And then there was the time a friend and I were arrested for being Peeping Toms.
 
Now, to be fair to my already diminished reputation among decent people, I should note that we were innocent of any crime.  Yes, I know “I didn’t do it,” is what guilty people say, but it’s also what innocent people say. It’s Schrodinger’s Plea.

I should also clarify that we were arrested in the sense that we were stopped and taken to the police station without having any choice in the matter. It’s not exactly like the cop said, “Hey, you guys wanna come down to the station with me? Totally your call.” Nope, he did not say this or anything like it, unless you consider, “Get in the car,” to be a request.
 
Anyway, to the story… We were home on summer break and we planned to get together one evening with no particular plans in mind. I was at a cousin’s house, so we came up with the goofy idea—which, I swear, seemed really sensible at the time—to drop my car off at my parents’ house and walk back to where his car was parked. Then he would drive me back to my parents’ house, drop me off and go home.
 
No, looking back on it, I can’t come up with any reason why this seemed like an enjoyable experience, or why it appeared to make sense, except we were exceedingly lame, but not lame enough for miniature golf.
 
So we drove to my folks’ house, dropped my car, and started what was going to be a 5-mile walk back to his car. (As I type this, it sounds even stupider than it sounded when I typed it in the last paragraph, as if such supreme stupidhood is possible.) Anyway, at about the midway point in our amble, a suburban squad car rolls up and the cop asks us what we’re doing.
 
This is where the cop should have known we were innocent, because even the dumbest of the dumb among criminals could come up with a better story than, “We’re walking five miles from my car to his car, so we can drive back in his car to drop me off by my car.”
 
The cop says a woman called in a Peeping Tom complaint from a nearby motel and he wanted to know if we had been in the area. The reason he was curious, he said, was that the woman described the peepers as a Mutt & Jeff combo and we fit the bill. Being the Mutt part of this pairing, I was slightly offended, although it was hard to argue that I didn’t need to drop a few pounds.
 
He takes us in his car to the cop house (which is what we hardened criminal types call the police station) and puts us in a room where he asks questions. No, we’re not under arrest, he says, although we can’t leave, either, and there’s no need to call a lawyer, or dad, because we haven’t been charged with anything.
 
Yet.
 
I’m taking all of this really, really seriously, since I presume this to be a crime of moral turpitude and it could blemish my reputation, if I ever got the chance to build a reputation. It’s one of those things that would absolutely go on my permanent record and follow me through life.
 
Ever since grade school, I had been warned about things going on my permanent record, which was chiseled in stone and locked up in the principal’s office, documenting everything you did wrong…ever. Like when it was the student assembly and you farted and Billy Kamden laughed and some of his spit landed on Sally Wunderlich and then everyone started laughing and now you can’t get good job, because they will look at your permanent record and see that you farted in the school assembly and ruined it for everyone.
 
And now we’re stuck in the police station and they’re going to add Peeping Tom to the whole farting thing and I would never get a good job or drive a cool car or even be allowed to order a pizza.
 
So, as I said, I’m taking this really seriously, but my friend had just a bit of disdain for everyone who was not at his level of brilliance, so he mouthed off more than a bit to the constabulary. It was like we were playing a game of good suspect, bad suspect, but at least I was the nice guy.
 
About a half hour goes by and they move us into another room, a room with a large mirror on the wall. Hmmmm. What could be behind that mirror? The cops have us sit there, someone has a conversation in the next room, and the senior cop comes in to tell us they are going to have to let us go because the woman was unable to identify us.
 
He didn’t say that we were innocent, of course. Clearly, we were guilty, since my friend was tall and I was fat and we were walking near the scene of the crime. The words he used were, “She couldn’t identify you,” which meant we were guilty but we were going to get off because of a technicality.
 
After a while, they agreed to take us back to where they picked us up, which was still about two miles from where had been going, and we were let out of the car with a warning not to do it again. Because it was clear to them that we had done it and we had gotten lucky, but we wouldn’t be so lucky next time.  That also meant they weren’t going to look for the actual Peeping Toms. They found their perps, it didn’t work out, but this case was closed.
 
We really dodged a bullet that night. What if the woman had been drinking and we looked familiar enough for her to accuse us? What if she had simply assumed the police had done their jobs, so we must be the guys who looked through her window? We’d be running around today with arrest records, possibly convictions, and the minor consolation of knowing it all happened before Facebook.
 
