"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there."

- Clare Boothe Luce

We were watching "So You Think You Can Dance" the other evening - okay so I will admit it, I watch all the reality shows.....

But anyhow, we were watching. One of the judges had apparently been made to apologize on behalf of the show for a Choreographer's routine he had designed in which all the contestants had to perform the same moves which were ostensibly a commentary on war and a hope for peace. I have to admit that the prior evening when the routines were actually performed I found it all to be pretty tedious, boring even. But the fact that it was made out to be anti-government and "unsupportive of troops" (itself a phrase I am getting tired of hearing) demonstrated to me how absurd the world has gotten. The performers had peace signs on their t-shirt fronts, and words like 'tolerance' on the backs. They danced and ended up walking toward the camera with their fingers in the 1960's-era peace sign and hopeful smiles. Egad how anarchistic!

What is wrong with us, that we now have to apologize for wanting to step back and declare that we've had enough? Shame on us.

"Saint. A dead sinner revised and edited."

- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913) American Author, Editor, Journalist

Our recent trip really confirmed a thought I have held for a long time - that there is nothing more disruptive than to be declared a Saint. Despite the fact that to be Sainted means that you will be remembered and revered, the truth is that you can never have a real rest because it is the practice to chop off parts and store them in churches all over the world. To me this is just not that attractive a prospect. This was brought home to me in particular when we were in Siena, where St Catherine's preserved head looks out at you from a niche. The spotlighted face is fortunately about twenty feet from the visitor, so it does have a bit of mystery about it. It is not until walking away, where in a small glass case to the side is a reliquary displaying her preserved finger that the reality of the situation strikes home - it is just standing there upright in its case inches away, and all too real. I actually am not sure what the significance of this dismembered digit might be - but personally I would think that Catherine would have preferred to be all in one place, not mounted like a deer.

Which brings me to my point, It just seems to me that to be remembered as a really swell person who did nice things for people would be far better than to be Sainted. Not only that but it is far easier to attain, and you don't have to worry that your haircut is good when you pass away. So for now at least, I am going to be doing my very best to avoid Canonization.

Clamo, clamatis, omnes clamamus pro glace lactis

- I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream

One hot afternoon recently, while driving home from the office through Lake Oswego (the town, not the lake itself, although given the fact the temperature was approaching 102 that day)...I passed the local Ice Cream Shop. It is a nondescript little storefront on the main strip through this little chi-chi neighborhood. I remembered the too-do occasioned when Mayor Clint (Eastwood) put the clamps on the ice cream vendors in Senior Chi-Chi Carmel, that nothing could be sold as take-away since it presented a mess when kids dropped their scoops on the sidewalk. Fortunately no such law has yet hit the Lake Oswego Creamery (such an original name). The shop is a venerable little institution, and has been there in the center of town for a number of years, apparently pre-dating the current wave of excess that is the town's claim to fame in modern Portland.

The only reason I bring all of this up, was that as I sat there at the stoplight- the car sweltering away in the heat - I noticed a sign placed in the window. "Now Serving Breakfast." This genuinely has piqued my interest, inasmuch as ice cream has for many years been a breakfast favorite of mine but I was unaware that it had become a sales feature.

Mary and I have long-since taken to celebrating certain breakfast occasions with warm apple pie with vanilla or caramel ice cream and a side of bacon. Okay, so we have taken to a slightly more health-conscious approach, substituting no-sugar-added versions of both the pie and the ice-cream, and the result is still very satisfying. When you consider this, the combination satisfies all the major food groups; fruits, dairy, bread (all right this is a stretch, but the crust does have flour in it) and meats. The meat product is mostly grilled salted fat, but I don't remember anything in Health Class that specified that bacon was anything less than a meat. In fact, I think I remember on the chart we were all supposed to learn that bacon was specifically pictured on the triangular chart of building blocks. That was the good part of going to school in the 60's, the Surgeon General had not yet caught up with "bad" fats and had yet to start mucking around with nice solid breakfast institutions.

So now there it was, a monument to our good taste, a temple for the iconization of the ice cream breakfast. I felt that a letter of appreciation might be in order, so the next day I went to the Internet to look the place up. The website was generic, and hungrily I scanned it for details on its ice-cream creations for breakfast. I imagined plates of cream topped with berries. Waffles mounded with chocolate cream and syrup. Bowls of crumbled cones substituting for cereal with melted ice cream for milk.

I was horrified to see that they actually advertised the cases covered with a cloth, and plates of health-nut whole-grain pancakes and twig-and-rock cereal. No bacon was even demonstrated, only sausages with an asterisk indicating that Soy-protein sausage was available upon request.

I was stunned and perplexed - why tease me so from the street. I was so very glad that I had not suggested that Mary and I check out the place in person - I am sure I would have made a scene.

I suspect that Clint Eastwood has something to do with this.

Vidistine nuper imagines moventes bonas?

- Seen any good movies lately?

