Take, for example, a blurb in today’s Washington Post about the discovery of 200 sewing needles in the body of a 2-year-old boy. The brief failed to reveal how the needles got there or what prompted the probe that lead to their discovery.

Nonetheless, the idea of sewing needs stuck every which way in your body is bizarre. Thank God doctors said they’d be able to remove most of them.

I also can’t get over the two Northwest Airlines pilot who were completely oblivious that they had overshot the Minneapolis airport by 100 miles. What were they thinking?

How bad movies get made and bad books get published also continue to astound me as well as common sense that’s trumped by guys who can’t keep their dick in their pants. I guess I’m sounding like my mother.

But the affairs of your organs rarely become affairs of the heart that last like an eternal flame.

Then there is Time magazine’s decision to name Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke as “Person of the Year” for 2009.

What were they thinking?

While the lasting impact of his decisions as Fed chairman catapulted him into first place, I think that the editors should have chosen the American people as “Persons of the Year” for 2009.

Surely, the decisions of this government—and let’s not leave out the Bush administration—will have a lasting impact on the future of Americans.

While many of us will continue to work past retirement and be forced to forgo a villa for a van, you can bet Bernanke will close out his reign with publishing houses clamoring for his autobiography and speaking engagement requests filling his inbox.

But life will continue to recycle stories that teeter on  bizarre and unfairness whether we like it or not.

Take the game of peek-a-boo. As a child, you hide your eyes, and if you’re really annoying pop up in front of a stranger’s airline seat and say, “Peek-a-boo.”

The other person is supposed to smile and engage with you, when in reality they’d rather put a paper bag over your head.

As you grow up, you begin hiding other things. Alcohol and sex come to mind. For me, I didn’t hide either because, well, I didn’t have sex as a teenager and my mom served me champagne for my 16th birthday.

But I know my brother got into a lot of trouble for sneaking booze and getting drunk one night.

A new phase of hiding emerges in adulthood. When I was married and my kids were toddlers, my husband and I would engage in what we called prison sex—meaning we’d sneak away from the children to an unoccupied part of the house and get it on.

Generally, sex in a hurry is no good, particularly if you’re the partner with the vagina. Still, this arrangement transformed the act. In your own bed, you make love. Hidden in the basement where you could be discovered any time, you f—ck hard and fast. And that’s not bad, either.

If you’re not hiding things at home, you’re hiding them at the office. When you’re tired of the daily grind, you can take a break and search online for presents, books or vacations, particularly if your computer monitor is hidden from view.

While employees hide behavior that wouldn’t be condoned by their superiors, employers are just as guilty.

In the wave of massive layoffs, do you think employers gave employees two weeks notice? In most cases, employers hide an impending layoff. There is no advance warning. They act swiftly to move ‘em out as fast as possible and terminate access to all accounts.

While employers can hide a layoff, they can’t hide the damage it does to families and this nation.

GEICO has changed the public’s perception of cavemen. They’re not stupid but hairy urban bachelors with enough brains to use the Internet.

I would love for the feds to change the perception of my net worth and credit score. After all, there’s billions of unspent bailout money to employ me, pay my mortgage and maybe give me a bonus night out at the Days Inn. Hey, I’m not asking for a stay at the Mandarin.

Of course, I can imagine that happening as much as seeing Raquel Welch reprise her fur-bikini role as Loana in One Million Years B.C. Taglines: “Travel back through time and space to the edge of man’s toxic mortgages…discover a savage Wall Street whose only law was greed!” and “This is the way it is.”

If cavemen exist in today’s society, as GEICO claims, it makes me wonder how they did it. Did they become unethical and pilfer rocks, food, and water from one another so they could stay warm and eat? Isn’t that called survival?

In today’s society, if you lie on your resume or income statement to get food stamps or take advantage of some other kind of government assistance, that’s called unethical behavior, or in the eyes of the law—fraud.

To me, that raises the question: When does unethical behavior becomes survival behavior?

Through writing Girl on the Brink, I met an ethics expert. (Fate has a strange way of introducing me to people when guilty feelings about how I’m surviving this economic downturn overwhelm me.)

I learned that moral principles stem from neither philosophy nor religion. They are inferred from life like grammar and logic are inferred from language and discourse. Similarly, they also function as conditions for making sense of things.

He says, “Morality is the grammar of life. Some will never learn it; others will choose to ignore it, when convenient. But ever at a cost, and the cost, ultimately, is the inability to make sense of the life we are living.”

How enlightening.

Cavemen survived with at least four basic skills. They could build a fire and find water, shelter and food. (Raquel also had a razor or a very sharp stone.)

Modern man must also possess these skills to survive. But we have more choices that pressure us to do bad things. When primitive cro-magnons roamed the Earth, I think they lived with less temptation.

If they didn’t, would there have been a Ken Lewis of the savanna? Ken, for those of you who have stopped reading the financial pages, is Bank of America’s outgoing boss who will pocket a pension of $53 million in December.

