Electrical failure

Dad:
(An e-mail of about 50-100 words that describes in laymen’s terms what happened on your flight)

Summary of report to Flight Department:
(Try to condense your report - but keep it technically accurate and informative for our more knowledgeable readership)

Dear Readers:
Imagine yourselves seated here. You are piloting this aircraft from Paris to New York and you are half way across. It is nighttime and you are 35,000 feet above the Atlantic. Suddenly everything goes dark and you have a major electrical malfunction. If you cannot swiftly restore the airplane’s electrical integrity, it will make a life-extinguishing dive into a storm-swept sea.

Now, I can see you are nodding affirmatively as I ask: Aren’t you happy you are sitting at a well-illuminated desk on terra firma - you are gazing at your functioning computer and you are not imperiled by a life terminating catastrophe?

Post hoc, ergo . . .?

NY Times - 9.23.05:
Quoted from Thomas L. Friedman’s OpEd, "Rooting for Bibi"

"There is something about the international climate today (Italics, mine) - the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the pressures of globalization, rising middle classes who want stability and the passing of a generation of charismatic leaders - that is blowing apart many of the stale political arrangements that have long governed Arab-Israeli politics. Syria has been forced out of Lebanon. Israel has unilaterally pulled out of Gaza. Egypt has held its first quasi-multiparty election. The Palestinian Authority has imploded with the death of Yasir Arafat, and the Baathists have been blown up by the Bushes. The laws of gravity are finally forcing some reality politics on the Middle East . . ."

{} Reacting to the above, I composed and sent the following letter to the Editor. Like has happened to all of my previous correspondence, it will find the black hole in his desk and disappear.

T.L. Friedman is one of your more impassioned columnists, often prescient but sometimes 180 degrees off the mark. In his paragraph that starts with "There is something about the international climate today" he is his sharply focused self. But let’s not delude ourselves. What is happening in the Middle East is not the result of random spontaneous political combustion. A case can be made that it all started when we put boots in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Krushchev had it right many years ago, when he reminded us that you cannot make an omelette without cracking the egg!

Burning Bush

On September 15, President Bush returned to New Orleans and spoke to us with heartfelt candor. He stressed that we need to rededicate ourselves to preserve every American's security and welfare and that our local, state and federal governments need to probe unendingly for ways to aid, abet and synchronize their whole spectrum of services.

Critics of Bush, who salivate over his slipping standings with sadistic satisfaction should revisit Exodus and speculate about what Moses’ ratings must have been during those many years he strove to free the Hebrews from their Egyptian bondage. Attacked savagely by Pharaoh’s charioteers; needing a miracle to cross the Red Sea; enduring famine, attenuated only by bits of manna from heaven; wandering in the wilderness; obliged to convert from their polytheism to his monotheism; then, after finally arriving in the Promised Land, having to engage in still continuing combat with the Philistines to make space for themselves, ~ the Hebrews must have rued the day their paths crossed with his. Reports sent to the Thebes Times, by the Maureen Dowds of that period, described him as a blithering idiot. His speech was so incoherent, Aaron had to serve as his interpreter. But be reminded, Moses was not "elected" by the Hebrew tribes to liberate them from bondage, he was "chosen" for the mission by the Supreme One, at the burning bush.

It is painfully clear that the devastating force of Katrina found everyone woefully unprepared. But its aftermath illuminated paths we must now follow to cope more effectively with future disasters. It was good to see the spontaneity and generosity with which our nation responded and reassuring to know that America has so vast a reservoir of genuine compassion. Enlightened now by greater understanding, we will continue on our proper course with renewed fortitude.

{} 1st sentence of 2nd paragraph features sibilant alliteration.

Alex ~ Poet

Alexander Sanyshyn, 15 year old son of Maria Sanyshyn, Managing Director at our local Somers Pointe Golf Club, has received word from T. K. Worthen, Ph.D., Editor of Creative Communication, Logan, Utah, that his poem will be published in their Anthology, A Celebration of Young Poets. His poem is entered in the final competition and it is still in the running for first prize. Alexander is in the 10th grade at the Brewster High School in Brewster New York.

Doomed to Die
Doomed to die,
He marched off to war
To fight for a pointless cause.
His children not knowing
Their father’s fate.
Doomed to die,
He marched behind the flag,
The flag that would represent his death
And the pointless war that caused it.
The flag that would symbolize
Man’s stupidity and ignorance,
Man’s savagery and lust for power,
Man’s bloodlust.
They would bury him with that flag,
The flag that represented his pointless death
And the pointless war.
His children not understanding,
Why Daddy is gone.
His son not knowing
That he too would meet the same fate.
Doomed to die.

Comment: Clearly, the travails and agonies of our world have already begun to impinge on this lad’s fertile and sensitive young mind. What else is destined to be inscribed upon it? ~ Dom Gabriele

Maureen Dowd, Pres.

You are invited to join the Horn in this fantasy

Imagine if OpEd Maureen Dowd were President and the incandescently omniscient NY Times Editorial Staff was her Cabinet. Include Frank Rich, Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman as her plenipotentiary ministers.

Within days of her inauguration, all of our glaciers will have stopped thawing and flowing into the sea. The ice caps at both poles would be totally restored and our planet, with Kyoto as its capital, will have ceased to heat up. Hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes and tsunamis would be relics of the remote past and a rebuilt New Orleans would be impregnably secure behind unbreachable levees.

At her direction, after mummifying George Bush, the entire Republican Party would be euthanased, embalmed and deeply interred under the Pyramids. With Bob Herbert's and Paul Krugman's inspired help, the poor will exchange places with the rich and every corporation would be a philanthropic institution run by poor, uneducated, untrained and uncorruptible executives.

She would encourage Islam to restore the Garden of Eden and open it to tourism. She would then persuade Osama and Zarqawi to sell dates and figs on Times Square and she would write a letter of recommendation for Saddam Hussein to become a Trappist monk. Under Frank Rich's able direction, our allies and adversaries would become rapturously infatuated with our new found purity and Dowd styled, Democratic leadership.

But tragically, there is a sad side to this brief excursion into nirvana. The New York Times could never survive in such an immaculate environment.

P.S. If there is a reader among you who has Maureen Dowd’s ear, please tell her I wrote this entire post without once referring to her as a "blithering idiot." This was the term she so ungraciously used in her OpEd Column today, to characterize a major Federal official.

P.P.S. But let's not be hard on poor Maureen. My intuition tells me that she keeps praying to God to reveal to her what unforgiveable sin she has committed, that He condemns her to live in a world overpopulated with nit-wits.