Has the economy dimmed the light at the end of your tunnel? Read on about this new plan from Congress.

Due to the current financial situation caused by the slowdown in the economy, Congress has decided to implement a scheme to put workers of 50 years of age and above on early retirement.

This scheme will be known as RAPE (Retire Aged People Early).

Persons selected to be RAPED can apply to Congress to be considered for the SHAFT program (Special Help After Forced Termination).

Persons who have been RAPED and SHAFTED will be reviewed under the SCREW program (Scheme Covering Retired-Early Workers).

A person may be RAPED once, SHAFTED twice and SCREWED as many times as Congress deems appropriate.

Persons who have been RAPED could get AIDS (Additional Income for Dependants & Spouse) or HERPES (Half Earnings for Retired Personnel Early Severance).

Obviously persons who have AIDS or HERPES will not be SHAFTED or SCREWED any further by Congress.

Persons who are not RAPED and are staying on will receive as much SHIT (Special High Intensity Training) as possible. Congress has always prided themselves on the amount of SHIT they give our citizens.

Should you feel that you do not receive enough SHIT, please bring this to the attention of your Congressman, who has been trained to give you all the SHIT you can handle.
Sincerely,

The Committee for Economic Value of Individual Lives (E.V.I.L.)

PS - - Due to recent budget cuts and the rising cost of electricity, gas and oil, as well as current market conditions, the Light at the End of the Tunnel has been turned off.

Heard about the new Squidoo & FB widget? Now you can easily connect to a Facebook Fanpage on a Squidoo lens with a self-loading automated widget, making a lens and a FB fanpage joined at the hip, so to speak. Some find this widget to be a match made in heaven!

To install the widget you log in to your Facebook account first, then log in to Squidoo to edit whatever lens you want to connect. The manage widgets tab will get the code to add your FB fanpage. New feeds on a FB fanpage will then automatically be added to your lens.

Two of my Squidoo lenses now have these new facebook fanpage widgets, a very fun new Squidoo toy! Laugh Outloud Lounge and Cross Creations on Squidoo.

Or go straight to the Facebook Fan Pages:
Laugh Outloud Lounge
CrossCreations on Squidoo

A relatively new project, my FB fan pages started a few months ago at the urging of those RMs over at Squidoo. It seems that facebook is exploding new information at lightspeed lately, and consuming all of the new info is akin to drinking from a firehose!
I found a great blog that stays very up to date with the details of FB changes and best ways to promote FB fan pages, and included a feed from that blog at this Squidoo lens:
Facebook Fan Page Promotion

Swimming with dolphins in your future?
Mine, too. I've had that 'dolphin swim' on my bucket list for many years now. However, I've recently learned some new facts about this 'swim with dolphins' activity that would be good for ALL of us to know and heed.

Have you heard about the recent film called "The Cove"? It's a recent award-winning documentary film about the brutal slaughter of dolphins off the coast of Japan. Not only is this brutal slaughter an issue of international controversy and outcry, but it even goes further... some of those dolphins are 'rescued' from the slaughter only to be sold to tourist attractions who host 'swim with dolphin' events for tourists...to the tune of some $15,000+ per dolphin! That means that this brutal slaughter of dolphins is financially supported in a HUGE way from the sale of live dolphins for these tourist attractions!

Rick O'Barry is one of the main characters of 'the Cove' film, and an activist in preventing further brutality toward dolphins. He saw first hand the bloodshed and brutality toward dolphins off the coast of Japan, and is determined to put an end to it. He was interviewed on Oprah recently in her annual Earth Day feature, and is a leader in a grassroots effort to stop such barbarian treatment of dolphins in the open sea for nothing but greed that helps no one.

