Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Who Ordered a Smear Campaign Against Andrew Cuomo’s First Accuser? - When Lindsey Boylan first publicly accused New York’s governor of sexual harassment, in December, damaging government documents about her were leaked to the press. - link

• L.A.’s Disorganized Vaccination Rollout and the Dream of Universal Health Care - The failures to reach the hardest hit populations are another reminder of how the system neglects so many. - link

• Biden Has Few Good Options for the Unaccompanied Children at the Border - The new Administration is coming under fire for a policy it says protects young migrants. - link

• Why COVID-19 Vaccines Aren’t Yet Available to Everyone - President Biden has promised that all adults will be eligible to receive a vaccine by May. But manufacturing and distributing enough doses will depend on a lot of things going right. - link

• The Cross-Country Skier Jessie Diggins Makes History in a Year of COVID-19 and Climate Change - Diggins, who won a gold medal at the 2018 Winter Olympics, becomes the first American woman to win the World Cup. - link

From Vox

• The difference between the Grammys’ Song, Album, and Record of the Year categories, explained -

  

  Here’s how to keep them straight.

  There are just four categories at the Grammy Awards where artists from all musical genres compete against one another — Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist. In these four races, country artists bump up against R&B musicians, and they both take on pop stars. If an artist wins one of these awards, they’ll make headlines and get to give a nice speech during the awards telecast.

  But the Grammys’ many, many categories are already steeped in confusing industry-speak, and the top four awards are no different. With the exception of Best New Artist, it’s easy to confuse the other three.

  Here’s everything you need to know to keep these categories straight.

  Album of the Year

  The Album of the Year award is the most prestigious Grammy there is, the rough equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar. The category honors an entire LP, from the first track to the last, and everything about the production of the album’s sound.

  Originally, the Album of the Year award went only to the album’s main artist. Today, the album’s producers, sound engineers, mixers, and songwriters are also honored, as are any featured artists who appear on the album. Generally, if you participated in creating a significant portion of the album (defined as at least 33 percent of its playing time), you get a golden gramophone.

  How to remember it: The whole album gets an award! Some people confuse Album of the Year with Record of the Year, since albums used to be on physical records, and the two terms are often used interchangeably in common parlance. But singles also used to be on physical records, and you wouldn’t call a single song “Album of the Year.”

  The 2021 nominees for Album of the Year are:

  Folklore — Taylor Swift

  Future Nostalgia — Dua Lipa

  Women in Music Part III — Haim

  Everyday Life — Coldplay

  Chilombo — Jhené Aiko

  Black Pumas (Deluxe Edition) — Black Pumas

  Hollywood’s Bleeding — Post Malone

  Djesse Vol. 3 — Jacob Collier

  Record of the Year

  Record of the Year is often confused with Song of the Year, since both awards go to individual songs. But the distinction is actually somewhat simple. The Record of the Year honors, first and foremost, the performing artist. Song of the Year honors the songwriter.

  Record of the Year is given to the performing artist, the producers, the sound engineers, the master engineer, and the sound mixers.

  How to remember it: Instead of thinking of “record” as a physical, spinning record, think of it as the product of a recording studio. Everyone who would be in a recording studio working on the Record of the Year–winning song receives a golden gramophone for this award.

  The 2021 nominees for Record of the Year are:

  “Colors” — Black Pumas

  “Black Parade” — Beyoncé

  “Rockstar” — Da Baby feat. Roddy Rich

  “Say So” — Doja Cat

  “Everything I Wanted” — Billie Eilish

  “Don’t Start Now” — Dua Lipa

  “Circles” — Post Malone

  “Savage” — Megan Thee Stallion feat. Beyoncé

  Song of the Year

  The Song of the Year Grammy doesn’t actually honor the performer of the winning song. Instead, it goes to the person or people who wrote the song.

  It’s easy to confuse this award with Record of the Year because there is often overlap in who is accepting the award. For example, if an artist has songwriting credit on their nominated song — a pretty common occurrence — then the artist might accept the award and give the speech. But they are receiving the award for writing and constructing the song’s lyrics and melodies, not for their performance of the song.

  How to remember it: Try to think of it as Songwriter of the Year, rather than just Song.

