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.
.
.
.
.