I’ve thought about that night quite a few times over the years, recognizing how close we were to a very damaging journey. The memory is triggered, often enough, when someone is accused of a crime and claims to be innocent. Having been on the wrong side of the table, I find myself more skeptical of the criminal justice system. I give the cops the benefit of the doubt, most of the time, but they don’t get my blind faith.
 
I’ve also given some thought to the decisions we made that night. After careful consideration, I’ve concluded that miniature golf was not our lamest choice.
 
 
Feel better about yourself every week, simply by reading one of the many cringe-worthy stories from my life. Just click here to subscribe now and you’ll be well on your way to immense feelings of superiority. Seriously, has anyone made you a better offer today? 
 

Sometimes, I am simply mesmerized when I’m sitting at a bar and there’s a hundred bottles of not-beer on the wall, a dizzying assortment of gins and whiskies and vodkas and tequilas and aperitifs and digestives and fancy hooch in magical bottles that Aladdin would covet. 

And I marvel at all the delivery systems on display for one active ingredient.

Alcohol is one of the most intriguing substances on earth, beginning with its beginnings. We can only imagine the excitement as Caveman Grunk ran to his friends and announced, “Look. That bird just ate those rotten berries and he fell on the ground and a snake ate him. We should eat those berries, too.”

Being an early humanoid required constant vigilance and anything that reduced your ability to focus could be pretty deadly, but that didn’t stop our fearless forebears from finding new ways to make and guzzle hooch. Since our earliest pre-history, alcohol consumption has been a driving force of—and against—civilization.

Through the millennia, moms have cautioned their children not to let food go to waste, while the truly visionary alchemists let the food rot until it turned into something much more interesting. Whether they focused on honey or rice or wheat or barley or grapes, they found a way to build the buzz around their buzz.

Wine makes the most sense, I suspect, since it is basically the archetype of rotten berries and it has enough sugar in it to taste okay. And once those wily monks of the Middle Ages found a way to insert wine into their religious rituals…Ka-Ching!…all of us were hooked. “Yes, we make the wine and, yes, you will burn in hell if you don’t drink it as we instruct. Was there a question?”

Outside of religious practices, wine has evolved into a religion of its own, with all kinds of rules and rituals and taboos and hierarchies. And, to be frank, a lot of it is both pretentious and weird. I would never bite into a piece of chalk or oak bark or peat, and I definitely don’t chew tobacco, but I’m supposed to taste all of that in my wine and go, “Yummmmm?” If you close your eyes, you can hear Dom Perignon chuckling in his grave.   

While wine is usually tolerable for almost everyone, most other kinds of alcohol are what we call, um, an “acquired taste,” the stuff that makes you wanna holler hi-de-ho. I drink bourbon, and scotch, and an occasional Slivovitz, but I promise I am not doing it for the taste.

No, I’m doing it for the sophistication. If I drink enough bourbon and I can tell the difference between Swampmash, Swampmash Barrel Strength, Swampmash Reserve and Swampmash 62, I will have a “sophisticated palate.” And, outside of curing cancer and inventing sliced bread, there’s nothing more admirable than having a sophisticated palate.

So I have been trying, almost every day, sometimes three or four or fourteen times a day, striving to discern the difference between Malbec and Malpeque, between Pinot Grigio and Topo Gigio, maybe even between Claret and Claritin. Perhaps, one day, I will look at the magic wall behind the bar and I’ll know whether to order my martini shaken or stirred.

In the meantime, I will silently envy the sophisticates who can find the perfect wine for veal Prince Orloff or the best beer to match with beef jerky. Someday, somehow, I will win my seat at their table.

It’s likely to be a long time before I am a true sophisticate, but it takes no time to become a subscriber just by clicking here.

After so many people made a fortune by following my investment advice a few weeks ago, I’ve been getting all kinds of inquiries about how to deal with inflation.

Well, you’ve come to the right place. I waited in line to get a 12% mortgage back in 1985, and I once had a CD that paid 16% interest, so I am absolutely the guy to teach everyone how to deal with rising prices. Unlike all those so-called “experts” with their fancy “degrees” and years of “experience” in financial markets, I am a self-taught genius who does my own research. So, what do you want to know?

What’s the real cause of all this inflation?

Covid vaccines.

What? How could Covid vaccines cause inflation?

