I overheard some of my co-workers talking yesterday, and one of them referred to someone else as "practically a genius."  How can you practically be a genius?  "Sorry, dude.  You have to have an IQ of 140 to be a genius.  You have a 139.4, and you know we round down." 

 

Why is it that we treat math like a sport, where it’s perfectly acceptable not to be good at it?  It’s like you’ve been invited to play in a pickup game of calculus.  “No, thanks, guys.  I’ve got a bum brain.  Besides, I was never any good at it.”  Or is it some perverse urge in us to publically announce our disabilities?

 

And here’s a thought:  What excuse do rocket scientists have?

 

The Annual Show Me Clowns for Jesus National Conference will be in Springfield on Feb 12^th through the 15^th.  Boy.  That pretty well sums it up.

Wouldn't it be fun to publish a map where most of the towns are wrong?  Enough are right so it's not obvious, but if you're trying to find Hurley, good luck.

You know, it just sounds wrong to say you went to a porn shop to buy a gag gift.

My Fellow Americans,

 

I come to you today to take a stance on a subject that has long been dear to me.  And that is my Second Amendment right to arm myself, to the teeth if necessary.  We have the God given right in America to shoot each other, and that happens to be a right I won’t give up without a fight.  And you had better believe I’ll be packing.  Of course, I’ll be packing a perfectly legal handgun, along with the permits necessary to own that gun.  And I have a trigger guard, too.  Just in case the grandkids accidently open the combination on my gun safe.

 

Today, though, I come to you for your support.  And the support I seek from you, my fellow Americans, is help in repealing the ban on possessing ballistic missiles.  There are many collectors and serious hunters, like myself, who are being unlawfully denied their Second Amendment Right to procure ballistic missiles.

 

First of all, a man has the right to protect his home.  Does it really matter from what?  Second, it opens up an entire new dimension to hunting.  Kill it and cook it, all at once.  Third, think of the collector!  Imagine a trophy room displaying every weapon ever made... except that blank spot along the wall.  Are we that cold-hearted that we wouldn’t give just one man that little pleasure in life?  But finally, the Second Amendment says I can, and that’s all the reason I need.  And I’ve got the NRA behind me to boot.

 

It’s time for this blatant, and unconstitutional discrimination to end!  Not another day should pass without the possession of ballistic missile’s being legal.  After all, outlawing the possession of ballistic missiles will not keep lunatics from killing thousands of people.  If you outlaw ballistic missiles, they’ll just use a board with a nail in it. 

 

Therefore, I want all of you who know what is right to email every elected official that you know, repeatedly, and tell them that you demand access to ballistic missiles.  In fact, you tell them that you are determined to possess ballistic missiles.  In double fact, you tell them that you are even willing to die, if that what it takes.  And who wouldn’t be willing to die in protecting his Constitution rights?  I guarantee you, you will see action.

 

And remember, ballistic missiles don’t kill people.  Lunatics who are allowed to have ballistic missiles kill people.

 

Thank you for your support.

 

The Honorable Leonard K. Bullfinch, Senator-at-Large

  

First the bad news.  Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning, so there will be six more weeks of winter.    Now the good news.  In six weeks it will be the 16^th of March, and that’s four days before Spring actually begins.  So either way, we win!  Now I know there are people out there who don’t believe in the prognosticating abilities of a mere rodent.  However, the way I figure it, why not?  I mean, if people believe that Nostradamus is reliable, why not Punxsutawney Phil?

The government has been talking a lot lately about spending a trillion dollars for the economic bailout, and we all just politely nod, as if we really comprehend what a trillion truly is.  A trillion is a thousand billions.  And, of course, a billion is a thousand millions.  And we all know what a million is.  In other words, if a million millionaires all got together and gave their money to... say, me... then I would have a trillion dollars.

 

According the to Bureau of Engraving and Printing, a one dollar bill weighs right at one gram (which, incidentally, is how much a 100 dollar bill weighs).  Therefore, it would take 454 one dollar bills to equal a pound.  One trillion one dollar bills, then, would weigh somewhere around 2,202,643,172 pounds.  That’s more than 2.2 billion pounds, which is around 1,101,322 tons.

 

If you spent a dollar every second of the day, it would take you 317,000 years to spend a trillion, and that’s not counting any interest you might make.

 

If stacked, one trillion dollars would reach 68,966 miles.  That’s a third of the way to the moon.

 

You could not physically put a trillion one dollar bills in your house, no matter where you live.  You probably couldn’t physically put them in most cities, or many states, for that matter.

 

You could probably paper the entire surface of the world with a trillion one dollar bills.

 

A dollar bill is six inches long.  End on end, a trillion dollars would go all the way to the sun (100 million miles, more or less), and you’d still have money to burn.

 

If you were to sing “A Trillion Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and you could average one verse every ten seconds, and you never lost count and had to start over, it would take you around 250,000 years to finish.  Which is good to know if you’re ever in Purgatory with a lot of time to kill.

 

And by the time you finally finished singing that song, the United States Government just might have paid back that ridiculous debt, but only if they weren’t spending it at the piddly rate of one dollar a second. 

 

In five billion years (which is one/two hundredth of a trillion), more or less, the sun will run out of fuel.  At that time, it will grow increasingly dimmer, like a campfire left to burn itself out.  Then, like that campfire, where the remaining logs fall in, the sun, too, will collapse in on itself and flare back out – all the way to... say... Jupiter.  In the process, everything in between, including the US Treasury Department, will be vapourized.  Kinda puts global warming into perspective, doesn’t it?