  The 2021 nominees for Song of the Year are:

  “Black Parade” — Denisia Andrews, Beyoncé, Stephen Bray, Shawn Carter, Brittany Coney, Derek James Dixie, Akil King, Kim “Kaydence” Krysiuk, and Rickie “Caso” Tice (Beyoncé)

  “The Box” — Samuel Gloade and Rodrick Moore (Roddy Ricch)

  “Cardigan” — Aaron Dessner and Taylor Swift (Taylor Swift)

  “Circles” — Louis Bell, Adam Feeney, Kaan Gunesberk, Austin Post, and Billy Walsh (Post Malone)

  “Don’t Start Now” — Caroline Ailin, Ian Kirkpatrick, Dua Lipa, and Emily Warren (Dua Lipa)

  “Everything I Wanted” — Billie Eilish O’Connell and Finneas O’Connell (Billie Eilish)

  “I Can’t Breathe” — Dernst Emile II, H.E.R., and Tiara Thomas (H.E.R.)

  “If the World Was Ending” — Julia Michaels and JP Saxe (JP Saxe Featuring Julia Michaels)

• Hannity says Biden should call Trump and thank him for his Covid response. That’s a stretch. -

  

  Fox News’s absurd reaction to Biden’s primetime coronavirus speech, explained.

  Fox News reacted to President Joe Biden’s primetime announcement that all American adults would be eligible for a coronavirus vaccine by May 1 and the country’s aim is to return to a semblance of normalcy by July 4 by insisting that former President Donald Trump actually deserves the credit. But that claim can’t withstand scrutiny.

  While Trump’s Operation Warp Speed program provided incentives for private companies to speed vaccine development and did directly help Moderna develop an effective vaccine, it’s not necessarily the case that vaccines wouldn’t be available today had it not been for Trump. The first FDA-approved coronavirus vaccine was developed by Pfizer last year without any direct help from the federal government.

  To be clear — Trump deserves some credit for the fact that multiple vaccines were developed so quickly. As my colleague Dylan Scott reported last October, the federal government’s multibillion-dollar investment in helping companies like Moderna and Johnson & Johnson develop vaccines no doubt helped the country get to a point where there is finally some light at the end of the tunnel. Biden has acknowledged this, saying in December that “I think that the [Trump] administration deserves some credit, getting this [vaccine effort] off the ground, Operation Warp Speed.”

  But vaccines don’t do much good if there’s no plan to get them into arms, and this is where Trump really fell short. As was the case when the US struggled to ramp up coronavirus testing infrastructure in the early days of the pandemic, the Trump administration’s plan for vaccine distribution did little more than pass the buck to under-resourced states. Trump’s failure to plan for the “last mile” resulted in episodes where unused vaccines were thrown out in the weeks before Biden took office.

  So while it’s going too far to say Trump deserves no credit, the criticisms Biden opened his primetime speech with are totally fair.

  “A year ago we were hit with a virus that was met with silence and spread unchecked. Denials for days, weeks, then months,” he said, alluding to Trump’s effort to downplay the coronavirus ahead of and during his failed reelection campaign. “That led to more deaths, more infections, more stress, and more loneliness.”

  “A year ago we were hit with a virus that was met with silence, and spread unchecked. Denials for days, weeks, then months. That led to more deaths” – Biden begins his big coronavirus speech by taking shots at Trump pic.twitter.com/gljYpCMLv5

  — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 12, 2021

Biden moved on, barely alluding to the former president the rest of the way. But he had already provided Fox News something to get mad about.

“He kicks them in the groin”

It’s hard to spin a pandemic response that resulted in more than half a million dead Americans as a success, but during a rant about Biden’s speech on Friday morning, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade tried.

“We don’t need to go over the 500,000 dead; we had that moment,” he said. “Let’s talk about the future moving forward. Every time he has a chance to praise the previous administration, he not only doesn’t praise, he kicks them in the groin.”

Kilmeade’s suggestion that Biden took a cheap shot by criticizing Trump’s coronavirus response echoed what host Sean Hannity said on his show shortly after the speech.

“Joe Biden — he needs to pick up the phone, I suggest, call Mar-a-Lago, and, yeah, bring unity to the country, as he says he so desperately wants, and thank President Donald Trump,” he said. Later, he added: “No Trump, no vaccine, Joe. Stop taking credit for something, frankly, you had nothing to do with.”

It’s true that when Trump left office, about 1 million vaccines were being administrated each day. But Biden has nearly tripled that rate in less than two months.