Just look at the facts here and it’s obvious. We were all dealing with Covid in 2020 and inflation was low, sometimes negative. Then, we started getting all those “free” vaccines in 2021 and, BAM!!! Suddenly, the CPI jumped 4% in March, 6% in May, 7% in July. The more people got vaccinated, the more inflation soared. Coincidence? I think not.

Wait, what if  it was a simple matter of people getting out more and spending more and overloading the supply chain?

Hah! You’re one of those people who still believes in supply and demand? Where do you guys come from? In fact, there were a ton of shortages in 2020, but the only one we noticed was toilet paper. Nobody cared that the shelves were empty until they took the vaccines and, then, it was like Wile E. Coyote suddenly looked down. Shortages didn't cause inflation until they started forcing us to get vaccinated.

Well, maybe, but didn't all those $trillion budget deficits play a part in creating too much demand?

Absolutely not. Yes, the federal government has spent $6 trillion more than they took in since the pandemic began, but there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that swollen pustule of largesse had anything whatsoever to do with raising demand and prices for anything whatsoever. Whatsoever.

On the other hand, I heard from a friend of a friend that it’s all Joe Biden’s fault.

Your friend is 100% right. Donald Trump pushed for Operation Warp Speed to create the vaccines, but he was smart enough not to create a distribution plan for them once they were developed. Then Biden got in and ruined the whole thing by distributing vaccines and causing huge inflation.

No, I meant I heard it was his fault because oil prices are higher.

Well, oil prices are higher across the world because people are getting out more, driving more, flying more, and buying more fuel. But that would never have happened without those dagnabbed vaccines, which are absolutely Biden’s fault.

So when will all this inflation subside?

Not for a long while, because we’ve added several new problems to the list. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is affecting global food prices and there’s a new avian flu that’s killing millions of chickens, and we can expect more supply chain problems because China is closing half the country due to a new Covid outbreak…so don’t expect lower prices for food or any of the crap you buy on Amazon.

Oh, and you should know that OPEC and major oil companies have decided to keep supplies low so they can maximize their prices, so don’t expect a ton of relief at the pump either. Basically, consumers are screwed.

But what about investors? Maybe I could make some money off all this economic turmoil by buying some stocks.

Absolutely not! When inflation goes up, the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to slow demand, which is bad for business and causes stocks to go down. Sell, sell, sell.

Okay, I will sell all my stocks.

Absolutely not! When the Fed overshoots and causes a recession, Congress will pump an extra $trillion or two into the economy to boost demand and stock prices will soar. Hold on to all your shares and buy more, more, more.

Will do! Should I also buy bonds to take advantage of higher interest rates?

Are you crazy??? When the Fed raises interest rates, bond prices go down and you’ll lose money.

So I should sell my bonds?

Are you crazy??? When the Fed overshoots and causes a recession, interest rates will plunge and the price of your bonds will skyrocket. Hold on to all your bonds and buy more, more, more.

All of this is getting way too confusing. Isn’t there some simple way for me to make a killing right now?

Did I mention that I’m selling NFTs of my kids’ old art projects? Absolutely guaranteed to be worth ten times as much in 2023 as they're worth today and I guarantee you will never owe capital gains tax when you sell them. Even better, you can buy as many as you want, since quantities aren’t limited at all. Just send me your cash and I’ll handle all the details.



I only think I’m supposed to mention that your results may vary and that you should ask for a prospectus before investing, but I definitely know to tell you that you should click here to subscribe.
 
 
 
 
 
 

We’ve got some unfinished business here in America, and it’s way past time we made good on our promise to thousands of women who suffered the ultimate harm while their cities were locked up over the past two years.

As always, it’s women who bear the burden when the world falls apart and nobody has suffered more over the past two years than brides. When wedding halls closed and relatives quarantined, nearly 247 million women in America were forced to get married via Zoom and forgo the absolutely perfect, no flaws-at-all parties they began planning in utero.

Now that the hotels are all open again, it’s this year’s brides who are getting all the choice dates and the women who missed their windows in 2020-21 are shipwrecked in the seas of despair.

Until now.

Today, the Clef d’Or team at Dad Writes announces the Wedding Do-Over, an incredibly high-tech and lifelike simulation that brings all the joy of that perfect wedding to the brides who were the real victims of Covid. Using the latest in CGI technology—the same incredible science that made it look like Will Smith actually slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars—we will finally deliver the perfect day for the most deserving of women.

