• How can the news be presented “in depth” by a wannabe model whose beauty is only makup deep?

• Youth is idealistic, yet wants it “my way.”

• Voting and agitating to tax somebody else, not yourself, that’s idealism nowadays.

• If taxing the rich is idealism, then there’s no difference between idealism and just plain envy.

• The rich get rich by stealing from the poor, and the poor get their share from Robin Hood who steals from the rich, it's a 2-way street gridlocked by traffic.

• Do unto others as ye would have them do unto numero uno — the Golden Rule in living English.

• Is living English really only street speech?

• To go where no man has gone before, not, should I go there? — modern man’s only concern.

• Maybe it’s OK for a man to go where no man has been before, as long as it’s out in space; down here, not always.

• To go where no man has gone before might be where angels fear to tread.

• If you are hellbent on going where few men have gone, go to God.

• I’m more confident of an astronaut’s right stuff than Clinton’s right thing.

• If a Liberal sees only grays and never blacks and whites, how does he know the right thing to do!

• Secularists are always scoffing at Christians for being morally too simplistic, when they themselves are quite satisfied with  “it’s the right thing to do.”

• The single secular affirmation: It's the right thing to do.  What happened to nuance?

• The New Testament admonition to pay unto Caesar what is Caesar’s I can buy, but paying unto everybody else, not just Caesar?

• Appalled as always at the checks I’m writing for taxes, I am torn between saving and pinching on what’s left and oh what the heck!  — any amount of squeezing wouldn’t make that much difference after the IRS took so much, so why bother budgeting at all?

• If you have a hard time comprehending the existence of parallel rich and poor worlds, just consider your own two separate rich and poor worlds of spending.  You spend as much on taxes as you do everything else all together, and to keep your sanity try to pretend these are two separate worlds of existence.

• Why, sigh, must Easter and taxes come at exactly the same time of the year?

• Ah, Spring!  Our daffodils just might not blossom but our potholes never fail.

• Man yearns to go where no man has gone before.  Woman has always gone where no man can.  Now she isn’t happy with that.  You’ll be sorry!

• Nine-eleven may not have actually changed our lives but it sure has changed our excuses.

• All those teenage Palestinians blowing themselves up make our ‘60s hippies seem almost wholesome — they blew only their minds.

• While Americans try to find themselves, Palestinians are blowing themselves to smithereens.

• Well, the world has heard of Yankee ingenuity but now it learns of Palestinian ingenuity.  A nuke in a Nike — wow!

• He that is ignorant of history is doomed to hear George Will repeat it for him.

• If a Christian with only the pretense of piety is a hypocrite, isn’t a Christian rocking with only the appearance of joy one too?

• A thought I had last night at the concert a couple of hours into Mahler’s 7th symphony was that in this age of miniaturization, diced sentences and TV commercials, and nonosecond attention spans, the world needs a smaller Mahler.

• Getting a life is not the same as getting a lifestyle.

• Never confuse details with depth.

• Just came back from a nature walk in an Ohio nature preserve.  More restricted areas there than at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.

• Eat, drink, and be merry — for tomorrow we pay taxes.

• April 15th and Sept 11th — now citizens have two days of infamy.  The IRS has just done to me what bin Laden did to the WTC.

• If bin Laden had been a truly evil genius he would have scheduled Sept 11 for April 15.

• They say we the people vote our own taxes. I have just met the enemy and they are us.

• But what happens when an irresistible force meets an invisible fence?

• I could more readily accept this new animal activism if it were simply for humane treatment of animals, not their rights.

• Actually, the whole idea of saving the environment isn’t all that absurd and maybe even a good idea — until they start talking about redwood trees having rights

• Popular graffiti sprayed on felled huge trees: “TREE RAPE!”  Rape?  Makes me wince, thinking of the rapists.

• Before you go where no man has gone, an environmental impact report must be filed.

• No, you can’t go home again, and it’s unlikely you’ll go where no man has gone before.  So?

