Sigmund, Carl and Alfred

It may be the Testicle Festival in Wisconsin, but it has a better ring en francais, n’est pas?

Wisconsinites have deep-fried cheese curds, candy bars and Twinkies. They now have deep-fried livestock testicles, too.

More than 300 people paid $5 for all-you-can-eat goat, lamb and bull testicles Saturday at the ninth annual Testicle Festival at Mama’s Place Bar and Grill in Elderon in central Wisconsin.

“Once you get over the mental (aspect) of what you’re eating, it’s just like eating any other food, and it tastes good,” Buster Hoffman said.

Festival founder Nancy Fenske said the festival grew out of her late husband Roger’s birthday party 12 years ago. They decided to have “a nut fry” at Mama’s Place after bringing back lamb fries from a trip to Montana.

The event grew every year and now they fry up to 100 pounds of testicles, she said.

“What else can you do in a small town?” Fenske said.

Butch Joubert, 58, likes the parts sandwiched between bread with tartar sauce. They’re not so different from regular meatballs also served at the festival, he said.

“After a few beers, you can’t really tell the difference,” Joubert said.

Nudists are in a panic. It seems young people aren’t signing up.

Here’s the naked truth about nude recreation: The people who practice it aren’t getting any younger…

We don’t want the place to turn into a gated assisted living facility,” said Gordon Adams, membership director at Solair Recreation League, a nudist camp in northeastern Connecticut that recently invited students from dozens of New England schools to a college day in hopes of piquing their interest.

The median age is 55 at Solair, where a yearly membership is $500 for people older than 40, $300 for people younger than 40 and $150 for college students.

The Kissimee, Fla.-based American Association for Nude Recreation, which represents about 270 clubs and resorts in North America, estimates that more than 90 percent of its 50,000 members are older than 35.

“If a young person is enlightened enough to go to a beach or resort, they’ll find that they’re outnumbered by people who are not like them,” said Sam Miller, 32, a medical student in Riverside, Calif., who is helping to plan a youth ambassadors workshop being held next month in Orlando, Fla. “Oftentimes they won’t go back for that reason.”

Yeah. The reason is called ‘Gravity.’

“Grandpa, were you really rescued from crap?“

Four men were rescued in America last Friday, after they fell into an 18-foot tank filled with fish faeces.

Rescuers had to cut through the side of the fibreglass tank after the workers became trapped in the fish dung, at the Australis Aquaculture fish farm in Massachusetts.

All the men had chicken for dinner.

Big health news out of Germany.

Bald men in Germany have no right to state-funded wigs, according to a new court ruling.

A court in the southwestern state of Rhineland-Palatinate rejected an appeal by a man to have the costs of his hairpiece paid for by a statutory health insurer, saying the problem was not unusual enough among men to justify his claim.

The man had based his appeal on the grounds he had been bald since childhood, but the insurer told him it only provided “long-term hair replacement support” for women and minors.

“The hair’s protective function against the sun and the cold can easily be replaced by a hat,” the social court said in a statement. “The health insurance does not have to pay for that.”

Germany’s generous health insurance system has been known to fund such benefits as trips to spa resorts and breast implants.

Nazi bastards. No entitlement programs for bald guys. Imagine that. Well, no doubt we’ll show ‘em.

What starts here,

Ends up here.

Tonight, the Sanity Squad is scheduled to interview Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (website), host of the popular TV series, ‘Shalom in the Home.’ and author of numerous bestsellers, including Kosher Sex, Moses of Oxford, Hating Women, The Private Adam, 10 Conversations You Need to Have With Your Children, and The Psychic and the Rabbi: A Remarkable Correspondence.

Boteach was the Rabbi at Oxford University for over a decade and founded the L’Chaim Society. He has met with and debated some of our generation’s luminaries, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Professor Stephen Hawking, Shimon Peres, Deepak Chopra, Benjamin Netanyahu, Elie Wiesel, Christopher Hitchens, Yitzchak Shamir, Prof. Richard Dawkins, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Simon Wiesenthal, Michael Jackson, and Prof. Colin Blakemore.

