CHENEY BACK IN THE NEWS

The slender ailing Cheney is back to expressing his learned opinions.

Oy Vey!

Yes, I feel sorry for him, because he has to live with the fact that he hasn't got a lot of busy, productive years ahead of him -- that he isn't going to go down in history as a great vice president, or humanitarian, or knowledgeable authority on administrative affairs.

In fact, he's got a lot of critics down on him -- the half truths and lies, the contractual commitments that made him richer and the country poorer, commitments that the country is still paying for financially and spiritually-- for instance Halliburton and water-boarding.

I feel sorry for us because Cheney puts poison in the air that's already laden with emissions and ...

I am not going to list what I think are the Cheney environmental and global poisons. It's only polishing the memories of what Cheney promoted, or ignored, or dismissed as nonsense, or encouraged -- ugly words, ugly politics, that right now are slowing up stymieing, tainting, and inspiring fear, horror, and criminal behavior ... just about everywhere.

All I can say is, Mr. Cheney, we don't need you, don't want to see you, or hear you, or get your opinions about anything. Please, do us all a big favor -- deal with your exercise, your doctors, your pump, your family, your place on the Heart transplant list, and shut up.

BIBLE BALLADS (video)

John Cullum is taken aback when Emily asks him what he is doing with his project, "Bible Ballads." He can't concentrate on it, he's been working on a benefit for Burton Lane, and learning music for a workshop.

Emily Frankel presses him to sing just a bit of "In The Beginning"-- a song he's been working on as the opening number for his bible project. But John doesn't want to even begin to try. He starts into another song -- stops and shrugs it off.

The Cullums finish the session, but Emily begs John, and downstairs in his office, Emily films John singing his opening song.

GUNS

What are we going to do? Keep on doing nothing? Mayor Bloomburg of New York City says no, NO, NO!!
I want to believe Bloomburg. At the end of the clip, MLK's son, Martin Luther King III, hammers home the point.

I hope that Mayor Bloomburg and King are right -- that we will do something, and begin to WIN THE WAR with the NRA.

THE FACE

I am not using the name, so that Google's tentacles that find information, and translate it into Google Alerts, won't grab what I'm saying, and the search engine that The Face has built, won't seize what I've writing and deem it treason.

I will use metaphors, beat around the bush, and avoid references.

It is tricky, complicated to figure out how to do this or that in The Face's domain. There are imponderable cross references and batches of potential answers to similar questions, but rarely a simple sequential "do this, then do that."

The rules are hidden. They seem to be traditions, but no one I've met seems to know, specifically, what they are. Nevertheless, you are punished, told to stop what you are doing, with a warning that appears with no preliminaries. You can be permanently stopped if you don't respond to the message that suggests you need to do something, but it isn't clear what.

You are NOT required to reveal more about yourself than you want to, but messages appear here and there, that remind you, that you are not revealing significant aspects of your background -- age, phone number, nitty-gritty details of your education, hobbies, and favorite things.

The inner environment of The Face's domain feels like a high, hard-surfaced curved wall, sort of like a silo, with no hooks, handles, or indents, nothing to grasp, no easy way to climb up and out.

All this has been created by a seemingly bland, un-threatening, innocent countenance of a young boy-girl child man. There's no contactable anything, no feeling in that countenance -- just cold blue-lake eyes that are wide-open focused, and a not generous expressionless mouth.

I don't know why I don't like that face. It is probably imitating it's parents in their supervisory mode, telling the boy-girl man child, "Oh yes, dear, you can have fun and freedom" which they did not have, and maybe that's why I feel that fun and freedom is denied, restricted by The Face.

The Face is getting more popular, famous, rich, recognizable, and more -- much more important, much more powerful -- and has no need to be concerned with me as an individual, or any other individual with whom it comes in contact.

What will happen to The Face? I fear it will go too far in its need to control me, limit and box in my thinking, stop me from anything I do that's out of the boundaries that The Face has created.

It permits words, words, triviality, inconsequentiality of words, words, words, that become an amusing, curiously inventive "reason for being unto themselves" -- the path to travel, the goal, the place where you end up, full of sound and fury that signifies almost nothing except bla-bla.

Yep. I'm afraid that The Face is leading me to a great big horizon-less, infinite nowhere, and if I don't find a way out, I'm going to disappear.