Lion and Lamb or Maybe Iguana

Most of my life I’ve been aware of the affable adage, “March comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion”. Or, maybe it’s “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb”. Then again, it may be “March will eat you like you’re a zebra and then knit a wool sweater for you by the time April gets here”. I could never remember the actual saying because the weather in March where I'm from never lives up to any of these versions. And who the hell is April?

Consequently, each year I am confused when March comes along. At the beginning of the month I wrench my brain trying to figure out if the weather is acting like a lamb or a lion. One day it may seem like a lion, roaring in my face, but then the next day will be calm and baaing like a lamb. "Take an umbrella, it's baaing outside." Is a lion a windy day with temperatures in the fifties, or is it calm, crisp and freezing my ass off day in the twenties? How could it be a lion at all? A lion has never frozen my ass off at the zoo. Nor has it ever comforted me with a warm spring breeze. Are they talking about a schizophrenic lion with shamanistic powers over the weather? Maybe they don’t accept these types of lions in zoos.

What about the lamb? Do lambs make it snow one day and then rain the next? Are they the ones who invented this crazy wintery mix I keep hearing about? How did a lamb get its hooves on the hydrologic cycle handle bars? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a lamb in a zoo, if you don't count the spray on tattoo stand. Maybe the lion ate it (the lamb, not the stand). The weather in March is so uproariously unstable, by the end of the month I don’t know what the hell is going on. I can’t tell if it’s a lamb or a lion. It could be a casque-headed iguana by then for all I know.

I think lions and lambs have nothing to do with it. They are too busy controlling the stock market (buy in a lion market, sell in a lamb market). The truth is, March comes in like a wet burlap sack of frozen bars of soap, bashing you over the head with false hopes of warmer weather, and it goes out like a milk infested roll of carpet thrown off the back of cement truck into field of half-boiled shoe tongues. A University of Phoenix study proves it, so it has to be true. Please share this new saying, this scientifically proven saying, with your children.

Google This, Bastards

Google’s shares were down almost $50 today – over 8%. Good. They were getting a little too cocky anyway. Besides, I’m just bitter that I had decided the shares were overpriced when they went public at $85. They’re still over $500 even with today’s decline. But, hey, I love coming to work when it’s single digits and there is 8” of snow on the ground so who cares if that 600% return would have brought me a little closer to retirement. I can work another couple years. My minus 13% gain on Under Armour stock will help me reach my financial goals in about minus 27 years. But I digress.

I blew off Google because it was just a search engine to me. Sure, everyone was using it, but to me it was just a giant card catalog for the Internet. And last time I checked, my local librarians weren’t driving exotic cars to work. But that’s because libraries don’t sell advertising in their card catalogs. There’s an idea for all you cash-strapped municipalities that can’t figure out how to balance the budget without taxing the crap out of me. Sell advertising on your catalog searches. Someone looks up Stephen King and gets a link to buy or rent a DVD of the screen adaptation. The library gets some cash for the ad. The video store makes some cash on the sale or rental. The producers get royalties on the sale. And less wear and tear on those silly books. Winners all around in my trickle down economic stimulus package, all while increasing revenues for my local government. There’s my contribution to society – it’s all yours, free of charge. You’re not going to make any money collecting ten cents a day because Grandma Moses returned Tuesdays With Morrie a couple days late. But I digress.

Google earns 99% of its revenues from advertising. Sure, I saw the ads but I didn’t think anybody actually clicked on them. But I guess there are enough people with computers who are clicking on those ads like rats in a psych lab looking for a Scooby Snack, and thus making the people at Google very rich. And making the people that bought those shares at $85 a bit wealthier.

But that’s not the only reason I’m bitter about Google – it’s their not so subtle placement of ads in their mail program Gmail. When I go to Google and do a search for hot fudge bikini waxing, I understand if I get some ads for laser hair removal or the latest offering from Dairy Queen. But now Google is analyzing the content of my email and providing what they believe to be helpful links. Telling me, objectively, what they think I need in my life based on my communications with other boneheads in the world. On a recent email, I reviewed the sponsored links and the list was as follows:

5 Essential People Skills
Dale Carnegie’s Free Tips
End Your Procrastinating
Leadership Skill Coaching
Success/Life Coach

Really. Screw you, Google. You don’t think I have people skills? Well, yo mamas are all fat. And that’s fat with an “f” and not phat with a “ph”. You think I need to hear what some jagoff named Dale Carnegie has to say? He’s probably some loser living in a van down by the river. You think I need to stop procrastinating? You should be thankful that I do or else I would have ripped you when I got this email back on January 12th. I’ve been busy, okay, because I can’t motivate the people who work for me to do anything right and have to do it all myself. So back off. It’s not my fault I have a cruddy job and the stress in my life is overwhelming. Sitting in your little Silicon Valley ivory towers thinking you know what’s best for everyone. Well, you don’t. So just screw you, Google. Bastards.

