Why I'm not a comedian:

A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, CEO, and President Obama are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across, takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier, and says, "Look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie." President Obama then asks the public employee, "Why are you looking at me?"

I can't overlook the context even when it detracts from the punchline.

In jm's spirit, and cannibalizing my own FB status, "...then the Democratic Party proudly says that the remaining cookie belongs to the union guy, and arranges for him to only give half of it to the CEO and a quarter to the tea partier."

Actually, Wall Street gets it all, it's sort of what's been happening the last decade or so.

POPULATION DISPLACEMENT PUDDING

In the spirit of politicized desserts, a repost from December 2010 of something I sent to snoburbia.

My family has New England roots, and I was intrigued to recently discover the following recipe for Microwave Instant Pudding. I made it yesterday, and thought the molasses flavor was a bit too strong - next time I'll substitute brown sugar for part of the molasses. The following is as published at the surrealistic satire site Fafblog!

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MICROWAVE INDIAN PUDDING

About the traditional, but anachronistic, name of the dish: The recipe was adapted from the English “hasty pudding”. What's “Indian” about it is the cornmeal, formerly called “Indian meal”. The original inhabitants of North America had neither dairy products nor molasses, although they had developed maple syrup as an ingenious indigenous equivalent for the latter. The molasses used by the colonists was produced on West Indian plantations by the unpaid labor of involuntary emigrants from Africa, who were found to be more suited to such work than the people in place there when Europeans arrived. Anyone wanting a new name reflecting a contextualized historical and multicultural perspective could call it Population Displacement Pudding.

With best wishes,
Fannie Farmer (Mrs.)

MICROWAVE INDIAN PUDDING

2 c. milk
1/4 c. cornmeal
2 tbsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ginger
1 egg, beaten
1/4 c. molasses
1 tbsp. melted butter

Vanilla ice cream

Pour 1-1/2 cups milk into 1-1/2 quart bake dish. Cook on 50% (simmer) for 5 minutes. Combine cornmeal, sugar, salt, cinnamon and ginger. Stir into hot milk. Cook, uncovered, on 50% for 4 minutes. Stir well. Beat egg, molasses and butter. Stir a small amount of milk mixture in egg mixture. Return to dish. Stir well. Cook uncovered on 50% for 6 minutes. Stir well. Pour remaining cold milk over top of pudding. Don't stir. Cook, uncovered, on 50% for 3 minutes until set. Let stand 15 minutes before serving. Serve warm topped with ice cream.

By the way, everybody keeps mentioning "President Obama?" Is he still President?

Did someone say cookie?

Dacher Keltner, a social psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, says power entails a paradox. "People in organizations and in hierarchies and in informal groups like college dorms want leaders to be socially intelligent," Keltner said. "They will sacrifice all manner of things to have leaders who are thoughtful and engaged and give other people voice." But once socially gifted people rise to power, Keltner added, the paradox is that "power simplifies our thinking. We tend to see things in terms of our own self-interest, and it makes us more impulsive. We forget our audience in service of gratifying our own impulses."

[snip]

Keltner once had groups of three people sit before a bowl that contained five cookies, and each volunteer took one. That left two cookies. By mutual agreement, the volunteers always left the last cookie in the bowl. So who took the fourth cookie?
Invariably, Keltner found, the person in the group who had been randomly assigned to feel powerful rudely grabbed the fourth cookie.
"We videotaped how they ate," Keltner said, laughing. "The high-powered person ate with their mouth open, cookie crumbs falling all over their shirt."

[similar story told, but with another confection as prop]:

Three fellows from Van Nuys are at a table: a CEO, a proctologist manqué, and a guy who just got fired from the Jiffy Lube™ in your home town.

On the table we find no less than EIGHT boxes chock full of Kripsy Kreme glazed/filled product. The expiration date reads 01/07/2011. With all possible dispatch--and without the slightest regard for the otherwise refined sensibilities of his table partners--the CEO begins consuming two and three at a time the contents of the first box of les bonnes bouches.

Meanwhile, clear across town, his wife--known affectionately as "Muriel Mayhem"--is at the hoe down with a hyper-libidinous newspaper carrier with a skin outbreak. We'll call him "Skippy". Skippy, being a minor, is secretly recording the debauchery in order to blackmail the CEO, a staid Presbyterian who, it is rumored, is, in actuality, a mulatto cardsharp raised in Flushing, NY. More on this in a moment...

