Smile & Laugh 01 (May 08 - Oct 08)

[millionairemind]

Fidelity only lasts five mins in a western marriage??

[millionairemind]

Yo Amigo, isn't that you??

[winston]

And the gold medal for Olympic scams goes to...
Fri May 30, 2008 8:49am EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) - Tricksters are setting up fake Olympic ticket websites, selling Olympic bonds that do not exist and running fraudulent Olympic-linked competitions, state media said Thursday, warning people not to be taken in.

There were eight common Olympic-themed frauds, the official Xinhua news agency said.

In one, text messages are sent out claming the recipient has won a prize from the Beijing Games organizers, but then the person is told they have to pay tax upfront to get the prize, Xinhua said.

In another, people are told that a warehouse containing Olympic medals caught fire and several medals are missing, but that the government was offering rewards for their return, though the report did not explain exactly how the fraud was carried out.

A third involves the setting up of a fake Olympic ticket website which offers to sell unclaimed pre-booked or reserved tickets, and a fourth offers to sell special Olympic bonds or financial funds.

"They spin a web of lies to tempt and deceive people, and carry out their frauds by taking advantage of victims' desire for a small gain," Xinhua said.

Police are warning people to be cautious and not to let their guard down, the report added.

[winston]

Getting to the Bottom of a Russian's 26 Toilets: Michael Lewis

May 29 (Bloomberg) -- For some months now I've made a point of popping into Bloomberg's offices every now and again to share with readers the secret thoughts of a successful hedge-fund manager.

People like me -- that is, people with more than $1 billion under management and in excess of $100 million in net worth -- seldom tell ordinary people what we actually think, for the obvious reason that it doesn't pay.

As a result, ordinary people -- defined as anyone with a net worth of less than $10 million -- know very little about the inner lives of the seriously rich, even in places where there are lots of seriously rich people. The uproar in Greenwich, Connecticut, about the rich Russian and his toilets strikes me as an excellent case in point.

To recap:

In 2005 Valery Kogan, a Russian whom no one outside of Russia had ever heard of, turns up in Greenwich and buys a five- acre lot with a 20,000-square-foot house on it.

Naturally -- he being Russian, this being Greenwich -- he expects to tear down this old house and erect his own new 54,000- square-foot place. Like me, Valery Kogan overcame great odds to become a capitalist success. (I went to Penn, for example; Valery was born in a police state, and given a girl's name, to boot.)

Having made it this far he clearly never imagined that anyone might try to stop him from going even further. But then he met the organized proletariat of Greenwich. And before he knew it he was all over the American newspapers as the Slavic lout who wanted to build in their suburban idyll a palace with a 12-car garage, a Finnish spa, a dog-grooming salon and 26 toilets.

Need Versus Want

I would have thought the dog-grooming salon would have caused him his biggest problem with the masses, but it is these toilets that have proven his public-relations nightmare. His desire for a 26-holer is the thing no ordinary person, even in Greenwich, seems capable of understanding.

``Who needs that many toilets?'' one of the protesting nimrods of Greenwich put it to Bloomberg News, speaking for the whole miserable rabble.

Well, for a start, Valery Kogan needs 26 toilets. He also needs someone to explain the need. Allow me.

To begin with -- and it depresses me that I find myself instructing citizens of Greenwich on the special needs of the very rich -- the seriously wealthy don't use their houses as ordinary people do.

The Great Indoors

When a rich Russian says he is going for a hike, for instance, he doesn't mean outside. Out of doors he will encounter ordinary people, who not only don't understand his need for 26 toilets, but also pester him for money. He can always tell them to go away, of course, but in the process he's wasted his valuable time. This is one of many reasons a rich Russian requires a 54,000-square-foot mansion: so he might hike, indoors.

But there is of course one thing that every man knows before he sets off on a long hike: he's going to need to pee. Ordinary hikers pee in the woods. But Russian multimillionaires aren't ordinary hikers. No one wants to find himself half an hour into a long rappel down a spiral staircase, or in a hand-over-hand climb along a wall, only to have to retrace his steps to some remote rest room.

Better to have one wherever in your indoor wilderness you happen to be.

