Thank you all so much.  And Blue Yeti, thank you particularly.  I can now head back to the Main Feed without squinting.

To sweet gruesome-enured Percival:

You didn't call me a doody-head, so I'm way ok with your comment. 

At least once a day, my husband and I look up from our reading or the the news and sigh:

It isn't my world anymore.

Why do we not hear voices . . . words . .  truths . . like Dave's - from the lecterns of Congress?

Why?

BaracKaa will seduce and cajole his media lapdogs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1ILPl5FQaM

You two . . . 

Hilarious.

Never watched one episode.  Hmmm . .  but I could go for those outfits.

Case in point regarding gratuitous noise:  Hubby and I are just watching the recap of the Preakness.   We had to playback the DVR twice to hear the commentators' remarks as they ran the footage of the race.  The overlay of noise was just amazing . . . . and I don't think most people even hear it anymore.

To all the funny and beautiful expressions of gratitude for modernity's mixed blessings and the wistful sighs for what we'd have otherwise . . 

Allow me to combine my  complaint and wish in one:

Stop the music/noise.

Please.

Documentaries, movies, news shows,  that would otherwise be entertaining, informative and enjoyable are destroyed by the synthesizer  drumbeats and  guitar squealings in dins of thumping and screeching that render the monologue or over-voice as an almost irrelevant intrusion.

Oh kid sis . . .

 . . . . beautifully stated and sadly - true.

A former neighbor and friend, a beneficiary of your tax dollars for his solar start-up company - left this message on my answering machine after 9-11.

"Was Samson a terrorist?"

Sis.  Those cruets were pretty clean-looking when your tomato vine tumbled over on 'em.  Nice harmony - the feminine cruets with the robust vine.

And I'd say that's what you and Mr. Chauvinist have achieved  . . . a mutually satisfying, happy balance.  

Indulgence granted, Dave.

Eyes moist with resonating memories.

You were a lucky little boy all propped up in bed listening to Johnny Carson's theme song beside a woman who loved you the way she did.

Her sunburst was part little David.  

The glow continues.

" . .but there is a quality of absolute knowing to the knowing."

Precisely.

I was making the bed in the second story of a summer home on White Lake in Michigan.  The house was on a high bluff and well-back from the edge of the overlook.  I looked up from my job . . . and said with complete knowing:

"Keith needs me."

I ran down and out the front door, across the porch, the lawn and down the long steps to the beach where I stood and observed my husband floundering, but hanging onto his over-turned canoe.  He was in no serious jeopardy, but highly distressed to be in that water - up to his gills in dead alewives.

Sorry.  Didn't load and I over "Posted.

But equally mind-boggling is the fact of Grandma pacing the floor on the day Dad was crossing the English Channel for the D-day invasion.  She wept as her parents watched helplessly.  

Grandma told me she'd wake at night with tears on her pillow. She called Mother and Dad on a few occasions to tell them that she heard one of her grandchildren, in distress, calling her name.

And as you know . .  . information would emerge that one of us was in a crisis . .  

I've only had a couple extraordinary 'knowings' like that.  Always with someone in distress.

It seems my kid has inherited something of this. He always bats way better than average on card/color/what's in the sack stuff.  Has dreams and 'knowings' in extraordinary accuracy about colleagues and friends.

(He's a Ph.D. physicist and doesn't talk about this skill from lecterns:)

Sis . .  there's more to this event.  At the point that the oil was spilling and igniting Grandma Glady's clothes . . . an uncle pulled up in his horse-drawn dray wagon (had to look up the spelling  . .  I'd only heard Grandma say the word 'dray') and helped beat out the flames with his leather gloves.  

(continued below)

My son is a research scientist with a Ph.D. in astrophysical, planetary and atmospheric sciences.

His denialism is a screaming #2 with the following alterations:

Original # 2:

I think there's warming, but it wasn't caused by us.

Corrected # 2:

I know there was warming, but it wasn't caused by us.

Oh.  And he'd add: Don't throw out your long underwear.