• How can a politician claim to be a moderate when he’s only either “troubled” or outraged?

• Here’s my aphorism algorithm— be grumpy.

• I’m still not happy with calling these things “aphorisms.” How about pithograms?  And I’m the philosopher Pithogoras

• Call me a fundamentalist but I still think it is the Holy Spirit that brings power to the church, not puppets, clowns, drama, and rock ‘n roll.

• Has our church opted not to move mountains by faith but by rocking them or disintegrating them by sonic guitar guns?

• The Israelites at Sinai held their hands over their eyes, so blinding was the glory of God.  Now I hold my ears, so deafening the holy rock ‘n roll.

• Our church produces a Saturday night Christian rock “event” called “Oasis, a safe place for  youth to go.”  Not for their ears, it isn’t.

• If “I have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.” (1 Cor. 13:1).  St. Tinkling cymbal?  Paul got off easy.  With pop-charity and love-love-love galore, we have become as giga-amplified  drums, synthesizers, electronic guitars.

• “And I say also unto thee, thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” (Matthew 16:18)  Whether the church was founded on Peter “the rock” himself has always been a divisive issue but is no longer moot, for the church now functions on rock (‘n roll), at least as divisive.

• A more reliable counselor than Freud counsels us to give to others, not unload on them.  Give ourselves, not our complaints.  Complaints they have enough of already.

• I'm beginning a course (self-taught) in comparative liturgy.  I've discovered that the crux of it is the point of bending and the segment in motion.  Pentecostal and rockin' churches bend at the middle and are in motion from the waist up, especially in the shoulders and arms, the swaying and clapping parts,   For Catholics the crux is the knees (genuflection) and cruciate ligaments.  Muslims, two extreme bending points, knees and hips, to flop plop face upon the floor.  We just sit there.  The orthodox of us still do, anyway.   I do hope I haven't offended anybody.

• So was the Founding Fathers’ vision for America a mirage, the American Dream an illusion, modern America e-virtual reality?   Have a good day.

• One guy is proclaiming that everything is possible, while another explains that everything is illusion.  Ergo, the idea that anything is possible is an illusion.  Have a good day.

• As near as I know (I’m no expert in such stuff, hardly even interested) nirvana is a state of consummate dissolution, nothingness, void, thus the consummate bliss, the consummate illusion.  No wonder Eastern religion is so big with the virtual e-creative  crowd nowadays.

• What gets our biggest awards and loudest acclaim is the least real — special effects, virtual reality — while what is consummately real — God, His Bible, heaven — dismissed with a sneer.  Have a good day

• What is least real most reveals the human condition.  There’s a dose of reality for you.

• “Hey,” you say, “you’re getting imagination and faith mixed up!”  Have a good day.

• My usage references (I have at least a dozen) still make a distinction between illusion and delusion.  So does the award go for Best Illusion or Best Delusion?

• My usage references still make a distinction between illusion and delusion.  if you create an illusion, you get an award (or get elected) and get rich.  If you create a delusion, you are impeached and activists are after you.  Illusion is good, delusion bad.  But in e-reality, is there a difference?

• Then which is better, an illusion of grandeur, which can’t materialize, or a delusion of grandeur, which as far as you’re concerned has?

• Seeing illusion as reality or reality as illusion, is delusion.  See, Virginia, there is a difference.

• I’m so old I remember when to careful writers and students illusion and delusion were distinct, different.  Is anybody bothering now?  Does anybody care?   If Hollywood doesn’t why should anybody?

• Create an illusion of delusion, never the other way around.

• Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.  9/11 wasn’t an illusion.  But it didn’t count.  So now we have another parameter to deal with.  Have a good day.

• As to your personal “dream” and which is it, illusion or delusion?   Who cares, if it sells?

• If we must define every last thing, I suppose your Dream, the American Dream, is a marriage of both illusion and delusion.  What man has joined God would put asunder.

• It turns out that the people insisting anything is possible don’t think God is.

• It’s better to have questions about a reality than not to question an illusion.

