Mr. Andy Pandy

by T.M.R.

Three young men decided to go camping. They put on revealing summer dresses and colorful lipstick and ...

No. Start again.

Three young men decided to go camping. It was July 1975. One of them left a pregnant wife at home ... because leaving your pregnant wife at home while you go camping is a manly thing to do.

The three young men found a campground. After working at it for three hours, they pitched a tent. They were very hungry now. By mistake one of the young men ... who would later become a first-class barbecue chef ... poured way too much starter fluid on the hibachi, so the fumes from the starter fluid permeated their weiners.

Attracted by the smell of too much starter fluid, another young man wandered over from a neighboring tent. He introduced himself as Jerry and sat down without being invited. His real name, in fact, was Benjamin, but he called himself Jerry.

Jerry made a living distributing Andy Pandy cartoons. He was also mentally unstable. He had a floating decimal point and a fixation on the number 23. Here is a paragraph of Jerry's conversation to illustrate his problem:

"So I bought a house for $23, but I pay $2.3 million a year in utility bills, and I only make 23 cents a year with the Andy Pandy cartoons. My car gets 2.3 billion miles to the gallon, and I've had it for 2.3 days, with only one tune-up, which took 23 days, so I had to walk 2,300 miles to work in 23 seconds."

Finally, one of the three young men couldn't take it anymore. All around them, hundreds of fireflies were blinking on and off. The young man said to Jerry, "Look, Jerry. Look at all those blinking decimal points. Go catch some."

Jerry was puzzled. "Why do I need decimal points?"

"You do. Trust me. You do."

"What do I do when I catch one?" asked Jerry.

"Eat it."

Wanting very much to be liked, Jerry ... whose real name was Benjamin ... spent the rest of the night chasing fireflies. He ate dozens of them.

Of course, the fireflies were useless in solving Jerry's (or Benjamin's) floating decimal point problem, but the three young men had rid themselves of Jerry, and that was enough for them. They didn't give a damn about Jerry's floating decimal point.

Today, 35 years later, they do.

Jerry (or Benjamin), after eating dozens of decimal points that night, decided to abandon his Andy Pandy distributorship and go back to college. He majored in economics and earned a Ph.D.

Jerry is now known to the world as Ben Bernanke ... who is single-handedly destroying the U.S. dollar and the U.S. economy by propping up his friends on Wall Street and in the corrupt U.S. banking system with $2.3 trillion in free federal handouts, and setting the stage for 2.3 decades of 23 percent inflation and $23,000 television sets from China.

The moral is obvious: Be nice to dimwitted people.
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Her Only Child

by T.M.R.

At the age of 64, Roger L. left his room for the first time in his life. He was hungry. His mother had not brought him a meal for three days.

He found the 95-year-old woman dead in the basement laundry room. She had gone into cardiac arrest while doing Roger's laundry. Roger delivered his soiled garments directly to the basement laundry room via a special chute built into the wall. The chute had cost $14,000 to install, but Roger had insisted on it. His mother took out several loans against the house to pay for it.

Roger looked at the pile of unwashed laundry next to his mother's body.

"You always find a way to let me down," he said, poking her with his foot. "I'm goin' to the track, baby."

In the kitchen, Roger emptied the cupboard. It took him twelve trips to move the non-perishable items -- mostly cans of Progresso soup -- to his room.

Now set up to survive comfortably for many, many years ... or so Roger believed ... he locked the door and took a nice, long nap.

Three weeks later, he was dying.

As modes of dying go, death by starvation is comparatively easy, and this gave Roger lots of time to review his life without the distraction of pain. His only regret, he discovered, was that he had never met or married Teri Garr.

Shrugging off that single disappointment in an otherwise fulfilling life -- lived on his terms and no one else’s -- Roger L. passed away with a smile on his face and, by coincidence, with his television tuned to an obscure 1989 movie, Out Cold, in which Teri Garr plays a femme fatale. In one scene, she wears a black wig.

"God, she looks hot in a black wig," were Roger's last words.

The circumstances of Roger L.'s death prove ... incontrovertibly ... that our seemingly cold, indifferent universe does, in fact, pay attention to what's on our minds.
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