Oh, by the way, this blog is hosted by Blogger, a Google company. So please click on our little, hidden, unobtrusive ad box somewhere down the page on the right so we can share in their wealth. Moist Rub informs me that we have earned $0.23 to date through the Ad Sense program. But I haven't seen my $0.115 yet and he's not answering my emails so he has obviously absconded with the funds. Bastard.

Ed. Note: I've just been informed by Moist Rub that telling people to click our ad violates our terms of service. So don't click our ad. Ever. It's dumb. Forget I even mentioned it. Besides, last I checked it was a link for a gentleman's club directory. You don't need that - just email me and I'll tell you where to go. Or just send me the $25 and I'll describe in great detail via return email the table dance I'd give you.

Moist Rub Legal

As many of you may know, I am a high powered investor in the stock market. In fact, it comes so easy to me, and I’ve made so much gad durned money doing it, I’ve taken to investing in only one share at a time in order to even the playing field with the other investors. Sure, it’s difficult to earn money doing this, but I told you, I’m good, plus I have plenty of money left over from my soap opera days (You may remember me as the suave veterinarian, Dr. Dizzy Havaids, on "As the Chimp Yearns". It was a big hit in the late seventies/early eighties, riding the Every Which Way But Loose and BJ and the Bear anthropomorphic ape fad.) Recently, I found myself in a bit of a legal telephone pole climbing competition with some litigious gutter snipes from the shareholder service of a given company of which I owned one share. Apparently, over the years that I owned this share, the company was bought and sold a number of times. Eventually, supposedly since my one share was raking havoc on their books (but probably they feared my presence was a takeover threat) they asked me to cash out and pocket my $32.43. Since the stock price had not yet hit my sell point, I continued to hold. So, they sent me the stock certificate. And then they foolishly sent me an undeserved additional one. I filed both documents appropriately by placing them somewhere on my bar.

Time past, supposedly correspondences were sent to me, phone calls were made, parties where had utilizing my bar, things were spilled upon, information was learned and forgotten and forgotten again, and then sort of remembered, but not really, and maybe a deja vu here and there, and all of a sudden, I received a FINAL REQUEST letter, via Fed Ex, from some brie-eating, clean-shit-smelling pseudo-legal type fellow demanding that I return the ill-gotten stock certificate or they would kick me down and pester me with "herewith"s and "nisi prius"es until I caved. This irked me for two reasons. First, lawyers suck. Second, their FINAL REQUEST was the first I heard about this heinous matter. And third, (I lied, there are three reasons) it’s only one goddam share!

Below is the FINAL REQUEST letter I received from the corporate legal weasel. Below that is my response to him. My hope is that others can benefit from my experience, as I will be living in a shoe horn box in the street soon, unless justice (as if there is any for oppressed, little people like me) prevails.

**********************************************

VIA FEDERAL EXPRESS

November 23, 2005


FINAL REQUEST

Moist Rub
Some Huge Castle
Chicago, IL 60010

Re: Give us back our stock certificate, you sniveling little nobody

Dear Mr. Rub:

As indicated in prior correspondence, you were sent certificate #38393 for 1 share on or about September 2, 2005. You were not, in fact, entitled to the shares. To date, you have failed to respond to our requests for the return of certificate #38393. If you continue to fail to respond, we will have no alternative but to take legal action to recover funds that are the subject of this demand. Such legal action may include referral of this matter to a collection attorney or the filing of a lawsuit or both. We look forward to your response within sixty (60) days of the date of this letter. If you do not respond within that time, we reserve the right to take any legal action to which it is entitled under applicable law.

Please remit certificate #38393 to us in the enclosed, postage paid envelope (ed. note: remember this for later). Once we have received the certificate, we will release you from its claim.

Please forward that correspondence to Asswipe Shareholder Service, Personal/Confidential: Attn: Willie Fukyerass, Esq., 3rd cubicle on the right in the basement, Canton, MA 02021. Thank you in advance for your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Willie Fukyerass
Assistant Counsel

Cc: Some other bitch that will sue you if I’m unsuccessful

**********************************************

January 2, 2006

Re: Blow me

Dear Mr. Fukyerass, Esq.,

I received your threatening letter regarding stock certificate #569857. Very nice. Asswipe Shareholder Service (ASS) screws up and may or may not have sent me something they shouldn’t have, and I’m the one that gets threatened with a law suit. This is such a wonderful legal system, undoubtedly built by frog-assed lawyers.

