"WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US"

Pogo

Those of you of a certain political persuasion will agree with this.  Others of you will not.  It was written by a Brit who knows us well.

Yeah, I know I posted cartoons just a couple of days ago, but this one made me laugh out loud.

And while we're on a cat theme ...

Could you pass a citizenship test?  Find out here.  Some of the questions are ridiculously easy for the native-born, but I can see how they might stump the foreign-born.  And with the state of American public education, maybe they're all hard for the younger set.  Many of the questions involve history that I lived through.  It's good to be old ...

I missed four of them.  Let me know how you do.

THIS ONE'S FOR YOU, DAVID

JUST FOR FUN

And because I can't think of anything else

Thanks to Jack B. for this

“In the end, more than freedom, [Athens] wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”

― Historian Edward Gibbon

A DO-IT-YOURSELF ENTRY

You all know what a fan I am of bad writing, and you must be too, else why would you come in here so often, hmmm?  Along those lines, every year I post some "winners" from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest ("where WWW means Wretched Writers Welcome").  As most of you know, this is a contest where bad writing is rewarded, and people write badly on purpose, whereas I do it unintentionally, as witness this very sentence. 

I didn't think this year's winners were all that great (it's possible all the bad writing has already been written, but somehow I doubt it), but if you're interested you can find them here.  I tried copying over the ones I liked, but some reason it won't let me do it.  You're on your own.  You had nothing better to do today anyway.

More info about the origins of the contest can be found here.

We've been following the storm coverage closely because we have family and friends in Pennsylvania.  News about what's happening in PA has been sparse, at least when I've been watching, but I gather from Facebook entries that it hasn't been devastating there.  Most of the coverage is about New Jersey and New York City.  Amidst all the coverage of the disaster on the Jersey shore, I did have to smile a bit when I read this last night from CBS Philadelphia:  "Wind gusts over 60 mph in the city, over 70 mph down the shore."

Down the shore.  When I was growing up in Philadelphia, that's what we always called it - going down the shore.  Never going to the shore, always going down the shore.  (Am I right, Marsha?)  I don't miss Philadelphia at all - it's such a different city than it was in the '40s and '50s - but when I hear that accent and hear something like "down the shore," it sounds like home to me.

The latest issue of Senior Independence News, published by (surprisingly) our county Council on Aging, has a list of comparisons between the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy.  No doubt you've seen such lists over the years.  Since 1963 there has been an attempt to make Kennedy into a Lincoln, but that's not the point of this screed.  What is the point, you might well ask.  This is:  Some of the comparisons are interesting and serious, some are not.  I won't burden you with the whole list, but I did laugh out loud at the last one.

"A week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe, Maryland. A week before Kennedy was shot, he was with Marilyn Monroe."