• Reality can be misunderstood; illusion is misunderstanding all the way through.

• After illusion, reality must follow.  Shame it must be in that sequence.

• Reality isn’t open to question, but is questioned anyway.  Illusion should be questioned, but isn’t.

• Alert, you sit up and study reality on into the night.  Illusion you sit back and enjoy, on into the night.  The trick is to know when to sit up and when to sit back.  Sounds like an advertisement for La-z-boy chairs.

• Reality is the school of hard knocks.  Illusion is a massage parlor.

• We must always be on the alert for illusion.  Once recognized, then relax and enjoy it.  Neat trick.

•  If you can’t recognize illusion, better have a designated driver.

• You bet, I abet.

• Dispensationalist Christians put obedience in abeyance.

• The hard-nosed aren’t necessarily the hard-hearted, unless they are Republican.

• Throwing your weight around is not a good weight reduction plan.  You reduce only your friendships.

• Most do only what the crowd does, and some do only what the crowd doesn’t.  Few do anything because of the thing itself.

• To conform or to comply, that is the question, for a jellyfish

• A toxic fume is what you inhale and then expire.

• You're looking to find yourself?  Sorry, he's not in.  That's what he told me to tell you.

• He's looking to find himself.  Some people look for love in all the wrong places.

•  Their incompetence and bloopers, blobs on canvas and typos on paper, prove their transcendent creativity, or so they say at their creativity seminars and awards galas.  I say dreaming up such excuses  is their real, and only, creativity.

• How can you find yourself when you are beside yourself or if you have escaped from yourself?

• He's looking for himself.  Lots of luck.  He plays hard to get.

• God is beyond belief (Roman 11:33).  That’s because there is yet more of God beyond what you can believe.  But beyond disbelief?  Nothing.  Not a blessed thing, not a damned thing.

• You're looking to find yourself?  Do you have a warrant for his arrest?  Or are you from Publisher's Clearing House and you and camera crew have a door-sized check for him?

• You're looking to find yourself.  But you're just a robocall with a survey.

• Why are you looking to find yourself, to hand yourself a protest sign?

• If you're looking to find yourself don't go to Dr. Phil.  Go to "To Tell the Truth," and see who stands up ("Will the real you stand up!")

• You're looking to find yourself?  Sorry, you're at the boy's dorm.  He just switched genders.'

• If you’re hellbent on finding yourself, there’s been a real technological breakthrough, of course.  Google.  Just Google yourself.  There you’ll discover your credit rating and mug shot, for a fee (easy on Paypal).  That’s the real e-you.

• And it turns out you’re schizophrenic: there are four people in Colorado with your name.  For a fee find out which is you.

• So you want to find yourself?  Twenty pages of scam and the NSA already have.

• If you go to a shrink to find yourself, better take a magnifying glass along.

• He went to a shrink to find himself and found just a shell of his former self.

• So go to Google to discover your real self and Facebook to discover your real friends.

• I went to Google to find myself and found my name four times, with a failing credit ratings and a mug shots.

• So who leaves you in smaller pieces, a IED, the IRS, or a shrink?

• You didn't make that!  I'm talking to you, God.  Everybody seems to think you made hurricanes, cancer, death, evil.  I'm telling you, you didn't make that.  Satan did.

• Postmodernism says there are no such things as morals and truths, it’s all relative, you can believe anything you want.  Postmodernism has got it wrong there.  Truth and morals exist and they are absolute.  But in grammar – what’s a preposition and what’s an adverb? – postmodernism is dead on. It’s all relative and whichever, whatever.  Happy tweeting LOL.

• From my perspective your moral high ground is a gutter.

• Some have a Broader View, some a World View, some have merely a Perspective.  Postmodernists just have smartphones.

• Postmodernists have no absolutes, only relatives, and they sure better be absolutely politically correct.

• Postmodernists have relationships with relatives.  Never marriage, just one-night stands.  Sounds incestuous.

