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Kickin'
Rocks
Cardboard Oil Cans... the key to our salvation.
Recently I received my property tax statement and there was a little item listed there called "County DF". County DF? Gotta find out about that. Made the call and apparently nobody at the tax office knows what DF is, they just collect the money and send it to somebody in government, they think. So I call the head guy, the Chairman of the County Commission, that'll do it. I think most of these guys were door to door vacuum cleaner salesmen before they hit the big time. It was clear that he didn't know either, but he'll check into it and call me back. Yeah right. THREE WEEKS LATER.....the call comes, it's an assistant to the commissioner, she wasn't sure what the question was, but the answer is "Discretionary Fund". Webster defines discretionary as "left to or regulated by one's own discretion or judgement". Well... first they are defining discretionary by using the word discretion, then to totally confuse me they include the word judgement, I assume good judgement. So let's see, tax, county, discretion, judgement, I see at least one word in there that the commissioner won't be using. Bottom line it's money that we MUST pay so they can play with their "discretionary" projects. Have you ever noticed that there are people in this world that just seem to "get it" long before the rest of us do? Or maybe they're just lucky I don't know, but some how they figure out how to put themselves in the money stream while most of us are still looking for our first job. Well I think I finally figured it out. The federal government does two things really really well, collect taxes and spend that blackmail "there is no bottom to this pit" tax money. So let's jump in that bureaucratic cess pool and look around a bit, look for the magic words....aha there' one.....GRANT. A grant is another way of saying "here's a whole bunch of money, don't worry about paying it back and you don't even have to keep receipts, it's free money, if you need more let us know we'll go seize some houses and businesses". What we are going to do is apply for a grant to conduct a study of something having socially redeeming value in the car world. Since these guys are so good at this spending thing (and I have huge respect for people that do things well), we should be able to assist them to start shoveling some of that cash our way, all you have to do is give them the right word to put on the right line on the right form and presto, just like ABBA....Money...Money...Money! Right off the bat I am stuck because government speak is a foreign language to me. (Why is it called double talk, they can say it twice and we still don't know what they said). When I get a brain freeze I look around for something that will trigger some kind of useful thought, from my point of view anyway. Since we are going for a grant on carstuff, I thought who do I know that has the biggest garage with the biggest mess. I went there and stood in the middle of the mess and started looking around. "What can I fix here that will have socially redeeming value and we can write a proposal that will confuse even the politicians". Looking...looking...looking...aha, there it is. You remember those cardboard oil cans? I liked those cans, you could cut the top off and fill them with bolts and nuts, or mix paint in them, or feed the dog, or wrap up your wife's birthday present, there are lots of uses. Changing to plastic seemed like a good idea at the time, but times change. Comparing the two, the cardboard ones are much more environmentally friendly. Now there is a buzz word that will work nicely in our proposal. Car guys have a pretty good track record with environmental issues, we put tarps down at Bonneville to protect the salt and when our rod starts dripping we fix it, and we do our best to use up all those petro chemicals we can by keeping our cars in the 8-10 mpg range. I think we are heroes of the ecology and have an obligation to use all the grant money we can get our hands on to better this world. Whorah! (You have to say that word with a little grunt in your voice like the Marines). WHO-RAH! It's clear to me that we have an obligation to mankind, how could they possibly turn us down. We have two days before the application deadline, so let's get started. Let's see....cardboard oil cans. Okay here we go, the plastic oil "bottles" usually end up in the land fill, they don't degrade which means Pennzoil will be advertising to rats in the garbage dumps for hundreds of years to come. We can fix this, this is BIG! Dear Mr. Grantman, we would like... oh say $5,000,000 to rid the world of plastic oil containers with a biodegradable chemical that turns plastic into cardboard, which will make boxes to carry food to the starving children all over the world, medicine to beleaguered nations or for the politico to use to stack tax payer's money in their garages, which ever they prefer. We need your money to do this invaluable study, we are not going to create the chemical or the system to use it, just the study. To properly do this study, we need to understand where the oil comes from and how it is disposed of, so we know why the plastic bottles are needed. We will buy a fleet of America's cars, hot rods, drive them a whole bunch, change oil often creating empty plastic bottles, so we can track them and fully understand their impact on the world! This sounds really good to me, I think we can get the money. The proposal is in by the deadline, the grant guy gives us a knowing smile as we hand him the eighty two inch tall proposal and offer to hire him with no specific job but will pay him $200,000 a year, or a finders fee of $1,000,000 whichever he prefers. It's two weeks before the list of approved grants comes out, Mr. Grantman says he will call us, he winks. Well...we didn't get the money. Turns out that there weren't any grants, it was a sting to feret out the crooks in American society. We are being indicted, jail is almost a certainty. Oh well... live and learn, I wonder who we need to talk to about this grant idea, it's really a good idea, and we need the money for legal fees, OJ got off for two mill, five should do it. Kick a Rock DP
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