So Hannity’s comment that Biden “has nothing to do with” the progress of the US vaccination effort is false. Biden has overseen the federal government purchasing hundreds of millions of vaccine doses, making possible the aggressive timeline he outlined on Thursday. And his administration has overseen the development and implementation of vaccine distribution plans that do more than just rely on the states.

But Fox News spin is not only impervious to reality; it’s also impervious to shame. A panel discussion on Hannity featuring former Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus and former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany went after Biden for being too prepared — proving that Fox was prepared to attack Biden if he said anything short of “Thank you, Mr. Trump. You deserve all the credit.”

In the same vein, while Hannity has been hammering Biden on a nightly basis for minor verbal gaffes that he insists are evidence of some sort of cognitive impairment, a chyron on his Thursday show denigrated Biden for merely “surviv[ing]” a “short, scripted speech.” Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

It gets even more absurd

Kilmeade and Hannity’s far-fetched spin was nothing compared to comments from Fox News host Mark Levin, who went on a rant so unhinged on Hannity’s show that you had to wonder if he even watched the same speech.

“This speech that Joe Biden gave is the most disgusting, propagandistic speech that a demagogue, even a politician, has ever given,” Levin said. “It is pathetic.”

Even the fact that Biden says the country is on track to be able to safely have small Fourth of July gatherings was somehow spun as bad by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, both of whom complained that Biden is acting like a tyrant by telling them what to do.

“How dare you tell us who we can spend the Fourth of July with?” Carlson said.

“And then to pick Independence Day as the day where he says he might allow people to gather is just so un-American,” said Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway on Ingraham’s show. “Joe Biden doesn’t get to tell me when I can have a barbecue in my backyard.”

As ridiculous as all this may seem, it’s serious stuff to most of the approximately 2.5 million people who are tuning in to watch Fox News’s primetime shows, which remain the top-rated shows in cable news, even without Trump in the White House.

Then, on Friday morning, Hannity’s false and misleading rant about how Biden should call Trump and thank him was covered as if it were news by one of the network’s “news side” shows, illustrating one of the ways Fox regularly launders its opinion content into the news cycle.

Fox News is having a hard time with President Biden

Trump inherited the longest streak of job growth from former President Barack Obama when he took office yet still characterized the state of affairs he inherited as “a mess” even in the earliest days of his administration. Fox did little to push back on that spin. So the idea that Biden has some sort of moral obligation to give Trump credit for anything is hypocritical at best.

But in its struggle to land blows on a popular president who just signed a very popular $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill, Fox News is normalizing the absurd by, for instance, trying to turn the mundane into huge scandals and linking Biden with culture war grievance issues.

And it’s not just the primetime hosts. On Friday afternoon, Chris Wallace equated Biden fairly criticizing Trump’s Covid response to Trump’s treatment of Obama, saying Biden is “being about as gracious to his predecessor as Donald Trump was to his predecessor.”

Donald Trump, you might remember, rose to political prominence in 2011 by spreading racist conspiracy theories that Obama isn’t really American. So Wallace’s comment is about as false as false equivalences can be.

It’s tempting to tune it out, especially given Fox News’s diminished relevance following Trump’s departure from the White House. But as Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) demonstrated on Friday, elite Republicans share the same warped worldview as Hannity.

“Thank God for the genius of the Trump administration,” Scott said during a Fox News interview in response to Biden’s speech.

Scott’s claim is sure to please Trump, who released a tweet-like statement earlier this week saying “I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the Covid-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers!”

But Scott’s praise of Trump rests on false premises. He claimed that, thanks to Trump, there were “300 million doses ready to be put in arms” on the first day of Biden’s presidency. But that’s not true.

According to a recent fact check by Kaiser Health News, Trump had contracts in place for enough vaccine to vaccinate 200 million Americans when he left office, but that’s not the same as “doses ready to be put in arms.” Furthermore, beyond vaccinating health care workers and people in assisted-living facilities, Trump’s plan to get them in arms did little more than offer thoughts and prayers to the states.

Unsurprisingly, however, the “news side” hosts Scott was speaking with offered no pushback.

• Daylight saving time begins Sunday: 8 things to know about “springing forward” -

  

  We push our clocks forward at 2 am Sunday. Here’s why.

  On Sunday, March 14, at 2 am, daylight saving time begins. We’ll set our clocks forward one hour, and the change will push sunsets later into the evening hours and sunrises later into the morning hours. The cost is that “springing forward” will temporarily disrupt the sleep of millions of Americans. Yet as simple as it seems, there is still a lot of confusion.

