GOD, WHAT MONEY!

The Reverend Fredrick J. Eikerenkoetter -- aka Reverend Ike -- died this week. He was 74.

The Reverend preached on national TV and radio. He had a peak audience of 2.5 million. He preached "Prosperity Now," or "Thinkonomics."

Here is some selected wit and wisdom of Reverend Ike:

• "Close your eyes and see green. Money up to your armpits, a roomful of money and there you are, just tossing it around like in a swimming pool."
• The Reverend solicited cash from his congregation, but only folding money, no coins. He said, "Change makes your minister nervous in the service." In return, he'd send you a prayer cloth.
• Ike loved exotic cars, claiming "My garages runneth over."
• In 1969 he bought New York's Lowe's 175th Street Theater for a half million dollars for his headquarters. He called the style, "Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco.
• Expanding on Matthew, Ike said, "If it's that difficult for a rich man too get into heaven, think how terrible it must be for a poor man to get in."

The Reverend Ike died a multi-millionaire. But you can't take it with you.

CUT THE MUSTARD

Tomorrow is National Mustard Day.

You can celebrate at the Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. There are 5,000 different mustards on display from 60 countries and 1,500 antique mustard pots, bottles and tins.

Tomorrow there'll be mustard painting and music by the Poupon U Accordion Band and more music from Staff Infection and the Red Hot Horn Dawgs.

And -- FREE HOT DOGS FOR ALL -- WITH MUSTARD! Ketchup is $10.

PICKLES MAKE YOU BEAUTIFUL

In other food news, Guss's Pickles is moving.

Guss makes the best pickles EVER. I haven't been there since I left the east coast, but I remember Guss had several pickle barrels set up on the sidewalk in front of the store on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The barrels ranged from new to old pickles. The old ones were the best, the most sour. If you brought your own jar Guss would fill it with pickles, force the last one in with his thumb, top it off with pickle juice and name a price.

Actually, I'm not sure if that was really Guss at all. The current owner is Pat Fairhurst. Isidor Guss started the business on a pushcart in 1920. But it doesn't matter. The pickles are GREAT.

High rents are driving Guss's Pickles to to Borough Park in Brooklyn. Eat a pickle. Say "hi" to Guss for me, or whoever he is.

END OF THE LINE FOR THE LITTLE PISTOL

This is the story of the little pistol that could.

It was a .32 caliber revolver, manufactured in the Smith & Wesson plant in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1949. It was shipped to the John Jovino Gun Shop in Manhattan.

The shop still stands, still sells guns; it's been in business since 1911. We don't know who bought the gun because records from the '40s no longer exist. It might have been a policeman because back then there was a nearby police station and police firing range. These .32s were popular with police; back then cops still shot mouse guns.

In 1976 it belonged to Corrections Officer John Eckert who filed a police report saying he lost it. Eckert retired later that year and is no longer alive.

In 2009 a man named Carlos is said to have had the gun. Edwin Santana says he took the gun from Carlos. That was the day, last Sunday, that Police Officer Rodney Lewis arrested Santana. Lewis's partner searched Santana and took the gun, but dropped it. The gun went off, and the bullet hit Lewis in the chest. Those old revolvers sometimes did that, they didn't have the safety features of most modern revolvers.

Officer Lewis is out of the hospital; he'll be OK.

But the little pistol that could has reached the end of its line. Like all guns confiscated in New York City, it will be melted down and the steel used to make wire coat hangers.

(NYT)

NEW YORK'S PAPER OF NON-RECORD

"The New York Post" is one of my guilty pleasures. It's a rag. I like it.

My wife took a business trip to Manhattan and picked me up a copy. Here's what I learned:

• Michael Jackson's doctor killed his patient with a shot of propopol.
• The jealous wife of a cheating husband poured a pot of scalding water on his genitals. The headline read, "Great Balls Afire!"
• Madonna's love letters to her ex are up for auction, including the one that says, "Just watched the HBO special... My booty looked good and you should see how good it looks in person. It looks Bootyful!"
• Rachael Hunter is fighting depression after hockey star Jarret Stoll dumped her. (Who is Rachael Hunter?)
• When Hugh Hefner dies he will be buried next to Marlyn Monroe. He paid $1 million for the plot.
• A flock of doves released at a wedding is starving to death in Flushing Meadow Park.
• Two teenage would-be purse snatchers in Greenwich Village used an umbrella to batter a woman, but she wasn't seriously hurt and they got nothing but arrested.
• My horoscope says I know what people will say before they say it. (But I knew it would say that.)

