August Is Happiness Happens Month August 3, 2010March 18, 2017 Artichokes are badly misunderstood. And apricots! They are in season and just 17 calories each. The trick to not spurting juice onto your clothes or close associates as you bite into them is to put the whole little thing in your mouth and eat it, shunting the pit off to the side with your tongue. I may have more to say about this at a later date. CHEESE DOODLES Joel Grow: “A moment of silence to honor the passing of a true Great One.” ☞ Morrie Yohai, inventor of the cheese doodle. Gone. Dead at 90. It was a good life. Gone too: NATIONAL THRIFT WEEK It died in 1966, after a half-century run. (“In 1916, with the First World War looming imminently on the horizon, the leaders of America’s major civic organizations launched an ambitious education campaign designed to ready the American public for a wartime economy. Dubbed ‘National Thrift Week’ and sponsored primarily by the Young Men’s Christian Association (Y.M.C.A.), the campaign became a recurring celebration, beginning each year on January 17, in honor of the birthday of Benjamin Franklin, the ‘American apostle of thrift.’ . . .”) It sounds silly – there’s a “week,” or more commonly a “month” for everything, and few pay attention. (August is, among much else, National Cataracts Month, National Beach Month, National Investors Month, Happiness Happens Month and Psoriasis Awareness Month – the perfect month for happy investors with psoriasis and cataracts to go to the beach.) And yet think what’s happened to America since discontinuation of National Thrift Week. It’s time to bring it back. COLLEGE LOOMING? Zac Bissonnette writes on the Huffington Post that the default train wreck on student loans is just beginning. Out at the end of this month, available now for pre-order: Debt-Free U: How I Paid For an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching Off My Parents.