Give Us This Day our Daily Chuckle

This week, a compendium of wit, wisdom and neat stuff you can tell at parties. Enjoy!

My 12 year old daughter asked me, “Mom, do you have a baby picture of yourself? I need it for a school project.”

I gave her one without thinking to ask what the project was.

A few days later I was in her classroom for a parent-teacher meeting when I noticed my face pinned to a mural the students had created.

The title of their project was: “The oldest thing in my house.” ***

Some art appreciates faster than others

A New York attorney representing a wealthy art collector called and

Scholars, on the other hand, have unique access to such documents that are still kept locked in a vault at the University of California, Berkley.

Literary pundits are given greater access to many of these still-hidden documents, all of which affords them a better view of this extraordinary man whom historians have tagged, “The Quintessential American Novelist.” asked to speak to his client.

WHAT FORMED HIS RELIGIOUS VIEWS. There is a longstanding ‘catch phrase’ which states that, “The Child is the Father of the Adult,” which means a child’s upbringing often determines the outcome of the adult-tobe in later years.

This certainly seems to have played a major role in forming Mark Twain’s inner-most character regarding life in general, and politics, and religion in particular.

Twain’s acrimonious view of organised religion and Biblical accounts, for example, can be traced to his earliest years when he was forced to attend Sunday Services. These formative years as a mere child, left an indelible imprint that lasted his entire lifetime.

These were the beginnings of his darkest lifetime moments that decimated and traumatised a young Samuel Clemens.

“Saul, I have some good news and I have some bad news.”

The art collector replied, “You know, I’ve had an awful day, Jack, so let’s hear the good news first.”

The lawyer said, “Well, I met with your wife today, and she informed me that she has invested only $5,000 in two very nice pictures that she thinks will bring somewhere between $15 and $20 million ... and I think she could be right.”

Saul replied enthusiastically, “Holy cow! Well done! My wife is a brilliant business woman, isn’t she? You’ve just made my day. Now, I know I can handle the bad news. What is it?”

The lawyer replied, “The pictures are of you and your secretary......”

***

Lunch with the Pope...

President Trump invited the Pope for lunch on his mega yacht. The Pope accepted and during lunch a puff of wind blew the Pontiff’s hat off, right Into the water.

It floated off about 50 feet, then the wind died down and it just floated in place.

Church sermons and hymns in his upbringing days were long, tortuous, and mournful, aimed at lost souls and eternal suffering and damnation in hellfire!

To Samuel Clemens, a mere child in bloom, God seemed to be nothing more than a menacing brute, what he referred to as an overbearing “Big Policeman up in the sky,” just waiting to pounce on him with curse after curse in retaliation for his sinning and ways gone wrong.

In her excellent account of these horrific and terrifying days for Samuel Clemens, gifted author and unexcelled biographer, Nora Stirling, writes with great emotion of young Clemens’ nightly visitations, which scarred him forevermore:

“Sam, knowing he was doomed, tossed and screamed in nightmares each Sunday night, but each Monday morning he was back at his sinning ways; and so he went, piling up a reserve of guilt and fear that was to last the rest of his life.”

(“Who Wrote the Classics,” Vol. 1, by Nora Stirling.)

It is punishing to just imagine a human child, literally, waking up screaming at the top of his lungs, in nightmares, each and every Sunday night. And yet, it was so.

In full adulthood, Samuel Clemens – who now morphed into world-fa-

The crew and the Secret Service were scrambling to launch a boat to go get it, when Trump waved them off, saying, “Never mind boys, I’ll get it.”

Then Donald climbed over the side of the yacht, walked on the water to the hat, picked it up, walked back on the water, climbed into the yacht, and handed the Pope his hat.

The crew was speechless. The security team and the Pope’s entourage were speechless.

No one knew what to say, not even the Pope.

But that afternoon, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC reported: “TRUMP CAN’T SWIM” ***

My name is Alice, and I was sitting in the waiting room for my first appointment with a new dentist. I noticed his DDS Diploma on the wall, which bore his full name.

Suddenly, I remembered a tall, handsome, dark-haired boy with the same name had been in my school class some 40 years ago.

Could he be the same guy that I had a secret crush on way back then?

Upon seeing him, I quickly discard- mous celebrity, Mark Twain -- often dipped his pen in vitriolic ink: “If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be – a Christian.”

And, “Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned.” Since his boyhood days, Mark Twain was certain that God, in retrospect, punished him with tragedy after tragedy for his wayward ways of smoking, cursing, and hating school.

THE SECRET LIFELONG GRIEF OF A MURDER HE BELIEVED HE COMMITTED. One particular moment in Twain’s boyhood forged a dagger in his brain and led him to believe – all his life – that he had, inadvertently, murdered another human being.

