THURSDAY, May 27, 2010

NEW ORLEANS, LA (AP) - After several failed attempts to stem the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has begun  pumping mud and cement into the breach, a process known in the industry as “top kill.“  Not to be confused with that unidentified thing on Donald Trump’s head.

AUSTIN (AP) - The Texas school board voted to rewrite student history books to emasculate the separation of church and state doctrine and replace “democratic republic” with “constitutional republic.”  Worse, the word “Alamo” has been changed to “Alamo Car Rental.”  

PALERMO, SICILY (BBC) - An Italian clothing manufacturer is running ads featuring Hitler wearing a pink uniform with a heart instead of a swastika armband.  According to military historians, it was the official dress uniform of the 6th Broadway Showtune Battalion, 1st Interior Decorating Brigade of the Nazi Poofwaff.

NEWARK, NJ (AP) - State Health Department investigators have arrested a man performing plastic surgery in hotel rooms using black market derriere implants that contained "hardware-grade caulking material."   He was caught after he implanted one that still had a shower curtain attached to it.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) - The U.S. Postal Service will honor legendary actress Katherine Hepburn, best known for Oscar-nominated movies like “The Philadelphia Story,” her life-long love affair with Spencer Tracy and doing more to popularize the woman's pants suit than Hillary Clinton.
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Excerpted From THE LAUGH MAKERS  

Compared to today’s modern construction boom in China (office high-rises can take as little as a week per floor to erect), 1979 construction was rudimentary, labor intensive and slow, using methods that had been the norm for centuries. Scaffolds which could extend upwards four or five stories were made of sturdy bamboo stalks lashed together with hemp. Hard hats had not yet been introduced — workers wore large-brimmed straw coolie hats as they scrambled along bamboo platforms that looked like the raft Tom and Huck ran away on.  Heavy duty tricycles with large, wooden flat beds between the two rear wheels were used to transport building materials — everything from twenty-foot tall stacks of bricks to bags of cement to steel re-bar and girders. 

One day I noticed one of these flat beds had pulled up beside us at a stop light (all stop lights came with a white-uniformed traffic control officer perched on a raised platform in the center of the intersection). The bed was empty save for a large canvas cover cinched around the edges with twine. Three sets of feet, toes upward, protruded beyond the edge of the canvas at the rear of the flat bed.  Pointing, I said to our guide, “Get a load of these guys catching forty winks on the way to the job site.”  He shook his head and said, “No more work for them. They’re dead.” 

He explained that so many peasants came to Peking looking for employment, they became part of a faceless horde with no ties to local families and no means of identification. The flat bed driver was part of the city’s “corpse corps,” charged with picking up the deceased and taking them to a central location for disposal.  From the moment we arrived in China, I’d had a sense of how vastly different our cultures were, but that day I realized how wide the chasm really was. Though it’s been 31 years, I can still see those six sets of toes pointing heavenward.

Tomorrow:  We lock horns with the Ministry of Culture over a comedy sketch




Order THE LAUGH MAKERS on line:

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Also available in an unabridged audio version read by the author: 

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