We won’t actually put together a party, of course, since we don’t know anything about having a good time, but we will create a video that recreates the celebration that might have been. And, it will be so realistic that everyone who watches it will say they remember being there. Our video absolutely will include:

• The bride and groom walking solemnly down the aisle, only to break dance with a flash mob halfway toward the altar.
  
• The groomsman whose vest is undone and whose shirt is hanging out of his pants before anyone can say, “I do.”
• Women of a certain age (80+) who insist on shaking it down with the 10-year-old ring bearer.
• The bride’s father, announcing he got all his ideas for his toast from The Google.
• The bridesmaid’s plus-one who stages his own dance show, busting moves and furniture as he shows everyone how it’s done.
• The band leader guiding his troupe through YMCA, Macarena, Achy Breaky Heart and a dozen other songs that were popular before the bride and groom were born.
• The flower girl standing on the shoes of some random old guy as they dance to whatever syrupy old song you want.
  
• The husband and wife—though not each other’s—caught making out in the coat room.
  

But wait, there’s more. Also included are the Cake Smearing Ceremony, the Sweaty Garter Toss, Bouquet Battleground and those uncomfortable dances among the in-laws. We make it look like the real thing, without all the anxiety and stress and absolutely no food poisoning.

But wait yet again, because there's even more more! Order in the next 15 minutes and we will add a free video of the bachelorette party that should have been, including the Drunken Trolley Ride, Condom Balloons, Sobbing BFFs, and, of course, the inevitable Ponytail Holding Ceremony.

Yes, it all sounds too good to be true, but don’t let that stop you from sending us photos of the wedding party and only $48,000,000 (plus postage and handling) to recapture the moment that never was. We’ll be glad you did.

We’ll also be glad if you click here to subscribe for our next unbelievable offers, or whatever other lunacy we come up with each week.
 
 

This week’s post is only for the incredibly smart and wealthy people who will be receiving at least $14 million from the IRS after following all our tax filing advice last week. The rest of you are just too poor for our incredibly brilliant, can’t-lose, 137%-guaranteed investment wisdom, so scram.

Okay, all you 1%-ers, are we alone now? Great, because we are about to share some of the most incredible, unbelievable tips for putting your tax refund to work so that you never have to work again. All you need to do now is deploy capital* as follows:

Cryptocurrency: First, let’s get this straight. Crypto is absolutely not a Ponzi scheme where the first guys to invest announce that the value is going up so they can get others to invest and then bail out at the top. It’s much, much better. “Miners” run up electric bills of $10,000 to create $4,200 worth of crypto, which seems like a losing proposition, but then they announce that their crypto is now worth $50,000 and nobody can prove them wrong. Unlike stocks, where the price is based on “trading” in a “public” “market,” every crypto brand is worth whatever the brand’s CEO says it’s worth, so there is no limit to how high this can go. Clearly, you want to put all your money into cryptocurrencies.

NFTs: Like cryptocurrencies, NFTs are a high-tech investment that nobody really understands, but that makes it the coolest and hippest way to get filthy rich. Basically, you take an everyday item, like a floor lamp, and then you take a photo of it and you sell a data file of the photo that makes the buyer the owner of…wait for it…the data file of the photo. With NFTs, you can sell all the contents of your house without actually selling any of the contents of your house. You can sell an NFT of your oven, but you get to keep the actual oven. Sell an NFT of your television, refrigerator, underwear, pretty much anything, and the rules are the same. Me? I’m offering up NFTs of the hand turkeys my kids made for Thanksgiving in 1986 and 1987 and a slow weekend in 2014. This is the best investment opportunity since Enron invented those “special purpose entities” and we all got to retire from the proceeds.

SPACs: Unfortunately, Enron isn’t selling shares in special purpose entities anymore, but Special Purpose Acquisition Companies are the next best thing. Basically, a SPAC is a pool of money that will/might/could be used one day to buy/build/caress something that’s valuable and make it more valuable. It’s a lot like buying stock in a company, but it has these added advantages: 1. You have no idea what the operators will buy. 2. You have no idea whether anything will work out. 3. There’s pretty much no limit on how much the operators can pay themselves for “managing” your money. Even better, it doesn’t matter which SPAC you choose. All of them are absolutely certain to accept your cash.

