100410- A joke

.....This post is in fact the one hundredth consecutive daily post on this blog. As it becomes increasingly difficult to come up with original ideas on demand, I've noticed that since the fifty day mark that I've been using more long stories and topical jokes. Attributable quotes would be next, I guess, followed by cribbing Bazooka Joe comics and Snapple lids. Of course, I'm even more embarrassed that I haven't used the past seven weeks to nail down these tricky daily anniversary commemorations. For instance, a one hundred year anniversary would be celebrated with a gift of platinum (I think), seventy-fifth with diamond, fiftieth with gold, etc. Of course, once you get below the fortieth (rubies), the traditional list and modern list become radically different. That's because the modern list is a shameless, obvious scam. The later anniversaries are all the same because they're already remembered with precious stones and metals. They're already expensive and besides that, fewer people reach those anniversaries. Between death and divorce, there are far more people reaching their fifth anniversary than their seventy-fifth. The so-called modern list is an attempt to move the more expensive materials to the more common earlier anniversaries: the second anniversary, cotton, becomes china (previously twentieth) on the modern list; the twentieth becomes platinum. Leather becomes crystal, fruit becomes appliances (ooooh, romantic), wood becomes silverware and in an oddly specific turn wool becomes desk sets. This sounds less like a way to renew the bonds in your life and more like a stranger's attempt to empty a crowded warehouse. I say we just skip the pretense and insist that all anniversaries be marked with the elements on the tail-end of the periodic table. Accept nothing with an atomic number less than one hundred. These are the sort of materials whose nuclei are so massive that they can only exist if they're synthesized in a laboratory, and even then they almost spontaneously tear themselves apart. What better way to say that our time together is precious than with something that can't even exist for more than a fraction of a second? And best of all, the process is so expensive it nearly guarantees bankruptcy for most young couples early on, eliminating the need to memorize the rest of these silly lists.