Learn to laugh

You might not appreciate the following unless you're older than 39:n Just before the funeral services, the undertaker came up to the very elderly widow and asked, "How old was your husband?" "98," she replied, "two years older than me." "So you're 96," the undertaker commented. She responded, "Hardly worth going home, is it?"

* Reporter interviewing a 104-year-old woman: "And what do you think is the best thing about being 104?" the reporter asked. She simply replied, "No peer pressure."

* The nice thing about being senile is you can hide your own Easter eggs.

* I've sure gotten old. I've had two bypass surgeries, a hip replacement and new knees, fought prostate cancer and diabetes. I'm half blind, can't hear anything quieter than a jet engine, take 40 different medications that make me dizzy, winded and subject to blackouts. Have bouts with dementia, have poor circulation, hardly feel my hands and feet anymore. Can't remember if I'm 89 or 98. Have lost all my friends. But, thank God, I still have my driver's license.

* I feel like my body has gotten totally out of shape, so I got my doctor's permission to join a fitness club and start exercising. I decided to take an aerobics class for seniors. I bent, twisted, gyrated, jumped up and down and perspired for an hour. But by the time I got my leotards on, the class was over.

* My memory's not as sharp as it used to be. Also, my memory's not as sharp as it used to be.

* These days about half the stuff in my shopping cart says, "For fast relief."

* The Senility Prayer: Grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.

* Always remember this: You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing.

-- E-mail

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Total tolerance: President Obama's Cairo University address to the world's Muslims squandered a historic opportunity that perhaps only a president with a Muslim father and a Muslim name could have utilized: effectively rallying the Islamic world against Iran as it pursues nuclear weapons.

Instead, he did pretty much the opposite, declaring that "no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons."

This is multilateralism taken to its reductio ad absurdum. Since the dawn of atomic weapons, it has been mostly the United States' job -- what Harry Truman called "an awful responsibility which has come to us" -- to act as a kind of global nuclear custodian.

Truman made no bones about defending our building of the bomb, noting that the Nazis "were on the search for it" and that "we know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first."

That Democratic president made it clear to the world that "Great Britain, Canada and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction."

If we are honest with ourselves today, we must admit that even now, nearly six and a half decades into the nuclear age, there remains no foolproof means of controlling the bomb. It continues to be, in "Give 'em hell" Harry's words, "too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world."

So it is chilling to here a U.S. president go to Egypt and, after issuing an unprecedented apology for the 1953 CIA coup that kept Iran and its oil from the clutches of Iran's direct neighbor to the north, the Soviet Union, declare that Iran has "the right" to nuclear power-which it can easily use to build bombs.

There is nothing new in a president calling for "a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons," as Obama did in Cairo. Ronald Reagan expressed such hopes. But isn't contending that "no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons" the opposite of zero nuclear tolerance?

-- Excerpt from an Investors Business Daily editorial

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Top 10 poverty cities: This has to be one of the greatest American tragedies. What do the top 10 cities with the highest poverty rate all have in common?

Detroit (first on the poverty rate list) has not elected a Republican mayor since 1961.

Buffalo hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1954.

Cincinnati hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1984.

Cleveland hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1989.

Miami has never elected a Republican mayor.

St. Louis hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1949.

El Paso has never elected a Republican mayor.

Milwaukee hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1908.

Philadelphia hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1952.

Newark (10th on the poverty rate list) hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1907.

Einstein once said, The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." It is the disadvantaged who habitually elect Democrats -- yet they remain disadvantaged.

Most of these cities voted 70 percent or more for the Democrat candidate for president.

How can people be a fifth-generation American and still be disadvantaged?

Answer: The disadvantaged remain disadvantaged because, instead of working for it, they are looking for a liberal government to give them something.

-- E-mail

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Thoughts:

* Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.

-- John Quincy Adams

* Why pay money to have your family tree traced? Go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.

-- Mark Twain

* Isn't it a little ironic? We pick politicians by how they look on TV and Miss America on where she stands on the issues. Isn't that a little backward?

-- Jay Leno

* The truth is that many people set rules to keep from making decisions

-- Mike Krzyzewski

* The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.

-- Ben Stein

* A monologue is not a decision.

-- Clement Attlee

* It is the characteristic excellence of the strong man that he can bring momentous issues to the fore and make a decision about them. The weak are always forced to decide between alternatives they have not chosen themselves.

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Gary Rust is chairman of Rust Communications.