* April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four. - Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894
* Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed. - Mark Twain
* A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool, usually has his suspicions. - Anonymous
* Politicians never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge. - Thomas Reed
* Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. - Chinese Proverb
* Don't approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool from any side. - Jewish Proverb
Hike on over to The Social Poets to enjoy a funny video, funny photos, and - I totally guarantee you haven't seen this fashion outfit - it's the weirdest fashion statement yet. Not even Lady Gaga wore this crazy thing! :)
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From Denny: Pull out the tissues because you are going to need them! If you are not crying your eyes out, wondering if you emptied out the tears reservoir, then you need to watch the hour long special of this story. Yes, it's that good. If you are in need of having your faith restored in the goodness of strangers, then this story is for you. These ordinary people will astound, amaze and delight your heart.
The entire town of Grafton, Wisconsin came to the aid of a single mother battling breast cancer who has 13 year old triplets. Two of those triplets are seriously ill with a life long degenerative disease and are already now in wheelchairs. They needed so much. A whole town of neighbors, many who lost their homes and their jobs, came together to help the Longoria family remodel their home so the kids could get around in wider halls and larger spaces.
It's quite an amazing story of what spiritual development is really all about: helping someone else when you have lost so much. There is a man in the process of losing his home because he's been out of work for two months. Yet he came and volunteered every day to renovate the house. There is a hotel owner who gave the family free rooms for the entire time it took to renovate the house.
There is an AIDS charity CEO, living on 40% less income now and facing an uncertain personal financial future, who showed up to organize and raise funding - cheerfully. Another story is of a mother who lost her son 19 years ago and today came to be the interior designer for this family's renovated home. She said this is the first time she has not felt emotional pain since the death of her child.
This first video is a clip that was featured on the news. The other video clips tell the story. The full story and more links are at Dateline and it's an hour show worth watching. It reminds me of a real life story to match the famous Christmas movie, "It's a Wonderful Life." What's so much fun about this story of giving is how the giving rolled into something bigger than the project itself. People got into the spirit of giving and the joy was contagious, drawing thousands of people to volunteer during construction or to help fund the project.
A Circle of Hands is a poem written by one of the volunteers to remember the "Hometown Heroes" project that healed the town.
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From Denny: This funny polar bear says it all: Whew! Time to take it easy after a long harsh winter!
If you are a blogger like me with the Blogger platform at blogspot.com, and you haven't already heard about it since it came out a couple of weeks ago, you might want to check out this new feature from Blogger: Blogger in Draft. I spent the entire weekend playing around with the possibilities and decided to change over to this new dashboard and template offerings.
Blogger has come out with some outstanding new templates and the ability to widen margins of all your columns to imitate the old stretch template or create your own ideas of what appeals to you. Be as creative as you like! Read that as embedding videos and cartoons will now work better. Before, if you had a background from somewhere else - like I was doing - you had to reduce the width of your template down to the Minima template offered by Blogger. Then you could not run the cartoons at all as they were chopped off on the right side.
You now have many choices of how to arrange your columns just like a newspaper. There is a good variety of stunning backgrounds from which to choose - and believe me I've been choosing all this weekend for 12 blogs! :) I would like to see them expand their background choices in various colors and genre but what they have offered so far is plenty for most bloggers.
What am I still looking for from Blogger? To the folks at Blogger: I'm looking for more seasonal choices that have a sophisticated look, peaceful or spiritual, as opposed to just fun or downright cheesy. Backgrounds tailored to writing, poetry, art and literature other than the standard stack of books would be great - like beautiful calligraphy pens and parchment papers, stylized handwriting or fonts offered on the background and for the blog. You might want to consider backgrounds of America's cities like New Orleans and others for those of us with regional food blogs.
I'd also like to see the ability to post headlines and 200 word summary excerpts of up to 10 posts per page so people could easily choose what they want to read much like Wordpress already offers. Scrolling at the top of the page or at the header of the most recent posts would be cool like you see at newspaper sites online. Dreamer, that's me! So far, Blogger is on a roll so keep up the good work, guys! Oh, and if you could ever get that Google Connect or Followers Gadget to work with Google AdSense ads on the same page it would be much appreciated too.
