MINI 037 Jack the Driver

 Jack the driver retired from the Gobbleup & Sons Construction Company a few years back and his retirement checks were a lot lower than he expected.  So, paperwork in hand, he asked the human resources department why.

 Pricilla Personnel assumed her official scowl, pretended to read Jack’s papers and then said it was because the market tanked.  Jack hauled out his Wall Street Journal which said the market’s been just fine.  The scowl deepened. Trucker with a Wall Street Journal?  These days, sure. 

 

What really happened was that members of the Gobbleup clan and some of their poker buddies were fudging the figures. The kind of fudge that comes in dollar-green and lands in hiding.

 

The court said give the money back.  They did… along with one of those agreements that says “We did nothing wrong and we’ll never do it again.”  Consent decrees, they’re called.

 

But guess what everyone just now found out.  They had started siphoning a whole lot earlier than anyone told the judge.  So now they’re all back in court.

 

The big question isn’t what the court does, or the company. It’s whether the judge is a member of their weekly Texas Hold ’em circle?

 

I’m wesrichards@gmail.com 

My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them.

© WR 2021

 

4769 The Time Bank

  A little misleading.  There IS no time bank.  But think of what you could do if there were.

First, let’s get one thing straight: Time is your only asset and it’s not renewable.  Forget relativity, spacetime, alternative universes. We get enough of that elsewhere.

Time may be an artificial construct based on observable phenomena.  But in day to day use, it’s real.  

And think of how much you squander.  If you could bank some of it, your life would be longer… generally considered a plus.

As in any market, there are gains and losses.  When the court has a missing item on its calendar and your arraignment comes up early, you gain.  (Unless, of course bail is denied and they take you directly to the electric chair. Or the needle in more humane places.)

When the sign in the doctor’s office says if you’re more than 15 minutes late you will have to reschedule, you’ve lost time even if you’re only 16 minutes late.  Of course if doc is late, no matter by how much, tough, buddy. Live with it.  He’s a doctor, after all. Or she.

You lose time on checkout lines, in traffic jams, waiting for “her” to put on her makeup after taking forever deciding on what to wear (still subject to change after the makeup’s done.)

You lose time when the foursome ahead of you on the 18th hole decides to drink and carouse before they get to the “19th Hole Lounge” in the clubhouse.

You lose time when you use the cash only lane on the George Washington Bridge and eight cars ahead of you is Jed Clampett in his 1928 Model A trying to get directions to Rhinebeck followed by seven cars from Ohio.

These are times you can’t bank.  But think about the time you lose all by yourself. 

 An hour watching “The Voice,” which recently began its 1123rd boring scream season, or the MTV awards is an hour you’ll never get back. A trip to the outlet mall is a day you can’t get back.

 The clock is not syncopated, it counts steadily.

 Grapeshot:

-When you tell the bank teller you want to make a “time deposit” and she asks how much and you answer about an hour” she’ll have you thrown out.

 -Calling a watch a “timepiece” in an ad is pretentious, calling it a timepiece in conversation is ridiculous, printing the word on the watch face is gauche.

-In the smartphone era, watches are just jewelry because there’s no need to have one to tell time.

-Digital watches with LED readouts often have a zillion functions but they lack one you get only with analog: time remaining in the hour at a glance.

-Make that two functions… because a stopped analog is right twice a day but a stopped digital is a blank face.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WR 2021

 

4768 The Cracked Whip

A guy with four arms can probably also have two faces, right?  This is Rep. Steve Scalise, republican of Louisiana.  Scalise is the number two republican in the House of Representatives, a job they call the whip.  Besides voting against everything, his job is to make sure the rest of his fellow partygoers also vote against everything.

 

Other than that, there’s nothing special about this four-armed klutz.  Oh. Wait. Yes there is.  He’s a refuser.  That is someone in a high ranking job who will not come out and tell the truth, which is that trump lost the election. 

 

Maybe he and the cabal he leads voted more than once… and assumed that everyone else with his viewpoint did.  And with all those multivotes, it was arithmetically impossible for Biden to win.  Chances are high that he only voted once. Chances are high that he isn’t high. Or a lobotomy survivor.

 

Maybe he thinks Kev McCarthy will run for higher office and he’ll get to fill the top spot but needs the votes of his fellow illusionists and delusionalists.  Or maybe his party’s #3 Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-Utica, NY) is nipping at his heels and since electing women is getting popular, she could surpass him when Kev runs for Senate or President.

 

Now, be honest.  If you aren’t from Louisiana or Upstate New York, answer this: did you ever hear of either of these relative newcomers?  Of course you haven’t. Scalise has done nothing to attract your attention, and Stefanik has done less.

 

But wait. How do we know Scalise is a Biden Denier?  It’s not like he has a “trump really won” or “the election was stolen” bumper sticker on his car. No. It’s not like he runs around proudly covering his high forehead or mini hairline with a bright red MAGA cap.

