Garrison Keillor, "Mom's the Word," Salon, April 26, 2006.

How does it feel?"

Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"

Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution shows how the linguistic battle lines are drawn: "'Iraq is now at civil war' means 'we have already lost the battle and we should get out now'; 'Iraq is now experiencing sectarian violence' means 'Iraq's natural propensity is toward civil war, but thank God for the presence of American forces that are preventing it.' " But Charles Krauthammer, the most powerful conservative-internationalist columnist, had noted in 2004: "There already is a civil war. It is raging before our eyes. Problem is, only one side is fighting it." Recalling this recently in The Washington Post, Krauthammer updated his point: "Does not everyone who wishes us well support the strategy of standing up the Iraqis so we can stand down? And does that not mean getting the Iraqis to fight the civil war themselves?"

By William Safire, "War Names,” New York Times, April 9, 2006.

"The Pledge of Allegiance was written for the popular children's magazine Youth's Companion by socialist author and Baptist minister Francis Bellamy on September 7, 1892. The owners of Youth's Companion were selling flags to schools, and approached Bellamy to write the Pledge for their advertising campaign. It was marketed as a way to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus arriving in the Americas and was first published on the following day.

Bellamy's original Pledge read as follows: I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

On Flag Day, June 14, 1954, Congress passed the legislation adding the phrase ‘under God’ to the Pledge."

Source: Wikipedia.com

Responding to the chorus of retired generals who have recently called for his ouster, hundreds of retired oil company executives marched on Washington today to show their support for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"I know that the retired generals aren't happy with the job Secretary Rumsfeld is doing, but there are two sides to every story," Mr. Greeley said. "As far as we retired oil executives are concerned, things just couldn't be going any better."

Mr. Greeley said that many of the oil executives spent their entire careers working to raise gas prices to stratospheric levels, something Mr. Rumsfeld has helped accomplish in a matter of a few short years.

"Donald Rumsfeld hasn't brought peace to the Mideast, but he has brought three-dollars-a-gallon gas to the Midwest," he said. "For that alone, he deserves our unwavering support."

By Andy Borowitz, "RETIRED OIL EXECUTIVES VOICE SUPPORT FOR RUMSFELD: Chauffeur-driven March on Washington Draws Hundreds," Borowitzreport.com, April 26, 2006.

By William Safire, “War Names,” New York Times, April 9, 2006.

"As a journalist, it's not my place to editorialize. I'm here to objectively divide the facts into categories of good and evil, then you make up your own minds."

Stephen Colbert, “The Colbert Report,” Comedy Central.

"Philosophy I: Everyone from Plato to Camus is read, and the following topics are covered:

Ethics: The categorical imperative, and six ways to make it work for you.

Aesthetics: Is art the mirror of life, or what?

Epistemology: Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this?

The Absurd: Why existence is often considered silly, particularly for men who wear brown‑and‑white shoes. Manyness and oneness are studied as they relate to otherness. Students achieving oneness will move ahead to twoness."

From the early comedy of Woody Allen.

"[Antonio] Banderas isn't anything so boring as a simple sex symbol; what makes him such an erotic presence is his superbly expressive face. If there's such a thing as intelligent good looks, Banderas has got them: He always looks as if he's taking the world in, one crazy sight at a time, with a suitable degree of amusement. In a climate where male actors have to worry almost as much as women do about being perceived as ‘old,’ Banderas has been striding through middle age with astonishing self-assurance and good humor. He makes insouciant self-deprecation seem like the sexiest thing in the world."

From a review by Stephanie Zacharek of Take the Lead, Salon.com, April 7, 2006.

For the writers at XplanaZine, today has been a day of rest and time with family. Some may have wondered about our weekly What's Up and What Matters segment. It did not run today due to our declared family holiday, but be assured that it will appear again next Sunday.

Tune in tomorrow for our regular daily conmtent -- Tech Trends, Daily Edublogging Update, Nicely Worded, and Lone Star Learning.

