For anyone interested in the subject of women and humor, Alternet's got a story up about humor's connection to power -- and about a new documentary called "Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women."

Here's some more serious news about women's health: Another article (this time from the San Francisco Chronicle) about how women need different heart treatment than do men, and that techniques that often prove life-saving for men might actually put women at greater risk of death.

Just in case you were wondering, first kisses are apparently more important to women than to men, according to the BBC. The article also asserts that there's a difference in the kind of kisses each sex prefers, "with men liking wet, tongue kisses." Just so you know.

Speaking of Brits, here's an editorial from the the Guardian that asks why, when it comes to commercials for stomach-and-intestinal-tract-soothing medications, women are always the ones shown bloated and farting. Perhaps I'm not as up on my diarrhea commercials as I should be, but I think that in the United States, both sexes equally shoulder the burden of advertising hemorrhoid creams and gas relievers. I knew there was a reason why I love this country.

Here's an article from the Sacramento Bee that asks whether general interest women's magazines like Glamour and Cosmo have become outdated as specialty magazines like Lucky and Real Simple become more popular. Personally, I'm not buying the idea that there's no one out there who reads Cosmo anymore. I mean, where else are you going to get tips on hot sex positions (today's suggestion: "the passion pretzel") combined with essential celebrity gossip and fashion tips? You'd have to read InStyle, Vogue and the Good Vibrations Catalog to amass that sort of information. The real issue, as I see it, is that no women's magazine except for O contains any actual articles -- they seem to be devolving into editorialized advertisements for clothes and beauty products interspersed with tips for sexy things you can do with ice cubes. But that doesn't mean that people are going to stop buying them.

And last, a follow-up to a post I wrote last week about the New Yorker's Shouts & Murmurs column -- I completely forgot to include a link to a site called Silence of the City that features Talk of the Town submissions that the New Yorker rejected. They're each stamped with the date they were denied. Now that's funny.