Dear James ... I have a fifth and a sixth question marked phrase to add ...

Have you watched the "students" in Montreal Canada?

And is Canada a European Model?

I think yes, no?

(That was three, yes?)

Carsten Stroud

WARNING! This Is Your Mind On Obama!

Dear Pat ... I cannot imagine that you haven't already heard this one but I'll repeat it anyway since I do love the sound of my own voice:

 "I have read your book and found it both good and original. Unfortunately what is good is not original, and what is original is not good. Sincerely. Groucho Marx".

PS: I bookmarked that site. Thanks for finding it!

Carsten Stroud

Now this is my kind of conservative: I think Pike Bishop would agree that gun control is hitting what you're aiming at. By the way, Mister Bishop, who said "when you side with a man you stay with him. Otherwise you're just some kind of animal."

Never mind. I suspect you already know. My favorite film. By the way, LOVED that flip, love cats, but I loathe tofu. So, one outta three?

Linda and I lived in Midtown NYC for several years, and every Friday afternoon, while the UN was in session, we'd watch in simple wonder as various armored columns of black Suburbans full of NYPD Protection Detail cops holding their HK MP Fives, headed and tailed by two NYPD cruisers with lights flashing and sirens going, all of them protecting one lonely stretch limo, the whole noisy and massively expensive caravan butting its way north through the impossible traffic jam going up First past our hotel (The Beekman) and only because they had to get, for reasons never made clear to we slack-jawed yokels, The Second Undersecretary For Pork Renewal And Slum-Lord Management for Ouagadougou (that's OOH-wah-GAH-doo-goo) back to La Guardia in time for his First Class flight back to - Hell, ANYWHERE but OOH-wah-GAH-doo-goo! No wonder these guys love the UN gig in midtown.

God knows I would! Well said, Pat!

(BY the way, I vote for San Francisco. They could use Nancy Pelosi's ego for a squash court!)

Is it wrong of me to want this video to end in a head-on car crash and a great blooming billow of fire and smoke and shrapnel?

Is it?

Dear Andrew:

I've gotten used to wishing I'd said what you have just said in one of your postings ... it's an irritating tick you have that I've learned to live with - but now you've gone and done it: Now, instead of just wishing I'd said this particular thing, I'm forced to resort to pretending I did and then telling everybody who calls me on it that you stole it from me.I don't know how you live with yourself.

Really.

Dear Diane ... thank you.

While I have conflicted feelings about posting this, I guess I have a lot to be humble about when it comes to my career, so please bear with me. I have been writing for the New York publishing cabals since 1985, when I made the Times list with Close Pursuit, a non-fiction book about NYPD Homicide cops. I've written over fifteen books.  have lived a wonderful life as what is gently termed "a mid-list writer" but, at 64, I'm still standing, if not quite so tall. Thanks for asking, Ms. Ellis, and I hope I don't sound like a complete mook. Cheers!.

Dear Kenneth:

I come from a long line of cavalry soldiers - all the way back to Waterloo (on the British side - a cornet of horse with the 17th Lancers) - but I had my moment when I was at the Little Bighorn battlefield a few years back. I was standing over a lone grave marker on top of a grassy slope. I think it was the place where Sergeant Butler was finally ridden down and mutilated. I looked down at the soldier's grave, and then I was on my back, in the tall grass, looking up at a man standing over me. I was both men. One dead. One alive. This lasted for only a minute or so, but I can relive it every night, if I don't make an effort not to. By the way, I was in the 7th Cav myself a long time ago.

Would I be right in asking you "what is the frequency?" or is it just that your name really is Kenneth?

Great question, and thanks for posting it.

Carsten Stroud

I guess the tension arises here between what we like to think of as "artisanal and folk work" and mass-produced echoes thereof. While this bird retains and arguably preserves a motif in danger of being swamped by the sort of god-awful trinketry we find in border crossing gift shops, do the means of its manufacture make the undeniable art of the thing illegitimate? Your painted bird is a thing of beauty, and what would happen to the people who created it if we were all to become so fastidious in our choices that your painted bird would cease to exist? That's the question you raise, and I'd be intrigued to hear the answers. Thanks for posting it!

Carsten Stroud

 Well dammit. I have nothing to add other than that I feel like a complete mook. I've happily hated that Hippy-Dippy mutt ever since I saw him lying (is that the way to spell that?) around in his hotel room with Yoko. I have secretly enjoyed tweaking my left-wing ex-hippy friends (I have more than I can easily explain) about what an utter useless prig Lennon was. Now I find out I was dead bang wrong. I owe the man an apology - although I still can't stand Yoko - and I hope he's around somewhere to hear it. Thanks Diane. It's never too late to get your facts straight, no matter how much you loved the illusions. Carsten

Dear Denise:

I have a massive edit sitting on my desk right now, a novel freshly in from Knopf. I have to get it done, I agree, but I have also found that nothing in the writer's world is ever quite as urgent as editors and publishers wish you to believe. I've been writing for thirty years, I've been as sick as you (well, almost) a few times, in exactly your situation, and what did I do about it?

I contacted my editor at the top of the business day, usually by phone, and I said I'm too sick to work, and if I tried I'd just have to rewrite it later. They'll cope. When there's nothing to be done, nothing is what you should do. Pros get that, and I gather you're working with pros. Have faith in your professional gravitas, take the time to get better, and then get back in the saddle.  They all know you're good. You don't have to prove it from a sick bed.  Cheers, Carsten Stroud.

I've been grinding my teeth and throwing things against the wall - often things I love, such as my sanity - every time I've had to listen in impotent rage - my least favorite kind of rage - while Obama says "we can't afford to give the rich another 700 billion" ... dear darling lad, it's NOT YOUR MONEY.

It's theirs.

They figured out how to earn it - and in the doing they made money for other people along the way - and now you say, we can't afford to let them keep it? Dave is right. This is the kind of thuggery he stood the long silent watch on the Rhein to keep at bay. Thanks for making me feel slightly less crazy, Dave.

Carsten Stroud

Dear Dave:

"We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire."

Oliver Wendell Holmes (as quoted in Ken Burns' The Civil War.)

And of course, Sullivan Ballou's letter to his wife.

Thank you, Dave, and thank you all, for your service.

Carsten Stroud.

Dear Denise:

But I'm not at all dazzled ... I myself have performed exactly that sort of gestalt-like intuitive leap many many times, most often when I'm crawling home late from some disorderly rout at a local bar and I look up from my hands-and-knees position on the front-hall floor to see my lovely wife Linda standing there on the landing, arms folded, staring down at me. You may not believe me, but I quite often know PRECISELY what she is about to say, before she even begins! Incredible, you may say, but also quite true.

Carsten Stroud