I believe that cavemen had a simpler, more moral life. No toxic mortgages. Just more rocks you could shake a stick at, and there were plenty of those, too.

Ann Powers Appears on Fox Business Happy Hour to Discuss the Manifesto.

ANN’S NOTE: I decided to post the manifesto early given the outpouring of support and response I received from my appearance on the Fox Business Happy Hour yesterday. Tune in to NPR affiliate the Louisiana Radio Network at 10:45 AM EST on Labor Day to hear me speak more about it. Read the manifesto through Labor Day.

Manifesto of the Idle Workers of the World

We are more than 15 million individuals in the prime of our lives who have lost our place in the world of work. We call upon our representatives on Capitol Hill to help us directly, rather than assisting our institutions first in the hope that their recovery might also bring us along.

We declare ourselves too big to fail. But we are being pushed by circumstance from the comfortable middle-class to the terrified middle-class, and from the working poor to the hopeless poor. We have lost our savings, retirement, and, in many cases, our monthly income to sustain our lives. We fear homelessness and a loss of stability as we struggle with rebuilding our assets.

We can and will help ourselves. We take jobs for which we are over qualified. We work longer hours. We work odd jobs. We downgrade our lifestyles. We deny our children their birthday gifts and vacations. We try to educate ourselves to the options for cure and take positive steps every day.

But still our financial standing degrades, and we feel the journey of recovery will be long, and we will cry and stumble.

Despite the names chosen by officialdom to describe us, we are not displaced, dislocated, discouraged, disadvantaged, disaffected or disgruntled.

Instead, we are disappointed and disillusioned that the financial condition of our households is of secondary consideration to the economic stabilization of huge Wall Street financial firms, curiously declaring their own recovery just months after calling themselves near death.

Last month, six of the seven biggest financial institutions reported quarterly profits that surpassed expectations, despite deteriorating loans on many of their balance sheets. Many of us, however, teeter closer to foreclosure, find ourselves in distressed sales or evicted from our homes.

We are distressed that the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has money to keep us unemployed for longer but not to get us back to work. In July, one in three unemployed individuals were jobless for 27 weeks or more. And, the number of workers who have stopped looking for a job rose to 796,000, up 335,000 over the past 12 months.

We feel disrespected that our government has committed trillions of dollars to get the nation moving again. Yet, we can see no change in our own daily lives.

Has any of this $1.5 trillion bought a single Happy Meal for an unhappy family? Has it sent the creditors that hound us by telephone into silence by making a mortgage or credit card payment for us? Has it bought us groceries or paid the utility or insurance or tax bills? Has it paid for our health insurance?

On this Labor Day, we declare that we are lost, lonely and forgotten, but that we vow to become loud, united and forceful so we will claim our rightful place at the center of the political debate. The body politic is seriously diseased if those of us who have been the very backbone of U.S. prosperity can be left without direct assistance when we are facing the loss of our homes, careers and all the possessions we need to maintain a safe home for our children.

Patience is no longer the order of the day. There is a rabble to be roused, virtual signs to be made and held up, marches, petitions, visits, phone calls and every manner of communications used to say to the public authorities now it is our turn. Now you must save us.

I knew it when I read his online profile, but I was seduced by the thought of exploring a relationship with a man who shared my passion for sailing. He could have had another passion as long as he wouldn’t take mine away.

When I finally confronted him and he admitted the ruse, I felt as misled and betrayed as I did in my former job.

On my last day of work, my boss emailed me to set up an appointment in her office to discuss an analysis I had written about an online service the company was thinking of using. She had never called me in her office before. Then, an hour later, the company’s top dog delivered the news of my layoff.

My ex portrayed himself as Hank at the Helm and didn’t include any pictures until I called him on that. You can’t do the online dating thing without pictures. Even without the pictures, I recognized his writing style. That happens after you’ve been with someone for a while—you discover their “voice” in words. But I kept playing along.

For the next few days, he emailed me several times, revealing more of his backstory, which had a striking resemblance to mine. He told me he had a 9-year-old daughter named Halle. I had a 9-year-old son (now 10), and my mother wanted to name me Halle.

He also said he was a divorced lawyer living in a big house in Potomac.

Three other tip-offs that made me suspicious. He began to discuss his fantasies with me online (so inappropriate) and refused to give me his phone number when I said I had to talk to him first before meeting him at a restaurant. I played along for a few more emails. He also described himself as Christian when his picture showed features more aligned with being Jewish.

I asked him about his sailboat, thinking I’d trip him up, but he’s a smart rascal and did some research to describe his boat as a Hans Christian sloop (one mast). He at least could have chosen a world-class boat. The tête-à-tête ended when he fessed up after I continued to confront him.

The ruse gave him a fantasy that pleased him, just like the fake meeting with my boss filled me with the expectation that I had pleased her. At  least my ex had the balls to deal with me in person when I asked him if he was Hank, while my boss did the sheepish thing when I got laid-off. She hid in her office.