On to the posts of the week and a few extra recipe posts from the past two weeks in case you missed anything good! :) Finally got caught up over at my science blog this weekend with some interesting stories so be sure to check out their offerings. Please bookmark this post to catch up on all the interesting news, great recipes and beautiful photography in our world! :) Enjoy...
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From Denny: Cartoonists had a field day when the Health Care Reform bill passed, most of them in favor. They even did a special section on the issue of health care and past Presidents. While most of us in America and outside America, especially rightfully so very self-righteous Canada who rolls their eyes at this excuse for national health care, well, we all are under-whelmed at what was finally passed. Everyone in America is holding our collective breath to see how this actually plays out.
Read that as "So, who gets screwed first?" Hopefully, it's the stingy rich who have screwed over the middle class from two stolen Presidential elections, Big Banks screwing over homeowners on their mortgages and charging outrageous high interest rates on their credit cards, a rigged stock market and collusion among oil and gas companies to continue to price gouge the public at the gas pump.
I would hope the Obama administration does not take its eye off the ball here and continues to pass legislation or issue Presidential directives or whatever it takes to fine tune the American health care system. Right now all this bill has accomplished is to hold it together with some semblance of order by using crazy glue. Not including the public option was a serious error. Congress will need to revisit that idea within a few years as the Baby Boomer generation starts aging rapidly.
There is no excuse to see young families living in shelters or past war veterans living under bridges because the cost of living has risen more rapidly and continually in relation to what jobs are paying - primarily from greedy insurance companies escalating car, home, business and health insurance premiums.
Just this week cartoonists have began to hammer the religious sex scandals, especially Pope Benedict. It's interesting to see Karma come back to roost on the Church's former Enforcer of the Faith. Read that as "the worm has turned." His harshness from past decades and a cavalier attitude toward the abused has brought abuse to roost up close and personal. The people who continue to enable abuse in any organization need to be arrested, tried and jailed as much as the actual abusers in my book. There is no excuse why a child anywhere in the world does not have the right to reasonably expect safety from murderers and sexual deviants during their growing up years.
China continues to demand internet search engines like Google censor their searches. Read that as that government does not want their citizens to finally figure out just how much they are being lied to. Pssst! Guess what, China, I think they already know. No one is that stupid or naive.
Oh, yeah, and Karl Rove's rich handlers paid him to write yet another Book of Lies about the Bush years, hoping to avoid future prosecution for high crimes and misdemeanors. Speaking of misdemeanors, remember those Republicans who committed a felony by bugging the federal office of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu in my home state? Well, the fix is in with all those Republican conservative judges Bush and Cheney put in place and the deal was made to knock the felony down to a misdemeanor for the son of a federal judge. Our government at work, our corrupt government left in place by corrupt Republicans. And they still own the Supreme Court with their favorite puppets Chief Justice Roberts (the biggest suck-up I've ever seen. Oh, excuse me, the GOP calls it "ambitious.") and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito.
And, in the news every week now, because the media so loves their exaggerated villains and wingnuts to get people to tune in and watch or read the news, is that weirdo Tea Party. I've provided a link to a news story over at Dennys Global Politics at the end of this post for you to see the latest weirdness coming from that sector.
You will love these cartoons as they are outstanding this week, enjoy! Let me know what's on your mind...
*** ALSO be sure to check out the latest weird news about the Tea Party over at Dennys Global Politics. It's the last story in the post. You will also enjoy the funny short video of the comics reviewing the news of the week:
*** THANKS for visiting, feel welcome to drop a comment or opinion, enjoy bookmarking this post on your favorite social site, a big shout out to awesome current subscribers – and if you are new to this blog, please subscribe in a reader or by email updates!
From Denny: Check out the latest Cheeky Quote Day over at The Social Poets! Here are a few of the funny quotes:
