Things I Know

I used to think the name of the last bank left standing would be bank.com.  I now think it’’s likely to be bank.gov.

With all the billions being thrown around in Congress these days, I can only thank God we’’re not Great Britain.  You see, here in the good old USA, a billion is a thousand million.  In Great Britain, a billion is a million million.  That’’s a big difference.

The late Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen is famous for having said, “”A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.””  Only problem is he probably never said it:  http://www.dirksencenter.org/print_emd_billionhere.htm

Here’’s why a city like Seattle or London can be crippled by snow that other cities like Chicago or Albany would consider insignificant.  If you bought enough equipment to deal with six inches of snow and you got that much snow once every twenty years, you’’d use the equipment once and it would then rust and rot.  The next time you needed it, in an average of twenty years, it would be broken beyond repair and you’’d have to buy more.  So in areas where it doesn’’t snow much, they don’’t have a lot of snow removal equipment.  After all, snow does melt.

An MRI is a large and very noisy machine.  They charge a lot to stuff you in one and its main purpose is to cause your nose to itch.

Village elections in New York State are held on the third Tuesday in March.  This year, that date is also St. Patrick’’s Day.  A while back the state legislature, in its extremely finite wisdom, passed a law that says if the election would fall on St. Patrick’s Day it will be moved to March 18^th.  As an American of Irish descent, I don’’t know whether to be flattered they want to honor St. Patrick and Irish Americans or offended that they think we’ll have too much to drink before, during and after voting.

I told my wife that I would never have married her if I had known what her mother-in-law would be like.

Capital One, the credit card company that’’s also a bank, sends me multiple credit card offers each month.  On the back of each envelope it says “”Please recycle.””  Hello!  If you want to save the environment, mail me fewer credit card offers. 

A while back, I said the best invention of the twentieth century was mixed vegetables with no lima beans in them.  Now that our kitchen remodel is complete, I have to say that sliding shelves for your pots and pans are right up there.   I’’m not going to try to evaluate the best of the 21^st century until we have more of the century to go on.