Lancaster High School - Mirage Yearbook (Lancaster, OH)

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MIRAGE 17 The comic view is perfect because it takes nothing seriously and impales the inevitable on a smile. What is it that made $260,000 for the originator of Billiken, that little barefooted fellow who went the length and breadth of thi3 country and brought home the golden harvest for his originator? It is because the heart of humanity is always hungry for a smile. Billiken says: “I force the failure to his feet, I make the growler grin, I am the god of happiness, my name is Billiken.” So essential is humor to a well balanced individual that Dr. Eliot has given it a prominent place in the religion of the future. He says the new religion will have more laughter in it. It will be a religion of love, of work, service, sanitation, deep breathing, broad thinking, good food and above all laughter, cheerfulness and contentment. Mark Twain, the king of a nation of humorists, knew better than any one how to turn a frown into a smile. Notice his treatment of the bitterness attending a wet-dry fight. A community is divided against itself, friendships are broken, customers lost, and a general feeling of distrust and ill will prevails. Into a situation like that Mark Twain injects a bit of his characteristic humor: “I am a friend of temperance, and I want it to suc- ceed, but I don’t think prohibition is practical. The Germans you see, prevent it. Look at them! They have just invented a way of making brandy out of saw dust. Now what chance will prohibition have when a man can take a rip saw and go out and get drunk with a fence rail? What is the good of prohibition if a man is able to make brandy mashes out of the shingles on his roof, or if he can get the delirium tremens by drinking the legs off his kitchen table?” You pupils think the grading of examination papers an irksome task. To be sure, there is the monotonous grind of the same ques- tions, the same mistake and the tedious hours under high pressure. But there is another side. Listen to these answers from your latest examinations: The reason Irving was so interested in Charlecot Estate was because they were going to move the bones to Westminister Abbey. The Normans and Saxons were no relation at all unless they married each other. Bryant wrote the Conquest of Grandpa.