Betty Finney's Oomph • Motivation Programs for Stress Relief • Betty Recommends

Presenting Dr. Whoopee Stressbusters stress relief products
	Presenting the Dr. Whoopee Stressbuster Clown Nose. Apply once per day as needed for stress relief. Repeat as desired. Price: $4.00 ea. or 3 for $10.00 Contact Betty at bellylaugh@me.com to order.
	Presenting the Dr. Whoopee Stressbuster Stressball. Squeeze, squish, bounce or toss as needed for stress relief. Price: $4.00 ea. or 3 for $10.00 Contact Betty at bellylaugh@me.com to order.

Other laughter-inducing stress-relief products recommended by Betty.
	With a loose, free-associative flow, Ellen DeGeneres glides through her 2003 HBO special, Here and Now. In just the first 10 minutes she touches on procrastination, new paint colors, television commercials, and mental disorders--topics that fit into the show's subtitle, Modern Life and Other Inconveniences. By the end, she's also spun out sneaky jokes about cell phones, memory loss, elevators, vocal inflections, pickle jars, and social embarrassment.
	This post-coming-out performance fully acknowledges Ellen DeGeneres's status as America's most famous lesbian, but it is nevertheless imbued with a sense of fun. For instance, rather than describe the experience of closet-exiting on her self-titled situation comedy in the late 1990s, she performs an amusing "interpretive dance." She uses her trademark goofiness to ruminate on the necessity of directions on shampoo bottles, ant road rage, and the possible nightmarish consequences of buying cheese.
	In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Ellen DeGeneres shares her hilarious take on everything from our most baffling human foibles–including how we behave in elevators, airplanes, and restrooms, and why we’re so scared of the boogeyman–to fashion trends, celebrity, and her secret recipe for Ellen’s Real Frenchy French Toast. Most of all, this witty, engaging book offers insights into the mind of one of America’s most beloved comics.
	Degeneres continues her year-long domination of all media (following a cross-country stand-up tour, an HBO special, a show-stealing turn in Finding Nemo and the successful launch of her daily talk show in September) with this new humor collection, winningly preserved on audio. The laid-back, observational comedienne's stream-of-conscience musings gain additional zest from her wry and adroit delivery.
	LaRoche is Erma Bombeck with a wellness agenda. A motivational speaker with her own company, The Humor Potential, LaRoche has been featured on PBS and serves on the faculty of Boston's Mind-Body Institute. Her theme: laughter is important for reducing stress and maintaining a healthy life.
	Are you aware that 75 percent of daily conversation is negative? While you may not have noticed that, you are no doubt aware of the stress and hassles of everyday life. Loretta LaRoche, an adjunct member on the faculty of the Behavior Institute of Medicine, which is an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is determined to break you out of your cycle of negativity.
	Loretta LaRoche is sick to death of diets and diet books. Not a day goes by without an article appearing in the media that reveals some food that could be harmful or helpful to our health. Food has become either demonic or divine. We’ve forgotten how to be in “right relationship” with one of the greatest pleasures we have in life: eating. As a result, we’re fatter than ever and more stressed out about being fat!
	The "master of mirth" is back by popular demand. Loretta LaRoche is ready to help viewers in their continuing quest to get a handle on their stress. Behind her irreverent unconventional wacky and just plain funny style Loretta has successfully found a way to make cognitive therapy (rethinking the way you think) accessible and in so doing help viewers see "the folly of their ways" and put our lives back in perspective.
	"All you have to do is discover the healing power of humor, it will change your perspective and lighten your load." -Loretta LaRoche, MD (Mirth Doctor) The Joy of Stress Stress in an individual reaction; it can be fantastic or it can be fatal! The choice of how we respond is ultimately up to each of us. Join comedienne Loretta LaRoche as she teaches you how to prevent "hardening of the attitude" and how to use humor to break the negative and irrational thought patterns that cause stress, and reframe them into powerful, positive tools for change.
	In hilarious, brand-new pieces, Dave tackles everything from fatherhood, new fatherhood ("Over the next five years, you will spend roughly 45 minutes, total, listening to songs you like, and roughly 127,000 hours to songs exploring topics such as how the horn on the bus goes* [*It goes: 'Beep! Beep! Beep!']"), self-image, the battle of the sexes, celebrityhood, technology, parenting styles, certain unmentionable medical procedures.
	Dave runs American history through the wringer, and comes up with some wonderfully warped formulations. (The Vikings, for example, "were extremely rugged individuals whose idea of a fun time was to sail over and set fire to England, which in those days was fairly easy to ignite because it had a very high level of thatch, this being the kind of roof favored by the local tribespeople...") Covering pre-Columbian days through the dawn of the Bush administration, Dave Barry Slept Here is the funniest thing to hit this great nation since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.
	Although Barry retired his column in 2004, he continues to examine current events with his annual Year in Review surveys, and the ones he wrote between 2000 and 2006 are collected here. He opens with a 33-page outline of history (from 1000 to 1999) in which we learn that the first book Gutenberg mass produced in 1455 was Codpieces of Passion by Danielle Steel, and that computer pioneer Charles Babbage died in 1871, still waiting to talk to someone from Technical Support. In 2002, airline industry losses prompted America West, in a cost-cutting measure, to eliminate the cockpit minibar 2003.
	A Greatest Hits package to die for, in which the inimitable, Pulitzer-packing humorist applies himself to taxes, toilets, airbags, baseball, beer commercials, and numerous other American artifacts. A typical bit, from a piece on legalized gambling: "Off-Track Betting parlors are the kinds of places where you never see signs that say, 'Thank You for Not Smoking.' The best you could hope for is, 'Thank You for Not Spitting Pieces of Your Cigar on My Neck.'" Happy? There's plenty more where that came from.