Complex Numbers

Fourteen Thousand?

My wife has a thick paperback book called, "14,000 Things to be Happy About."

http://www.amazon.com/14-000-Things-Happy-About/dp/0894803700/sr=8-1/qid=1172779...

All I can say is, ""

Fourteen thousand? If you contemplated ONE of those saccharine gems per day, you'd be using up 2/3 of your life. Or more, since doing so would certainly shorten your life by a significant amount. Me, I'd die of insulin poisoning long before I reached #13,999.

The book is in our Place of Excremeditation, so I have thumbed through it from time to time. The only saving grace it has is that a lot of things that seemed to make that author "happy" would disgust me:

Wet babies She probably meant "just bathed," but I read it differently.

Golden retrievers

Naming your baby That would imply that I had a baby, which would cause me no happiness whatsoever.

On the plus side, the book might be a good source of Writer's Cramp prompts...

So I thought I'd come up with my own list of Things That Make Me Happy. Sadly, I don't have much time, so this'll just be a start. Feel free to add.

Watching people make fools of themselves.
The Darwin Awards.
News stories about freak accidents.
Psychotic Flash animations.
Other peoples' misfortune.
Someone gets theirs.
Kittens.*
Ultraviolent movies.
Well-executed practical jokes.
Hanging up on telemarketers.
Signage mistakes, like the C falling off from "Now Hiring Closers."

*Well, I had to have SOMETHING legitimately cute in there.