Post stuff that makes me smile

http://graphjam.com/2008/09/10/song-chart-memes-handcuff-usage/

made me smile.

I’m smiling a lot because some very nice things have happened to me yesterday:

I won two awards at work.
My wife’s business is going very well.
And my mother did something extremely nice for us, financially.

It feels like things are coming together and we won’t have to worry quite as much about money, and can get away from the whole paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle.

Thank you, God. And Mom.

While in Iowa on Monday visiting relatives, we stopped by a local shoe store and found the greatest walking shoes on sale. They’re so darn comfortable, I’m going to take a walk!

This weekend we watched The Night Listener with Robin Williams and Toni Collette. It’s based on a true story by Armistead Maupin. A well-done film, Hitchcockian in places.

In the DVD extras, Maupin says this:

“We live in a world today where people are in virtual relationships all the time, and have constructs about the other person that are often more about what we need than what that person actually is. And we fool each other by mutual consent in order to get what we want.”

It made me think about all my virtual relationships here at 43T, and I smiled.

I was looking at some historical materials, and smiled when I saw that near the end of Prohibition, there was a sign in my town that said:

“What this country needs is good beer and confidence.”

75 years later, its still generally true, though I fear some of our leaders have a bit too much confidence in the rightness of their cause.

I love my Onion. It always makes me smile. Here’s today’s chuckle:

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago’s School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.

“On topics from evolution to the environment to gay marriage to immigration reform, we found that many of the opinions expressed were so off-base and ill-informed that they actually hurt society by being voiced,” said chief researcher Professor Mark Fultz, who based the findings on hundreds of telephone, office, and dinner-party conversations compiled over a three-year period. “While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don’t have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them.”

In 2002, Fultz’s team shook the academic world by conclusively proving the existence of both bad ideas during brainstorming and dumb questions during question-and-answer sessions.

Professor Sees Parallels Between Things, Other Things

AUSTIN, TX—University of Texas professor Thom Windham once again furthered the cause of human inquiry in a class lecture Monday, as he continued his longtime practice of finding connections between things and other things, pointing out these parallels, and then elaborating on them in detail, campus sources reported.

“By drawing parallels between things and other, entirely different things, I not only further my own studies, but also encourage young minds to develop this comparative methodology in their own work,” said Windham, holding his left hand up to represent one thing, then holding his right hand up to represent a separate thing, then bringing his hands together in simulation of a hypothetical synthesis of the two things. “It’s not just similarities that are important, though—the differences between things are also worth exploring at length.”

Fifteen years ago, Windham was awarded tenure for doing this.

At a meeting this afternoon, my boss kept making jokes about sandwiches. Seems another office in my company provided sandwiches for some rescue workers, which is usually nothing to laugh about, but it is somehow if you know the people in the other office.

Item by item as we went through the meeting, he kept mentioning sandwiches until the joke got really old.

But I kept smiling with each sandwich joke. Because whenever somebody says sandwiches, I think of something else worth smiling about.

I have no idea where they came from, but I’m happy to have them.

I’ve been hovering in the lower to mid 30s for quite some time, but never higher than 35 until today. Now I’m at 37.

(Small potatoes compared to some of you, but I’ll take all I can get.)