A grade school teacher was asking students what their parents did for a living. “Tim, you be first. What does your mother do all day?”

Tim stood up and proudly said, “She’s a doctor.”

“That’s wonderful. How about you, Amy?”

Amy shyly stood up, scuffed her feet and said, “My father is a mailman.”

“Thank you, Amy” said the teacher. “What does your parent do, Billy?”

Billy proudly stood up and announced,

“Nothing. He’s an economist.”

Translated from Latin scroll dated 2BC –

Dear Cassius:

Are you still working on the Y zero K problem? This change from BC to AD is giving us a lot of headaches and we haven’t much time left. I don’t know how people will cope with working the wrong way around. Having been working happily downwards forever, now we have to start thinking upwards. You would think that someone would have thought of it earlier and not left it to us to sort it all out at this last minute.

I spoke to Caesar the other evening. He was livid that Julius hadn’t done something about it when he was sorting out the calendar. He said he could see why Brutus turned nasty. We called in Consultus, but he simply said that continuing downwards using minus BC won’t work and as usual charged a fortune for doing nothing useful. Surely we will not have to throw out all our hardware and start again? MACROHARD will make yet another fortune out of this I suppose.

The money lenders are paranoid of course! They have been told that all usery rates will invert and they will have to pay their clients to take out loans. Its an ill wind ……

As for myself, I just can’t see the sand in an hourglass flowing upwards. We have heard that there are three wise men in the East who have been working on the problem, but unfortunately they won’t arrive until it’s all over. I have heard that there are plans to stable all horses at midnight at the turn of the year as there are fears that they will stop and try to run backwards, causing immense damage to chariots and possible loss of life. Some say the world will cease to exist at the moment of transition.

Anyway, we are still continuing to work on this blasted Y zero K problem. I will send a parchment to you if anything further develops.

If you have any ideas please let me know,

Plutonius

A lawyer died and arrived at the pearly gates. To his dismay, there were thousands of people ahead of him in line to see St. Peter. But, to his surprise, St. Peter left his desk at the gate and came down the long line to where the lawyer was standing. St. Peter greeted him warmly. Then St. Peter and one of his assistants took the lawyer by the hands and guided him up to the front of the line into a comfortable chair by his desk.

The lawyer said, “I don’t mind all this attention, but what makes me so special?”

St. Peter replied, “Well, I’ve added up all the hours for which you billed your clients, and by my calculation you must be about 193 years old!”

First Law of Bicycling: No matter which way you ride, it’s uphill and against the wind.

First Law of Procrastination: Procrastination shortens the job and places the responsibility for its termination on someone else (i.e., the authority who imposed the deadline).

First Law of Socio-Genetics: Celibacy is not hereditary.

First Rule of History: History doesn’t repeat itself; historians merely repeat each other.

Flo Capp’s Observation: The next best thing to doing something smart is not doing something stupid.

Flon’s Law: There is not now, and never will be, a language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programs.

Flucard’s Corollary: Anything dropped in the bathroom falls in the toilet.

Ten things to do with a graduate Economics textbook

1. Press pretty flowers.

2. Press pretty insects.

3. Use it as paper weight on your already overcluttered desk.

4. Leave out in obvious places to impress uninformed undergraduates.

5. Mail to the White House as an intimidation tactic.

6. Give it a walk-on part in a boring European existentialist play.

7. Just throw the lousy thing away.

8. Leave out for the rain and other forces of nature to reckon with.

9. Read it, and weep.

10. Get a refund from bookstore so you can buy a weekend’s beer supply.