Every year about this time, thousands of families endure an emotionally trying ritual: Sending their young high school graduate off to college – or in the case of my neighbor Bert Zablinski’s under-achieving boy Freddie, a four-week correspondence course for road construction flag operators. For many distraught parents it means driving hundreds of miles in a tightly cramped car filled with college gear, then coming to a startling realization – they forgot to bring one essential item: Their child. Don’t let this happen to you.
The experience of sending your offspring to college is different for every family. But there is one feeling almost every parent shares: a desperate hope they’ll have the winning Powerball lottery tickets so they can pay for college. That’s their Plan A. Most parents don’t have a Plan B, now that by latest estimates the average cost of four years of college recently has surpassed the GNP of Uruguay.
I am a staunch advocate of women’s rights to equal treatment and nearly equal pay. I’ve even watched Oprah and Ellen on occasion. (But please don’t tell my golfing buddies. They would never understand.) There is no denying that women have been victims of social injustices and hardships men have rarely had to endure. I’m talking, of course, about cellulite primarily.
The tables, however, have recently turned. I’m delighted to report that women have made amazing strides in the past 40 years – in the battle against cellulite. And even more than that. In fact, in the past ten years alone, for reasons unfathomable to me, two different women have received promotions I totally deserved simply because they were more qualified than I. Discrimination against men is real – and it’s everywhere.
The 2012 London Summer Games have officially begun. The breathtakingly beautiful new venue known as London Olympic Stadium (scheduled to be completed just in time for the 2016 Summer Games in Rio) was the site of an exhilarating opening ceremonies. Fans wondered how the London Games could ever live up to the grand spectacle of the 2008 Beijing Games’ opening ceremony, which featured more than 15,000 performers at an estimated expense of more than $100 million.
Not to be outdone, the London Games’ opening ceremonies were a festival of famous British celebrities. Sir Elton John, waiving the Olympic torch, proudly entered Olympic Stadium. He proceeded to carry his torch for, make that, to British soccer legend David Beckham, who headed to the stairs to light the giant cauldron.
A long time ago in a university far, far away, I attended law school and passed the bar exam. Which just goes to prove that an outstanding law school education is no guarantee your life will turn out the way your parents had hoped. But I digress. My point is that if there is one thing I learned from my legal training, it’s how to create oppressively one-sided legal agreements primarily designed to obfuscate.
Therefore, as a public service to all five of my readers, I urge you, before you enter into a long-term romantic relationship like marriage or going steady with Morgan from your 11th grade biology class, to be sure you and your very special someone have signed a legally enforceable Relationship Agreement that clearly spells out what each of you agree to do – and not do.
My point is, if we’re not careful, we’re liable to get sued for the least little hit and run car accident I failed to report. (Wait, did I just think that or did I just type that?) Sometimes our fairy tale romances take a few unexpected turns and what starts out as Happily Ever After may later descend into the War of the Roses.
Introducing Placebolax® – from SCAMCO – the company that brought you the (not-quite-FDA-approved) sleep interrupter device Miracle Snore and Eye Can See, the popular battery-operated do-it-yourself laser eye surgery kit.
Try Placebolax today and you’ll be amazed at how much you’ll lose.
With Placebolax, weight loss has never been simpler. What’s our secret?Baby polar bear liver oil. That’s right! We discovered that baby polar bear liver oil burns up fat, sugar, and your intestines and converts them into pure profit, er, muscle. Made from lovingly farm-raised Siberian baby polar bear livers, harvested on our polar bear farm in a secret undisclosed location in the Arctic Circle, we mix it with powder of seal pup brains and ground-up beluga whale dorsal fins to produce our unique patented weight loss formula.
[Our attorneys told us we need to include some additional “disclosures” in the very remote chance someone might not use our product as intended, accidentally resulting in permanent blindness – not that this would ever happen (we don’t think) – and try to sue us.]
LIST OF ACTIVE INGREDIENTS: High fructose corn syrup, sugar, malt flavoring, more high fructose corn syrup, sodium ascorbic acid, something that tastes like chicken, dextrose, hydrogenated cornstarch, salt, processed flour, food coloring, red dye #2, 40, 67 and 85, soybean, caramel, riboflavin, thiamin, hydrochloride, super-duper high fructose corn syrup, Pez, dried egg whites, lithium, tortoise dung, something that used to look like yogurt, mono-something or other, cocoa extract, extract of cocoa, boiled linseed oil, vinegar, frosted flakes, 3 of KFC’s original herbs and spices (but we’re not authorized to tell you which 3), nutmeg, something that looks vaguely like rabbit pellets but we can’t locate the original container so we’re not really sure what it is, folic acid, battery acid, stomach acid, coconut juice, asbestos, fluoride (for stronger teeth), quartz, silicon, did we mention salt yet?, plutonium isotope, lead, unleavened yak intestines, eye of newt, DNA from some guy named Brad, petroleum byproducts, banana, and baby polar bear liver oil. (more…)