  The first thing to know: Yes, it begins in the spring, just as the increase in daylight hours starts to become noticeable. And it will end on November 7, right before the darkest time of the year. Let’s sort it all out.

  1. Why do we need to “save” daylight hours in the summer?

  Daylight saving time in the US started as an energy conservation trick during World War I and became a national standard in the 1960s.

  The idea is that in the summer months, we shift the number of daylight hours we get into the evening. So if the sun sets at 8 pm instead of 7 pm, we’d presumably spend less time with the lights on in our homes at night, saving electricity.

  It also means that you’re less likely to sleep through daylight hours in the morning (since those are shifted an hour later, too). Hence “saving” daylight hours for the most productive time of the day.

  Overall: We agree, the name is kind of confusing.

  2. Isn’t it “daylight savings time” not “daylight saving time”?

  No, it’s definitely called “daylight saving time.” Not plural. Be sure to point out this common mistake to friends and acquaintances. You’ll be really popular.

  3. Does it actually lead to energy savings?

  As Joseph Stromberg outlined in an excellent 2015 Vox article, the actual electricity conservation from the time change is unclear or nonexistent:

  Despite the fact that daylight saving time was introduced to save fuel, there isn’t strong evidence that the current system actually reduces energy use — or that making it year-round would do so, either. Studies that evaluate the energy impact of DST are mixed. It seems to reduce lighting use (and thus electricity consumption) slightly but may increase heating and AC use, as well as gas consumption. It’s probably fair to say that energy-wise, it’s a wash.

  4. Why don’t Arizona and Hawaii change their clocks?

  Arizona has a simple way to deal with daylight saving time: Most of the state ignores it.

  Fifty years ago, the state legislature opted to keep the clocks in most of the state in standard time all year. One reason: Arizona summers are very hot, and an earlier sunset gives residents more time to enjoy tolerable temperatures before bed, as AZcentral explains. (What’s confusing: The Navajo Nation in Arizona does use DST.)

  Hawaii also doesn’t observe DST. The island state is the farthest south of all states and rejected it because it doesn’t see a hugely noticeable daylight hour difference between winter and summer months.

  5. Didn’t a bunch of states pass laws making daylight saving time permanent? What happened with those?

  If you’re a bit confused about which states follow daylight saving time and which do not, I don’t blame you. That’s because lately, a few states have looked into joining Arizona and Hawaii, but with a twist: They want daylight saving time to be in place all year long.

  In the November 2018 election, Californians voted in favor of a ballot measure that paves the way for this. The measure, which passed with 60 percent of the vote, simply grants the California Legislature the power to vote to change the clocks permanently. Any changes would need to start with a two-thirds majority vote in the state legislature — which hasn’t happened yet.

  And even then, the time change wouldn’t be a given. The federal government would have to approve it; that has uncertain prospects, too.

  In 2018, the Florida government approved the delightfully named Sunshine Protection Act, which seeks to permanently leave Florida in daylight saving time. (Essentially, it would mean that Florida will be one hour ahead of the rest of the East Coast during the winter months.) Massachusetts has looked into a similar measure.

  The bill is still waiting on approval from Congress before it can go into effect. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has put forth a few bills to push the approval forward, but they haven’t moved at all. The latest version of Rubio’s bill — which has some Democratic co-sponsors — would keep the whole country in daylight saving time permanently.

  Arkansas, too, passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent, but it included the condition that the changes wouldn’t go into effect until its bordering states changed their clocks permanently as well. Other states that have approved legislation to enact year-long daylight saving time include Washington, Tennessee, Oregon, Nevada, and Alabama. Some Maryland legislators are interested, too. But none of the changes can go into effect without approval from the federal government.

  So for now, all these states will be changing their clocks on Sunday along with the rest of us. Sorry!

  6. What would happen if daylight saving time were abolished? Or if it were extended forever?

  It’s worth thinking about what would happen if Congress abolished daylight saving time (or kept it going all year long).

  How might our patterns change? Blogger and cartographer Andy Woodruff decided to visualize this with a great series of maps.

  The goal of these maps is to show how abolishing daylight saving time, extending it all year, or going with the status quo changes the number of days we have “reasonable” sunrise and sunset times.

  Reasonable, as defined by Woodruff, is the sun rising at 7 am or earlier or setting after 5 pm (so one could, conceivably, spend some time in the sun before or after work).