Meme Stocks: Yet another high-tech opportunity to make a killing in the stock market, meme stocks are almost always failing companies that desperately need a friend to pump up their value. Like all those flash mobs that blocked traffic with their “spontaneous” dancing in shopping malls, meme investors suddenly place a flood of orders on Robin Hood for the worst performing shares in the universe, sending those stocks soaring into the stratosphere. Meme stocks are the perfect investment for anyone who doesn’t really understand investments, but wants to get rich without any effort or insight.  Timing is key here, however. Meme stocks are the Wile E. Coyote of investing; able to levitate in mid-air, but only until somebody looks down. Not a problem for you, though. You’ve always had perfect timing in your life, so you will know exactly when it’s time to bail.

Clearly, these investment tips are reserved for the world’s smartest, savviest and, dare we say it, best looking people, and we guarantee that it is hypothetically possible in some parallel universe that we can guarantee your future fortune. Best of all, it's absolutely a sure thing that people who follow our investment advice will never have to pay any capital gains taxes.

So, as soon as you get your $14 million tax refund be sure to send it to Dad Writes so we can invest it on your behalf in these can’t-fail opportunities.

What could possibly go wrong?

*We’re not quite sure what “deploy capital” actually means, but we heard it on Fox Business News and everyone on the show nodded, so it must be smart. It’s also really, really smart to click here to subscribe to Dad Writes.

Tick, tick, tick, you can feel the pressure build as April 15 approaches and it’s time to pay the viper over at the Internal Revenue Service. After two years of stimulus checks, special tax credits and delayed filings, this tax season is especially painful for Americans.
 
Or, it was painful until the accounting geniuses at Dad Writes got to work. Thanks to our cracked team of financial magicians, millions of working stiffs can maximize deductions, minimize income and make out like bandits—"legally.”
 
We’ve examined every word of uild Back Better, Restore America, Help Apple Survive, Wall Street Orphans Support, and all the other one-time, emergency, never-to-be-repeated (wink wink) tax packages that Congress came up with over the past three years and we can absolutely “guarantee” that all of these special deals are 182.9% “foolproof.”
 
Sharpen your pencils and don your green eyeshades as you calculate your tax savings, now that you can…

1. Donate to the Congressional Budget Office Go Fund Me campaign, which offers a tax credit equal to 400 times your donation. As an added bonus, any taxpayer who donates $1 million or more gets to own one member of Congress. Move quickly on this one, though, because there aren’t many Reps who aren’t already owned by somebody else.
   
   
2. If you coached your six-year-old for a week until they could make an impassioned speech about masking to the county school board, you qualify for the special theatrical tax credit issued by the National Endowment for the Arts. A double credit is issued if you were able to work words like “contraindication,” “superfluous,” and “poopyface” into their presentations.
   
   
3. Now that the boss is insisting that people return to work, we can all write off our home offices as a casualty loss--and not just the dining room table where we held all our Zoom calls. Now, we can write off our front halls (guest reception), kitchens (break room), dens (conference room) and bathrooms (bathrooms) as well. Don’t be shy about this. Just go ahead and claim the entire value of your home. And that means the current inflated value, not what you paid. (If you're a renter, give it a shot anyway. What do you have to lose?)
   
   
4. The cost of any unused masks, air filters, wipes, hand sanitizers and protest signs may be deducted from income, along with that garage full of toilet paper that was supposed to be your retirement nest egg. If you do plan to deduct the cost of the toilet paper, you must pinky swear that you’ll never use any of it, except for  Homecoming weekend or Halloween.
   
   
5. If you invested in infrastructure by filling potholes with debris from your storage facility, you can deduct $1,500 from your taxes for each pothole you filled prior to Christmas. After Christmas, the deduction is available only to those who filled potholes with fruitcake.
   
   
6. If you used your Covid relief check to buy lottery tickets, you can apply the original value of any losing tickets to your tax liability. If you used the money to buy food or pay the rent, though, you’re out of luck.
   
   
7. If your adjusted gross income was more than $150,000,000, feel free to ignore all these tips, since you’ve probably figured out a way to avoid paying taxes altogether.
   
   
8. If you’re running a Fortune 500 Company, see note 7.
   

 
Remember, keep these incredible tax tips to yourselves, as only loyal fans of Dad Writes are eligible to claim these unbelievable benefits. Even better, you won’t need to worry about making any mistakes with your filings this year, since Congress has prohibited the IRS from auditing any taxpayers ever again.
 
Trust us on this. We know these things.
 
*It’s always possible that rules will change over the next few days, so you’ll want to consult your tax advisor, just in case. In the meantime, you’ll definitely want to click here to subscribe so you’ll have something to read while waiting for your sentencing hearing.