A 20-year-old boy was lying in bed with an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. Removing the mask, he asked the nurse, ?Are my testicles black?? The young nurse was very embarrassed and said, ?I only came here to give you a bed wash.? The boy removed his mask again and with some difficulty asked, ?Nurse, are my testicles black?? With extreme reluctance, the nurse raised the sheet, lifted up his penis and testicles, examined them and found them to be normal. ?No,? said the nurse. ?Your equipment is perfectly okay.? With a desperate gasp, the boy removed his mask and said, ?Nurse, that was very nice, but are my test results back??

Here is a question taken from the bar exam this year.

Q. What do you call a Supreme Court judge who has lost his thumbs?

A. Justice fingers.

All this trouble with age in the Olympics! First they banned me from the 200-meter hurdles because I am three years over the age limit; then, there were questions whether the young girl gymnasts were 16, just because one was wearing diapers. With not a single medal, the Filipino team asked the London Committee to include graft and corruption in 2012 but this was rejected so they asked for 9-ball pool. It used to be 8-ball but because of 12.2-percent inflation...

A man and his wife went for counseling. When asked what the problem was, the wife went into a passionate, painful tirade listing every problem they had ever had in the 15 years they had been married. She went on and on: neglect, lack of intimacy, emptiness, loneliness, feeling unloved?an entire list of unmet needs she had endured over the course of their marriage.

Finally, after allowing this to go on for a sufficient length of time, the therapist got up, walked around the desk and, after asking the wife to stand, embraced and kissed her passionately as her husband watched. The woman shut up and quietly sat down as though in a daze.

The therapist turned to the husband and said, ?This is what your wife needs at least three times a week. Can you do this??

The husband thought for a moment and then replied, ?Well, I can drop her off here on Mondays and Wednesdays, but on Fridays, I play golf.?

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Forget the day-to-day movements of Wall Street. They are random and meaningless and one should look at the big picture. The whole world is going into recession, not just the United States. They have their special problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have plummeted more than 90 percent this year and stand at just a few dollars, option money. This problem is not going to go away as concern grows about a government bailout, which could cost the taxpayers between $30 billion and $100 billion. Fannie and Freddie are crucial to the housing market because they collectively own or back about $5.2 trillion in mortgages, more than half the nation?s debt.

Allowing them to go bankrupt will precipitate a catastrophic collapse in the housing market, which could last for five years and cause the worst recession since 1929. Ahead of an election, this is not going to happen but the situation is complicated by the fact that a vast amount of insurance has been written with a fair value of $2 trillion.

If the Treasury puts up the money for a huge amount of preferred stocks, then the likelihood of a dividend ever being paid out on the common stock is remote and the stock will become worthless. Fannie and Freddie are currently offering three- and six-month bills to tide them over. Lehman Brothers is looking at a further multimillion-dollar loss in the third quarter ending this month and even Goldman Sachs is looking at a larger write-down. All the financial companies are vulnerable and will remain so. An offer for Lehman Brothers by a Korean bank has been denied.

Now for the more important bigger picture: Europe is going into decline with the United Kingdom leading the way. Its housing market is grossly inflated and is going to fall faster than the United States. There is no Fannie and Freddie, so only the government could intervene and they will be facing an election they will surely lose. The United Kingdom also faces unemployment and inflation at 5.0 percent and the pound is at a two-year low against the dollar. Germany, the biggest European economy, saw its economy contract by 0.5 percent in the second quarter while France, Italy and probably Spain also dropped slightly. So 2009 is going to be much worse than 2008, said the chief economist at an Italian bank. There goes one of America?s main export markets.

What about Japan, the world?s second-largest economy? The Bank of Japan said it has become more pessimistic about the economy and kept rates at its subnormal 0.5 percent. ?Economic growth has become sluggish against the backdrops of high energy and commodity prices plus weaker growth in exports. Wages fell 4 percent and employment slipped for the first time in years so Japan is still stuck in deflation, which is worse than inflation. ?The economy isn?t likely to recover until 2010,? said the Bank of Japan. Its latest GDP figure is minus 0.6 percent.

China remains the only growth engine trying to support the rest of the world and is now the third or fourth largest economy. But even China is slowing down. Last February, industrial production was growing at a blistering rate of 23 percent and inflation was running at 8.7 percent, twice the target rate. Despite the snowstorms and earthquake, production has been rising every month but at a slower rate. In July, industrial output was growing at 15.5 percent and the economy is slowing to a more sustainable level 9-10 percent from 12 percent. On the good side, inflation had declined to 6.3 percent.

However, the slowing is affecting all other countries. For example, nickel ore shipments to China in July plunged 96 percent as lower prices of refined nickel, down from $52,000 a ton to $18,000, and energy shortages cut production of nickel pig iron. Millions of tons of laterite lie waiting at the ports to be unloaded because China has closed its small blast furnaces to save energy. It may well be that now the Olympics have ended factories will start up again. Slower growth would bring under control current shortages. It would also put pressure on commodity prices including oil. This, in turn, would affect Australia, OPEC, Russia, Brazil and other suppliers. The whole world is facing a global slowdown next year and beyond. This is not just my opinion but also that of the IMF, which is predicting that growth in the global economy will slow from 5.0 percent in 2007 to 4.1 percent in 2008. With editing by INQUIRER.net