With no offense to my Pops,

And no offense to the Reader's Digest "Humor in Real Life" division, this I received from a person younger than I with the subject line "Funny Email" which just tells you right there something not at all funny is coming behind the click.

What I do think is amusing about it is not the subject matter or the way in which it is presented like it actually occurred, but the path it took to end up in my inbox.

I like to think it happened like this: someone FWD: Fwd: fwd: FWD: fwd it to John Beahan, who is most definitely of the generation before ours, and let's say his sister-in-law is a features editor at the local paper somewhere in the Midwest. So John sends it along with some sort of addition at the top: "SCROLL DOWN YOU WONT BE DISAPPOINTED HA HA HA LOL" and it was so funny, Judy the features editor was so tickled, she had to print it in the newspaper. An email forward. In the newspaper.

And then the next baby boomer read it, got a chuckle, shared it with Martha over breakfast, folded his newspaper up and asked his granddaughter the second-grader to scan it and FWD: it back to him so it could begin its journey as a bad scan and end up here, where I will mock it. The end.