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"They'll ruin a good yard 'cause they like grub worms.

"So all you have to do is to lay a few marshmallows out and then put a marshmallow or two in the trap cage. You'll catch those suckers.

"Pretty soon, that armadillo fellow, he's in my cage. I got him. And the reason I got him is he kept thinking he could get something for nothing. He kept thinking, 'Man, that's a sweet marshmallow.'

"I either put 'em in the back of my pickup and take 'em 10 or 15 miles away from my property or I shoot 'em.

"That's exactly what's going to happen to us. We are either going to be carried far way from what we know, we trust and believe in to be right or we are going to be extinct as a nation.''

-- Tom Coburn, U.S. senator from Oklahoma, on freedom and armadillos

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"I'm just another one of the prophets that went to jail for the Gospel."

-- evangelist Tony Alamo upon being convicted under the Mann act for "marrying" five underage girls, one as young as eight years old, and having sex with them.

"RAPE," SHE SAID

I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Indian politician Rita Bahuguna Joshi announced that a rival politician should be raped so she could better understand the plight of women.

Next, Joshi's house was burned down.

Then, she was arrested and jailed.

Now, she faces a possible ten year prison term for "insulting a person of lower caste" and "insulting a woman's modesty."

There's a lesson here. Never cry rape in a crowded parliament.

QUOTATIONS OF THE DAY

"You don't have to believe in God to be a moral or ethical person."

-- New York City Atheists advertisement on the side of a New York City Transit bus


"The problem with being an atheist is that you don't have a holiday."

-- Henny Youngman

CHA CHA CHANGIN', REARRANGIN'

Algeria has officially moved the weekend to Friday and Saturday. It used to be Thursday and Friday.

Please see that your calenders comply.

---

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A massive magnitude 7.8 earthquake off New Zealand last week has moved that country twelve inches closer to Australia.

.

Please see that your maps comply.

THE WIT AND WISDOM OF TOM COBURN

“The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country and they wield extreme power. That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That’s a gay agenda.”

-- Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn on freedom


"I favor the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life."

-- Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn on the death penalty


"If I wanted to buy a bazooka to use in a very restricted way, to do something, I ought to be able to do that."

-- Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn on gun control


"I don't apologize for saying we need to protect the unborn. Do you realize that if all those children had not been aborted, we wouldn't have any trouble with Medicare and Social Security today? That's another 41 million people."

-- Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn on Medicare and Social Security


“Lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.”

-- Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn on education


"You got lots of 'splainin to do."

-- Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor

FOR ALL MANKIND

Milestones in space aren't what they used to be.

There are 13 people on the space station today, the most folks in Earth orbit at one time ever. A new milestone in space.

But 40 years ago two humans walked on the moon.

I watched the TV coverage that summer day, a full day of talking heads leading up to the actual landing.

My girlfriend and I visited her grandmother, who was transfixed by the TV. It was a great show, she said. But of course it isn't true because the moon is only this big, she said, holding her hands a basketball's width apart.

At one point Walter Cronkite was interviewing Arthur C. Clarke in Florida, and they brought in Robert A. Heinlein by satellite from California. Cronkite gradually dropped out of the conversation as these two great science fiction authors talked to each other. I don't remember what they talked about. The miracle was just that they were there, talking, on this amazing day.

Clarke had predicted communications satellites. And Heinlein wrote about the first men on the moon. And they each wrote about a future of space colonies on Mars and Ganymede, and humans who would take spaceships to the stars, even if it took several generations to get there.

The future isn't what it used to be. The average person alive today was nine years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounced around the moon. And a surprising percentage of Americans don't believe we really went there in the first place. After all, it's impossible. The moon is only this big.

What happened to my space colonies and starships? What happened to the Walt Disneys, Willey Lays and Werner Von Brauns who popularised the dream of human space travel? What happened to the science fiction greats who inspired us and the Communists who challenged us?

