Best E-mails of the Week 7/7/02

Here is a great 4th of July site (keep your speakers sound on):

http://www.dayspring.com/movies/webmovies/america.html

Here is another site with Red Skelton discussing the Pledge of Allegiance (sound on):

http://home.att.net/~poofcatt/july.html

Band of Roving Chief Executives Spotted Miles from Mexican Border
    SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Rooters) -- Unwilling to wait for their
   eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S.
    companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican
    border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the
    entire rampage off as a marketing expense.

    "They came into my home, made me pay for my own TV, then
    double-booked the revenues," said Rachel Sanchez of Las Cruces,
    just north of El Paso, "Right in front of my daughters."

    Calling themselves the CEOnistas, the chief executives were first
    spotted last night along the Rio Grande River near Quemado, where
    they bought each of the town's 320 residents by borrowing against
    pension fund gains. By late this morning, the CEOnistas had
    arbitrarily inflated Quemado's population to 960, and declared a
    200 percent profit for the fiscal second quarter.

    This morning, the outlaws bought the city of Waco, transferred its
    under performing areas to a private partnership, and sent a bill to
    California for $4.5 billion.

    Law enforcement officials and disgruntled shareholders riding posse
    were noticeably frustrated.
    "First of all, they're very hard to find because they always stand
    behind their numbers, and the numbers keep shifting," said posse
    spokesman Dean Levitt.. "And every time we yell 'Stop in the
    name of the shareholders!', they refer us to investor relations.
    I've been on the phone all damn morning."

    "YOU'LL NEVER AUDIT ME ALIVE!"
    The pursuers said they have had some success, however, by
    preying on a common executive weakness: media coverage. "Last
    night we caught about 24 of them by disguising one of our female
    officers as a CNN anchor," said U.S. Border Patrol spokesperson
    Janet Lewis. "It was like moths to a flame."
    Also, teams of agents have been using high-powered listening devices
    to scan the plains for telltale sounds of the CEOnistas. "Most of
    the time we just hear leaves rustling or cattle flicking their tails,"
    said Lewis, "but occasionally we'll pick up someone saying, 'I was
    totally out of the loop on that.'"
 

    Among former and current CEOs apprehended with this method were
    Computer Associates' Sanjay Kumar, Adelphia's John Rigas, Enron's
    Ken Lay, Joseph Nacchio of Qwest, Joseph Berardino of Arthur
    Andersen, and every Global Crossing CEO since 1997. ImClone
    Systems' Sam Waksal and Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco were not allowed
    to join the CEOnistas as they have already been indicted.

    So far, about 50 chief executives have been captured, including
    Martha Stewart, who was detained south of El Paso where she
    had cut through a barbed-wire fence at the Zaragosa border crossing off
    Highway 375.
    "She would have gotten away, but she was stopping motorists to
    ask for marzipan and food coloring so she could make edible
    snowman place settings, using the cut pieces of wire for the arms,"
    said Border Patrol officer Jennette Cushing. "We put her in cell
    No. 7, because the morning sun really adds texture to the stucco
    walls."

    While some stragglers are believed to have successfully crossed
    into Mexico, Cushing said the bulk of the CEOnistas have holed
    themselves up at the Alamo. "No, not the fort, the car rental place
    at the airport," she said. "They're rotating all the tires on the
    minivans and accounting for each change as a sale.

 

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to
generation, says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse,
the best strategy is to dismount.
    At BOEING however, a whole range of far more advanced strategies are
often employed, such as:
 1. Buying a stronger whip.
 2. Changing Riders.
 3. Threatening the horse with termination.
 4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
 5. Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses.
 6. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
 7. Re-classifying the dead horse as "living impaired".
 8. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
 9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed.
 10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead
horse's performance.
 11. Doing a study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's
performance.
 12. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less
costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more
to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
 13. Re-writing the expected performance requirements for all horses.
 14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.
 15. Terminating anyone who points out the irrelevant fact that the horse
is dead.
 16. Announce, "Of course the horse is dead, that was the strategy from the
start."
 17. Keep the rider on until he/she gives up and moves on to a different
company.
 18. Deny that there is, or ever was, a dead horse.
 19. Re-organize the managerial command structure to place the blame on
someone without family connections in the upper management ranks.
 20. Sell lots of company stock before announcing any news about the dead
horse.  Then buy back after the price dropped.
 

Last week I asked why the bridge towers are not parallel. Here is Jim's answer:

The distance between the 2 towers of the V. N. bridge is substantial.

i.e. plumb, they MUST be out of parallel, to one another.

Actually they are 3/4" out each way or 1 5/8" further apart at the tops of the 693' towers than at the bottoms.

Here is our 4th of July picnic tent at Lou's and Mary's.

It's legal to sell sparklers in Connecticut this year.

They have the 24" long sparklers that everybody loved!
 

Pete