Held in captivity, these dolphins suffer HUGE emotional and physical trauma at being confined and separated from their pods (dolphin families). Further, they are fed only when their tourist performance matches such expectations as various 'tricks' performed, which are totally beyond anything dolphins DO in real life, it's all for show, a tourist trick. Dolphins raised in captivity this way have no chance of survival in the wild, for their learning curve is bypassed toward one of performing for tourists in ways that are completely unnatural to a dolphin living in a natural environment. In captivity they are fed only dead fish, so they lose the skill of foraging for live food in their natural way in the sea.

Given you might have a dream of swimming with dolphins, do you have to give up that dream? Absolutely NOT! The thing to do is to search for outfits that support swimming with dolphins in the wild as opposed to doing same in captivity. BIG difference! In captivity, dolphins are forced to interact with you, whereas in the wild they will do so by choice, and they WILL! But that will require some time and some respect for their habitat. There ARE organizations who support such, one of them * Wildquest * is featured in the video below.

NOTICE the dramatic differences between the photo of a girl clinging to a dolphin above at top of this article and the experiences of people actually swimming WITH dolphins in the Wildquest video. Do you seek a REAL dolphin experience? or will you accept these imitations that support the brutal slaughter of dolphins for personal greed? Please consider the difference.

Learn more about these issues about dolphins.

Divorce satire at its best! Get ready to guffaw!

Divorce Dance - Disorder in the Court

My favorite LOL moment in this video - watch the two COPS!

This same wedding party also posted a video of their entrance into the church on wedding day, which is hilarious and SO entertaining...but I find the divorce court one even better.

I posted this one into the list of funniest videos EVER at the Laugh Outloud Lounge

Humor is hard to define, since what some find funny, others just don't. What do YOU think?

If ya like it ... might want to mingle at the Laugh Outloud Lounge on Facebook. FUN place!

THE COVE is a very important environmentally themed film that won an Oscar for best documentary in March of 2010. The film is about the slaughter of dolphins off the coast of Japan and has become so popular that it will even become a new television series on Animal Planet. The focus is a social action campaign to create awareness of this act and also exposes the health dangers of eating seafood contaminated with mercury. THE COVE will be featured on Oprah's Earth Day show next Thursday, April 22nd. One of the main characters from the film named Rick O'Barry will be interviewed.  

The Secret Is Out:  Spread the Word (from 'The Cove' website)

"The Cove exposes the slaughter of more than 20,000 dolphins and porpoises off the coast of Japan every year, and how their meat, containing toxic levels of mercury, is being sold as food in Japan and other parts of Asia, often labeled as whale meat. The majority of the world is not aware this is happening as the cove is blocked off from the public. The focus of the Social Action Campaign for The Cove is to create worldwide awareness of this annual practice as well as the dangers of eating seafood contaminated with mercury and to pressure those in power to put an end to the slaughter."

The social action is working! The film has been making waves with praise and audience awards. "THE COVE" has focused international attention on the dolphin drives off the coast of Japan.  Under intense pressure, there was a temporary ban on killing bottlenose dolphins. The film was originally rejected, but later was shown at the Tokyo Film Festival due to public outcry. Residents in that Japanese community of Taiiji are being tested for mercury poisoning, and for the first time Japanese media are covering the issue. Over a million people have signed on to the campaign. The fisherman clearly are rattled by all of the attention on them, yet they have NOT stopped killing dolphins.

Learn more about dolphins and view THE COVE movie trailer here:  Dolphins and Dignity

Our young get little choice about their education. Parents and teachers make choices about what is best for them, decide what they should learn and about what constitutes mastery and/or success. We claim such importance in an education and yet the recent track records of US schools in general is not particularly impressive. Could it be that our schools actually tend to interfere with education?

Many schools seem to become more and more full of insane politics as the years roll by. Have they become mostly top-down structures with decisions made by those with little to no experience as educators? I know of a retired public school administrator who remembers decades ago running a school with the freedom to implement programs that helped students to think and puzzle through solutions to problems, to foster artistic expression and creative thinking. However as time went on, his bosses (other administrators and ultimately - politicians) put a stop to many of these same programs. By the time he retired from the Public School system he felt that the schools were at best factories and at worst prisons that suppressed creativity and innovation among the students.