As you stated, I was "not, in fact, entitled to the shares." Then why did you send them to me, allegedly? As if I was "in theory" entitled to the shares. Or maybe I was "for Pete’s sake" entitled to the shares. Or, possibly, I might have been "assumed by a third party" entitled to the shares. I’m sorry. I don’t understand why you used the phrase "in fact" in that sentence. It seems extraneous - probably a pretentious lawyer thing. It does, however, insinuate that somehow I was at fault for allegedly receiving these shares (actually one share, but you used the plural, probably to cover your ass in case your company sent multiple shares, but you wouldn’t know that because nobody there knows what is actually going on, otherwise, none of this would have happened). It doesn’t sit well with me.

Let me revisit a point I made earlier. ASS screws up and then threatens to sue me. That is rich. Did I tell you I love this legal system? Speaking of screwing up, in the letter you sent me "VIA FEDERAL EXPRESS" (a letter that stated FINAL REQUEST, which was a relief to me at first because I thought, "great, maybe they’ll get off my back now.") you asked me to "remit certificate #84802 in the enclosed, postage paid envelope." But, there was no "postage paid envelope" enclosed. Imagine that. Yet another screw up. Or, maybe it was a lie. I’m pretty sure you lawyers have some law made up on the books to sue me for that, too.

To make things more clear for both of us, allow me to outline the situation as I see it.

1. ASS screws up.

2. ASS sends a FedEx letter, which I assume asks for the certificate back, but I never received the letter since FedEx doesn’t leave the letter at my door and expects me to take time from my regularly scheduled life to go pick it up because ASS screwed up in the first place.

3. It gets fuzzy after that because I stopped paying attention. ASS may have sent another letter via FedEx that I didn’t get because they would have sent it to my house on a weekday when I wouldn’t be home because I was at work, and they must have once again expected me to take time from my life to go fetch it, but I’m not sure. There were maybe a couple of phone messages left, too. I don’t remember, exactly. Feel free to sue me for not returning telephone calls. There’s gotta be a law against that, too.

4. I get the FINAL REQUEST because I happen to be home on a vacation day, and it pretty much ruined my New Year because I was worried about the big mean lawyers suing me because ASS screwed up. So, I let it fester in my head for about a month or so, because the lawyer guy said I had 60 days before they crush me. As if there is anything significant about 60 days as opposed to 59 or 61.31 days.

5. I waste more time of my life writing this silly letter because ASS screwed up and I’ll get sued because of it, which will undoubtedly waste more time from my life and dry up any cash I have laying around paying for other lawyers to fight the lawyers who represent the people who screwed up in the first place. But then the ASS lawyers will win, because my lawyers are probably no good since I don’t have a lot of money to pay them. So ASS wins the suit, but I have no money left to pay the settlement because my lawyers ripped me off, and ASS takes everything I own and forces me and my kids to live in the street picking the beards of bums hoping to find a discarded morsel of a crouton as sustenance.

Here’s the deal. Send me a postage paid envelope to my work address (below) as I’m there during the day. If you send it to my home address, and I’m not there, and FedEx expects me to come get it, forget about it. This fiasco has already wasted too much of my time here on Earth. But, this time, actually send the envelope. Don’t just brag about having sent it merely to impress the ladies in the Steno Pool. If I find the certificate, I’ll send it back. Honestly, I’m not really sure where it is or if I even have it. Sue me for being an unorganized slob. There’s gotta be laws about that - just ask my ex-wife. I know that you are still only an Esquire and probably haven’t memorized all of the laws yet, but if you look hard enough, I’m sure you can find a law to sue me for being a sloven, as well as other laws to get me for all the stuff I’ve written in this letter. If you plan on spending your life suing people, you had better cut your teeth on defenseless plebians like me who don’t really give a crap before you start knocking heads with the big boys.

Thank you for my time.

Moist Rub
Work Address: (withheld from blog, I don't want to drag you into this mess)

p.s. You have one hundred fifty-six (156) arbitrary days to do this, otherwise I may have to come up with threats to combat your threats regarding temporal restraints you placed on me.

p.p.s All of this for one lousy share. I hope your cases get bigger as time goes on so you can sue some real important people.