Ha Ha

It's early in June, and I'm sitting in a small, brightly lit room in New York City, facing a TV camera, grinning enthusiastically and having a conversation with perky voices in my ear.I'm doing what's called a "satellite media tour" to promote a book. For three straight hours I've been talking to perky TV News Teams all over the country, one after another, for about five minutes apiece. The only person in the room with me is Gary, the cameraman. I can't see the News Teams; I can only hear them via an earpiece.

Every year at tax time, I write a lighthearted, "fun" column about the Internal Revenue Service, in which I make a lot of jokes that are not serious, because I am just kidding around in a humorous vein. The truth is that I have the deepest respect for the IRS, and for the thousands of fine men and women and Doberman pinschers who work there. Ha ha! That's an example of the kind of good-natured "jab" I usually take at the IRS, stemming from affection, rather than hostility. Because in all seriousness, I believe that the IRS is wonderful.

"Mighty Aphrodite" is Woody Allen's take on the great fate-haunted, destiny-tossed Greek dramas of yore, and he does manage to come up with something Sophocles never thought of: a tragedy with a happy ending.But what did Sophocles know?The movie is a return to the loopy, not terribly deep mode of parody out of which Allen first hacked his career with films like "Sleeper" (sci-fi), "Love and Death" (Russian novels) or even "Zelig" (documentary). That means, consequently, that it's still a further turn away from the powerful examinations of moral ambivalence that have consumed him over the past decade, as in "Crimes and Misdemeanors" or "Husbands and Wives."

I long have been a big fan of Amnesty International, one of a tiny handful of organizations of ostensible good will that in my experience has never succumbed to empire building or blathering political foolishness. Now 40 years old, it gets on with the job of trying to save people from abuse by wielders of awful powers. As a fund-raising exercise for Amnesty, now comes "Yeats Is Dead! -- A Mystery" by 15 Irish writers, edited by Joseph O'Connor (Knopf, 259 pages, $23). The idea is not exactly fresh.

IT'S BACK-TO-SCHOOL time, parents, and you know what that means! It's time to get the kids off the TV-room sofa, using logging equipment if necessary, and take them to the mall for back-to-school supplies.Getting the right school supplies is crucial to your child's chances for success. We all remember the tragic story of young Abraham Lincoln, whose family could not afford school supplies, so he had to write on a shovel blade with a piece of coal. This meant that if young Abe saw a cute girl and wanted to pass her a note in class, he had to hand her this gross, filthy digging implement, sometimes with worm parts stuck to it, and she'd go, "Ewwww!"

In light of last week's television news weather predictions about the blizzard that never was, The Sun is providing, as a public service, excerpted transcripts from weather reports of truly biblical proportions. First, from WMAR: Male Anchor: "... Coming to us live from the city zoo today is WMAR's own Noah Lewis, who can tell us what lies in the future. Noah?" Forecaster: "Stan, we've got one nasty prophesy for the days ahead. If you look here to this part of the Storm Trak parchment, where the cloud-like hieroglyphs are covering the entire known world, you can see that we're expecting to have as much as 30 to 60 days and nights of rain.

Just as much as I look forward to new music every year, I also greatly anticipate reissues. Sometimes, I enjoy the revisited material more than the new stuff. And that was more or less the case last year. In concluding my look back at the music of 2006, I spotlight the reissues I couldn't get enough of. The Sisters Love Give Me Your Love You probably have never even heard of this group. And that's understandable, because the Sisters Love never had a real hit. The group evolved from the Cookies, which turned into the Raylettes, Ray Charles' backing group in the 1960s.

TODAY'S SCIENCE topic is: Insect Intelligence. I don't know about you, but I've always taken comfort in the idea that insects are stupid. For example, if I'm outdoors and a bee lands on me and starts walking around on my head -- causing me to turn rigid with fear, terrified that, if I move, the bee will become angry and sting me in the eyeball -- I've always reassured myself by thinking: "This bee does not wish to harm me! Its tiny brain is confused! It thinks I am a flower!"But now I have received, from alert reader Greg Stevens, a news item by the Reuters (pronounced "Associated Press")

I hate to put a fly in your ointment, but if you think that just because you live in America, you are safe from the terror of terrorism, then I have three words for you: ha ha ha.I make this statement in light of a terrifying incident that occurred on Christmas Eve, according to an article from the Newport, Ore., News-Times, written by Gail Kimberling and sent in by alert reader Deane Bristow, whose name can be rearranged to spell "Sewer Bandito," although...

SHOULD AMERICAN schoolchildren be given standardized national educational tests? I believe they should, and I will tell you exactly why: Because I am not a schoolchild. I am strongly in favor of things that I, personally, do not have to do. Childbirth is another example.The testing program was proposed by President Clinton, who has been proposing new programs as fast as he can think them up, because he desperately wants to be remembered by posterity for some achievement other than being investigated and jogging around in shorts the size of a wedding tent.