--Mark Twain

"Some dummy built this pencil wrong--
The eraser's down here where the point belongs.
And the point's at the top--so it's no good to me.
It's amazing how stupid some people can be."

"Stupid Pencil Maker," a poem by the remarkably talented Shel Silverstein

"Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far -- it is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and on land."

By Walt Whitman, Song of Myself: A Poem of Walt Whitman, an American.

"I had a horrifying experience in the House of Representatives last week. The House Immigration Caucus held a press conference so members could compete to see who was the biggest blithering idiot in the group.

'Anybody who votes for an amnesty bill deserves to be branded with a scarlet letter, A for Amnesty!' one aspiring idiot thundered. There's 'a foul odor that's coming out of the U.S. Senate!' bellowed Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, who then went on to win the prize by suggesting that instead of using illegal aliens to harvest crops, we force felons to do it. 'I say, Let the prisoners pick the fruits!'

Here was a seemingly mentally competent adult recommending that we force a largely minority population to go out in the fields and pick lettuce and cotton. You wanted to hit him over the head and scream: Is this ringing any bells, Representative Rohrabacher? Are we repealing the Emancipation Proclamation, too?"

By David Brooks, "Scuttling Toward Sanity," New York Times, April 6, 2006.

"There are also books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book."

"Are there many of those, do you think?" Bobby asked.

"More than the book-snobs and play-it-safers think. Many more."

From Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King.

"People have been falling in love through every dismal era of history and through every war ever fought. Enormous black headlines in the newspapers and agitated talk in the cafes and yet she waited for him on the corner by the hotel where they had agreed to meet, and as traffic streamed past she watched the buses pulling up to the curb, looking for his familiar shape, his beautiful face, his slight smile. Under her arm, a newspaper, and inside it a columnist shaking his tiny fist at corruption, but it isn't worth two cents compared to what's in her heart. When her lover steps down, the air will be filled with bright purple blossoms and they will embrace and turn and go into the hotel, and on this, the future of the world depends.

Take the day off, dear reader, and ignore the world and let the president play his fiddle. Find the one who means the most to you and make yourselves happy. If that be ignorance, make the most of it."

By Garrison Keillor, "Love Will Outlast Bush," Salon.com, April 4, 2006.

Planning to run for President of the United States? Might want to consider taking steps to cultivate a cowboy image, such as buying a ranch in Crawford, Texas. Here are some fun facts about how President Bush got his spurs.

If W. wants the information out, it's good for the country to make it public. If W. doesn't want the information out, it's bad for the country to make it public. L'etat, c'est moi."

By Maureen Dowd, "Divine Right of Bushes," New York Times, April 8, 2006.

"[Keith] Olbermann has repeatedly conferred on [Bill] O'Reilly the top place in a 'Worst Person in the World' competition, and probably more to the point, when discussing O'Reilly he often finds ways to work in the word 'falafel.' That is a reference to a sexual-harassment suit that a former Fox News producer named Andrea Mackris filed against O'Reilly a couple of years ago. (The case was settled out of court, but not before it got extensive press attention.) Mackris produced what she said were quotes of O'Reilly on the phone discussing things that he imagined they might enjoy doing together. The most notorious of these was a scenario in which they would be in the shower and he would massage her with a loofah, a scrubby sponge--but then, as he went on talking, he slipped up and referred to it as 'the falafel thing,' which is funny not only because the picture of smearing wet mashed chickpeas on someone's body is profoundly unerotic but also because the mistake seems to be a peculiar by-product of O'Reilly's suspicion of things non-American. That's why, for O'Reilly, 'falafel' is a fighting word."

Nicholas Lemann, "Fear Factor," The New Yorker, March 27, 2006.

"One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph and once I get it, the rest comes out very easily. In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Writer's Chapbook (1989), George Plimpton, editor.