As a matter of fact, I’m going to reference the same scripture as Sanford. His choice of words were so good. To wit,

“David failed, literally, and yet he constructed his life, put it back together and became a guy who was after God’s spirit. So I would say I’m on the larger voyage. I won’t say anything definitive. My hunch would be that it’s a good example with regard to my boys—if you fall down in life, that you get back up. I think it’s a good example from the standpoint of the larger voyage of humility.”

In case you’ve flown somewhere special to see your lover, Sanford confessed last week that he flew to Buenos Aires to make love to María Belén Chapur, 43, an executive with Bunge & Born, an Argentinian grain trading and food dynasty—behind his wife’s back.

I’m not sure quoting scripture will be good enough to redeem Sanford, but why should it matter, now that he’s become a “celebrity.” You can bet that NBC will come a callin’ to put him on that awful show, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.  The show just ended with the crowning of you-don’t-see-him-anymore-actor Lou Diamond Phillips as the “king of the jungle.”

He beat 11 contestants, including Patti Blagojevich, who stood in for her husband and disgraced Illinois ex governor, Rod Blagojevich. A federal judge ordered him not to appear on the survival-style reality show set in a Costa Rican jungle because of his misbehavior. Blago’s dick didn’t make a bad decision like Sanford’s: His brain did when he got caught attempting to sell Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder.

So if Sanford does lose his job, I hope NBC will recruit both of us for I’m Unemployed, Get Me Out of Here. Since “here” is everywhere for us laid-off and fired folk, how about sending us to Chaco, the “majestic jungle” of Argentina. Chaco’s vegetation is interrupted by estuaries, lagoons, steamy rivers and what is known as “The Impregnable of Chaco.” Why, that’s got to be me. Hey, do me. Me, me, me…..tenga sexo conmigo!

For me, I’d never steal from a store. Too risky, and the punishment is real, unlike what’s happened to the corporate pirates on Wall Street.

A stupid college friend of mine got caught shoplifting at a G.C. Murphy five and dime (now out of business). She stole, of all things, tools, and I don’t remember which kind she told me. She might have gotten away with it if she hadn’t tried to remove the packaging.

That experience, which she did for the thrill of it, landed her behind bars for a few hours until a friend bailed her out. She said she felt humiliated, ashamed and that she has kept this a secret, especially from prospective boyfriends. Who’d want to date a thief?

I’m not so sure why she should still feel guilty about it now, given all I read in the paper about Wall Street greed, which I find to be the epitome of money, ego and power.

I know others who cheat on their unemployment insurance. They don’t like doing it but can’t see any other way out when maintaining what they’ve worked for over their lifetime is paramount, and I’m not talking about folks with mansions. They live in middle-class neighborhoods and send their kids to public school.

As for me, I don’t see any benefits in the new stimulus act coming my way, except for an extra $25 a week in unemployment compensation. Like so many Americans who are out of work, we need immediate help because we are either still losing our homes to foreclosure or feel as if we’re about to.

Getting fired made me as so angry. You want to stomp your feet and swear your heart out. But I’ve got to agree with more traditional career-advice columnists: You don’t want to do that, especially not online or on Facebook.

The digital breadcrumbs you leave behind your bitching live for what seems to be forever on the Internet. Call your mom, dad, girlfriend, boyfriend, anybody. The point is: Use the telephone for dissing, with one exception. You can post anonymous reviews about companies you’ve worked for on glassdoor.com.  The site promises not to divulge your personal information when you sign up for an account, which amounts to an email address. And it’s cathartic.

You can set up an extra one of those using Google gmail, which is one of the easiest free email services available. Once you submit a review, an actual human being reviews it before it’s posted live to the site.

Before my firing, I hadn’t realized how much a job becomes part of your existence and identity. It can either bring you a sense of pride and self-worth or leave you feeling as valueless as a broken zipper. Mine left me feeling unimportant, disrespected and unchallenged while I was there, and then left me high and dry. I have a family to help support.

Working for others also teaches you lessons. You should heed them on your next job. To wit, here are my 9 Commandments for Starting a New Job.

ONE: You shall keep up your network contacts, even when you land a new job.

TWO: You shall keep your office spartan, though any likeness of your children and significant other is permissible.

THREE: You shall not use company email for personal reasons.

FOUR: Remember the weekend; it is your time off.

FIVE: You shall use a flash drive for any personal computer files.

SIX: You shall not get too friendly with the HR director.

SEVEN: You shall ask the office manager to give you back your change when you lose it in the vending machine.

SEVEN: You shall you use all of your vacation time before the end of the year.

EIGHT: You shall take advantage of every possible employee benefit.

NINE: You shall keep your small-talk high level. Stick with the weather.

Hey, if you can think of one more I’ll add it in. Email me at girlonthebrink@gmail.com