  This is what the map looks like under the status quo of twice-yearly clock shifts. A lot of people have unreasonable sunrise times (the dark spots) for much of the year:

  Andy Woodruff

  Here’s how things would change if daylight saving were abolished (that is, if we just stuck to the time set in the winter all year). It’s better, particularly on the sunrise end:

  Andy Woodruff

  And here’s what would happen if daylight saving were always in effect. The sunrise situation would actually be worse for most people. But many more people would enjoy after-work light — and there’s a strong argument to make that this after-work light is actually worth more. (More on that below.)

  Andy Woodruff

  (Note: The length of light we experience each day wouldn’t actually change; that’s determined by the tilt of Earth’s axis. But we would experience it in times more accommodating for our modern world. Be sure to check out the interactive version of these maps on Woodruff’s website.)

  In 2015, Stromberg made the compelling case that the daylight saving time shift into the evening should be extended year-round. Having more light later could benefit us in a surprising number of ways:

  • People engage in more leisure activities after work than beforehand, so we’d likely do more physical activity over sedentary leisure activities. Relatedly, studies show that kids get more exercise when the sun is out later in the evening.
  • Stromberg also cites some evidence that robberies decrease when there’s more sun in the evening hours.
  • There could be economic gains, since people “take short trips, and buy things after work — but not before — so a longer DST slightly increases sales,” he writes.

  7. Is daylight saving time dangerous?

  A bit. When we shift clocks forward one hour in the spring, many of us will lose that hour of sleep. In the days after daylight saving time starts, our biological clocks are a little bit off. It’s like the whole country has been given one hour of jet lag.

  One hour of lost sleep sounds like a small change, but we humans are fragile, sensitive animals. Small disruptions in our sleep have been shown to alter basic indicators of our health and dull our mental edge.

  And when our biological clocks are off, everything about us is out of sync. Our bodies run this tight schedule to try to keep up with our actions. Since we usually eat a meal after waking up, we produce the most insulin in the morning. We’re primed to metabolize breakfast before even taking a bite. It’s more efficient that way.

  (There’s some good research that finds taking over-the-counter melatonin helps reset our body clocks to a new time. Read more about that here.)

  Being an hour off schedule means our bodies are not prepared for our actions at any time of the day.

  One example: driving.

  In 1999, researchers at Johns Hopkins and Stanford universities wanted to find out what happens on the road when millions of drivers have their sleep disrupted.

  Analyzing 21 years of fatal car crash data from the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, they found a very small, but significant, increase in road deaths on the Monday after the clock shift in the spring: The number of deadly accidents jumped to an average of 83.5 on the “spring forward” Monday compared with an average of 78.2 on a typical Monday.

  And it seems it’s not just car accidents. Evidence has also mounted of an increase in incidences of workplace injuries and heart attacks in the days after we spring forward.

  8. How can we abolish daylight saving time, or extend it year-round?

  That’s easy! Well, not really: All it would take is an act of Congress. But I wouldn’t count on this happening any time soon.

From The Hindu: Sports

• World singles TT qualification tournament | Indians eye Olympic qualification - There are four spots available for men and five for women.

• Ind vs SA preview | Lack of lower-order firepower a worry for India ahead of 4th ODI - In the third ODI, India couldn’t step up the rate with the team managing just 27 runs in the last 30 balls following the dismissal of vice-captain Harmanpreet Kaur

• Ind vs Eng preview | Following heavy defeat, India aim for better batting effort in 2nd T20 - The bowling department didn’t have enough runs on board to put up a fight but whether one of the three spinners can make way for a fast bowler remains to be seen.

• Vijay Hazare Trophy final: Prithvi Shaw-led Mumbai up against a young, spirited U.P. - Prithvi Shaw has scored four centuries and he could even be expected to go past the 900-run mark.

• Seeking re-election as International Hockey Federation president, Narinder Batra files nomination - The FIH Congress was originally scheduled for last year but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, handing Batra an extended first term

From The Hindu: National News

• Jammu-Srinagar National Highway cleared of landslide debris - Officials said the road clearance work was completed around 3 p.m. on Saturday but only the local stranded traffic was allowed to ply towards their destinations.

• Stage set for MLC poll in East Godavari on Sunday - 11 contestants are in the fray

• India’s first AC railway terminal to function soon: Union Minister - “Named after one of the foremost civil engineers, Bharat Ratna Sir M. Visvesvaraya, the nation’s first centralised AC railway terminal in Bengaluru is set to become operational soon,” Piyush Goyal tweeted.

