INVISIBLE HANDJOB! Say you're at the helm of one of the world's top brokerage firms, and investigators have uncovered proof that you've been forcing your "market analysts" to hype certain stocks - even when they know the companies involved are duds - because those companies happen to be big money clients of yours on the investment side of the business… clients whose performance on Wall Street has a direct effect on your own bottom line. How would you handle such a crisis? Well, if you were Merrill Lynch, you'd hire Rudy Giuliani to use his post-911 aura of incorruptibility to smooth the political waters for you, and make sure your whole shady operation doesn't collapse in a cloud of scandal. And really… could you blame yourself?! But Merrill Lynch's obvious criminality is beside the point. The bigger picture is far more interesting. The point is that yet another one eyed jack has shaken loose of the slowly collapsing house of cards erected by three decades worth of intellectually bankrupt management gurus and bought-and-paid-for Free Market propagandists. You know who I mean… those snooty, bespectacled court jesters who continue to insist that deregulation is always desirable, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Those pimps who peddled the idea that wealth could continue to grow indefinitely, and independently of any real-world correlation. The goons who would steer the Lexus of democracy right into the olive tree of elitist greed, with the pedal to the metal, if given half a chance. You'd think after Enron and Andersen, these fuckers would be trying to stay clean. Hell, maybe NONE of these big money players are clean. Maybe the whole stock market thing is nothing but a vast game of three card Monte, and Wall Street is nothing but a respectable version of a Las Vegas casino… which would make the Wall Street Journal nothing but a glorified track report… which, considering the quality of the minds who infest their editorial board, sounds just about right. Maybe we should just invite Hugo Chavez to come on over here and clean up this fucking mess, once and for all. Cheers, YOPJ

ON THIS DAY April 29 On this day in 1854, the first college founded solely for African-American students - the Ashmun Institute - is officially chartered in the state of Pennsylvania. The following day, while discussing the Institute with his neighbors, an anonymous toothless cracker says: "Blacks only?! Whud'ya think'd happen if we got together 'n chartered ourselves a whites only uni-ma-versity? You jes' know them coloreds'd accuse us o' bein' racist! Let's go hang one and teach'em all a lesson!" Today, each and every one of that cracker's many profoundly inbred descendants writes yer old pal Jerky on a semi-monthly basis, just to keep making that same brilliant argument.

QUOTES! "My premise is that I consider Dahmer a tragic figure, which I know a lot of people have trouble getting their hooks around. You can’t think anything about the types of crimes he committed without thinking that guy was an animal and he deserved a bullet in the brain. And I can’t argue with that. But this guy was just a disturbed kid who could have been helped if just one adult in his life had stepped up and said, there's something wrong with this kid. Let's get him some help." - Cartoonist John Backderf - of derfcity semi-fame - talks about his junior high school friendship with notorious cannibal serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. *** *** *** "Muslim Brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women? Why don't you wage jihad? Why don't you pillage them?" - Prominent Saudi government official and cleric Shaikh Saad Al-Buraik asks what yer old pal Jerky assumes to be a series of rhetorical questions. For those of you who spreichen ze towel-head, you can listen to his insane religious blather right HERE (warning: verry iffy, very choppy audio stream)