According to Mark Twain’s own memoirs, this is what transpired: At the tender age of fourteen, Twain was in the company of his boyhood chum, Tom Blankenship (whom Mark Twain transformed into Huck Finn in his Huckleberry Finn novel; Mark Twain, himself, became Tom Sawyer).

One particular night the two young teens took note of a vagabond drunk who was placed in the town’s oneroom jailhouse and decided to pay him an unauthorised visit. Peering ed any such thought. This balding, gray-haired man, with the deeply lined face, was way too old to have been my classmate.

After he examined my teeth I asked him if he had attended Morgan Park High School. “Yes”, he said. “I am a Mustang” he gleamed with pride.

“When did you graduate?” I asked.

He answered “in 1967. Why do you ask?”

“You were in my class”, I exclaimed.

He looked at me closely, then this ugly, old, bald, wrinkle-faced, fatassed, gray-haired, decrepit, son-ofa-bitch asked me.......... “What did you teach?”

***

When God sends help, don’t ask questions

She hurried to the pharmacy to get medication, got back to her car and found that she had locked her keys inside.

The woman found an old rusty coat hanger left on the ground. She looked at it and said, “I don’t know

Mark Twain from page 2 at each other through the jail bars, the derelict finally asked the two youths for a light for his old smoking pipe.

It was against town rules to even converse with the incarcerated; it was triple-wrong to hand him any matches. Not one for rules, Mark handed the drunk some matches.

Short time later, the boys, now at the opposite end of town, noticed a bright orange ball illuminating the evening sky.

Running back to the jailhouse, it was too late.

Engulfed in an unforgiving inferno, the frantic screams from a man tearing at his bars was suddenly silenced.

The dead man was only the first of many tragedies that Mark Twain would blame himself for.

He felt certain, the Big Judge in the sky (the Biblical God), was reaching out to punish him for all his wrongdoings, all his transgressions, all his careless behaviour. Mark Twain would later write, “ . . . the swindle of life and the treachery of a God that can create disease and misery and endless crime – create things that men would be condemned for creating – that men would be ashamed to create.”

Truths often couched in humour have long been a Mark Twain trademark. However, when wrestling with such raw experiences such as death, suffering, and pain, Twain often took off the gloves and wrote his thoughts down hard, bare-knuckled, uncensored, and filtered with disguised humor.

The celebrated author never relished the company of Christians, nor subscribed in their belief-system and, in fact, boasted that his early church-tending days seemed happily over.

“Nothing agrees with me. If I drink coffee, it gives me dyspepsia; if I drink wine, it gives me the gout; if I go to church, it gives me dysentery.”

CONFLICTING RELIGIOUS VIEWS AND AMENDMENTS.

Despite his acrimonious view on organised religion, Mark Twain found it most ironic that his supreme idol was a Catholic saint, by the name of Joan of Arc (The Maid of Orleans). “It took six thousand years to produce her; her like will not be seen in the Earth again in fifty thousand.”

(Source: “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc,” by Mark Twain, 1896.)

She was the summit of Twain’s admiration, “She is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.”

(Source: “Saint Joan of Arc,” by Mark Twain, 1919.) Equally ironic is that the celebrated Mark Twain was traveling through the Holy Land as a correspondent when he chanced upon a portrait of a young, staunch Christian girl, petite andslender, and with piercing dark eyes and, suddenly, his mind was reversed. Reversed, that is,regarding comporting with Christians, and also in regards to the fairer sex.

As a journalist and lecturer, he had often boasted that he was a confirmed bachelor. “I’ve neverhad the wish or the time to bother with women.”

Now, something strange and indefinable crystallized within Mark Twain, now in his thirties, and he heard himself say, “I could worship a girl like that.”

And he did, for the remainder of his life.

Mark Twain had found his other half of existence, in the form of his wife-to-be, Olivia Susan Langdon (“Livy”).

She was the best thing that ever happened to him, and their love was unparalleled by any standard. And she was a devout Christian, overturning Twain’s blanket statement regarding her ilk.

Forty years after they married, Mark Twain said, “From the first day I saw her, she has never been out of my mind.”

But, Mark Twain was ever leery of that Big Judge up in the sky (the Olde Testament God), ready to pounce on him for his every transgression, past to present.

When Twain had lost his father earlier in his life, who died at the young age of 49, he blamed himself, because he felt God was punishing him through his father’s death.

Same when he lost his brother, Benjamin, struck down as a mere child of ten.

His life seemed a cursed one. He had lost his sister, Margaret, who died at age nine, leaving Mark, a confused toddler only four years old.

Then, curse upon curse, he lost his other brother, Henry, when death claimed him at the young age of 20.

Mark was 23 when his brother,

Mark Twain continued on page 5