• Is scripture inspired?  All the way?  Sort of?  What difference does it make, after unquestionably uninspired theologians and hermeneuticeans have mauled it for a semester or a millennium or two?

• Seminary theology is like gossip, with very little resemblance to the original scripture or what the speaker really said, or intended to say.

• Emergent progressive pewmates love to tell how Christ hobnobbed with prostitutes, publicans and pot dealers. Not quite.  He mingled with ex-prostitutes, ex-publicans, ex-pot dealers.

• October 2013.  Our acting president proclaims that he has bent over backward telling Boehner to drop dead.  That's extreme outreach.

• Beauty is only skin deep, alas.  Alas, alas, so's gender change.

• November 5, voting day.  I've got to keep this straight; a Libertarian is not the same as a libertine.

• To talk to and with God, or about Him, that is the question, has been since Abraham and Plato. Somehow, it's one or the other.

• Somehow, to talk about God is, sooner or later, to doubt Him.  That's the way it works.  As I've seen it working out, seen it for 70 years, about is soon doubt.

• Parents are so proud of a kid who questions everything, and the kid is so proud of himself, especially if it makes his teachers mad.

• Having questions of science leads to stronger science.  That's good.  Having questions about God somehow always leads to doubting God, the highest good of all.  Is it?

• Ask questions of God, not about him, just as you ask questions of science, not about it.  All sins shall be forgiven man except questioning science.

 

 

 

 

• “And I say also unto thee, thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it..” (Matthew 16:18)  Our church rejects Peter as The Rock but has espoused the harder rock, rock ‘n roll rattling the very gates of hell.

• Mark 4:11 updated version: And he said unto them, unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God through puppets, clowns, drama, and rock ‘n roll.  Parables are retro.

• Can a parable be explained and understood by another parable, and another, and another, parable upon parable?  The straight answer is no.  Understanding seems inversely proportional to the layers of explanation.

• Going the wrong direction entirely, not just the right direction asymptotically.

• No one is more pathetic than the creative, imaginative person with nothing to say or create.  Fiddling with writing SiFi doesn't work.

• In ancient days understanding and wisdom came by prophets, seers, and philosophers through fables and parables.  Then through novelists and poets.  In these latter days by filmmakers and spinners through films, PAC and Super Bowl ads.  Finally, by rappers through pot.

• I’m so old I remember when our church boldly proclaimed the image of Daniel 2 and the beasts and trumpets of the book of Revelation.  Beasts and trumpets are out; clowns and amplified rock drums are in.

• Seems that nowadays anything can be blessed by the church as a “ministry.”  Bingo ministry?  Works for our Catholic friends.  I believe we have a Gay Ministry.  Why Not Ministry of Galas?

• Off hand I can’t think of any worldly thing our church hasn’t embraced as “unto the Lord,” or as a ministry, except maybe Temple Prostitution.  The Temple Prostitution Ministry?  See our newsletter.  Check our Web site, T-ProMin.org.  I was kidding!  At least for the moment.

• God, Christ is the answer to man’s agony.  “Actually, I’m not in all that much agony,” you tweet.

• Acclaim brings little true satisfaction but oblivion brings less.  Awards, not much less.

• Just doing something to be doing something is an end in itself, not the means to an end.  Well, as long as it's an end.

• If you don’t toot your own horn nobody else will.  That’s what agents are for.   I don’t have one.

• But if you tweet, everybody tweets back.

• Tweets aren't sweet.  They're bleep-bleep, in the Chief' Tweet's tweets they are.

• Bumper sticker:  Toot if you don’t toot your own horn.

• nowadays the best way to toot your own horn is to tweet.  Honk!

• If you don’t spin your own wheels nobody else will.  Buy a treadmill, and burn up some calories while you’re at it.

• She was so blonde she thought “roll your own” was an admonition to fidelity.

• If you don’t roll your own, somebody else sure will.

• If you don’t hoist yourself by your own petards, somebody else will.  What you really need to do right now is look up “petards” in the dictionary.

