Penny Serenade

Published 08 June 05 06:45 AM | Jason Looney 

If you ask me, “A penny for your thoughts?” you should be ready for a weird thought or two.  More importantly, you should also be ready to give up that penny.  

I’ve always taken the penny thing quite literally, for I believe we should be men of our word, if nothing else.  For instance, when one of my students at Harvard offered the penny-for-a-thought trade a few years ago, my code of honor compelled me to share, "Okay… Here it is:  DOS." 

(The student's name?  You guessed it –– the guy from whom Bill Gates stole DOS.  But later that year Gates himself paid a penny for, “I bet it’s not as rainy in Seattle as people make it out to be.”  So I’d say we’re even.)

Right now, this second, if you produced a penny, I would share with you this particular thought:  I would make an absolutely fantastic runner of drugs.  

I recently returned from Missouri, a.k.a. The State That Will Search Your Windowless Van (And Your Cavities) Quite Thoroughly If You Exceed The Speed Limit By Even The Tiniest Of Margins.  The current crop of drug runners, amazingly, has yet to catch onto the trend, so Missouri’s friendly troopers continue to make record-setting busts on I-44.  But let me tell you, if I were the one running the drugs… I would never speed!!  I would invest in cruise control and a van with large-but-tinted windows!!  I would try very hard to not look shifty or anything like a minority!!  And I would probably avoid Missouri altogether. 

But I can’t run drugs right now.  Not when Google is paying me, literally, tens of pennies for the thoughts expressed on this website. 

Which reminds me: A few weeks ago I wrote a post about John Elway and the top Google ad for that post was JohnElway.com, the official website of The Man.  This means that if any of my readers clicked that link, at least one penny went from John Elway’s pocket to my pocket.  WHICH MEANS THAT, RIGHT NOW, I MIGHT HAVE PENNIES IN MY PANTS THAT WERE GIVEN TO ME BY JOHN ELWAY. 

PLEASE NOTE MY USE OF ITALICS AND CAPITAL LETTERS TO INDICATE THE GRAVITY OF THIS SITUATION.

Yeah, I know:  Most of you would be more impressed by the Bill Gates penny.  But I don’t have that penny anymore. 

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# Jason Looney said on June 8, 2005 9:20 PM:
Okay, this post is stressing the wife out. For her sake, allow me to explain that I was not, nor will I ever be, a professor at Harvard. I also do not know Bill Gates. I just thought it would be funny if one were a stickler about the penny thing and therefore had to give up a billion dollar idea because of it. Ha ha.

The rest of the post contains no lies.
# Jason Looney said on June 8, 2005 9:22 PM:
Oh yeah, I also don't have a shiny Chevy van. Other than that: no lies.

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