Back at the engorgement, and as the proctologist pares his fingernails, he relates a story he had heard told by an itinerant go-go dancer from Vilnius when traveling in the upper Congo region during a cholera outbreak--coinciding, no less, with the feast of St. Point du Pugine.

"And, please be convinced of the absolute necessity of due discretion in the hearing of the facts I am about to relate. That is, I speak to you in confidence and with the assumed assurance that you will in no wise share this witness I am entrusting to you. Gentlemen,"

And with this, he paused in his narration, and leaning forward, his voice assumed a tone at once grave yet somehow...informed by a terror which could be exorcised in only a purging of every wraith his nightmare bore for him. He went on...

"Gentlemen...I, Petr Ouspenska Ouspenskovitch, who has seen--with my own eyes--who has heard--with ears that were vulnerable to the cries of those souls made to bear the fury of men quite obviously possessed--must declare to you this day the horror--yes! no other word will suffice!--the unearthly horror of having suffered the...

"Yes, my friend," the CEO implored, cake crumbs poised on waxed tips of a graying mustachio, "please be convinced of our discretion and do but continue the recounting of this tale--no matter horrific, and despite the ghastly nature of the torment, do but unburden yourself and keep not the impressions your mind has been made to bear to yourself. In a word: the specters you have found to be haunting your every waking moment will be seen to be purged from you with every retelling..."

"Yes, quite," he concurred, "I was about to reveal, finally, the precise nature the details of which I have thus far only provided the merest
soupçon, as it were...Where was I?--oh, yes, I had been traveling in the company of the Governor-general near the Katanga region at the height of the rainy season, when my party became separated from the physician--one Dr. Raymond Barry, as I recall--sent by the Crown to help deliver the natives from the immiseration by which they had been aggrieved for time out of memory, to wit: the dreaded kse kse bacterium which proliferates..."

to be continued...

Dean Taylor seems to have begun a non-quick joke, but the similarity of name and a bit of the atmosphere reminds me of the following, which takes place in a barn during the Russian Revolution:

THERE were the three of us in an old barn in Rostov-on-the-Don. Outside it was freezing... We found also a quantity of spirit in one of the cupboards in the barn, and despite Zaharov’s protests, we proceeded to convert it into vodka with the addition of some orange peel. Ouspiensky told Zaharov that the rightful owner would never get back to Rostov in time to use it before the Bolshevists came—a prophecy which proved to be accurate—and that, if we did not drink it, the Commissars would. So we began to drink it.

“People have been drinking since the beginning of the world,” remarked Ouspiensky suddenly, “but they have never found anything to go better with vodka than a salted cucumber.”

[snip]

“It was when I was a young man in Moscow,” he was saying, “and my cousin once gave a party. We brewed the vodka together. It was a marvelous brew. There was one man there, the sort of type one only sees in Russia; a young man with long hair, a long beard, long moustaches and a sad, far-away look in his eyes. Well, he had one glass of vodka, got straight up from his chair, walked out of the house and into the nearest hairdresser’s. There he made them run the clippers all over his head, and shave him; he came out as bare of hair as an egg, and went straight home to bed. That shows you what good vodka can do!”

“Apropos, did you ever hear,” he asked, “about the chief of police in this town just after the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917? His clerk found him sitting in his office one morning, with a pile of newspapers and proclamations in front of him. He was scratching his head in perplexity. ‘Ye-es,’ he said at last, ‘I can understand that the proletariat of the world ought to unite; but why must they unite in Rostov-on-the-Don?’”

This is not a comment.

Adding my own variation:
A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, a CEO and Barak Obama are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across, takes 11 cookies, looks at the Tea Partier, and says, "Look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."

A great fight ensued between the public employee and the tea party member. After watching it rage for a while, the remaining cookie losing many crumbs, Obama rose ponderously. "Gentlemen," he said, "these are troubled times and the plate is clearly almost empty. All of us must make sacrifices in the face of such a dire situation. We must give the remaining cookie to the CEO so that he can use it to make a cookie factory! Oh yeah, the Union guy wants your crumbs."

11 cookies is not enough
http://www.angrybearblog.com/2011/03/too-big-to-fail-wall-street-and-main.html

The CEO looks at the union guy and says, "if you have any cookies with you, now is the time to add them to the plate."