• Centre must reaffirm 1991 Act on places of worship: CPI(M) - Polit Bureau voices concern over SC notice on PIL challenging status quo

• Cong. leader criticises BJP at rally - “BJP people chant Lord Ram’s name, but behave worse than Ravana”, remarked former Minister and Congress leader Krishna Byre Gowda, at a party rally in

From BBC: Europe

• Covid-19 pandemic: Italy to shut shops and schools amid infection spike - Most shops, restaurants and schools will be closed on Monday as Coronavirus infections rise.

• UK exports to European Union drop 40% in January - Official figures show a sharp drop in trade in goods with the EU as the Brexit transition period ended.

• Corinne Masiero: Actress protests naked at ‘French Oscars’ ceremony - Corinne Masiero sheds a donkey skin and bloodstained dress at a coronavirus-dominated César Awards.

• Brussels bombers ‘murdered elderly man as a test’ - Two brothers who killed 31 people in 2016 earlier shot dead a 76-year-old, a Belgian report says.

• Brexit: UK delays border checks on EU goods into Great Britain - Ministers say the move will help firms after Covid - but Labour says it “smacks of ill-preparedness”.

From Ars Technica

• The Code Breaker is the CRISPR chronicle you need to read - Q&A: Walter Isaacson’s account is a thrilling tale of scientific discovery. - link

• Exchange servers first compromised by Chinese hackers hit with ransomware - As if Exchange users didn’t already have enough to worry about, they have this. - link

• “Shocking” genetic data suggest Ebola lurked in survivor for 5-6 years - Ebola virus is known to persist in some survivors—but not for this long. - link

• Qualcomm smartphones are the next devices to get hit by chip shortage - Qualcomm faces pandemic shortages, Huawei’s sanctions, and Texas power problems. - link

• US lawmakers propose Australia-style bill for media, tech negotiations - Both Democrats and Republicans want to do something. Maybe not the same something. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Barack Obama walks into a bar, but he is invisible. -

  After attracting the bartender’s attention, the bartender says “Ok, I’ll bite. Why are you invisible?”

  Barack says “Well, I found a bottle on the beach and…then I rubbed it.” “And then…importantly…A genie came out.” “The genie said I could have…3 wishes.”

  For my first wish, I said “Let me say this, and this is profoundly important…I want Michelle to marry me…I love her,…and I think America will love her too.” That wish was granted.

  For my second wish, I said “Like all patriotic Americans, I am deeply patriotic…and I want to be President…of the United States…so I can serve my country.” That wish was granted too.

  And then, for my third wish, I started by saying “Let me be clear…”

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• In Europe, they don’t call it the “Friend Zone” -

  They call it the “Pal Region”

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• A teacher told her young class to ask their parents for a family story with a moral at the end of it, and to return the next day to tell their stories. -

  In the classroom the next day, Joe gave his example first, “My dad is a farmer and we have chickens. One day we were taking lots of eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the truck when we hit a big bump in the road; the basket fell off the seat and all the eggs broke. The moral of the story is not to put all your eggs in one basket.”

  “Very good,” said the teacher.

  Next, Mary said, “We are farmers too. We had twenty eggs waiting to hatch, but when they did we only got ten chicks. The moral of this story is not to count your chickens before they’re hatched.”

  “Very good,” said the teacher again, very pleased with the responses so far.

  Next it was Dave’s turn to tell his story: “My dad told me this story about my Aunt Karen…. Aunt Karen was a flight engineer in the war and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a bottle of whiskey, a machine gun, and a machete.”

  “Go on,” said the teacher, intrigued.

  “Aunt Karen drank the whiskey on the way down to prepare herself. Then she landed right in the middle of a hundred enemy soldiers. She killed seventy of them with the machine gun until she ran out of bullets. Then she killed twenty more with the machete ’til the blade broke. And then she killed the last ten with her bare hands.”

  “Good heavens,” said the horrified teacher, “What did your father say was the moral of that frightening story?”

  “Stay away from Aunt Karen when she’s been drinking…”

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• Whenever a guy says I look familiar… -

  I tell him I used to do a lot of gay porn.

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• My wife just left me. She says life revolves around football and she’s sick of it. -

  I’m quite upset. We were together for 7 seasons.

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