No hard-hitting news, medical or otherwise, has come to the attention of the Poorhouse's massively insightful and genius-like brain today. This is probably mainly because he was semi-conscious working very hard most of the day. No matter, instead you can have some random ramblings, just like the Poorhouse in real life.

Firstly, how to beat Marks and Spencers currency exchange passport rule and no doubt breach international security. Imagine the situation: you need to change your currency quickish so you can get out of the country speedily. So you go into M&S' Bureau de Change and ask for £50 worth of Euros on your debit card. They say you need your passport to do this, but because you are a normal non-insane citizen you do not carry it around with you. What to do? It's raining outside, and you don't want to catch a chill.

The solution is rather simple. After a little debate with the gentleman as to why this is necessary simply wander to the other end of the shop under his beady eye. Blatantly use your debit card to extract £50 of cash from their ATM and head back. Said gentleman will not only do the transaction in an uncomplaining style, but despite the fact you were only away 1 minute and there are no other customers he will inquisitively ask you what you want as if he never saw you before. Note that this trick does not work in other situations: boarding a flight sans passport is significantly more tricky.

Next up, we have another money related story. Borrowing money from sharks disguised as legitimate companies, although not disguised that well to be fair. Total credit - no pun intended or found - to Gemma for her in-depth investigation in such matters and the forwarding of the hilarious link to paydayuk.co.uk. Payday UK is one of the 3 trillion sites out there (yes, the Poorhouse counted them) offering credit in situations where credit should never be offered. To be fair, the humour might just be because they are relatively honest about what they're offering, but it's funny nonetheless - unless of course you have taken "advantage" of their services some might say.

So say you want a nice quick loan pretty much immediately for such unforeseen desperate life-threatening situations as "Take your partner away for romantic weekends" and "Have extra spending money for your holiday", to use a couple of their examples. Annoyingly due to your your bad-credit ridden past, you wouldn't qualify for anything vaguely legitimate that wasn't advertised on channel 5. Go fill in a form and it's yours, so the story goes. The highlight is the charges. Check it:

Now there's one orange button that never needs pressing.

In case this raises feeling of mass incredulity or an assumption of a typing error on their webmaster's site there is a section below that factoid conveniently entitled "I don't understand your APR?" - a more placid version of the internet slang doubleyou tee eff that most cybersurfers would probably exclaim.

Rather than a "yep, neither can we" response, the section gives you a few tables to show what a bargain a 1355% APR actually is. Starting with the phrase "APRs are a good way of comparing similar products but are not effective when comparing different products" it then goes on to do exactly that. This produces such numerical revelations as that borrowing four times the amount of money from a different company for sixty times as long will cost you more in absolute interest. Shocked face.

Despite the fact that the section began bemoaning the inadequacy of comparing different types of products, apparently two paragraphs on "You can also compare a payday loan against an unauthorised overdraft.". Much as the Poorhouse hates banks, the opinion is ventured that there is actually rather a difference between borrowing money from a company who willingly agrees to do so (before owning you for the rest of your life) and just deciding to break terms and conditions to use an organisation's money as though it was your own. The APR on a Payday UK loan is probably also (marginally) less than one could conceivably compute as representing the fine you get after being convicted of stealing from your employer to pay for your goods, but for some reason they seemed to have missed that part of the table off.

Again, here's the numerical proof. Note the use of a tiny amount of overdraft exceedingness used together with a relatively large fixed bank fee to produce a 12 figure APR. This nearly made it into the much underused "funny pictures" album.

To be honest, if you are suffering from such on-the-face-of-it ridiculous bank charges you should try and claim them back anyway. It's worked for many, many people, after the Office of Fair Trading's ruling that "A default charge should only be used to recover certain limited administrative costs".

Please note that this article is not to be taken as a recommendation for using the services of Payday UK or any of its clone company brethren. In case it wasn't clear.

Lastly, let's just look at funny things to take all that financial stress away. Kind of, anyway, because it's actually yet more ridiculous companies trying to sell you yet more ridiculous tat. Nonetheless, the occasionally literal LOL producing website Cracked.com recently featured "The 10 Most Laughably Misleading Ads". And "laughable" is the right word. From the Titty Bear, to a pen to help those of you for whom putting the lid on a normal pen is an eternally painful relentless daily chore, to an "Easy" toothbrush resembling in every way every other toothbrush out there, there are giggles to be had. Once you're done reading that, check out the links to the reviews of the products in questions. Some are almost as hilarious as Amazon's Biro reviews (credit to Kat for the latter, for her presumed pen fascination).