding the answer to his mathematical problem in Turkey and took off for Greece, but he’d forgotten to bring detergent, so his stay was brief (and so was his underwear).

Giving up, he returned to his domicile in Alaska because, after all, there’s no place like Nome. (And, as the little men who put on the amateur theatricals reminded him, there are no plays like gnomes’.)