• He was just spinning his wheels but he said he was balancing his tires.

• A rolling stone gathers no moss but maybe picks up a few Tyrolese.

• Why is that when the price of gas goes up ten cents it's our own Oil companies we always accuse of gouging, not OPEC or the EPA?

• When taxes go up another ten percent who’s screeching “manipulation!  Government greed!”?

• The world can be divided into two groups: those who close their eyes during…, and those who keep them open.   Er, while flossing their teeth, that is.

• Better to bite your tongue than have your head bitten off.

• If you can’t hold your tongue, bite it.

• Nature activists seem obsessed either with obscure bugs, which I cannot take seriously, or historically dreaded predators like sharks, tigers, wolves, with whom I simply cannot sympathize, having been ingrained to expend my sentiments in behalf of their victims.  I’m a tough sell

• On nature walks there are two kinds of people, those who greet other hikers and those who hello their dogs.

• For pride in America the last thing you should do is read a recently written history book.  Just heed our media and be proud of our jazz, rock, pop culture, colas.

• So which is the most noble, to make history or rewrite it?

• If a tree falls where no one hears it, does it make a sound?  If you toot your own horn because nobody else will, do you make a sound?

• This is a wonderful time to be alive.  Back in the Enlightenment days philosophers could lambaste only kings, popes, the Inquisition, and the bourgeois. Now the bourgeois and bourgeoisie,  Big Oil and Big Labor, gun control and gun use, Environmental whackos and exploiters, doctors and HMOs, plus WASPS, clowns in church, and that’s just the beginning.  And everybody gets into the act.  Wonderful time.  To be alive?

• By their fruits ye shall know them. So what's your taste in fruit?  I don't care for mango.

• I’m not sure but I get the impression that usage equates “ethics” with morality and the Ten Commandments themselves.  And rightly so, judging by how quickly they're discarded.

• We go to a discussion group at our church that claims to discuss “contemporary issues,” challenging issues, relevant to our everyday lives — which turn out to be only the media’s trendy, politically correct agenda and talking points.  It seems that nowadays the issues that are truly contemporary are the most eternal and, alas, least likely to be discussed.

• When a developed country learns that another has developed an awful weapon, it develops its own.  When an undeveloped country learns a developed country has developed such a weapon, it gets a development loan from the developed country and simply buys the weapon (and defaults on the loan).  Undeveloped maybe, but not dumb.

• When a developed country learns that another has developed an awful weapon, it develops its own.  When an undeveloped country learns a developed country has developed such a weapon, it gets a development loan from the developed country and simply buys the weapon (and defaults on the loan).  Undeveloped maybe, but not dumb.

• Raising funds isn’t the same as raising standards.

• We go to a discussion group at our church that claims to discuss “contemporary issues,” challenging issues, relevant to our everyday lives — which turn out to be only the media’s trendy, politically correct agenda for mass consumption.  Boring, hardly challenging to me, except to hold my tongue. It seems that the issues that are truly contemporary are the most eternal and, alas, least likely to be discussed.

• This is a wonderful time to be alive.  Back in the Enlightenment days philosophers could lambaste only kings, popes, the Inquisition, and the bourgeois. Now the bourgeois and bourgeoisie,  Big Oil and Big Labor, gun control and gun  use, Environmental whackos and exploiters, doctors and HMOs, plus WASPS, clowns in church, and that’s just the beginning.  And everybody gets into the act.  Wonderful time.  To be alive?

• People confuse high dudgeon with the moral high ground.

• The Socratic school says that any student’s mind already has all knowledge, albeit unformed and unbeknown to him, and it will materialize and emerge nicely structured simply by a teacher’s asking just the right questions to prime the pump.  Another school of education says the opposite: students’ minds are simply void, able to respond only with a duh to any sort of question, but a gifted teacher, who himself has formulated the concept, can insert his ideas into the blank minds of students, and make the duh-d student think they were his own.  Which explains how such a dumb idea got into Socrates’s mind.

