JOKE OF THE DAY: Three convicts were on the way to prison.

 

 Three Convicts on Their Way to Prison – A 3,000-Word Saga of Misadventure

Three convicts were on the way to prison. The first was a meticulous man named Harold “The Organizer” McClintock, who, despite being a career criminal, had an obsessive love for lists, charts, and spreadsheets. The second was Benny “The Babbling Bandit” Thompson, a man whose mouth moved faster than his brain and whose stories—true or false—could stretch for hours. And the third was Leo “Lucky Legs” Martinez, a man so chronically fortunate that he had narrowly escaped death or disaster on at least 17 documented occasions, mostly involving improbable coincidences, runaway chickens, and malfunctioning vending machines.

It was a sunny Tuesday morning—or maybe it was a Thursday; Benny couldn’t remember—when the three were herded into a nondescript prison transport van that smelled faintly of rubber, disinfectant, and despair. The vehicle lurched forward, making the kind of creaking noises that suggest that any minute, the entire assembly of bolts, springs, and ill-fated screws could abandon physics entirely.

Harold immediately began organizing the interior. He inspected the seats. “Seat A is misaligned by approximately 2.7 degrees,” he murmured, “which is a violation of ergonomic principles and could increase long-term musculoskeletal risk by… oh, approximately 43% over the course of a five-year incarceration period.”

Benny, meanwhile, was staring out the tiny, barred windows. “Do you ever think about what happens after prison?” he asked. “Like, maybe we could start a podcast or a YouTube channel? ‘Three Convicts and a Van: True Tales from the Asphalt.’” He grinned. “I hear prison wifi is, uh… complicated.”

Leo just shook his head. “You two worry too much. Luck is on my side.” He then proceeded to open a small pocket-sized book of fortunes he had stolen from a magician at a street fair the previous week. He read aloud: ‘Fortune favors the… slightly confused?’

This, naturally, was followed by Benny launching into a 12-minute tangent about the time he tried to predict the lottery numbers based on the lunar cycle and a series of unfortunate pigeons. Harold sighed audibly and began sketching a flowchart of Benny’s story, marking logical inconsistencies with red pen.

As the van bounced along the highway, an unexpected event occurred: a squirrel. Yes, a squirrel, who seemed either incredibly brave or entirely indifferent to the laws of vehicular physics, leapt directly onto the hood of the prison transport van. The driver swerved slightly, honking, while Harold calculated the trajectory of the squirrel’s jump in precise Newtonian terms.

“According to my calculations,” Harold said, “the squirrel will land approximately 14.3 meters to our left, assuming constant velocity and no air resistance, which, frankly, is unrealistic, but it’s a reasonable approximation.”

Leo, on the other hand, simply shrugged. “See? Luck. That squirrel didn’t hit us. Couldn’t plan that if you tried.”

Benny, however, was already narrating the squirrel’s backstory: “This squirrel, I bet, is named Squeaky McNutface. He was abandoned as a baby and raised by a family of chipmunks. That’s why he’s got such… charisma.” Harold groaned.