Rock Bottom

The Washington, DC, area is a great place to live in many ways. If you can ignore the traffic, the high taxes, the dismal state of many highways, the hit-or-miss bus service, and the shame of proximity to the 535 bloviating buffoons on Capitol Hill, you can find many things to enjoy. One of them is the weekly Style Invitational contest in The Washington Post.

The Style Invitational offers an opportunity for would-be comedians to generate really funny things on topics that are often topical and frequently bizarre. One of the best was the week we were asked to pick actual small towns across America and name their high school sports teams...the winner was the Broad Run Farms (Virginia) Agribusinesswomen. Another week, we were asked to combine two movies or books into one, and provide a short summary of the plot. The winner was "Terminators of Endearment" - at last, the perfect compromise date movie (although my personal favorite was "The French Lieutenant's a Man and a Woman" - "confused sexual identity threatens morale in Napoleon's army"). And then there was the week we were asked for creative ways to raise money to help relieve DC's annual budget crisis - one wag suggested we carve Abraham Lincoln out of his chair in the Lincoln Memorial and check the cushions for loose change, because a chair that big ought to have millions of dollars stuck in it.

Yesterday's Style Invitational invited us to suggest signs that the economy has finally hit rock bottom, and it generated some great suggestions. Here are a few:

1. You go into debt to keep up with the Joads (this one was the winner);

2. The Republicans can't find anyone rich enough to deserve a tax cut;

3. The dollar is propped up by an emergency loan from Zimbabwe;

4. The Navy is spending 25% of its fuel budget on oars;

5. In San Francisco, hollow-eyed men are standing in foccacia lines; and,

6. The Detroit Pistons change the team name to something more geographically accurate, like the Detroit Squeegee Guys.

You can read all the entries here, along with links to past contests.

As long as we can laugh, we're okay. I hope.

Have a good day. I'm going out again to slay more economic dragons.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo