Onion

I subscribe to The Onion podcasts via ITunes. They had an interesting one a few days ago. It was talking about ways to reduce the national debt. One (linked above) a phony coupe and another using the gold reserves to go to a Money4Gold site.

The Onion (for those who don't know) is a satirical news organization. At least they have some ideas unlike a certain president I know of!

“People say satire is dead. It's not dead; it's alive and living in the White House.” Robin Williams

“You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.” Art Buchwald

“Satire should, like a polished razor keen, Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen”
Mary Worley Montagu

SATIRE, (n) An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author's enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness. In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient, the humor that we mistake for it, like all humor, being tolerant and sympathetic. Moreover, although Americans are "endowed by their Creator" with abundant vice and folly, it is not generally known that these are reprehensible qualities, wherefore the satirist is popularly regarded as a soul-spirited knave, and his ever victim's outcry for codefendants evokes a national assent.
Hail Satire! be thy praises ever sung
In the dead language of a mummy's tongue,
For thou thyself art dead, and damned as well --
Thy spirit (usefully employed) in Hell.
Had it been such as consecrates the Bible
Thou hadst not perished by the law of libel.
Barney Stims (DD)

Laugh

One of my favorite things to do is to make my wife laugh.  I like to see humor in every situation.  My ravings here seem to be rather negative lately.

My humor is take the situation to a limit.  One example; after our previous pastor commented that the church is free that we don't charge for communion; I manufactured a "church" where the communion was charged for by the flavor of it (rice cakes & water - $1; steak & wine - $10); where the pews in the back were priced like the box seats in baseball games & the pews up front were like the bleachers; where pillows & reclining seats were extra but folding chairs were less.

I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose. ~Woody Allen

Even if there is nothing to laugh about, laugh on credit.

A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book. ~Irish Proverb
Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on. ~Bob Newhart

Seven days without laughter makes one weak. ~Mort Walker
A laugh is a smile that bursts. ~Mary H. Waldrip

LAUGHTER, (n) An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable. Liability to attacks of laughter is one of the characteristics distinguishing man from the animals -- these being not only inaccessible to the provocation of his example, but impregnable to the microbes having original jurisdiction in bestowal of the disease. Whether laughter could be imparted to animals by inoculation from the human patient is a question that has not been answered by experimentation. Dr. Meir Witchell holds that the infection character of laughter is due to the instantaneous fermentation of sputa diffused in a spray. From this peculiarity he names the disorder Convulsio spargens.