caption contest, kid reading newspaper on toilet

Here we go, another week, another Monday, just like clockwork.  Also, another caption contest.   This week’s funny picture was sent in by a regular reader (who credits the infamous bacon and cheese diet for his regularity).  This picture features a little kid / baby sitting on a toilet reading a newspaper.  Obviously it’s been altered already, but we’ll use it anyway and see what happens.

So think of funny stuff to explain this picture or to add a story to it.   Remember, you get to write the story however you want to — you can base it on world events in the news, you can embellish a story, or you can even invent your own.  Just whatever you do — make it funny.

kid reading newspaper on toilet

(To see the other caption contests, click on the “Say What?” category in the sidebar.)

spending more to reduce the debt

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the U.S. economy is having some problems.  There’s a LOT of debt (both private and public, corporate and personal), and there’s not enough money to cover those debts.  It’s way past time to do something about it.  Fortunately, President Barack Obama has a plan.

They say knowing is half the battle, but I’m not sure if Obama really knows what he’s doing (thus I’m not sure he’s even halfway right).  Obama apparently thinks quadrupling the deficit will fix the deficit.  I cannot begin to explain how backwards that sounds.  But if spending more money than we have and sending us deeper into debt 4 times faster helps the economy, then why don’t we do even more?  (I’m afraid he is planning to do more, particularly with the nationalized health care.)

I realize this may all sound foolish.  I mean, how can going further into debt get us out of debt?  The key here is that it has to be called “investing” instead of just “spending”.  Calling it by another name makes all the difference.   That must be it…

And if it will work for our government, maybe it’ll work for us.  Suppose you can decrease your credit card debt by spending 4X as much and putting it on your credit card…*

* Don’t blame us if you try this and your budget blows up and you can’t get credit anymore and the lenders start foreclosing on your properties that you can’t afford.  But be sure to blame Obama if that happens to our country…

Obama's economic plan

stupid lawsuit over a comet

Do you remember when NASA fired a space probe at a comet and hit it?  This was a $333 million mission called “Deep Impact”.  It was very impressive that they were able to hit the comet because it was moving at 23,000 mph.  NASA plans to study the debris generated to hopefully learn how the solar system was formed.

This was a few years ago, so it’s not exactly news, but I just found out something else about it.  A woman named Marina Bai sued the U.S. Space Agency over the mission, claiming it “ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe” and thus would “deform her horoscope”.  She sued for $300 million, for her “moral sufferings”.  (I wonder how bad $300,000,000 worth of “moral sufferings” would feel; I can’t say I’ve ever felt that bad.)

By now, you’ve probably already realized this is a stupid lawsuit.  But it gets even better — the comet in reference, 9P / Tempel, doesn’t actually appear on the horoscope!

So obviously this woman was just making all this up to get rich, but these frivolous lawsuits clog up the justice system (which is already inconceivably slow) and waste taxpayers’ money as well as time and money from the people being sued for no reason.  So can someone sue that woman for being stupid?  Although, on second thought, the ability to sue people for being stupid would overwhelm the court system even more, so perhaps some limits would need to be put in place…

free tax preparation (as far as you know)

There’s a lot of online tax preparation websites.  Personally, I stick with one of the reputable ones, but to each their own.  Anyway, while reading about taxes and extensions this week, I saw this on a website, promoting one of those online tax preparation services:

Use online Taxbrain to prepare your tax return, It’s FREE!  Only pay to print and file.

So it’s “FREE!” to prepare it, but then they charge you if you actually want to do something with it, like printing it or filing it online.  So really it’s not free.  Isn’t that false advertising?   That’s like Burger World offering free burgers, and they let you order it and they’ll prepare it, but if you actually want to eat it, you have to pay them.  They tell you it’s free to get you in the door, then they make you pay anyway.