"I don't have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They're upstairs in my socks." - Groucho Marx

We’ve decided to have a talk with Jack about the amount of mascara he’s using.

I didn’t go see Red Green today and I didn’t go to the Greek festival. Too much to do here at the house. But I feel good about the progress I made on several fronts, and that leisurely nap was nice, too.

I hope Cam Newton is clean. Either way, Auburn is impressive.

How in the world does any woman stuff $80,000 in her bra??? I can’t imagine what size cup is required for that much cash if the bra started out empty. Best case scenario, we’re talking about 80 thousand-dollar bills. That’s 40 per side!

This book about politics has me thinking. Not always agreeing, but thinking.
There won’t be any politics in heaven for one simple reason. There won’t be any problems in heaven. Politics and politicians depend on problems for their existence. A politician’s job, at least as they see it, is to solve problems. Some of those problems are social, affecting the entire populace. Sewage. Some problems are individual, like cancer. And some are global. Melting glaciers or crazies on a mission of destruction.

If there weren’t problems politicians would have nothing to do, but that’s not going to happen on this side of heaven for two reasons. First, this is a world beset by sin, and sin creates problems in every dimension of individual, social and global life. But more than this, politicians have to solve the problems caused by the last solution they came up with. And each governmental solution is guaranteed to create at least six new problems, two of which will be of greater magnitude than the original.

To be fair, some problems are best solved by politicians. For example, they’re particularly well equipped to deal with sewage, including an integrated system to carry it away from my house to some place far away where someone else has to deal with it. My neighbor didn’t even invite us to the block party last week so I think it’s unlikely we could come together over how to deal with our respective outflow.

Some problems can’t be solved by politicians. Like obesity. But that doesn’t keep them from trying, as the San Francisco city council has recently demonstrated. And it’s OK, because that gives parents someone else to blame. They aren’t responsible for the fact their kids are fat and lazy; it’s those little pieces of plastic junk McDonald’s puts in their kids meals. We complain about government’s intrusion into life but the silver lining is that their natural inclination to solve every problem gives us someone to blame for our own failures. (They’ll never come out and say we’re responsible for the problem because they need our vote. So they do the hard work of finding someone else, usually a “big corporation,” to blame it on.)

The politicians’ real genius is the arena of global problems, and the ultimate example is global warming. Here is a problem that, if it exists at all, can’t be solved by politicians who govern 300 million people when countries of 1.3 billion (China) and 1.1 billion (India) have no real interest in joining the fight. Never mind the realities, the politicians in D.C. and Sacramento can milk global warming into whole careers worth of solutions.

Yeah, just one more reason to look forward to heaven.

November 16th is National Memory Testing Day. People who think they may have memory loss are encouraged to do...something.