Today the science fiction genre has gone from hard science to sword and sorcery, outright fantasy and impossible space operas.

Today we have Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who promise to draw us together in ways we can't now imagine. We are turning inward. The new frontier is the human soul. We are gazing at our navels.
And today 13 people are orbiting our planet, a new milestone in space. But come on, they're 215 miles from Earth. That's the distance from Tulsa to Kansas City.

So maybe we're like the Vikings who discovered the New World and never followed up on it, leaving behind only bits of rotted ships and fading runes.

And maybe some future humans will populate the universe, and find on the moon a spidery bit of disintegrating spaceship and a plaque with runes that read, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July, 1969, A.D. We came in peace far all mankind."

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try."

-- Homer Simpson

GETTING MORE THAN YOU WANT

The Defense Appropriations Subcommittee has voted to spend $485 million on five new presidential helicopters that President Obama says he does not want.

The subcommittee also voted to spend $369 million on 12 new F-22 fighter jets that Defense Secretary Gates says the Pentagon does not want.

But these are only part of a $636 billion defense spending bill, so what's a few hundred million here and there?

A FRENCHMAN HERE, A FRENCHMAN THERE

Two violent Islamist insurgent groups in Somalia have agreed to a hostage sharing agreement.

Two Frenchman were kidnapped this week from their hotel in Mogadishu and turned over to the Hizbul group.

But the Shabab group wanted the hostages, and threatened to go to war with Hizbul over it.

Eventually a compromise was reached and Hizbul gave one of the hostages to Shabab. Now Hizbul and Shabab each have one Frenchman.

See how we can all get along if we just try?

THAT OLD CLASS ACTION

When the Onex Corporation bought Boeing's commercial aircraft operations in Kansas and Oklahoma, they came up with a money saving strategy:

Fire the old guys!

Onex even sent an E-mail to the board of directors describing the strategy, and saying "We are moving from a demographically expensive population towards one that should be cheaper."

Now the fired old guys are bringing a class action suit. They want their jobs back, unspecified compensatory damages and $1.5 billion in punitive damages.

It was pretty stupid of the Onex executives to put their age strategy in writing. But they were probably just too young to know better.

GAI STRASHEH DI VANTZEN

It was disappointing to hear that people from that nutso church in Topeka, Kansas, picketed the Jewish Community Center here in Tulsa, and that a bomb threat followed the picketing. The bomb threat turned out to be a hoax.

But it was gratifying to read some of the readers' comments that followed that story in the Tulsa World newspaper's web site.

It was "Rockfan" in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, who wrote, "Those hoaxers and protesters can kiss my tuchus!"

(The Yiddish headline, Gai Strasheh Di Vantzen!, means " You don't frighten me!" or, literally, "Go threaten the bed bugs!")

(Tuchus is Yiddish for "buttocks.")

QUOTATIONS OF THE DAY

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money."

-- Samuel Johnson


"I'm a blockhead."

-- Marc Sherman

CHEW, DON'T SWALLOW

Those devious Jews are at it again.

Hamas reports that Israeli intelligence agents are distributing aphrodisiac chewing gum in Gaza.

A Palestinian man filed a complaint that his daughter chewed the gum and suffered "dubious side effects."

A Hamas spokesman says, "The intelligence services are aiming to corrupt the young generation by distributing these products among students."

My only question is, where can I get some of this gum?

GREATLY EXAGGERATED

Despite what you may have read on the Internet, note the following:

• Jeff Goldblum did not fall to his death off the Kauri Cliffs in New Zealand while making a movie.
• Natalie Portman did not go off the same cliff.
• Harrison Ford did not go down in a capsized yacht in St-Tropez.
• George Clooney did not crash his private plane in Colorado.
• Miley Cyrus did not die in a car crash.
• Rick Astley was not found dead in a Berlin hotel.
• Britney Spears did not die in a car crash with a pretzel van.
• Ellen DeGeneres is still alive.
• Louie Anderson is still alive.

However, Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, Karl Malden, Robert McNamara, Billy Mays, Gale Storm and Oscar Meyer are still dead.