JOKES Today's first joke was sent in by our new pal Deez Nutz... A good Irishman, John O'Reilly, met regularly with his toastmasters club. One evening they were hitting the Guinness Stout and having a contest as to who could make the best toast. John O'Reilly hoisted his beer and said, "Here to spending the rest of me life, Between the legs of me wife!" That won him top prize for the best toast of the night. He went home and told his wife, Mary, he won the prize for the best toast of the night." She said, "Aye, and what was your toast?" John replied, "Here's to spending the rest of me life, sitting in church beside me wife!" Oh, that is very nice indeed, John!" Mary said. The next day Mary ran into one of John's toasting buddies on the street corner. The man chuckled leeringly and said, "Did you know that John won the prize the other night with a toast about you, Mary?" She said, "Aye, and I was a bit surprised myself. You know, he's only been there twice! Once he fell asleep and the other time I had to pull him by the ears to make him come!" *** *** *** Today's second joke was sent in by our old pal Mike Davies. The Queen and Princess Anne are out for a drive in one of the Queen's Range Rovers. Suddenly some armed robbers leap out of the bushes and stop the car. "Give us the money", they shout at the Queen. "But I'm the Queen of England, I have no need for money." "Oh, shit", says the leader of the armed band, and turns to Anne. "Give us yer jewels." "But I don't wear my jewels all the time, only on state occasions." The armed robbers look fed up, whens suddenly they hear the sound of wailing sirens approaching. "Quick, out of the car! We'll have the Range Rover at least," and with that the robbers drive off. As the Queen and Anne are waiting for the Police to get there, Anne turns to the Queen, "What did you do with all the cash you had? You're always loaded." "Ah," says the Queen, "I saw the robbers and in the few seconds before they got to the car I rolled up my notes and tucked them into that little place that only women have." Reaching under her skirt, she produces several thousand pounds in notes. "And what did you do with your jewels? You always wear lots of jewellery, my dear." "Well, like you, in those few seconds before the robbers got to the car, I slipped off my rings, necklaces and tiara, and like you, slipped them into that little place that only women have." Reaching down she plucks out her jewellery. They both sit quietly for a few minutes, before the Queen turns to Anne "You know, if Fergie had been with us, we could still have the Range Rover." WORST JOKE OF THE DAY Today's worst joke was sent in by Mr. Ca. Q: What do christians think when they die and the find out there is no heaven or god? A: They don't think, they are dead. P.s. i think i made this up on my own but if you know of someone else who said it first tell me.

JERKY KNOWS! Relationship troubles? Philosophical quandaries? Nagging doubts about your spouse? Jerky knows the answer! Send your letter to the feedback address at the bottom of the page: Dear Jerky; I have a simple question for you. What is the meaning of life? Signed: Golfinguy Dear Golfinguy; There are a few things you have to do before you will be able to comprehend the answer to such a question. Here are those things, in handy checklist form: First of all, if you're a woman, skip this response. Most of you already know the meaning of life, and have no need to ask such questions to an anonymous, faceless, internet pornography-peddling nom-de-plume. So just move along, cuz there's nothing for you to see here. Now, gentlemen... Whether he's alive or dead, whether you love him or curse his name, you have to know your father. If they're still alive, ask his folks what he was like as a kid. Get him drunk and squeeze some stories out of him. This is perhaps the most important thing on the list. You have to have personally killed at least one large animal - neither fish nor foul - which you have subsequently eaten. If you've never been seriously beaten up, you're missing out on something. Any man who hasn't been on the losing end of a serious physical altercation remains unfinished clay. There is something about feeling another man's rage manifesting itself as an attack upon your person that imposes a sense of clarity and presence on you. So the next time the occasion arises, go for it. You know that "fight or flight" adrenaline rush? You know how you usually take the "flight" option? Well, next time, abandon yourself to the fight. Snap. If you're afraid of the pain, don't worry about it. You'll be so pumped, you probably won't even feel that broken eye socket until hours after it's all over. Surviving a serious car crash comes in a distant second, at best. You need to have come into close contact with a dead body, outside the confines of a funeral home. Read and understand the following works, as a start: Homer's Odyssey, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, the Torah, Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Upanishads and the Bhaghavad Gita, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, the New Testament, the Koran, the Bardo Thodol, Beowulf, Dante's Divine Comedy, Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, Albert Einstein's Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, James Joyce's Ulysses, H.G. Wells The Shape of Things to Come, Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf, Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Douglas Hoffstaedter's Godel Escher Bach, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle, Don Delillo's White Noise, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture, and a shit-load of comic books. You must know how to swim. Whatever you do, do NOT read Prisig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the bullshit hoax version of the Necronomicon, any "management theory" books, anything by Ayn Rand, the fucking Celestine Prophecy, or any book by any author who personally claims to be able to talk to dead people. You must commit yourself to at least one hopeless cause. Recognize that you are the end result of billions of years of biological evolution. Research your family tree and superimpose your own ancestral timeline over the epic of history. Marvel at how the "distant past" is actually very, very close. You must own and care for a low-order mammal for a majority of its natural life - from puppy to arthritic old hound, from kitten to imperious housecat - and you must hold it when it dies. The universal power of unconditional love is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the eyes of an animal that knows its struggle is over, but fears not, because it greets the darkness while being cradled in the loving arms of its master. Smoke a bail of weed and watch the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" part of 2001: A Space Odyssey while Pink Floyd's Echoes plays over it in a synchronistic orgy of sight and sound. Actually, just smoking a bail of weed is enough. After that, you can make your own movies... with your MIND! Come to an understanding with the authority structure of the society in which you live, on both the macro and the micro scales. Learn to slalom through it with as few collisions as possible. According to Robert A. Heinlein, "a human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly." This is maybe pushing it a bit, but yer old pal Jerky agrees with the spirit of it. Golfinguy, if you do all these things with your eyes, mind and soul wide open, you will have taken the first step on the long walk towards the highway where you will be able to hitch a ride to the launching pad where a rocket is waiting to fly you to the planet where there is an infinitesimal sliver of a chance you might be able to find the answer to your question: "What is the meaning of life?" Cheers, YOPJ

