Part of my daily reading routine is a stop at Cute Overload to see what new delights have been posted. Every day, several new photos, audio clips, or video clips of animals are posted. “Cute Overload” is a very apt name for this site, and if you love animals, you’ll find it irresistible…
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Perils of Gambling
A big “thank you” to SimiL for a good laugh:
The IRS decides to audit Ralph, and summons him to the IRS office. The IRS auditor is not surprised when Ralph shows up with his attorney. The auditor says, 'Well, sir, you have an extravagant lifestyle and no full-time employment, which you explain by saying that you win money gambling. I’m not sure the IRS finds that believable.'
'I’m a great gambler, and I can prove it,' says Ralph. 'How about a demonstration?'
The auditor thinks for a moment and said, 'Okay. Go ahead.' Ralph says, 'I’ll bet you a thousand dollars that I can bite my own eye.' The auditor thinks a moment and says, 'No way! It’s a bet.' Ralph removes his glass eye and bites it. The auditor’s jaw drops.
Ralph says, 'Now, I’ll bet you two thousand dollars that I can bite my other eye.'
The auditor can tell Ralph isn’t blind, so he takes the bet.
Ralph removes his dentures and bites his good eye. The stunned auditor now realizes he has wagered and lost three grand, with Ralph’s attorney as a witness. He starts to get nervous.
'Want to go double or nothing?' Ralph asks. 'I’ll bet you six thousand dollars that I can stand on one side of your desk, and pee into that wastebasket on the other side, and never get a drop anywhere in between.'
The auditor, twice burned, is cautious now, but he looks carefully and decides there’s no way this guy can manage that stunt, so he agrees again. Ralph stands beside the desk and unzips his pants, but although he strains mightily, he can’t make the stream reach the wastebasket on the other side, so he pretty much urinates all over the desk.
The auditor leaps with joy, realizing that he has just turned a major loss into a huge win. But Ralph’s attorney moans and puts his head in his hands. 'Are you okay?' the auditor asks. 'Not really,' says the attorney. 'This morning, when Ralph told me he’d been summoned for an audit, he bet me twenty thousand dollars that he could come in here and piss all over your desk and that you’d be happy about it.'
This pretty much hits on all cylinders: the good guy wins, he pissed on the IRS, and the lawyer is screwed. Hooray!
Attitude Adjustments
Although many Americans don’t seem to know it, there are foreign journalists embedded with American troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of these reporters come from countries where strong anti-American sentiment is the norm, and suspicion of the motives and actions of the U.S. military rampant.
Jeff Emmanuel, writing for the American Thinker, thought to look at these reporters and their reactions to being embedded. He discovered that many of these reporters emerge from their “embed” experience with far different attitudes than they held previously. Do go read the whole thing, but here’s a sample:
The most spectacular recent case of a journalist with an anti-war mindset being completely overwhelmed into a change of heart by American soldiers, according to the PAO, was a Greek public television reporter who had been embedded with an infantry unit that became entrenched in a 45-minute firefight with insurgents. Yanked out of the line of fire by a soldier who put the journalist’s life above his own, he waited under cover and in fear of his life for the almost hour-long duration of the battle, with the best view possible of American soldiers in action against an armed and murderous enemy. He credits his having lived to tell the tale directly to those young troops.
"He had tears in his eyes as he talked about it,” said the PAO. “He just kept saying, ‘they saved my life, they saved my life…these are great men; they are heroes.' Even after telling it several times, he couldn’t get through the story without choking up - and this was a man who had arrived here with all of the disdain for the Iraq mission and for the American soldiers who he [like seemingly most Europeans] had seen as the bad guys in this fight."
While it may be decried by some for causing journalists, who claim to be “objective” and “neutral” in their reporting, to lose their cold detachment and actually begin to see the soldiers they live alongside as humans, it is that very fact that makes the practice of embedding reporters with military units so beneficial to both parties. Rather than observing events from a safely detached distance - and thus being able to remove the human element from the equation - embedded reporters are forced to face up to the humanity of their subjects, and to share common experiences - often of the life-and-death variety - with those who they are covering.
Our soldiers are doing us proud over there…
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