Last weekend we went to see the new Bruce Willis movie, "Die Hard and Blow Stuff Up" (I think that was the name) and it was really pretty good. I have to admire Bruce at his age still bouncing off cars and falling down elevator shafts, always limping but inevitably able to shoot it out with the bad guys in the end and save the day. You have to wonder just where the world would be if it was not for Bruce. I did always wonder though in whichever edition it was that he had managed to lose his shoes just before having to race across a roomful of broken glass, why it was that he didn't grab something and sweep the glass out of the way before he tromped through. Yet, except for the bloody footprints he left everywhere, it really did not seem to impede him. Personally if I get a thorn from the rose bushes in the backyard when I'm out there cutting them back I whimper for a couple of hours. Obviously I am just not of Bruce's mettle.

Which brings me to a thought. Why haven't we sent Bruce overseas to clean up this mess in the Middle East. Given his willingness to throw himself into the fray for any cause, whether it is his cause or not, I'd think he'd be glad to go over and straighten it up. If not him, he seems to be on pretty decent terms with Demi - surely he could enlist her as GI Jane to mow down the Jihad with a steely look. Failing that, he might throw in Ashton - we might just be able to pull out of this mess if we can make a convincing argument that it was all a Punk.

Oh, that it could be true.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after he grows up.

- Pablo Picasso



I suffer from artist block now and then. Actually it is more like easy distraction. It is not that I don't want to be creating something, it is rather the fact that any shiny object passing in my view is just too immediately attainable - and it is the ease of immediate gratification over earned satisfaction that gets in the way. TV and snacks are just such a distraction, and when the two are coupled, well, the project in front of me that would require more than 50% of my attention span just all too simply falls by the side. Then of course there is the guilt that rolls through me when it is time to go to bed and I realize I have not done anything at all. I try to justify it by telling myself that I have instead spent quality time with Mary - which is true, any time together is a treasure, but in reality I deep down inside realize that I have frittered away a very valuable couple of hours. Not only that, but I am making Mary my excuse, which is not very complimentary of me.



Kids have it made; they are fully occupied in the very minute they have before them. I remember when I was little and building elaborate structures out of the incredible wooden blocks Grandpa Miller had made (in fact I wonder where they are today - I'd love to be playing with them right now...). At that very moment, there was nothing that would distract me. The level of concentration at that age was extraordinary. I'd like to think that I was incredibly endowed with a singular purpose to create something - even something as tenuous as a tower of odd-shaped wooden blocks. In retrospect I suppose it was just that my mind was still pretty uncluttered at that point, and the activity around me just held little relevance. I would blithely work away at my project obliviously, and delight in my finished creation in a way that I genuinely wish I could feel again.



In "On Walden" Thoreau preached the need to "simplify, simplify..." and maybe he had something there. I work every day in an environment where I have goals to attain and drills to follow, papers to fill and reports to read. I realize that I carry that process home with me, setting goals for my evenings and weekends like homework. Mary has noticed this and told me to stop and just let my time, and my projects, evolve. She's a pretty sharp cookie. And by the way, cookies in front of the TV can be all right.

SCOOTER SKATES!!!

Well, I just have to comment on the state of the world when Scooter Libby gets a walk on Boardwalk and poor Paris had to sit her time out in the hoosegow. Here we are, with a guy who has been convicted of leaking top secret information, and he gets pardoned - while Missy Hilton had to go to the clink not once but TWICE...and then to face the indignity of all that Paparazzi without a visit from her make-up artist. Justice is truly blind.

But then, the whole subject of secrecy seems to have taken on a new life in DC - last week it was reports of Dick Cheney's own Special "SECRET" stamp which he insisted on having emblazoned on all kinds of documents, including press statements - so obviously the term "Top Secret" has a much lesser meaning these days than it may have had once upon a time. Indeed, to have a secret is to have something to share, as might be attested to by school-kids for generations. apparently it was we Baby-Boomers who got it all wrong, wrapping the term up in a bundle of red-tape, only appropriate for a bunch of kids who spent their formative years learning about the proper way to cover our heads in aluminum foil to deter the effects of radiation and to spend our days under our school-desks to avert the detrimental onslaught caused by the dropping of an Atomic Bomb aimed at taking out the local Cartoon-Riddled Television Station. Of course that was the era when women would coif their hair into massive cones protected by a gallon of spray shellac, and men would coat their hair in Red-Rose Brilliantine so it probably was needless for adults to learn the duck-and-cover routine, which is why it fell off the curriculum after the sixth grade.

I digress.

So we have learned that Dick Cheney occupies an office, but answers not to any of the three branches of our government. He has a man-sized safe in his office. He has the heads of various friends he has shot in the face mounted on his wall. (Okay I exaggerate there - he only mounts the ones that died). He gleefully stamps documents that have no particular priority or importance with his own "Secret Stuff" stamp. And so now we learn that the term Secret itself has little bearing on National Security. Thus, to keep the Scoot on ice would be a travesty of justice. The Courts got it wrong, and it is for our fearless leader to set it all to rights.

Miss Hilton on the other hand did ignore her probation. She was bad. It was all too obvious that she needed to spend time cloistered away to consider her sins. I am sure it worked, and that she will be clothing the homeless in India next week. A lesson in sobriety and charity is no doubt the outcome of her incarceration. Well, at least the homeless will be able to get some make-up and shopping tips.

I am so happy to see that the US has its priorities back on track. I have forgotten to check in a while - how is that fence project on the Mexico border going?