Q: What time should an innkeeper visit an iron foundry?
A: When he wants a bar-maid. (p. 28)
* Most history texts will tell you that the first robot was invented in the 1920s, to serve as a decoy for President Calvin Coolidge. (Cool-Bot also allowed the President to slip out of the White House for romantic peccadilloes without his wife suspecting anything. It was programmed to sound and act exactly like Coolidge, and perform all of his duties, both presidential and husbandly.) But evidence has begun to appear suggesting that robots were actually walking among us as early as 1854, when they were employed in the hospitality industry in Wild West towns that were too dangerous for the women and effete snobs who normally worked at hotels and restaurants.
Fig. 134 – Some of these robots even became lawmen and cowboys
In the early years of manifest destiny, most “women” in border towns were robots, including prostitutes, laundresses, and, most commonly, bar maids. So if an innkeeper needed a new woman to serve drinks in his saloon, he would take a few donkeys for trade and go down to the iron foundry to place an order for a new one.
The practice was generally phased out as the American West became more hospitable to the fairer sex, with human bordellos first appearing along the Mexican border in the 1870s. Among the menfolk, these were infinitely preferable to robot bordellos, with their enormous, iron sexbots — the first human-staffed establishment was so popular, it was called “the best little whorehouse in Texas.”
