I’ve been really wanting to write some important blog entry that just ties up all the loose ends and makes sense out of it all. Not for other people, of course — what am I, Confucius? — but just in my own limited ability to be all right with the world. But what are you going to do? Is there any one of the big looming current events that lends itself to having a lovely 300-word-plus-clip-art bow tied around it? Checking the headlines, we see:

• Immigration issue — complex and unsolvable
• Terrorism at home — frightening and terrible
• Mideast crisis (no. MXCVIII in a series) — hopeless and awful

Good grief, they even managed to dredge up somebody who says he killed Jon Benet Ramsey and we can’t get closure!

I’m sorry. I hate pretending to be more jaded and cynical than I am, but there’s enough in the papers right now to make a person nearly insane. So that must be the reason I’m inclining toward dumb, pointless or juvenile humor these days. What the heck, right? If being a grown-up isn’t going to pay off, must be time to just forget about heavy thinking and laugh at stupid stuff.

And judging from some of the stops on the Ortho-blogosphere tour, I’m not the only one.

A quick perusal found little in the way of deep cogitation, but …

• Alana has a thoughtful gift for the budding monastic in all of us.

  Your commute becomes a time of blessing and not cursing, when road rage and cursing is transformed into soul-illumining prayer thanks to the INFLATANABBOTT(tm) riding shot-gun!

  No longer will you be tempted to waste your evenings watching mindless TV, for with the INFLATANABBOTT(tm) in your living room, Kathismas are the order of the day!

  DON”T WAIT! ORDER NOW! Plastochristodoulos, Inc. has operators standing by and waiting for YOUR IMPORTANT CALL! 1-555-ABBOTTS

• E Rica posted the latest in the now-classic “Farting Preacher” series. All right, so this is majorly low-brow humor. But I haven’t been able to make it through any of this series without laughing so much my face hurts. (Do you ever wonder who this poor schlub is? How would you like to be more famous for your humorously-embellished sermons than for the real thing? Well, I can’t feel too sorry for him. Does he have to keep scrunching up his face like that every time he makes a point? It was just a matter of time before the bad kids in church got hold of some video production programs.)
• S-p at Pithless Thoughts passes along a sensitive little cry for help that’s sure to tug the heart-strings of anyone who has heart-strings to tug:
  

  I hope you will help me. You can help me if you forward this email to everyone you know. Forward it to people you don’t know, too. Dr. Johansen said that for every person you forward this email to, Bill Gates will team up with AOL and send a nickel to NASA. With that funding, NASA will collect prayers from school children all over America and have the astronauts take them up into space so that the angels can hear them better.

Come on, that’s just funny stuff.