Rabbi Boteach is on the front lines of the ‘culture wars.’ From his vantage point, he sees the real damage and threats of nation, culture and society being eaten away from within. His arguments are not political in nature. Instead, he discusses the ‘facts on the ground’ of a culture in conflict, exacerbated by political partisanship and agendas.

The following was written by Rabbi Boteach. The original title was The Academy Awards: When Court Jesters Become Kings.

Arguably, the biggest problem in American culture today is the fact that mere entertainers are its heroes. There is no precedent in any civilization in the history of the world for entertainers – actors, singers, dancers and directors – to be elevated to the highest positions of prominence in the culture. That’s why none of us can name actors and actresses from ancient Greece or Rome. They weren’t important enough to be remembered.

Sure, we can name the playwrights and we can name the satirists. We can name the politicians, the philosophers and the generals. Because literary, academic, political and military figures were always the personalities who dominated the cultural landscape. Whatever you thought of these pursuits – and many of the ancient conquerors were highly immoral men – their pursuits were at least consequential.

But entertainment? Lighthearted merriment? That’s what you did in your spare time, when you needed a break from the serious things. Prior to the rise of American popular culture, entertainers could never even dream of being the most important members of a society, engaged as they were in a frivolous past-time that helped the folks escape their solemn responsibilities for a short time.

In our time, however, the incredible has happened. The court jester has become the king. Those who play the heroes have become the culture’s actual heroes. Those who direct fantasy movies are directing the direction of our youth. And with entertainers as the principal people we look up to, so much of our society has become silly and trivial.

This is exactly what was going through my mind as I watched the narcissism of the Academy Awards. In America today, there exists not a single mainstream televised awards ceremony for anything other than movies, television, acting and music. Even when brave soldiers are awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry, it is not broadcast on television.

When the president awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to our leading thinkers, writers and civil servants, it is watched by 10 people on C-SPAN. But the awards for best actor and best actress are followed closely by hundreds of millions who take such nonsense quite seriously. That’s a major change for a country whose only actor to become an historical figure, prior to the age of Hollywood, was John Wilkes Booth.

The consequences for the elevation of people who perform inconsequential tasks to the center of national attention are enormous. Even if our Hollywood celebrities were not the most damaged people in our society – drugged up, divorced, with even their kids in rehab – the results would still be tragic. By making fashion models our role models, Hollywood heroines our heroes, and singers into saints, we have created a shallow and vain society, distinguished not by sacrifice, but by indulgence. We have created a culture known not for virtue, but for vanity. And our country is becoming not more dedicated, but decadent.

American kids today, for the most part, don’t want to be doctors. They want to be directors. They don’t want to be rabbis, but rock stars. They don’t wish to be soldiers, but superstars. And then we wonder why American kids are so messed up.

To gauge the effect of entertainers being at the epicenter of a national consciousness, just imagine if it were to happen in the life of a single individual. What if entertainment, rather than scholarship, were the foremost preoccupation of a medical student. Instead of working at a library and attending lectures for eights hours each day, our student watched eight hours of television and DVDs each day. Would you trust him with your kidney?

And now you begin to understand why so many people around the world think we Americans are so stupid and shallow. It’s not because of Bush. It’s because of Hollywood. The very nature of entertainment is that it is something you do in your spare time. Entertainment is designed to be on the periphery, never at the center of national endeavor. Performers dare not replace professors, cinematographers dare not replace soldiers, and comedians dare not supplant cardiologists as a country’s most lionized citizens.

The future of the United States is not threatened by any existing foreign power. Less so is it threatened by any terrorist. Terrorists can harm us, but they can never defeat us. The only thing that can threaten the continuity of this great country is if it collapses from the inside. If its foundations become so eroded, its pillars so brittle, that its national edifice falls victim to the forces of historical inevitability.

If our nation is built of the marvelous marble of the Greek Parthenon or the Roman Pantheon, or the solid stone of Jerusalem’s Western Wall, it will last for many centuries, and perhaps millennia, to come. But if it is built of the flimflam material of a mere Hollywood sound stage, a movie set facade that is all glitz with no substance, it will, God forbid, crumble before our very eyes.

Sanity Squad archives can be found here.