A Luminous Halo

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." --Virginia Woolf

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Location: Springfield, Massachusetts, United States

Smith ’69, Purdue ’75. Anarchist; agnostic. Writer. Steward of the Pascal Emory house, an 1871 Second-Empire Victorian; of Sylvie, a 1974 Mercedes-Benz 450SL; and of Taz, a purebred Cockador who sets the standard for her breed. Happy enough for the present in Massachusetts, but always looking East.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Arabs and Israelis in the News

I tell people I don't read the newspaper, but that's not entirely true. I'm a faithful reader of The Onion, a satirical weekly publication which claims to inform "the educated and the stupid alike." The New Yorker calls it "the funniest publication in the United States."
The Onion exists in hard copy, but since it's available online for free and I'm wedded to my computer, I read it at http://www.theonion.com. It's my news digest; I figure if an issue is in any way important, The Onion will satirize it, and I can work backward from their treatment and figure out what's going on in the world.

When I worked at Intel, I used to read The Onion frequently on my breaks. Fellow technicians would routinely glance at my computer screen as they passed through the bullpen, and, failing to grasp that the article displayed was satire, say things like, "That Goddamned Pope! Who does he think he is?!?"

In several years of reading The Onion faithfully, I've come across perhaps two articles, tops, that I didn't find hilarious. But today's headline struck me as particularly side-splittingly funny, as well as spot on. In deference to their privacy policy, I can't print the headline here (or their actual logo!), but this is the link to it: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/51849.

If anyone today is writing better satire, I'd like to know who it is.

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