All about me

Poor Jeff Wiehe. He's a perfectly nice young man who writes news stories for The News-Sentinel. He did a story recently about two people who died in a motorcycle accident, making the perfectly reasonable observation that the two were not wearing helmet. That's the first thing people wonder when there's a motorcycle fatality -- was the victim wearing a helmet? -- and if that detail isn't there, we're likely to get calls. But it was too much for one reader, who fired off this rant:

Good lord. If anybody has any doubts about the lack of a real conservative in the White House for the last eight years, let Michael Gerson remove them. He was a speechwriter for President Bush and now says this in a column:

For all of conservatism's evident virtues, it can have one furtive, seedy vice: A justified suspicion of government can degenerate into an anti-government ideology -- rigid, stingy and indifferent to human suffering.

The trend of connecting to people rather than places continues:

For nearly three in 10 households, don't even bother trying to call them on a landline phone. They either only have a cell phone or seldom if ever take calls on their traditional phone.

Fancy houses are one of my weaknesses. The Parade of Homes has always been one of my favorite events, and I liked the short-lived Street of Dreams even more because the houses were even bigger. If I had a lot of money, I'd probably spend too much of it on a really luxurious home with every amenity imaginable. But this is too much even for me:

Any of you know what "effete" really means? I searched Google News for a hint that anybody writing about politics today has a clue:

•  "As an issue it's nothing, but it shows him as the effete, academic liberal." Nope. That's Charles Krauthammer, for pete's sake, and he seems to think it means aloof and elitist.

Love to see it:

As I hauled my creaky bones out of bed this morning, I decided there needed to be a new word for people like me, and here it it is: "Crippie," meaning crippled-up old hippie. The folks at the Urban Dictionary have a different definition, but what do they know? Come to think of it, there could be some connection there . . .

Oops. Made a liar out of myself. I wrote this last January:

I have never recycled anything and never will, however that concept is defined. "Use it up and move on" is my motto. Bring on the landfills. Trying to endlessly reuse the same resources is the mark of a desperate people with no options, such as those that might be trapped on a desert island.

The cell phone I had just before the current one had a glitch. If I didn't retrieve my voice mail in exactly the right way, I had to listen to all the saved voice mails before the phone would deliver the new ones.

A member of another misunerstood and put-upon minority (only 10 million Americans out of more than 300 million) asks for our understanding: