A Brief History of Fools

There were natural or dimwitted fools and artificial ones. Natural fools were more valuable and were sold at monster auctions; the more foolish they were, the more they cost.
Fool was one of the few positions open to women in Medieval times. However, it seems that more men had a gift for it.
Master Henry was King Henry III’s fool; he was also poet laureate.
Maître Jehain was the fool of King John II of France; when the king was imprisoned, the fool went with him.
In 1461, the kings of Bohemia and Hungary grew tired of war and sent their fools to fight each other, agreeing to abide by the results; the Hungarian fool won.

Medical Alert

MEDICAL ALERT from Francine Prozac
Imagine a disease that afflicts nearly every single person on earth, with the possible exception of the hermit—
And absolutely no one is working on a cure!
Shocking?
Well, it’s sad but true.

Lovesickness strikes millions each year, especially this time of year. No one knows how it happens. Some say it’s the close quarters of dry, poorly ventilated rooms.

NO ONE IS IMMUNE!
Rich and poor, young and old, men and women—the malady can befall all. That hermit is probably hiding in the cave because he’s a severe case.
Look around, you’ll see the tell-tale symptoms of the afflicted: the twitching fingers of someone itching to check for messages that never come fast enough to assuage the pain, zombie women popping Good ‘n Plentys like self-prescribing addicts under cover of the dark movie theater, and hapless bodies scattered across the park lawn like victims of some secret weapon that blows out the brain but leaves the body behind.

FACT: An 89 year-old billionaire from Texas came down with the love sickness after a night in a pole-dancing bar, and in fourteen months, he was dead.

FACT: You might be the next victim.
(Don’t laugh—that’s one way the disease is thought to be passed from person to person.)

Many try home remedies: cold showers, garlic, writing poems. Guess what? They don’t help much.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Help support my campaign to find a cure. Cash, checks and chocolates are welcome. Every little bit of chocolate helps.

A Child's Christmas

At a Christmas service, a young child stood clueless in the crowded pew, wondering what was going on. She couldn’t see past the coats on all sides. The elder sister explained it all for her:
"Christmas was the day God died in a stable manger."
What a shining example of reasoning things out for oneself, from parental warnings about the dangers of really filthy places.
But in a way, the girl is right: the old idea of a lone, distant God died in the incarnation, and in becoming flesh, God also accepted his eventual death. Incarnation and Passion are inextricable, as Bill Tully says. And each event requires us to give up something. The nativity requires us to give up our aloofness, the old faith that God doesn't need us—from the moment he was born, he was in grave danger.
At Easter, the girl must have taught her sister about how God was born out of an egg. Because at Easter the resurrection shatters the hardened, hollow world. If the graves were broken open and the saints walked, we have to give up our belief that anything spiritual is ever laid to rest.

Bottoms Up

The earth weighs six sextillion tons, yet it does not plummet to the bottom of the universe.
Why?
Because the universe has no bottom.
We create riddles by starting with the answer, but the world creates riddles first, with no answer in sight.
Dostoevsky writes in Brothers Karamazov, “Absurdities are all too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.”

Don't Look Now

This is a computer image with the black holes that riddle the universe highlighted.

At the center of most galaxies lie black holes. While the universe is expanding and forming new things, the black hole is compressing and making things one again, as they were at the Big Bang. 

Black holes are like little round rear view mirrors, so while we’re flying down the highway to nowhere, we can see where we’ve come from, oblivion, and whether it’s catching up to us.

Plan Ahead

After Legg Mason Opportunity fund tumbled 20%--two times more than the benchmark index, Bill Miller wrote about the Nobel-Prize winner Ken Arrow, who was enlisted to make long-range weather forecasts for the military during WW II. He said his forecasts were worse than useless. The general said that he knew the forecasts were of no use, but needed them anyway for planning purposes.

Shrek

Shrek in the movie strikes a chord in all of us, the part that wants to be left alone, to be ourselves, uncurtailed by social norms. He resists pressure to try to get along with others, to brush his teeth. The ogre is the ego with an “r.” as in Ogrrre.
“Ogres are like onions,” Shrek says.
“They stink?” Donkey asks.
“Yes. No,” Shrek says.
“Oh, they make you cry.”
“No. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers.”
“You know, not everybody likes onions.”
Ogre comes from the ancient Latin word for Hades.
Shrek comes from the Yiddish word for fear.
Donkey is the id, the animal self. He says,
“Remember when you said that ogres have layers?”
“Aye?”
“Donkeys don’t have layers.”
Maybe we love both characters so much, because we’re pressured to suppress both ego and id in daily life, in favor of the superego.