Good Morning Digital Neighbors from across Locals, all your Friends, Refugees, Seekers, Phamily, Triggeratti and ADD Irregulars! A late post this morning from the Friar since I was only moving in second gear in the early hours. Excuses, excuses, but the sad facts are what they are, Brother Ass was a dragg'n this morning and no amount of coffee was going to perk it up before Coffee Talk.

I have mentioned this before, but perhaps not to all of you current readers of these morning rambles. After faith, the most important thing in my life is laughter. Laughter opens the door to humor and joy, it bridges the divides that separate people, and is often the way many friendships are formed later in life when we share a laugh. I doubt relationships can be sustained on humor and laughter alone, but a relationship without humor and shared laughter is usually on the path to withering and dying.

The people that make us laugh are often the most attractive people we meet. Good humor helps us laugh at ourselves without the painful humiliation of fault finding and shaming. Good humor helps us grasp how odd life is and and really odd humanity is. Of course there is always the risk that you take humor too far and alienate or anger your audience or the target of your humor and laughter. Bad humor is often just spiteful and masquerades as funny when it reality it seeks to shame, humiliate or ostracize the subject. It is difficult to discern the dividing line between good and bad humor, thin-skinned souls find most everything offensive and think-skinned ones can laugh at almost anything. I tend to seek thick-skinned people in my circle of friends and associates, I am so weary of the perpetually offended, the victimhood clingers and the too easily to hurt and injured crowd. Some people I know not to joke with at all in ministry because they will be hurt or offended. While offense is in the heart of the offended, if one is striving to be respectful you don't go looking for ways to intentionally offend or insult others. All things can be subject to humor, mockery or questioning, how it is done does make a difference. Well, enough on humor, laughter and the like, how about some quotes and a nice barn? Happy Friday Early Birds & Later Dayers, Conversants & Lurkers, Dawn Patrol, Fascinating People, Merry Bigots and all you Visitors & Vagabonds to the WSN!

Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century, but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. — Mark Twain

A good laugh is sunshine in the house. — William Thackeray

As soap is to the body, so laughter is to the soul. — A Jewish Proverb

If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know the man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, or seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you’ll get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man…All I claim to know is that laughter is the most reliable gauge of human nature. — Feodor Dostoyevsky

The Old Barn by Mary Carlson on Capture Minnesota