Advice for young criminals

I always wanted to be a bank robber. That was my big ambition. My little ambition was to be a prison escapee; but only if I couldn’t make it as a bank robber.

Of course, my birthmark posed a problem. See, I have a birthmark on my face that makes it look like I am wearing a stocking over my head. You might think this would make it easier to rob banks, but it’s not. Once the police find out there’s a guy who looks like he has a stocking over his face, every time anyone robs a bank, they’re knocking on your door. ‘Well, you match the description that every eyewitness gave us.’

This makes it hard for me to just go down the shops and get some milk. In fact, my first few robberies were completely by accident. I just walked up to the counter with my birthmark all inflamed and the shopkeeper threw the till at me, screaming ‘Don’t shoot me!’ I suppose it was also because I happened to be holding a toy pistol that I had planned to buy for my cousin’s 10th birthday. I thought about correcting the mistake but, hey, free stuff. Free stuff is the number one motivator for robbers like myself.

This brings me to my first piece of advice for the budding crim: turn negatives into positives. Now, if you’re a scientist this should be fairly easy, but for the rest of you, you’re gonna have to work at it. So if you’ve got a bad leg, use that to play on people’s sympathies. Like ‘Hey man, come on, I’ve got this bad leg. Why don’t you, like, give me all your money?’ If your leg is OK, but hurts a bit from time to time, practice walking with a limp. Remember: when people feel sorry for you, you don’t have to say sorry.

My second piece of advice is also related to legs: walk the walk. When I’ve just robbed a joint, I’m always careful not to give my crime away by the way I walk. That’s the first mistake most criminals make. They think they’ve got away with a crime so they strut. That’s just asking for trouble. All of a sudden you’ve got guys coming up to you saying, ‘Hey, you look like you just robbed a bank. Could you spot me $20?’. I had an uncle whose tax evasion was discovered in the same way.

By the way, you know that saying ‘laughing all the way to the bank’? Well, in real life, it’s the exact opposite. You’ll actually be laughing all the way from the bank, preferably while running.
However, this rule is void if you have a particularly distinctive laugh. Then it’s ‘being silent all the way from the bank’.

This brings us to the third and final lesson: don’t be fooled by common sayings.

Remember that chestnut ‘Crime doesn’t pay’? If you have any kind of aptitude for bank robbing, you should be able to see right through this. Crime doesn’t pay? Really? Oh, then I guess I must have made all this cash money by working for a living! Yeah right. Pull the other one, science face.

And I can’t tell you the number of new thieves that get tricked by that old ‘If you do the crime, you do the time’ saying. The thing they forget is, that only applies if you get caught. It’s imperative that you don’t get caught. In fact, this is so important should have its own heading.

Lesson number 4: Don’t Get Caught.

Now, I know I said the third lesson was the final one, but that was just an illustration of lesson number 5: never trust a criminal.

So, that’s it. Five pieces of advice from an expert criminal. I know that might sound like not much, but who ever said life was meant to be fair? It wasn’t me, and if it was, see lesson number 5.

Happy thieving!

How to be a genius

Ping Pong

It's a good thing someone invented table tennis. Before then I bet the world was just wondering what the hell to do with all those ping pong balls.

Bullies

Sometimes when I see a little kid getting beaten up by bullies I feel like going over there and telling him that one day he'll realise that those beatings made him a stronger, more confident person. But you can't just tell a kid that; they have to learn for themselves. So I usually just go back to the staff room and finish my lunch.

Wig Shop

I had never seen such beautiful hair. I just had to stroke it. ‘Well, I’m in a wig shop; I might as well,’ I reasoned with myself. So I reached out and I grabbed a handful of the gorgeous locks. ‘Please don’t touch me,’ the shop assistant said.

Valid Argument

1. Superman doesn’t tell anybody he is Superman.
2. I don’t tell anybody I am Superman.
Therefore,
3. I am Superman.

Things my Grandpa taught me.

Grandpa was always trying to teach me how to fight like a man, like his father had taught him. But I had only ever been taught how to cook like a man, which didn’t really impress Grandpa.

‘You’re using too much salt!’ he’d say, punching me.

Once we had given up on my recipe for salt-soup, Grandpa would sit me down and explain how things were in the old days. They didn’t call them back then, of course. They just called them ‘days’.

My grandpa was born at the age of zero to a poor family; poor in the sense that they weren’t a good family, not that they didn’t have money. But they didn’t have any money either.

Grandpa told me about how they used to wrap fish and chips in newspaper. Because his family had no money they could only afford to read the news whenever they got fish and chips. He’d look down at his dinner and see, ‘Australia At War!’ smudged onto the side of the snapper. That’s how they came to refer to the news as ‘the snapper.’
One day my great-grandfather came home from the mines and said, ‘Did you see the snapper today? You’re off to war, Sonny Jim!’

My Grandpa’s name wasn’t really Jim; that’s just what his dad called him. They never had a close relationship, so Grandpa never corrected him. This worked to Grandpa’s favour when his dad tried to sell him to some Italian migrants for a pot of spaghetti.

When the Lombardi family showed up in Grandpa’s street looking for him, they accidentally went to the Smiths next door who did have a boy called Jim. So the Smiths got the spaghetti instead and Grandpa’s family went without.

But the joke was on them because everyone knew that Lombardi’s spaghetti tasted like kangaroo shit; or at least it did after my great-grandfather got a job at their restaurant.

Eventually, of course, Grandpa did get sent to war. The men already on the front were disappointed, having expected a model train set to arrive instead. But since Grandpa was already there, they figured they might as well make a model soldier of him.

So Grandpa modeled his way through the war and became quite the pin-up boy. When he came home, a young lady asked him to sign his autograph for her. Not being able to read or write, Grandpa took this as a threat to his manhood and smacked her in the mouth. It was only afterwards that he realised she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, except for the fat lip.

Once the bruises healed, Grandpa married the beautiful lady and that’s how I got my first Grandma. At the wedding reception everyone danced and had a jolly good time, except for the people eating spaghetti, who felt rather sick.

Grandpa never did teach me to fight like a man, but I eventually did get him to try my soup. At the funeral everybody was touched by my eulogy; and all anybody said was, ‘Oh, wasn’t he a gentleman?’ and ‘What a good right hook he had’ and ‘I always told him not to eat so much salt.’