This brings us to a second practical consideration ignored by the ordinary people of Greenwich: the delicate waste-disposal needs of the rich.

Hidden Treasure

Here's a question you probably have never asked yourself: What, at bottom, is a toilet? To an ordinary person, it's a device for transferring ordinary human waste from the body to the sewer, as discreetly and sanitarily as possible. But just as all humans are not ordinary, all human waste isn't ordinary, and the waste of Russians is no exception.

The richer the Russian the more likely he is to have failed to fully digest something or someone of serious value. To simply elbow the silver knob and flush it all down, without further thought or study, would be wasteful and self-destructive, like tossing out a savings bond before the final coupon has been clipped, or closing a silver mine before sifting the tailings.

The toilets of the rich aren't just toilets, in other words. They're bank vaults. And you can never have too many of those.

But these are just the most obvious, pragmatic reasons for owning a house with 26 toilets. Pressing as they are, they are dwarfed by a deeper emotional impulse: the need of every truly successful person to have things that ordinary people can't imagine the need for.

Bowl Superiority

Put this way you can see the true genius of Valery Kogan. Virtually every other form of conspicuous consumption in America has been bought and paid for; in the brain space that ordinary people reserve for the obsessive contemplation of the rich, there was hardly any real estate left.

Cars, houses, animals, furs, jewels, islands: From the point of view of the ordinary person looking for something to envy all are ``been there, done that.''

``Toilets!'' I can imagine Valery saying to himself, late on one cold Russian night, ``I will buy more toilets than any man on earth and the American people will speak of me with wonder.'' And they do.

[kennynah]

hats off to all of you who posted in this thread....

so many jokes to tell.... makes my day everytime i come here...ok lah...some quite funny, others cold jokes colder than mine...hahaha

[millionairemind]

Camoflauge Clothing

There once was pirate captain who, whenever it looked like a battle would be imminent would change into a red shirt. After observing this behavior for a few months, one of the crew members asked him what it meant.

"It's in case I get shot. I don't want you crew members to see blood and freak out."

"That's very sensible, sir." At that moment, the crew member spotted eight hostile ships on the horizon. The captain all of a sudden looked very concerned.

"Get my brown pants."

[millionairemind]

[millionairemind]

Maybe they should all cover up from head to toe..?

[winston]

Was struggling whether to put this post in the Retirement Planning or this one...

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Man orders father murdered to get his job
Tue Jun 3, 2008 11:03am EDT

PATNA, India (Reuters) - An Indian man, frustrated at failing to find employment, ordered the murder of his father to get his government job, a day before the victim was to retire, police said on Tuesday.

The man, arrested from a village in the impoverished eastern Bihar state, had planned to claim his father's job on the grounds that he died while still at work, police officer Naresh Singh said.

The son had paid a relative about $2,500 to carry out the crime which was committed at the weekend but reported on Tuesday.

"He told us he would have got a government job on compassionate grounds had this murder remained a mystery," Singh said.

[winston]

Hong Kong's websites the world's riskiest: survey

HONG KONG (AFP) — Hong Kong websites are the most likely to hit visitors with unwanted ads, viruses and spam, research from an Internet security company has found.

More than 19 percent of websites using the ".hk" domain name pose a security threat to visitors, the research by United States software firm McAfee found.

China-based sites are the second most risky with 11 percent, while those from Finland and Japan are the two safest. Romanian and Russian sites were also a threat to web users.

Last year, the survey ranked Hong Kong as only the 28th most risky Internet location.

"Just like the real world, the virtual threats and risks are constantly changing. As our research shows, websites that are safe today can be dangerous tomorrow," said Jeff Green, senior vice president at McAfee.

"Surfing the Web based on conventional wisdom is not enough to avoid risk online."

The study looked at 9.9 million well-visited websites in 265 countries and ranked them by the amount of adware, spyware, viruses, spam, excessive pop-ups, browser exploits or links to other problem sites.

The generic domain name ".info" was considered the most problematic, the survey found, while ".gov" was the safest.

Hong Kong and China are often cited as the source of much of the world's spam -- unwanted email messages that fill computer users' inboxes.