Though the event went largely unremarked upon at the time, a report published Monday by the Kaiser Family Foundation has found that the apocalypse, or end of the world, occurred three years ago….

Heh–read it all.

Watch it all (Hat tip: Selimah Harmon)

Following a recent survey of over 3,000 of our cabin crew, we’ve compiled a selection of the strangest, most unusual requests received over the years. Topping the poll for popularity are “Please can you open the window?” and “Can you show me to the showers?” but the survey also revealed a few, what can we say, unique examples”¦

“An elderly gentleman who couldn’t sleep in Upper Class first asked for a sleeping pill. When I explained we didn’t have these on board he then asked if the captain could turn the noise down. When I asked what noise he meant, he replied “The noise out there!” “Do you mean the engine?” I asked. “Yes, yes the engine!” I was speechless at first and in the end just replied “We can’t do that Sir, we need the engine to stay airborne”¦””

Read it all.

Marriage is very difficult. It’s like a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle, all sky.

–Cathy Ladman, as cited in Reader’s Digest, August 2011 edition, page 173

Read it all–Heh.

STUCK from Joe Ayala on Vimeo.

According to a new report from the National Institute for Safety Management, on any given day, the average American’s life is entrusted to more than 2,000 different people who are complete strangers.

The report, which shows how any one of these anonymous individuals making a single mistake can easily cause another person’s death, concluded that it is only through sheer luck that anyone ever makes it through a 24-hour period alive.

Read it all.

Recently some people stuck a needle into my arm, then put me into a tightly confined space and ordered me to hold my breath repeatedly for nearly an hour. This was not an abduction; I paid them to do these things to me.

Why? I’ll tell you why: karma.

Karma is the ancient Indian belief that what goes around comes around. For example, if you kill a mosquito, that mosquito’s soul will be angry at you, and it will wait patiently ”” for decades, if necessary ”” for the chance to be reincarnated as the Comcast customer-service representative you reach by phone when your cable goes out during the Super Bowl. You’ll know it’s the mosquito, because there will be a slight whine in the representative’s voice when he tells you he’s placing you on hold.

Read it all.

Watch it all.

Watch it all.

From the NPR blurb:

Humor writer Barry has been churning out comedy for more than 25 years, authoring hundreds of columns and more than 30 books. He won a Pulitzer prize in 1988 (which, for us, is what finally legitimized the Pulitzers….)

Take the time to listen to it all–absolutely hilarious (just under 12 minutes).

See what you make of the list.

I’m sorry for putting all that Ex-lax in your milk last year, but I wasn’t sure if you were real. My Dad was really mad.

–Bri, age 7, via emailsanta[dot]com, as quoted in Reader’s Digest, December 2010/January 2011 edition, p. 181

In these darkening days between Hanukkah and Christmas, here is a story to keep your spirits high ”” a story of cooperation between Jews and Christians, between people named Seinfeld and Samberg and people named Morgan and Lohan. A story of celebrities putting ethnic differences aside to raise money for charity.

By making fun of ”” or is that gently teasing? ”” Jews….

Read it all.

One Sunday morning an elderly woman walked into a local country church. The friendly usher greeted her at the door, “Good morning, ma’am. Where would you like to sit?”

“The front row, please,” she replied.

The usher said, “You don’t want to do that. We have a visiting preacher today who is really boring.”

The woman[,] bristling at the comment, asked, “Do you know who I am?”

The usher said, “No, ma’am, who are you?”

She replied “I am the preacher’s mother!”

The usher asked, “Do you know who I am?”

She said, “No.”

He said, “Good.”

–William J. Carl III, The Lord’s Prayer Today (Westminister: John Knox Press, 2006), p.85

This is hysterical and well worth the time–listen to it all (just over 12 minutes).

Read it all.

Jay Leno on undecided voters: “Do we vote for the people who got us into this mess, or the people who can’t get us out of this mess?”

Check it out-heh.

The four-hour [Union Theological Seminary] session, “Humor in Ministry,” was a kind of seminar in how to do stand-up for God.

The workshop’s leader, the Rev. Susan Sparks, pastor of the Madison Avenue Baptist Church on East 31st Street, moonlights as a nightclub comedian. Her adjunct for the day was another stand-up comic with whom she sometimes works, Rabbi Bob A. Alper, who bills himself as “the only practicing rabbi in the world doing stand-up comedy intentionally.”

Ms. Sparks and Rabbi Alper, invited as part of the seminary’s “field-based” program to teach some of the intangibles of ministry not covered in the divinity curriculum, surveyed the arc of potentially humorous situations ”” including weddings, funerals and long, hot summer days when even the sermonizer can lose the thread of a sermon.

They discussed the often-overlooked humor in some passages of the Bible, including Jesus’ use of irony and exaggeration, and the ribaldry in the Book of Esther.

Read it all.

AIRPORT-INDUCED IDENTITY DYSPHORIA Describes the extent to which modern travel strips the traveler of just enough sense of identity so as to create a need to purchase stickers and gift knick-knacks that bolster their sense of slightly eroded personhood: flags of the world, family crests, school and university merchandise…..

Read it all.

From satirical site Lark News:

After spending $2,000 to upgrade his church’s sign, and fighting the board for the money, pastor Chad Thomas was chagrined to see the word “church” spelled incorrectly.

“My secretary was gone that day and I’m not much of a speller ”” it’s my fault,” he says. “I signed off on the final copy.”

Read the whole piece.

–An actual Kansas City Star headline courtesy of the WSJ’s Best of the Web

“This is the holy grail of artificial intelligence,” said project director Kate Tillman, explaining that the robot instantly performs millions of computations to ensure feelings of unresolved anger and simmering resentment remain deeply buried within its complex circuitry. “We felt we were on the right track when we brought up a personal shortcoming and it paced around the lab muttering, but when it started breaking eye contact and changing the subject, we knew we had accomplished something revolutionary.”

Heh. Read it all.

That theater, and improv in particular, can make a company or employee more competitive is not a particularly new idea. But what may be surprising is such training has not lost favor during the recession.

Ward has taught corporate and professional classes for 10 years. The recession has not been easy, but he points out: “I’m a for-profit arts organization that has kept the doors open through three of the worst years I’ve seen in my lifetime.”

Indeed, there appears to be enough demand to go around. Transactors Improv Co., also in Carrboro, has long offered what Greg Hohn calls applied improv classes. Hohn, Transactors’ executive and artistic director, also teaches the class at UNC’sKenan-Flagler Business School for MBA students.

Read it all.