• The New Yorker, et al. , Friday, November 7, 2008 11 AM

'Tis an absurd news week. Newspaper sales soar.

Dow plummets again.

Spitzer survives prostitution charges but Craigslist doesn't.

Layoffs galore.

And everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward massive clumps of matter on the outskirts of creation at more than two million miles an hour.

Sounds like the set-up for a Woody Allen story. Which, in fact, it is.

More years ago that I should discreetly remember, I'd race through the New Yorkers my father had just brought home looking for a Woody Allen story with the glee that I'd rifled through Topps bubble-gum packages for a Harmon Killebrew card a few years before. If I came across a laugh-out-loud funny Allen two-pager, and most were, I'd wind up reading it to my parents at a time when our dialogue was often restrained to how much money I needed for subway fare.

The New Yorker this week contains an quintessential Woody Allen two-pager, with one hilarious non sequitur piled upon another. It has been generationally vetted as by the savviest Millennial reader I know, and you need not feel guilty about reading it at work: It's replete with such tags as Hammacher Schlemmer, Kleenex, Flagg Brothers, Mixmaster, Armani, Schrafft's and Amalgamated Permafrost.

Have a LOL weekend, one and all.

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