Catching up

Ayieeee! If I say it's as hot as a Texas summer, take heed. I know whereof I speak.

Anyway, glad to be back and blah, blah, blah.

Often on vacation, I try to completely ignore the news, as a palliative for my workday immersion in it. But this time, I decided to pay modest attention to the reported events of the day, the way most people do. That way, I could catch the highlights without having to obsess over the small stuff. So, the news that broke through my short attention span in Texas:

1. Casey Anthony's acquittal on all counts except lying to police -- this was so big it escaped the cable news monopoly on over-the-top sensationalism and left the major network news readers breathless with wonder. As the aftermath unfolded, we were told the country was "outraged" that she apparently pulled an O.J. and got away with murder. (Perhaps she, too, will now embark on a quest to find the "real killer"; O.J. seemed to look mainly on golf courses -- perhaps Casey should look in nightclubs.) Maybe so -- a new poll being reported today says nearly two-thirds of Americans think she murdered daughter Caylee. I don't think my sister or my brother and his wife or I were outraged. We expressed shock at the verdict and talked about the quirkiness of juries for a while, then went back to sitting on the deck and contemplating the universe (i.e., watching the deer hover around the feeder and the cat watching the deer). It's good fun to second-guess juries, but we can never know exactly what they know, having experienced the proceedings in minute detail every day. And this panel was sequestered, so jurors knew only what they heard and saw in court. The most obvious explanation of the verdict is that the prosecutors overcharged Casey. They had no fingerprints, no DNA, no witness to the crime, yet went for the home run of premeditation.

2. The stalemate over the "debt-ceiling crisis" and the looming possibility of the country defaulting. This wasn't exactly news, just constant updates on the slight movements of an immovable object and an irresistible force in a game of fiscal chicken. This is one of the most manufactured emergencies in the history of modern government. Everybody knows that we're not going to default (or, at least, that somebody should be tarred and feathered and run out of the country if we do) and that a last-minute compromise will involve a deficit reduction in name only and a continuation of borrowing and spending. If a "celing" is raised every time it's reached, it's not really a ceiling, is it? Officials' insistence that it always has to be bumped up as a way to head of the crisis tells you everything you need to know about the current state of the federal government.

3. The last flight of a space shuttle, ever. I found myself watching the liftoff of Atlantis the same way I watched the first few missions, anxiously rapt at every second of the countdown, anticipating the awesome thrust into space but also dreading the possibility of disaster. It turned out to be as nearly perfect a launch as possible, which makes the end of the shuttle era even sadder somehow. NASA hans't been the greatest government bureaucracy in the world (we should have begun a push for a manned flight to Mars the minute we set foot on the moon, instead of just endlessly recircling the globe at low orbit), but it's the only space agency we've got. President Obama talks about Mars, but the reality is that we're abandoning space at the same time the Chinese are gearing up for it.  They aim for a moon landing in 2025. How dreary seems Wahington's continuing efforts to merely redistribute what we have already accumulated. These are not heroic times, are they?

4. The death of Betty Ford. It's an unfortunate legacy of her time in the national spotlight that "rehab" has become almost a secular form of confession -- announce your weaknesses and character flaws and all your sins will be forgiven if you showily enter a facility to work on you demons. But I think she was about as classy as they come as a first lady, and she handled her private failings with public grace and a determination to help others learn from her mistakes, whatever the cost to her in embarrassment.

5. The United Nations' "stern warning" to the United States to ban assault weapons so they don't end up in the hands of Mexican drug lords. Huh. KMA, U.N.

There were a few other things, but in the "same story, different names" category. I spent a lot of my time in Texas, as I spend it here, in search of the perfect chili dog, with a side trip or two for smoked brisket. I'll probably never find the perfect chili dog -- if, indeed, it exists -- but the near misses are wonderful. When I got home, my cats Dutch and Maggie expressed the proper feline version of "Glad you're home, we certainly missed you" by mostly ignoring me after about five minutes. I spent Saturday night watching "Fail Safe" on cable (a wonderfully scary movie unfortunately overshadowed by the demented "Dr. Strangelove" that came out the same year) and reading a new (to me) book ("Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric," highly recommended) that I had ordered for the trip but which didn't come till the day after I left. Life goes on.

Oh, speaking of rhetoric and all that. I shouldn't leave Texas without recounting the trick my evil 16-year-old female relative (oh, OK, she's my grand niece, for pity's sake; how'd my brother get that old?) played on me. She had listened to my brother and me discussing a point of grammar, then said, "I have a question for you, Uncle Leo. Does anal-retentive have a hyphen?" I went into this long explanation of the function of hyphens, how they don't really have anything to do with grammar, that they're just visual aids for the reader, used to relate the words of a compound-modifier to one another. If two words (such as "high school") are used together so often that their pairing isn't unexpected, the hyphen can be dropped; as for anal-retentive . . . I was about three minutes in to my tedious rambling when I looked up and saw the cruel grin on my niece's face announcing that, yes, indeed, she had lured me into an anal-retentive state. I tell ya, these kids today.

Stay cool.