A good ol’ joke from DOD

My father, a/k/a Dear Old Dad, posted this joke on our family blog, and I thought you should have it too, no matter how you voted.  It’s an oldie but a goodie, sort of like most of us in Torch Lake Township.  Now here is the reason this joke is pertinent.  I suspect that a lot of elected officials might be in a frame of mind to listen to constituents who know a thing or two, whether about water or alternative energy or health care . . . or sheep.  My dearest wish is that the Age of Arrogance is over.  Bring on the Age of Respect.  Herewith the good ol’ joke—feel free to send it to your Representative as required:

Bud and the Yuppie [Told you it was old—who says Yuppie anymore?  At least in this township we’re rapidly becoming ORRies–Old Rural Retirees.]

A rancher named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in an Armani suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie [talk about dated], leans out the window and asks the rancher, ‘If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?’

Bud looks at the man, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, ‘Sure, why not?’

The man parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

Then he opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.  Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his Hi-Tech Miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the rancher and says, ‘You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.’

‘That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,’ says Bud.

He looks on amused as the man selects one of the animals stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then Bud says to the man, ‘Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?’

The man thinks about it for a second and then says, ‘Okay, why not?’

‘You’re a Congressman,’ says Bud.

‘Wow! That’s correct,’ says the man, ‘but how did you guess that?’

‘No guessing required,’ said Bud. ‘You showed up here even though nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are, and you don’t know a thing about cows.  This is a herd of sheep.’ 

‘Now give me back my dog.’