 

None of that.  Someone had to ask him.  And who would do such a thing?  Here are some choices:

1.  The American Society of Four-armed congressmen.

2.  The kid whose lunch bag he stole while passing a touring group of elementary school students from Ohio.

3.  Ivanka trump.

4.  Fox News. 

Whispered hint: pick #4.  There is no association of four armed congressmen, the kid from Ohio bared his teeth and growled during the robbery attempt scaring him off and Ivanka wouldn’t be caught dead with a guy like Steve.

 

Which leads us back to the questions about people (and organizations) getting high, voting more than once and undergoing volunteer lobotomies.

 

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any Questions? wesrichars@gmail.com

© WR 2021

 

  

4767 Party Like it's 1776

 It’s tough to find a picture of George with him facing page-right.

It was a lot less complicated to elect a president back in America’s early days. The idea of political monopoly existed, though they called it something else: monarchy. George Washington put that out of commission.

 

We had the collective sense to reject that and became a democratic republic. Then, everyone began to party. And now we're verging on the very kind of monopoly our ancestors feared.

 

There are ways around that. But even the easiest is hard, forming a viable national third party. Yes, it's possible. 

 

No doubt there's power in numbers. But there's even more power in zero.

 

Washington was the first and so far, the only president without a party.  What did he know that we don’t?  Probably not an awful lot when it comes to organizing. But there were only 2.5 million American citizens in his day. Now there are something like 330 million. So there has to be some kind of organization, right?  

 

Maybe.  

 

Sure, we have to sort these office seekers out somehow. Here’s how:

 

Make a checklist of your most important issues.  Send it to the candidate and promise that you’ll vote for him or her if he checks X percent of the boxes you consider right.  But don’t say which are which.

 

Put the issues in alphabetical order and say so. By all means do not list them by your own priorities.

 

Enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope. You can’t deduct that from your taxes. It shows you put you half-buck (Half a buck for a stamp?!) where you mouth is.

 

Just add thumbs up and thumbs down icon after each issue and the simple instruction “Circle Your Thumb,” and Presto! You have

The Wessays (™) SAMPLE CANDIDATE ISSUE CHECK LIST:

 

Abortion on Demand 

Automatic Weapons

Balanced Budget

Border Walls

Church/State Separation, Absolute

Church/State Separation with Wiggle Room

Climate Change

Concealed Carry

Confederate Statues

COVID Vaccination

Death Penalty

Deregulation

Donald trump 

Electoral College

Equality of Ethnicities 

Equality of Races

Equality of Women

For-profit Colleges

Free Trade

Immigration, illegal

Immigration, legal

Interest Rates

Lobbyists

Math

Medical Ads

Open Carry

Organized Labor

Outsourcing, Domestic

Outsourcing, Overseas

Paid Sex

Pluralizing “anyway”

Podcasts

Political Action Committees

Political Parties

Pot

Pronouncing the “t” in Often

Redistricting

Soaking the Poor

Soaking the Rich

Starbucks

Tax Loopholes

Tax Shelters

Term Limits

Time limits for Political Speeches

Two spaces between sentences

US Supreme Court Membership Limits

Video Games

White Supremacy

Write-in Topic______

 

Much easier than attending rallies, listening to speeches and watching and reading all those ads.  And much cheaper. Of course, we’ll have to establish rehab for the lobbyists and maybe a welfare plan, too.

 

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WR 2021

4766 The Pandora Papers

 Some of the rooms where it happens, Sioux Falls SD

Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be.

That world leaders, tycoons and celebrities galore stash secret valuables and cash in secret places is a dog-bites-man story. That is, it’s part of the nature of the world, the humans and the dog. No surprise here, right? Wrong.

 

The bite uncovered by the Pandora Papers is more than Fido taking a chunk out of the hand that feeds him.

 

It puts the utter corruption of the perpetrators in stark relief and in words we can all understand. And we don’t need to learn the geography of Southeast Asia or the Middle East to get the picture or how to pronounce the names of the main players. We all know who Tony Blair is. And most of us know of many if not most of the rest of the thieves.

 

It also reinforced the notion that if you get enough monkeys and enough keyboards, something akin to Romeo and Juliet will appear. You put hundreds of reporters’ noses into tens of millions of documents, something foul is going to emerge. And it has.

 

These kinds of ill-gotten gains used to be hidden in Swiss banks. Then there came strong competition from tropical island nations that saw juice in higher hanging fruit.

 

Now, South Dakota, a state formerly known for harsh weather, presidential faces sculpted in mountainsides and abused impoverished Native Americans? Yes, for the last few years, the snow-bound versions of tropical island tax shelters have been quietly sprouting out of the snow in places like Sioux Falls.

 

The Washington Post, which so far is the main mouthpiece for the Pandora Papers Problem, singles out Trident Trust. But it’s going on elsewhere in this country, too. Similar pop ups are popping up in other states. Nevada, for example.

