TENDER EARSHIT

Recently I ended a letter to the editor to my local newspaper, the Spokesman Review, in Spokane, Washington with the word "bullshit". They asked me to change the word because it was a word they didn't use in their paper. I'm sure that word is going to shock all the wheat farmers and cattle ranchers who surround this little backward town in Eastern Washington. It's not as if they don't step in it or a mighty fine substitue for it all the time.

I'll never forget the time many years back when members of the Eastern Washington U. literary magazine crew (Willow Springs) and friends were playing a softball game in a pasture in Oakesdale. One of us made an excellent slide into home plate and bottomed out in a big pile of bull- or cow- stuff at the end of his slide. OK—so he missed home plate by a wide margin. Unfortunately I was one of those who rode with the slider to the game. Gagsville all the way home, literally and figuratively.


ALAN DERSHOWITZ SAYS BENCH PACKED ON THE RIGHT BUTTOCKS

"The bench is always going to be heavily weighed toward the ideological right. One side, the Republicans, picks ideologically; the other, Democrats, picks without regard to ideology in a way that you expect the surrogate will be ideology—assuming that more blacks, women, Latinos, will be more interested in issues of liberty, and that just doesn't turn out to be the case, particularly on religion." from Freethought Today (Mar. 2004, p11.)


"If you don't go to other people's funerals, they won't go to yours." —my source says "anonymous" but I heard it was Yogi Berra