"Attempting to answer the calls within his own party to shake up his beleaguered administration, President George W. Bush today ousted the White House pastry chef and pronounced the shakeup complete.

'There have been many Republicans in Congress who have been calling upon me to do something drastic,' Mr. Bush told reporters at the White House. 'I am convinced that by firing the pastry chef, we have fixed the problems.'

Mr. Bush, while declining to 'play the blame game,' indicated that after much consideration he had concluded that the White House pastry chef was at the root of most of the problems of his administration.

'Let's face it, during the run-up to the war in Iraq, there was all of that talk about weapons of mass destruction, and the pastry chef didn't say anything about it,' Mr. Bush said. 'If he knew that the intelligence was faulty, he should have spoken up.'"

By Andy Borowitz, "White House Ousts Pastry Chef; Shakeup Complete: 'We Have Fixed the Problems,' Says Delighted President," The Borowitz Report, www.borowitzreport.com, April 2, 2006

"The weak and pathetic Democrats seem to move inexorably toward candidates who turn a lot of people off. They should find someone captivating with an intensely American success story -- someone like Senator Obama, Tom Brokaw or some innovative business mogul who's less crazy than Ross Perot -- and shape the campaign around that leader. Barack Obama is 44. J.F.K., who had a reputation as a callow playboy and lawmaker who barely knew his way around the Hill, was 43 when he became president.

Maureen Dowd, "What's Better? His Empty Suit or Her Baggage?," New York Times, March 15, 2006.

"Censure is a purely symbolic form of punishment. Though it carries no concrete penalties, the shame of it has a certain Roman gravity. The Senate has voted nine times to censure one of its own errant members—most notable, in 1954, Joseph R. McCarthy, who felt the sting so keenly that he drank himself to death three years later, aged forty-eight."

Hendrik Hertzberg, "Disarray This," The New Yorker, March 27, 2006.

What field do you think is a good one for young women now?

The field of celebrity journalism.

Oh, no. I hope that is not an expanding field.

Yes, it is. That's why I suggested it. We're all competing to find writers and editors who can do it. The circulation of the Star is 1.5 million every week, and then it's 9.5 million readers, because it has a lot of pass-along readers.

Answers from Bonnie Fuller, the editorial director of American Media Inc., the publisher of magazines and tabloids including Star, Men's Fitness, Shape and National Enquirer, as asked by Deborah Soloman, "Too Much Isn’t Enough," New York Times Magazine, March 26, 2006.

"There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it."

The last line of "Brokeback Mountain," a short story by Annie Proulx

"It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

First line from 1984 by George Orwell.

Among the list of reasons given by Anthony Lane why audiences will feel clever spotting plot holes in Inside Man, the new film by Spike Lee:

"The document in question, as we learn early in the film, shows that Arthur Case had links with the Nazis. This cannot be true, for one reason: he is played by Christopher Plummer, and, excuse me, but Christopher Plummer does not make friends with Nazis. He sings at them! He plays guitar at them! In a daring, nun-assisted escape, he flees from them over the hills with an annoying child on his back! Come on."

Anthony Lane, "Unsocial Studies," The New Yorker, March 27, 2006.

(Lane goes on to say, "Inside Man needs to be seen.")

"At his impromptu press conference yesterday, the president presented himself as a nice guy doing a difficult job, relentlessly joshing with reporters. He chided the press for playing into terrorists' goals by showing bad news from Iraq -- 'they're capable of blowing up innocent life so it ends up on your TV show' -- even as reports surfaced about insurgents outside Baghdad storming a jail, slaughtering 18 police officers and letting the prisoners out, following fast upon an insurgent raid on Iraqi Army headquarters in Kirkuk. Does the president think TV will instead report on an increase in melon sales at the market?"

Maureen Dowd, "Fly Into a Building? Who Could Imagine?," New York Times, March 22, 2006.

From the 2005 commencement address at the University of Maine given by Stephen King.

