Random thoughts on the passing scene:
A magician was asked what had happened to the lady he used to saw in half in his act. “Oh, she’s retired,” he said. “Now she lives in Chicago — and Denver.”
Despite the rhetoric of the “haves” and the “have-nots” that is so dear to the heart of the political left, a more accurate description of most Americans today would be the “have-lots” and the “have-lots-more.”
Not since the days of Joe Louis has any athlete been so universally admired and respected as Tiger Woods.
More than half of all the tornadoes in the world occur in just one country — the United States. How often have you heard of a tornado striking England, Argentina or China?
Big business executives across the country are coming up with literally hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money to pay for low-income youngsters to attend private schools. But this doesn’t fit the media’s vision, so it isn’t called “compassion” and often it isn’t even considered to be news worth reporting.
The people I feel sorry for are those who do 90 percent of what it takes to succeed.
E-mail from a reader: “How come we need to understand the anger and resentment of Palestinian Arabs who strap dynamite to themselves and slaughter children eating pizza, but a white American who puts pipe bombs in mailboxes is casually dismissed as crazy?”
It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else’s opinion.
Why can’t baseball use the kinds of machines that are used in tennis matches to tell whether a ball is inside or outside of certain lines? That would put a stop to umpires calling pitches strikes when the ball doesn’t pass over any part of the plate. Why should each umpire have his own personal strike zone?
Trust is one of those things that is much easier to maintain than it is to repair.
I often wonder what happened to the first students I taught at Douglass College nearly 40 years ago, whom I remember more vividly than the much larger numbers of students that I taught at other places since then.
What are terrorists in general, and suicide bombers in particular, saying, except that they want to feel important and that all they have to contribute to the world is death?
It is self-destructive for any society to create a situation where a baby who is born into the world today automatically has pre-existing grievances against another baby born at the same time, because of what their ancestors did centuries ago. It is hard enough to solve our own problems, without trying to solve our ancestors’ problems.
I would love to see Pete Sampras win one more major tournament — and then retire.
Don’t you love it when the intelligentsia condemn the United States for responding “unilaterally” after we are attacked, instead of waiting for the approval of that confusion of voices known as “world opinion”?
I wish that some way could be found to add up all the staggering costs imposed on millions of ordinary people, just so a relative handful of self-righteous environmental cultists can go around feeling puffed up with themselves.
After rioters have been christened “demonstrators” by the media, it was perhaps inevitable that terrorists would be christened “militants.”
Is there some iron law that pitchers throwing to the plate can only be televised from one angle? There are cameras at other places, which can show the pitch from other angles on replays — but not live, for some reason.
The great curse of the 20th century was the inability of decent people to realize that what was unthinkable to them was both thinkable and doable by others — like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Are we to wait until Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and we wake up some morning to find a couple of American cities obliterated?