The typical school tends to force students to learn in ways quite different than how they learn in the real world. Schools designed around economic considerations and curricula controlled by non-educators have failed to provide an environment within which natural learning can operate. Is the main focus on HOW to learn or WHAT to learn? Memorizing or problem-solving?

So what IS the natural learning process? When we learn naturally, we start by developing an interest, a passion to learn motivated by some source. We try things out and get hands-on experience. We might suffer expectation failures and then we ask questions. The typical classroom is not built around such steps. Instead, they tend to try and cut to the chase (and fail). They rush to present answers to questions students have not asked, to force generalizations about experiences students simply have not had. In their eagerness to fill students with knowledge, schools typically try to short-circuit natural learning. Rather than simply tell the answers, natural learning happens when we have to been motivated toward the questions first, learning ways of developing good questions rather than just good answers.

Are our teachers trained in this natural learning process? I believe they are, however when they enter the reality of the 21st century public school system, often they find their hands tied under pressure to mandate a prescribed learning process that is quite rigid. Just like the principal (above) who was forced to eliminate some very creative and innovative learning programs, teachers are often pressured beyond reason to force evidence of mastery of a fixed curriculum. While discovery and motivation and natural learning might be high priorities for the teacher, she is still the messenger, the delivery mechanism in a fixed curriculum school society. Add to that the fact that performance on standardized tests is how entire school systems are now evaluated. Our government has enforced mandatory testing in schools to the point of 'measurement mania', which now controls much of the education system.

It was over 100 years ago when Mark Twain said the words, "I never let school interfere with education." Have our school systems progressed in that century?

Now you might suppose this is all about teacher salaries, but 'what teachers make' is taken into an entirely different direction here that is hilarious and yet SO true. The author, Taylor Mali, is a teacher who writes slam poetry generally around the theme of education. One of his most popular titles is "What Teachers Make" and this one is so popular that it is called the most forwarded poem in the world.

Mali is known mostly as a performance poet, so the very best way to experience him is to see him on screen or even better, live.  His ability to dig deep and reveal flat out real truths within satire and twists on words has become wildly popular among educators as a serious reminder of why it is that they do what they do.

Go ahead and watch the 3 minute video, WELL worth it!   Then come on back and read the quote below of the ending part again.

What Teachers Make

You want to know what I make?

I make kids wonder,
I make them question.
I make them criticize.
I make them apologize and mean it.
I make them write, write, write.
And then I make them read.
I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely
beautiful
over and over and over again until they will never misspell
either one of those words again.
I make them show all their work in math.
And hide it on their final drafts in English.
I make them understand that if you got this (brains)
then you follow this (heart) and if someone ever tries to judge you
by what you make, you give them this (the finger).

Let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true:
I make a goddamn difference! What about you?

What's YOUR take on what teachers make?

With all the controversy and bantering over health care reform, it appears so complicated ...  yet this missing link is so obvious.

V
V
V

When those who make the laws are expected to follow them, we have reformed health care.

Isn't all the rest is just more political BS?

Did you LAUGH yet today? Join the fun at the Laugh Outloud Lounge!  

An ever-growing collection of the best LOL humor found in cyberspace or any space...because laughter is the best medicine and we can never have too much laughter.

You can also post your own favorite humor at the lounge if you like.   Your funniest stories, jokes, videos or pics are welcome ... even a link to your funny blog if you have one.

Lighten up and release some belly laughs!   The current video collection will keep you in stitches ==> carefully selected as LOL guaranteed.

New widgets provided for Squidoo lenses later TODAY!

Designed to appear at the right sidebar, Giants may choose any three from the following list:

• RSS blog feed
• Featured Lenses
• Amazon Spotlight
• Squidcast

The widgets are available to Giants to test out at this time, and will be available later today.

New Squidoo Widgets