David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

Humorist Andy Borowitz, "White House Jumps the Shark: Hunting Accident, Ports Deal Telltale Signs, Expert Says," www.borowitzreport.com, March 18, 2006. ("Jumping the shark -- a phrase referring to the phenomenon of a long-running television series suddenly becoming irretrievably bad.")

From "The American Scholar," a Phi Beta Kappa address delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson at Harvard in 1837. The speech was received with great enthusiasm.

"About The Awful: I was bored on the 9 th of Octover 1940 when, I believe, the Nasties were still booming us led by Madalf Heatlump (Who only had one). Anyway they didn’t get me. I attended to varicous schools in Liddypol. And still didn’t pass-much to my Aunties supplies. As a member of the most publified Beatles my and (P, G, and R’s) records might seem funnier to some of you then this book, but as far as I’m conceived this correction of short writty is the most wonderfoul larf I’ve ever ready. God help and breed you all."

John Lennon on his book of poetry, In His Own Write.

"What I’d like to know is this—when is this hypnotist’s show gonna be through so people can come back to their senses? The babysitter charges overtime." Leotus P. Funkhouse, "You are Becoming Very Sleepy," The Haven Register, March 15, 2006.

Not everyone relies solely on email. This vivid exchange of ideas between Donald Trump and author Mark Singer took place entirely via words on paper.

"This Katrina videotape is as defining for Bush's presidency as the audiotapes of President Kennedy's councils of state during the Cuban missile crisis were for his. Kennedy's tapes revealed him as probing, subtle, prudent and decisive. Bush's tape exposes a deaf man spouting talking points." Sidney Blumenthal, "Once More Unto the Breach," Salon.com, March 8, 2006.

Walter Cronkite encouraging support for the Drug Policy Alliance in "Telling the Truth about the War on Drugs," March 1, 2006:

"Amid the cliches of the drug war, our country has lost sight of the scientific facts. Amid the frantic rhetoric of our leaders, we've become blind to reality: The war on drugs, as it is currently fought, is too expensive, and too inhumane. But nothing will change until someone has the courage to stand up and say what so many politicians privately know: The war on drugs has failed."

Leotus P. Funkhouse on his possible relocation as published in The Haven Register, "Oh Con Trayer, Mon Frere," March 7, 2006:

"The rest of the world thinks everyone in Texas is all in love with George W. Bush, but I'm so embarassed of the man I've considered moving across the river to Oklahoma. That's how bad I think things have got."

David Denby, describing the two Newark mayoral candidates, both Democrat and both black, challenger Cory Booker, 36, and incumbent Sharpe James, 70, The New Yorker, "Candid Cameras," March 6, 2006.

"First, the challenger, Cory Booker: young, tall, athletic; civil-rights-activist parents; attended Stanford, Yale Law School, and Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. And then the old pro, Sharpe James: stocky, up-from-the-ghetto bruiser; the essence of a machine politician; an operator who sometimes delivers a skyscraper or a sports arena to Newark's downtown "renaissance." Booker, who is a bachelor and lives in a public-housing apartment, is strenuously sincere in his manner, and a little full of himself. James—who drives a Rolls and lives high—flirts, dances, and menaces his way through a campaign. One is a moralist who expects to be judged by the sternest criteria; the other is a canny mover who tells people that he has the juice, and the human understanding, to give them what they want."

From Ruth Rendell's 1977 novel, A Judgement in Stone.

"Literacy is one of the cornerstones of civilisation. To be illiterate is to be deformed. And the derision that was once directed at the physical freak may, perhaps more justly, descend upon the illiterate. If he or she can live a cautious life among the uneducated, all may be well, for in the country of the purblind the eyeless is not rejected."

"I'm sorry it didn't work out the way they wanted it to. Now let's go. Because anybody who tells you it couldn't possibly get worse is a fool." Nationally syndicated columnist Molly Ivins on the war in Iraq, "Unbounded Incompetence," March 2, 2006.