This is soooo Funny!!!

              

We buy stuff with money that we don't have. We promise to pay for it with money that we may never get. By the time we get our stuff paid for, it's broken. Then we go out and buy more stuff.  That is the definition of the word credit.

Today I would like to discuss the history of credit and how it all came about.

Credit has been around for centuries. It started with the early cave man. Uugg wanted a fancy stone club like the one his neighbor Oogg had. He believed it would make him a better hunter. After all, he worked as hard as Oogg did and he deserved a nice club. Besides that, he had more children. So off Uugg went, down to the local Stoneware Store and bought one on credit. He promised to pay for it in three easy installments of two dinosaurs per month for the following three months.

Uugg used the club to kill dinosaurs which he gave to the Stoneware Store for two months. By the third month he and his family had starved to death and the store owner came and took back the club, his cave, and his one surviving child. This was all legal since the credit application had been written and signed in stone. That's why people stopped paying for stuff with dinosaurs and began using those shiny chunks of rock called "gold nuggets".

When it was discovered that the shiny rocks were valuable, everyone began digging them out of the caves. Incidentally, this is the way "house cleaning" was discovered.

After a while and much digging by everyone from all over the continent, the shiny rocks kept getting harder and harder to find. It was also difficult to flash your wealth around because the sacks of rocks were so heavy. This is why Quasimodo became known as "The Hunchback". He was the richest man of his time, but his back had become terribly bowed over from carrying all these sacks of shiny rocks around. Even though being weighted down with riches sounds like a good thing, it really can become a hazard, so people began using paper.

The paper was easier to carry. It wasn't bulky, which made it easier for Robin Hood to rob the rich and give the money to the poor. The paper money was undetectable when Robin Hood stuffed the millions he stole inside his tights. Folks just thought he had huge thighs. However, all the kings men as well as the poor began manufacturing their own money. They cut pieces of paper from the Wall Street Journal and Sears & Roebuck catalogues. Soon everybody had so much paper it became worthless. Robin Hood stopped robbing people since his tights were now full of money which  nobody wanted. This caused him to waddle like a duck whenever he tried to walk, and that is how the term "tight wad" came about.

By now the government decided to take over control of all the money. They called it Internal Revenue. They began to make the money out of green paper only.  They put pictures of dead presidents on the front and a picture of a building on the back. They also wrote a lot of numbers and Latin words on it. They decided to call it "cash" which comes from the Latin word "munie" meaning "the root of all evil".

Thousands of years later man was still using this green paper, but it was slowly becoming worthless. Unless you had a sack full of this paper you couldn't buy anything. And carrying around sacks of this stuff made it difficult to use public transport. Besides, the airlines kept losing it. It also takes a long long time to acquire a sack of this paper stuff called cash, so that is why we now buy things on credit.
 
Now instead of having sacks of paper we use little square plastic cards to buy stuff with money that we don't have. We promise to pay for it with money that we may never get.  When we get it paid for we will go out and buy more stuff because the stuff we have now will be broken.

And that, Dear Children, is how the term plastic money came about.  And that is the reason we now live in a world of debt, politics, and collective ignorance.  It's so easy a cave man can do it.

 

 

There are three types of people who hang out at the supermarkets. There is the obnoxious, rude, whining, angry, demanding shopper, next there is the happy shopper, and finally there are the cashiers...those underpaid public servants who stand behind a counter all day and demand that you give them money.

And I know this because? I've been there, done that and have the nervous breakdown to prove it.

Anytime you want to be right in whatever you do or say, do it or say it to a cashier. I learned this in "How To Be A Cashier and Live To Tell About It" school. Lesson number one was: the customer is always right. Well, actually  the store manager told me this when I began working  at one of our local supermarkets. I think it was one of the ten commandments in the cashier hand book.

This is a good rule of thumb...or tongue. No matter what a customer says, be polite and keep smiling. Sooner or later, they will take their purchase and leave. In the months I was employed there I developed permanent creases in my face from smiling. To this day I can be grinning like a possum and yet be angry enough to slap the polka dots off a clown's suit.

Some times I would come home from work and look back over my day and realize that I had apologized for everything from the Civil War to the crack in the Liberty Bell. My face would be sore and my teeth would be on edge from the effort it took to hold my tongue and not offer them cheese and bread to go with their whine.

Nine shoppers in ten will be nice and polite to the store employees then along comes number ten and if you happen to say "How are you today?" they will tell you. They will go off on a tangent about how they had to wait in line for five whole minutes while the customer in front of them paid for their purchase with a check. Well kiss my assets. We don't all carry cash. They will whine about how the merchandise is not arranged correctly in the store, how the store is out of the XYZ brand of their favorite product, and how they are almost of a mind to go elsewhere to shop.

