The following came to me from Jack Holifield and are attributed to Bill Gates in a speech the Microsoft founder delivered at a high school graduation ceremony. More on that later.

1. Life is not fair -- get used to it.

2. The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

3. You will not make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss.

5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for flipping burgers: they called it opportunity.

6. If you mess up, it's not your parents fault, so don't whine about your mistakes learn from them.

7. Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

10. Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Okay, here's the rest of the story. These words are not from Gates. According to snopes.com, these words are from Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write Or Add by Charles J. Sykes.

The website points out there are three other rules that commonly get left off the list when it has been circulated on the Internet. I've abbreviated them here.

12. Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic.

13. You are not immortal.

14. Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school's a bother and life is depressing. But someday you'll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You're welcome.

Gates might wish he had said these, although snopes notes they don't necessarily sound like something he would say, they are pretty good rules to learn and the earlier the better.

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Along those lines

"Lazy spring afternoons create a perfect backdrop for the recall of nostalgic things that if you get to thinking about, you actually miss. Sounds likes the crash of a heavy hammer on an anvil that rang so loudly you could hear it all over town, the booming of the old courthouse clock and the shrill voices of children out for afternoon recess.

"Perhaps there was never an institution that did more to simplify living. In these days and times if Junior's tricycle goes haywire, you go to the bicycle shop, if the electric iron won't heat you go to the electric shop, everything specialized to a point… When we had the old blacksmith shop the solution was simple, all you had to do was take it to one place and no matter whether it was wood, iron or steel, it would be fixed.

"The versatility of this open building that housed a system of overhead pulleys and shafts, all of them driven by an antiquated one cylinder engine could not be matched today any place and when they fixed anything they meant for it to stay fixed for the rest of your life.

"If anything broke down in the shop they did not wait for weeks until the coal strikes and steel strikes were over to secure a repair, they just pitched in and made it themselves. Perhaps it was a bit more crude than anything they could have ordered but it served the purpose and there was no sales tax on it."

That item was from the April 14, 1950 edition of the DD, courtesy of our unofficial, but much appreciated historian, Vivian Helton. Perhaps the most interesting part of the blurb was the note about no sales tax being charged.

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A break

For the last couple of weeks we've had a little fun at the expense of Ralph Heman making his guest appearance as a walk-up cast member of a play in Memphis. It sounds like he had a lot of fun and his friends and neighbors who saw him on stage also got a kick out the show as well.

Bud Hunt is the publisher of the Daily Dunklin Democrat.