Between the war in Iraq, the hype and controversy of the Gardasil vaccine and the harms of global warming, I figure I would lighten the mood and talk about a few different newsworthy stories that have been running the press in papers that are a little less serious but most definitely something worth speaking up about. Basically, there are a few stories that I came across that I’m going to speak about.
I was reading USA Today and came across a rather interesting headline. It said “Study links sense of humor, survival.” It’s catchy, right? I thought so.
I consider myself to be funny, although some people may not agree. Sense of humor is second nature to me. I laugh at almost everything that I shouldn’t and I do it shamelessly. If you can’t laugh at yourself, what can you laugh at?
The point is that a study in Hungary has been done involving 54,000 Norwegians. According to USA Today, adults who have a sense of humor outlive those who don’t find life funny, and the survival edge is particularly large for people with cancer.
Over seven years they were tracked and the end result was that people who could find humor in real-life situations and how important a humorous perspective was had a better change of living longer in those seven years.
In general, whether a study had been done or not, I think people are well aware that if they walk through life without finding humor in things that they cannot control are going to be completely miserable the rest of the time they have here on Earth.
I guess I just don’t understand why people would dwell on something that they cannot control. Too many people put their life on hold or avoid living it because of something, like cancer, happening to them.
Speaking of cancer, maybe the law that Atlantic City plans on passing will deter people from smoking.
In Atlantic City, N.J. has announced that they’ll be making 75 percent of their casino floors smoke free.
It’s hard to imagine the casino floor without a gambler casually walking around smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke in your face or even seeing an old woman sitting at her slot machine ashing her cigarette in one hand into a butt-filled ash tray and using the other to continually hit the spin button.
The smell coming from the first floor up the escalator to the casino floor is a smell I never got used to. It made me gag.
I think it’s really a great idea. It might make the casino feel a little cleaner and a little less smoky. Next on the chopping block should be Harrah’s in Chester.
