Word: joke
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...many of us, though, Valentine's Day only pretends to celebrate what we like about love while actually undermining it. True romance comes unscheduled, unruly, "a madness most discreet," quoth Romeo. Overtime, as it ripens into devotion, still it improvises, a favor rendered, a sudden kiss, a private joke, flowers for no reason. Its expression is the very opposite of the fretful, "pre-order now, or be left with drugstore chocolates" connivances that the day promotes. For those who feel well loved, every day, of course, is Valentine's. For the rest, no card can console...
...Army Corps makework has become a kind of inside-the-Beltway joke; when I first interviewed Lott's spokesman about the Yazoo pump, he mock-squealed: "Oh, no! You can't tell people about all this pork for Mississippi! Not in an election year! Please, don't throw us into that briar patch!" But it's all seemed less funny since Hurricane Katrina, when Corps failures ruined a great American city. The Corps was wasting money and destroying wetlands with mockeries like the Yazoo pump when it should have been building decent levees and restoring the wetlands that used...
...Lincoln Own Slaves? gamely and even-handedly answers the titular question?no?and many, many others (readers are supplied with Lincoln's worst photograph and least-funny joke), but it doesn't shed much light on the question of the Lincoln compulsion. For that you might turn to This Republic of Suffering (Knopf; 346 pages), Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust's new wrenching study of how the mass deaths of the Civil War changed America. At the time, Lincoln's death was fused with Jesus' in the popular imagination?people needed Lincoln to be more than human in order...
Business for products aimed at the newly divorced, from greeting cards and postbreakup getaway packages to custom-made cakes and joke gifts like wedding-ring coffins, is booming. New Orleans resident Reneé Savant bought a hearse, thinking she would rent it out for over-the-hill-birthday celebrations. But since she began her service last October, the hottest demand has come from clients who want to ride around as they and friends celebrate the death of their marriages. "I would never in a million years have thought the fad would be divorce parties," says Savant...
...Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, the strikers carrying placards with slogans like no money, no funny and the yuk stops here. The spectacle of stand-up comedians, many of them well known from television, recasting themselves as extras in F.I.S.T., was an irresistible national story. Johnny Carson made jokes about it on The Tonight Show. Some of the more established comics were scornful ("This strike is the biggest joke I've ever heard come out of the Comedy Store," quipped David Brenner). But among the younger comedians it was a serious matter, and the vast majority...