My favorite Doug utterance ever was this:
We were at someone's house, someone we didn't know, and they had two hyper barking jumping little white dogs. You were reading something, and I asked you what kind of dogs they were. Without looking up or moving, you answered, "White". I don't know why, but it's the best ever.
I just laughed so hard and so long I coughed up a lung.
In my email this morning was this:
Dear First Prize Winner,
Congratulations! You have been selected to receive a prize in the Lexus HS Contest, administered by ePrize.
You have been selected as the winner of a the use of a Lexus HS for one (1) week and a Lexus Hybrid Living gift bag containing Sponsor selected Lexus branded products! Please see the attached Official Rules for further prize details and eligibility requirements.
I suppose it could have been even MORE of a great start to a Friday morning if I had received a note that someone had just given me my S8 free and clear, but this wasn't bad at all. I am psyched about it!
I notice this morning that the board of VW has voted to merge with Porsche.
For those that haven't been following, here's how this went -
Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP were elected to a plurality of seats in the German Reichstag in March, 1933.
They created a government with the Social Democrats.
They put all the Social Democrats in jail.
They eliminated all civil rights, unions, communists, jews, slavs, gypsies and youth organizations.
In replacing the unions with a single, national "union" that everyone had to belong to, they created the first rewards program wherein workers had deductions taken from their paychecks so that they could participate in vacations, cruises and such. This program was called "Kraft durch Freude" (or, Work through Joy).
To further give the non-unionized laborers incentive to labor endlessly without overtime, the right to strike or bargain or change jobs, the government announced that a brand new car would be sold on a weekly subscription basis - the "Kraft durch Freude" car - KDF, popularly known as the People's car (Volks wagen).
The car was designed by Prof. Dr. Ing. H. C. Ferdinand Porsche, who, like Hitler, was an Austrian, but had a bunch of training and skill other than bombastic oratory and making people hate each other. Prof. Dr. Porsche had this notion that designing a car with a flat, air cooled engine in the back driving the back wheels was the best idea since Austria became the center of the Holy Roman Empire, and later created a slightly more exciting car on the same basic design called the Porsche 911.
Said workers had another involuntary payroll deduction, and ground was broken for a massive factory near Wolfsburg, which had hitherto served no particular purpose in the German economy, but benefited someone who sold the land. This would become the massive Volkswagenwerk.
Gazillions of Marks were collected from paychecks, and not a single car was produced or delivered to those who had their money withheld. Sort of like a Tucker Torpedo, but without the cool movie starring Jeff Bridges.
Hitler got too frisky in his efforts to seize assets without paying for it, and eventually the Brits and the 'Murricans blew everything in Germany to bits with high explosives. In order to avoid this outcome, Prof. Dr. Porsche and his family designed tanks instead of air cooled cars with the engines hanging off'n their butts. They found it a little more convenient to avoid hot death dropping from the skies and moved their little operation to far Eastern Austria.
The 'Murricans thought that they could gain a leg up on 500 years of European colonial domination by rebuilding Europe, and so threw more money at Germany than they had previously thrown high explosives. Thinking that they had some say in the matter, the French, the Brits and the Russians took possession of different parts of Germany, and the Porsche family was involuntarily split into two geographic groups - northern and south-eastern.
Prof. Dr. Porsche and his family gently took control of the Volkswagenwerk, the plans for the KDF car, and the factory with the kind assistance of the government of Lower Saxony. Since they already had the plans for a real car thing, they started building them. This was the Northern part of the family.
Because the tank building part of the family had this nifty factory over in the southeastern part, and because they couldn't run back home to Wolfsburg and surrounds, they created a new company to continue to build Porsche automobiles.
Prof. Dr. Porsche died.
His family, in the grand tradition of the Hiltons, the Vanderbilts and others, fought over the spoils.
Each car company was mostly controlled by descendants of the guy who thought that hanging an engine off of the back of an axle was a great design.
People get confused, thinking that two different sets of folks control these companies - mostly because the Peich line controls the VW company. Peich is a grandson of the aforementioned Prof. Dr. Porsche. Porsche AG has been mostly controlled by Ferry Porsche, who was the son of Prof. Dr. Porsche. Peich is his nephew, the son of his sister.
Since Ferry died, the grandsons (Peich and Ferry the third) have been playing an endless game of "who's got the bigger dick", in which Ferry three attempted to swallow the world's third largest automaker whole with the backing of certain Gulf state oil investors.
Then, the whole economy of the world fainted, and Ferry three couldn't pay the bills on his efforts to "fress" (German for eat, but in the sense that an animal eats) Fow-Vay (German, for VW).
VW now is buying Porsche SE.
So, doesn't this mean that two cousins have blown through over $12,000,000,000 against shareholder interests, the interests of the workers, the franchisees, the ability to design new product, expand into new markets, reduce the costs of their products - just to see who had the bigger weenie?
Someone should take 'em both out back and give them the whacking that they should have each gotten back in the 1950s.
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