Punk'd

1. We had a small gathering at our house over the weekend and someone played the part of the prankster. Objects were found in mysterious new settings. I found pennies and nickels in various socks in my sock drawer. Clocks were reset 6 hours or so ahead. K said something about her phone numbers on her phone changing. And other pranks I won’t go into now. K has a short list of who she thinks the prankster was. I on the other hand believe it was Floyd. Fess up, Floyd. Fess up, you prankster. To read more about Floyd, read J.G.’s post about the Crucible. 2. Article from guest blogger, Larry Kunofsky THANK YOU, PRESIDENT OF IRAN! Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, took a real load off my mind recently. According to this article http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/12/14/iran.israel/ the Pres assures the world that The Holocaust was a myth. What a relief! And here I thought - and I thought this for years! - that six million Jews - along with thousands of Gypsies, Communists, Homosexuals, and those deemed mentally unfit, were murdered. I'm so glad that all those people weren't murdered. I can stop feeling so badly about humanity's inhumanity. Turns out, human beings don't really inflict unspeakable cruelty upon other human beings, often for arbitrary or irrational motivations; it seems that the worst anyone's ever done is make up a bunch of nasty rumors. I bet I can stop having all those nightmares now. Whew! When I was a kid, some old lady named Simcha - if that WAS her real name, after all - came to my school, and talked about this "Holocaust," as if it happened in front of her own eyes. She showed every kid in my class the numbers tattooed on her arm. Talk about Committing To a Bit! I thought that she was a living part of history. But the truth, as usual, is funner than fiction. Turns out, she was just a Performance Artist. Like Karen Finley, but without the nudity and the chocolate. And this old woman REALLY CRIED! I wonder where she got her training. I bet it's a sense-memory trick. I mean, I thought that she was really feeling something like agony and overwhelming grief when she spoke about some sister named Henya -who she must have made up - who she never saw again after Henya distracted the soldiers at the front of her house as "Simcha" ran out the back. What an imagination this lady had! I never paid much attention in school, and I feel kind of dumb now after all these years, believing this bit was real for so long. I guess the joke's on me! But that's cool. I think it's kind of awesome that the President of Iran, of all people, had to tell me that I've been punk'd! I have to say, this changes everything for me. For years, I kept putting off watching this film Shoah, because I thought it was a really long and heart-wrenching documentary. But now that I realize that Shoah is just science fiction, I'll just get it on Netflix and watch it as a double feature with Soylent Green. Who knew that the President of Iran would have such a profound impact on my X-Mas Weekend plans! Now I can take a joke as much as the next guy, but a lot of these bits about people having to flee for their lives are not really in good taste. Especially since, if you don't have the President of Iran to clue you in, you can kind of get your heart broken in a gullible moment. Where I draw the line is with Anne Frank.I mean, I used to think about this girl with this allegedly innocent and ostensibly abundantly kind spirit spending her youth in an attic. But it turns out that this Anne Frank is just a lying bitch! Sorry, Anne. I don't play that like that. I think your "diary," or "prank," is just mean. But getting back to Iran, y'know, words like "Fundamentalism" get bandied about when people talk about that part of the world, but any country that is run by a guy who knows when a joke's a joke, is all right by me. What a Good Egg the President of Iran is! I mean, what did I ever do for him? And this guy just gives and gives. Maybe the old sayings about the goodness in people's hearts during the holidays are true. Thanks again, President of Iran!