The state of the culture

You can't make this stuff up.

If 10 things are right for the Bible (that's right, they're commandments, not recommendations), the Bill of Rights (even though No. 9 and No. 10 no longer apply) and David Letterman, why fight it? Here's a good list. Don't agree? Whatever.

I was heading into full language-watchdog-geek mode when I started reading all these reviews of the new Harry Potter book by critics who obviously liked it and kept referring to it as the penultimate book in the series. Alas, I thought, professional writers are loose among us who stiil think that "penultimate" means "ultimate," only more so.

Let's mourn the passing of Salvatore Lombino, a writer whose influence on American popular culture is far greater than most people realize. Under the pen name Evan Hunter, he wrote quite a few novels, including "Blackboard Jungle," which became the 1955 movie of the same name. That's the film that featured the song "Rock Around the Clock," which had been released earlier but not done too well.