 

Did we mention that some -- maybe many -- of the loot stashers already are under investigation? Well, they are. Did we mention that some of the money hiders are splurging while the countries they run are wallowing in the mud of poverty? Like, say, Jordan? Well, they are.

 

But there also are some questions about the folks who opened Pandora’s Box. First, the organization that put the papers together, the International Consortium of Investigative Reporters says it’s supported by entirely by contributions. Who contributes? Who doesn't?

Second: what did the consortium miss?

 

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WR 2021

4765 Making Way For the Sane

 

There’s a lot of chatter on the secret channels this country uses to spy on potential terrorists, some of whom want to infect the rest of us during the pandemic. Welcome, freedom lovers about to quit your jobs in an anti-American wave of conscientious objection to the health and well-being of yourselves and others.

 

When you leave work, be sure to find a way to game the unemployment comp system.  After all, the rest of us working stiffs have no interest in feeding you in addition to treating your self-inflicted ailments and then paying to bury you.

 

The only thing the rest of us want you to do is stay away from us, from our children, from our community centers, from our houses of worship, from the stores where we shop and the restaurants where we eat.  That’s not asking too much, is it?

 

You quit working?  Maybe you needed an excuse. This fits perfectly in the department of plausible deniability. No one has to know your lazy little secret.  Or that your boss is a jerk. Or that you don’t like putting in the hours when you could be doing something better -- like watching football or sitting on a barstool swapping lies and trying to pick up members of the opposite or members of the same sex.

 

This is especially true of health care workers.  You guys have taken science courses that should tell you that you need those vaccines … you know, the ones you’re injecting into the sane.

 

Maybe you were absent those semesters. Maybe you’re just plain nuts.  Maybe you’re hiding behind religious nonsense.  Nah. Forget that one.  Everyone else can see through it.

 

Plus, how are those prayers working out for you?

Be good if we could nab and jail a few thousand of you. But we're out of jail space because those government socialists closed the private prisons to leave enough money to help you support your fantasies.

 

Maybe some entrepreneurial genius can realize the American Dream by opening a chain of franchised rehab farms. 

 

The “freedom lovers” are bullying the rest of us at the same time they’re infecting us. They’re hanging their objections on principles we supposedly hold dear … personal choice (except when it comes to abortion.) They’re wrapping stupid in American values without understanding root American values.

 

Yes, we value freedom and freedom of choice.  Except when it cripples us as a country; maybe destroys us.

 

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WR 2021

 

4764 Free Lunch

 

One of the supermarket tabloids reported this, so it must be at least as true as the space alien baby kidnappers and the ghosts in the attic:  You can get a decent meal out of a dumpster and never get your hands dirty. Well, almost never.

The paper says that under cover of darkness, you can stalk the dumpsters of the fanciest restaurants around and come up with discarded food, often carefully packaged and sealed against whatever else lives in the dumpster.  Same with fast food joints like Starbucks, whose franchise agreements demand owners throw out perfectly good stuff at the end of the day.

Save a bundle on groceries that way.

Of course, these days, the pickings are slimmer than they once were.  Restaurants seat and don’t seat indoor patrons with fair regularity in proportion to the fears or casecounts in the Covid Rush.  But the fast food joints remain open, at least at the drive-through window.

Restaurants don’t donate this stuff to food pantries because they fear lawsuits that result from someone eating something contaminated.  Same with supermarkets which discard packaged food with “sell by” dates that have passed by only several hours.

A recent exploration found a dozen packages of salad, some neatly wrapped onions a few boxes of soup mix and a few pounds of chopped beef in a dumpster.  All were expired by something like five hours.  In the coming colder weather, that’s like taking the stuff home and leaving it in the refrigerator a day or two beyond the “sell by” date.

Required tools for your own Operation Dumpster:  a box of disposable gloves, a roll of paper towels, a stepladder, a flashlight and a supply of decent garbage bags.   Put on the gloves, climb up the ladder, shine the light in the dumpster, fish around a bit, take what you see, wipe it down with the paper towels and, presto, free lunch. Unless the dumpster bags were torn, it’s safe to use disinfectant wipes.

Some spoilsport restaurants lock their dumpsters or the dumpster enclosures after closing.  There are two workarounds.  We do NOT recommend them.  But, of course it’s up to you.

Padlocks can be picked and chains cut. Employees can be bribed to go for a smoke break after dumping but before they lock up.  The downside, of course, is that in one case you are destroying property.  That’s bad as well as illegal.  In the second case, if you can afford the bribe, you can afford to buy the food like anyone else.

Is all this stealing?  Probably.  Will you get caught?  Maybe.  Will you be prosecuted?  Probably not.  Will you be sickened?  Also, probably not.  Something you’ve retrieved raises questions?  Do what many sport fishermen do: catch and release.

Hearty appetite.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Any Questions? wesrichards@gmail.com

© WR 2021