What kids say "weaksauce"?

I was with a party of journalists in Guatemala after an earthquake. I was struck by how the elite descended from Europeans treated the Indians: like dogs. Literally. They used whistles and abrupt hand gestures to order them around. When we went into the national assembly somebody ordered soldiers with machine guns to pour onto the balcony above, presumably to intimidate us. Maybe it had to do with being American or having a sense of the absurd, but we were amused rather than quaking.

Now that Newt's desire for an "open marriage" is out in the open, I wonder how women will react.

Fine job, Dave, but it's brusque.

The I Am an Atheist community must be in deep mourning even though most are soccer fans.

The special relationship will be restored as soon as the BO smell leaves the White House.

How about Charles Dickens then? A great commercial success.

The British empire's collapse didn't begin with WWII. It was the appalling slaughter of WWI that bled the country white and weakened its hold on the colonies, including India, the jewel in the crown. The impoverishment was responsible for England's post war disarming and the head-in-the-sand diplomacy that led to Munich and the ruling class's miscalculations about Hitler, not to mention the fatal weakening of that class. The first battle at Ypres alone claimed six peers, sixteen baronets, six knights, ninety-five sons of peers, eighty-two sons of baronets, and eighty-four sons of knights. The male line ended in families that had led the realm for five hundred years. So figure thirty years rather than a decade: still a blink of time.

Nobody's Perfect: When I made it through a couple of chapters, I thought, "Man this is nothing but gibberish - what am I doing hanging out with you?" 

You might want to take a second crack at it. It has sold abpve 150 million copies and the filmed version, which was very faithful to the books, sold $2 billion worth of tickets. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted in Britain by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's best-loved book." In similar 2004 polls both Germany and Australia also found The Lord of the Rings to be their favorite book. A 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers found it to be their "book of the century." It is the third best selling novel in history. W. H. Auden regarded The Lord of the Rings as a "masterpiece", in some cases it outdoing John Milton'sParadise Lost. 

Brooks has to get along with the publisher and the rest of people who work at the Times. Stray too far off the reservation even as the false in-house conservative and he might find himself looking for work at the Brookings Institute.

To those of us who remember the 'Sixties this doesn't seem like much. There was the Cold War and MAD on top of everything else back then. This is the farcical stage of the historical cycle.

Thank you, Spock.

Wherever one chooses to draw a moral line.

I'm with Tom.

I'm aware that we're the descendants of hunter-gatherers and it seems hypocritical to object to hunting if you buy pork chops at the supermarket. Meat's meat, right?

Two women got in the local weekly for killing two black bears . The ladies, both hairdressers, were very proud of of their accomplishment and grinned for the camera next to the bodies. They had got up in darkness to reach ambush points and waited for the bears to amble into their sights. I don't know what was more disgusting, the lengths to which they went to, well, yes, murder those living creatures or their pride in the act afterward.

I freely grant that animals don't have the same value as humans. Yet if a creature is capable of feeling pain, isn't it immoral to knowingly inflict pain on it? That argument carries more weight the older I get. If you have a dog, you know they are capable of a range of emotions. Perhaps bears do, too. They have been observed at play in the wild. These are deep waters when you think about it.

I assume everyone in Hollywood is gay in the absence of evidence to the contrary, and I'm not talking about the fake marriages that are always falling apart on the front pages of the tabloids (the only accurate source of news about that community).  You might find the occasional gay who is an economic conservative, but they are social liberals by an overwhelming margin. Scratch someone of this stripe and you'll find the standard bundle of left-wing views, from anti-Americanism to the half-baked theories on parade at the OSW encampments. It is career suicide in Hollywood to depart from the consensus, and it is the rare writer, actor of director who dares . The blacklisting is of conservatives is far more effective than that extended to communists in the 1950s. You would think Hollywood would worry about the thumbs-down the domestic market gives its America-bashing movies, but it makes most of its profits these days on the international market which applauds viewpoint.

The kids are better off.