You stand there smiling and apologizing and thinking to yourself how much you wish they would go elsewhere to shop.

It wasn't until later that I realized these people were showing the major signs of TAB.  (Not to be confused with the ancient diet soft drink called Tab.) TAB stands for Type A Behavior. Six of the major symptoms are:

1. Impatience and hostility. 
2. Beads of sweat on the forehead
3. Clenched teeth
4. Eyelids twitching
5. Dark circles under the eyes
6. Twitching of the corners of the mouth.

Did I just describe my high school math teacher?

Type A personalities are people who take everything seriously, they don't laugh often and they are always nervous and stressed out. These are the type people who are prone to heart attacks and strokes.

I began to wonder about the people with this disposition. What caused them to be so negative and bitter? I don't think people are born this way. Most babies, if they are dry and fed and loved are happy babies.  I wondered what kind of life they led that made them so miserable.

And then one day a strange thing happened. I started to listen to the things they weren't saying... really listen, and try to understand why these people seemed to be angry. It wasn't about the store, the service or me...it was about them and their personal problems. After talking to them for a minute or so and showing genuine  concern, I would usually learn that they had a sick family member, or they had been up all night working, or they had lost their job or some other tragedy had occurred in their life.

Of course this didn't make me feel any better. I quit my cashier job after a few months. I was beginning to show signs of TAB.

So, in honor of our brave men and women who lay down their sanity for this great nation of shoppers, I would like to designate this as "Be Kind To Cashiers Week". 

And if you have a spouse who works as a cashier, be nice to them when they come home. Chances are that even though they may be smiling, they've had a bad day...

We interrupt our regularly scheduled humor column for an update on the weather. What can I say? It's hot outside. Oppressively, sticky, unbearably hot, and as my friend Fred would say, "it's not just the heat, it's the stupidity."

According to recent news reports, the U.S. has lost track of some 190,000 weapons  — AK-47s and Glock pistols —  issued to Iraqi security forces by the U.S. over the past four years. A recent GAO report suggests that the weapons may have fallen into the hands of insurgents.

"Turkish media report that Glock pistols supplied by the U.S. to Iraq are showing up among the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK. The terrorist organization is fighting a guerrilla war against the Turkish state.

A year ago, Amnesty International issued a report that examined a shipment in 2004 of some 25,000 AK-47s from an American base in Bosnia to Iraq. The weapons (ordered by the U.S. military) were supposed to arrive in Baghdad on four planes licensed to a Moldovan air cargo firm named Aerocom.But Amnesty International's Colby Goodman said it appears the planes never landed in Iraq."

What is wrong with this picture? It seems that the fighting in the Middle East will continue until somebody runs out of equipment and ammunition...and as long as all sides are being replenished, it could be Doomsday the 21st before that happens. This makes about as much sense as playing "Cops and Robbers" and issuing everyone in the game a police cruiser and a deputy's badge. That makes the playing field a little bit too level in my opinion. Perhaps Al Gore should instigate a new panic. Maybe he could call it Global Arming.

On top of all that, Hershey, the All American Chocolate Company is moving a large percentage of its operations to Mexico.  This will cost Americans around 1,500 jobs in one area alone. But aren't most of the American businesses leaving the U.S. in search of cheap labor these days?  I think this must be their solution to immigration reform...simply move all the American jobs to a foreign country and the foreigners will go home. There will be no jobs for Americans and we will become a poor third world country. We can then cross the borders into our neighboring countries to find work and demand they speak English and give us government benefits. (Hey Al,  can you say "Global Swarming"?)  In the interest of political correctness, must we now refer to Hershey's Kisses as Los Besos de Hershey?

And has there suddenly become a shortage of screen writers with original ideas?  Hollywood  filmmakers are now re imaging older films and making them into new releases. This must be for the benefit of the young  people who have never seen nor heard of these old "Classic" films and also for us older senile crowd who have seen them and heard of them but can't remember anything.

How hot is it? I'm glad you asked. It's so hot we barbecued on the sidewalk this weekend without using the grill. The steaks turned out great but we burned the potatoes. We left them in the sun too long.

Was it this hot during the month of August over the previous years? Back in 1878, temperatures in the South were around 102 degrees this time of year so I guess this means that Global Warming isn't really all that new. Perhaps Al Gore should just calm down already. Were the levels of stupidity ever this high?  I'll let you know as soon as all the scientific research is complete. Can anyone say "government grant"?