About two years ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. Covid-19 entered the rolls of “where were you then?” along with 9/11 and a list of assassinations.

I know where I wasn’t—at a conference in San Diego. I’d cancelled the trip 3 days earlier, thus beating the WHO to the punch.

At the time, we (I) thought it might be a couple of weeks, then a couple of months, and now a couple of years, two shots and two boosters later, and we’re still not to the next stage.

In April of that year, 2020, I wrote this blog. Something silly. It’s still necessary.

Are you ready for something silly?

These days I’m finding it hard to be cheerful, to see the humor in life. I wake up in a land I’d thought of only in fictional terms. A flare-up. An outbreak. An epidemic. A pandemic? When someone cracks a joke (rarely), my smile or laugh seem foreign to me, as if my lips and mouth are not used to the configuration.

So for this week, I thought I’d look for Quotes that make me laugh, or, at least not depressed.

• from Steven Wright: I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn’t park anywhere near the place.

• from George Carlin: May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.

from Woody Allen: My one regret in life is that I’m not someone else.

• from Steven Wright: A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me. I’m afraid of widths.

• and this one is an original from my colleagues in our physics lab at Fordham U., c. 1965.

Me: the spectrograph is off kilter again. It’s going to take hours to adjust it.
Ron, a classmate: Let’s just rotate the Bronx.

Keep safe, everyone.