• But that’s old stuff.  Nowadays it’s accepted that students already know  more than the professors and should grade the profs, not the other way around.

•  I’ve always suspected that Socrates is simply very cleverly steering his own thoughts through my labyrinthine void, and then flattering me on my originality when his own thoughts emerge from my lips.

• When by his questions Socrates evokes an idea from me that is totally at odds with his, is mine born simply of the primal urge to be contrary and ornery, not from originality?

• As a direct shoot from Socrates came Stephanopolis questioning Focus Groups of puppets.

• The greatest teachers and leaders can put their ideas into our minds, yet let us think we thought them up ourselves.  I am pretty sure that’s also how our angels guide us.  Alas, likewise our devils.  And Socrates and his "Socratic method").

• “Just imagine what you could accomplish if you let the other guy take the credit!”  Great motto. Must be the devil’s too.  And Socrates’s.

• That there is War against Women that the GOP has been waging, and not knowing it, must be one of those "rumors of war" that are a sign of the End.

• That War against Women the GOP waved was a covert war, so covert the perpetrators didn't even know they were perpetuating it.   So textbook an example of covert coflict that it has it's been incorporated into the curriculum at the War College.

• Wars can be confusing, but this one was nonplussing: The aggressor didn't even know he, HE, was waging it, and the impresario gets the Peace Prize, again.

• The War against Women the GOP is waging but doesn't know it, it's just another undeclared war.  That's the only kind nowadays.

• The War against Women.  Congress is supposed to declare our wars, but the Libs presumed to, in behalf of the GOP.  Now that's downright gentlemanly of you libs.

• But in truth the War between The Sexes has been going on a lot longer than "The Hundred Years War," or all wars put together.

• That War against Women the GOP waged turned out to be the most one-sided war in all history, including the one against Custer, the worst annihilation any combatant ever suffered -- the aggressor was annihilated, totally, in a preemptive strike against aggressors who didn't even know they were aggressors.  So they were VIRTUAL aggressors, close enough.

• More tragic are the wars that must not be mentioned, the War against Achievement, the War against Individuality, the War against Capitalism.  The Unknown Soldiers.

• The same war must have two names.  America's War of Independence was Britain's War againstTerroism.  LBJ's War against Poverty was America's War Against Wealth.

• I'm so old I remember the phony war that WWII started out as.  Now I've beheld a VIRTUAL aggressors and a VIRTUAL war.  No less bloody or consequential.

• And I also remember -- I'm so old I remember -- when the Nazi's claimed the Poles were aggressors and in righteous wrath invaded Poland.  Alas, I've just suffered a politically incorrect (but accurate) memory.

• The GOP was ambushed and more soundly clobbered than Braddock in the French-Indian War, which nobody hears of nowadays.  It's a shame US history, recognizable as history, isn't taught any more.  The politically correctulum gives Braddock's annihilation   short shrift ("What does it matter?" in the words of Secretary of State Hillary), but I'll bet Custer's drubbing is exalted, and the GOP War against Women is allotted more space than WWII and adjudged more of a crime against humanity than Auschwitz or Hiroshima.

•  Awhile back the feminists declared an all-out no-prisoners-taken war, with manifestos, war rallies, parades, war bonds, celebrities boosting morale, the whole ball of wax -- The War against Men.  Ho Hum.  One of those wars the media puts on the back page.

• Fall, 2012.  Sandra Fluke.  Sandra?  Fluke?  She sure is, all right, a fluke, and a hurricane.  Such catastrophic puns, all in one person -- even I couldn't dream them up.  No wonder she's paranoid, thinking a war is centering around her!

• Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe and asked, "Are you the little lady that started the Civil War?"  Barack could ask Sandra Fluke, Sandra and Fluke, "Are you the little fluke that won me re-election?"

• In government are there such positions as under-secretarys?  If it's a woman occupying it, it would be sexist and against some law, wouldn't it?

• Are we to be dead to sin (as Romans 6 & 7 say), or is sin itself dead (as some new-covenant dispensationalists say)?

