Thursday, September 5, 2013

Good morning crew,

Black belt promotion testing again this weekend. That is always a long and tiring day, but it is worth it to see the kids finally make their first degree. My job is to help make sure they earn it.

A big part of earning that degree is the endurance testing. Three hours of calisthenics, strength training and kicking drills. The kids always try to dog the exercises after the first ten or fifteen minutes and I am there to encourage, cajole, persuade and sometimes threaten them in order to keep them from quitting. This almost always gets at least one of them crying. Frequently several.

To tell you the truth, I really don't feel like I have done my job if I don't have at least one little kid crying within a half hour.

I'll let you know how it goes next week.

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

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"About $30 million in $100 bills had to be destroyed because of a printing problem. Isn't that unbelievable? The only thing we know how to do right in this country is print money and we even screw that up." -Jay Leno

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"A new report says 60 percent of teenagers don't have even a basic knowledge of finances. Although in fairness, I'm 38 and I just found out this year that a 401(k) is NOT a type of marathon." -Jimmy Fallon

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"They're now making the first smartphone that's not made overseas. It's made in Texas. It's also the first smartphone that doubles as a handgun." -Conan O'Brien

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Laws of Life:

* Murphy's First Law for Wives: If you ask your husband to pick up five items at the store and then you add one more as an afterthought, he will forget two of the first five.

* Kauffman's Paradox of the Corporation: The less important you are to the corporation, the more your tardiness or absence is noticed.

* The Salary Axiom: The pay raise is just large enough to increase your taxes and just small enough to have no effect on your take-home pay.

* Miller's Law of Insurance: Insurance covers everything except what happens.

* First Law of Living: As soon as you start doing what you always wanted to be doing, you'll want to be doing something else.

* Weiner's Law of Libraries: There are no answers, only cross-references.

* The Grocery Bag Law: The candy bar you planned to eat on the way home from the market is hidden at the bottom of the grocery bag.

* Lampner's Law of Employment: When leaving work late, you will go unnoticed. When you leave work early, you will meet the boss in the parking lot.


*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
Basic Math is the subject I teach at a small community college in western North Carolina. I call one part of the curriculum Practical Applications for Living in the Real World. The day after I presented a lesson on simple and compound interest, one of my older students approached me in the hallway.

"You really taught me a great deal about my life yesterday," he said. "I realized I've been struggling with a lack of interest, compounded daily, for thirty years."