In the clip from “Saturday Night Live” below, Harry Shearer and Martin Short play a pair of men’s synchronized swimmers. Christopher Guest plays their coach.

It is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

I recall first seeing the sketch in the late 80s or early 90s and I have searched for it ever since. Thankfully, somebody has uploaded it to Google Video (whatever that is) and at long last this treasure of mockumentarian comedy is viewable on demand.

From The Looking Spoon, via Ace on Twitter.

The energy of the sun sustained almost all life on Earth.

SUN – The 4.5 billion-year-old star at the center of our solar system has cooled and shriveled into a white dwarf despite receiving over $1 billion in loan guarantees from the United States Department of Energy.

The failure of the sun marks another disappointing outcome in a series of ill-fated solar energy investments by the federal government and one which is likely to have adverse long-term consequences for the billions of people who have relied on the sun for warmth and food.

President Barack Obama remarked Wednesday,

The failure of one G2V-class celestial body does not spell the end of green energy for the United States.

Much promise remains for the green economy. We must look ahead to a new dawn– er, a new day…

In her editorial “Amateur Hour,” Peggy Noonan quotes an unnamed Obama adviser in 2009 who says of the stimulus:

We should have spent more time thinking about where the money was being spent, rather than simply that there was this hole of a certain size in the economy that needed to be filled, so fill it.

Meanwhile, The Onion asks, Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?