• Some philosophers say God is dead.  Some Christians say sin is.  Same difference, as I see it.

• To some “new-covenanters,” the death of sin is a greater joy than redemption from sin.

• “I have a headache.”  Her little white lie.  He tells blacker ones.

• One little white lie may be the mother of many big black ones.

• But if Eve committed the original sin, Adam gave the original excuse: I sinned because of “the woman whom thou gavest me.” Genesis 3:12.

• Kidding, I say going into this: I submit that when Adam excused himself, saying, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (Genesis 3:12), God did not take issue.

• Woman was made from the rib of man.  The original Prime Rib.

• To a philosopher definition is fundamental. By that definition Bill "as I definite it" Clinton is a philosopher.

• But which is better -- to define or re-define?

• Yes 'tis better far to re-define than to define, for you go where no dictionary has gone before.

• Explosions of high-energy radioactive particles of wit boiling from the nuclear reactor of my wisdom, is how I try to sell these eructations.  Truth to tell, they’re merely pied notes for essays I’ll never bother to assemble.

• January 2013.  These are serious times.  If everybody at Fox News round tables wore expressions commensurate with the times, they'd all look like Charles Krauthammer.

• February 2013.  Not surprisingly the evolution of the devil's relation with mankind through the eons has grown ever more weird.  At the beginning he appeared as a exquisite and very wise serpent.  In Biblical times he simply took possession of a person's mind, causing grand mal seizures and maniacal behavior.  In the Dark Ages, ladies thus possessed wore pointy black hats and could ride through the air on brooms.  In the 19th century he rattled windows and tables and managed Ouija boards.  A few years ago he put signs up on a small house or the web ("Psychic") and read your future for a fee.  Now they're back as hemorrhaging zombies with shiny pointy teeth.  Lucky Eve, she got the exquisite, dazzling, one.

• But through it all, from snake to zombie, the same demonic lies: "Did God tell you that?  Forget Him and be liberated!"  "But there isn't really a God anyway.  Nor is there a devil.  But if you have to have that sort of thing, go with God, leave me out of it."  "And He -- God -- He did it! -- He created evil, not silly old me."  "And to wrap it up, you're eternal, immortal, in whatever form you like."   Those aren't a fictitious quotes from a pretend character; it's paraphrase of an all too real enemy's spiel.  He that hath ears let him hear.

• As a pathologist I am stymied with this psychiatric question: was it ego, superego, or id that decided it would be iPad and youTube and not youPad and I-tube?

• My moral judgment is that iPad is self-centered and uTube is all heart.

• Here’s another set of two kinds of people: those who instantly complain to the authorities, and those who gripe only to their spouses and it never occurs to them go any higher with it.  Actually, there’s a third kind, the kind that just blogs all day.

• You can't go home again.  If it's not a welfare state you wouldn't if you could, and couldn't if you would.

• You DID build THAT! -- Global Warming.  So naturally it'll be taxed.

• The most natural thing in the world is for a man and woman to marry.  The most expected thing in the world is the declaration that the declaration that the most unnatural thing in the world is unnatural is bigotry and hate and unnatural.  If it takes you a while to figure out that sentence, I'll never figure out why seeing unnatural gay marriage is natural, and... yikes!

• In this award-winning generation the biggest drama in the latest terrorist bombing is who is going to claim credit for it.  Next, they'll be putting ads in Variety magazine to claim the credit.

• Terrorist bombers claim the credit.  The bereaved claim the bodies.

• We now have two parties to like: the Tea Party and the Brie Party.  At the Tea Party you get free tea and wafers.  At the Brie Party you get free brie and waivers.  The waivers cost plenty.

• In my day, 75 years ago, we students knew our places, even  whether we were nouns or adjectives, and which came first.  I was a medical student.  She was a student nurse.

• It has always been said that we must learn the morals, mores, customs, traditions, the natures, the people of other cultures.  And the best way to do that is to shop.