READER'S SOAPBOX! Got a gripe? Pet peeve? Have your say in the Daily Dirt! Columns can pretty much be about anything, as long they meet the following criteria: 1) don't write shit that'll get us in trouble. 2) Keep it interesting. 3) Keep it short. 4) We don't edit your mistakes. Oh yeah! feel free to send a picture of yourself if you want. Today’s Topic: GRAPPLING WITH ABORTION Care of: Juicy Lucy. I don't know if word has gone out for all "born again" Christians to get on their neighbor's case, but my holy-roller co-workers have been coming down hard on me lately because I made the mistake of answering truthfully when they asked me whether or not I was pro-life. Now, it's not like I'm some kind of militant lesbian feminazi. I'm not even very political. But recently, I feel like I've been declared a target for conversion! On the up side, one good thing has come from these lunch-break encounters… they've forced me to clarify my perspective on the issue of abortion. And I'd like to share my thoughts with your readers, if you've got the space for me. I will even try to use the pro-life vocabulary in my argument, and will assume, for the purposes of this particular point, that the fetus is indeed an individual human life. Even with such a caveat, I still don't believe it is right for the state to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will. The abortion issue, as I see it, is about a woman's right to sovereignty over what happens inside her own body. This right, to me, overrides the fetus's right to hang out in a woman's womb for nine months. Pregnancy is a long, messy, painful, exhausting, mentally and physically debilitating process. Giving birth is an excruciating, torturous ordeal with frequent complications and the small but real chance -- every time -- that the mother might die from labor (ask any OBGYN). With our ever-diminishing social safety-net, some people simply CAN'T AFFORD to be pregnant, or raise a child. The simple fact of the matter is our attitudes towards the sanctity of life are a lot more fluid than some of us like to believe. Some of us believe we are entitled to kill anybody who dares intrude into our homes, regardless of whether or not our lives are in immediate danger. If we have the right to shoot some pathetic junkie who sneaks into our apartment to steal a TV set so he can sell it for smack money -- even though this involves "taking a life" -- then I can't see how we shouldn't have the right to put an end to an intimate physical process that has the potential to turn our lives upside down, and our biological selves inside out -- even if it involves "taking a life." I've never had an abortion, myself. I don't even know if I could ever bring myself to make such a decision. However, I damn well want to know that, if the occasion should arise, the decision will be mine and mine alone to make. These are my two cents. Juicy Lucy [You sound smart. Smart girls are sexy. Let's make babies! - Jerky]

Send all Jokes, Letters and other stuff to Jerky: feedback@dailydirt.com