Who said fan mail from some flounder

Reasonable observers — and even angry, frustrated, hurlers of invective at strangers — will have to admit that regarding all the elements of such a grand bargain there are ways to approach the problem that could appeal to both sides, to reason and stay within the rules of arithmetic the real kind you learned in elementary school, not the Washington variety. Chamber of Commerce , and by Sens. John Kerry and Kay Bailey Hutchison. You could also move investment spending onto a capital budget thus forcing the Congress to treat money that is likely to bring a return differently from that which is going straight out the window … as companies already do.

On the budget deal, any superficial consideration of our debt problems has to acknowledge that the current structure of our entitlement programs is unsustainable. Personally, just so you know where I am coming from, I believe the only way we will get there is some kind of new, national single-payer plan that encourages competition … see, for example, how they handle this in Switzerland. And one reason we need to is in order to pry loose more revenue.

We can trade some of those revenues for tax reform that the Republicans want, especially for a corporate tax code simplification that will help attract needed foreign investment to the United States. Should the Bush tax cuts be allowed to expire? Of course. It was a mistake to extend them. It was a mistake to implement them in the first place. And America needs to get over the idea that we need to spend more than every other country in the world on defense added up in order to be secure.

Want a place to start there? The point is, my quote in the Times offered only a shard of my views, and one that might understandably offend when taken out of context. That said, when put into context, I am sure there is something in my views to offend everyone.

Going forward we need to look for that. If everyone is howling, then we are probably doing something right. Shusha was the key to the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Now Baku wants to turn the fabled fortress town into a resort.

David Rothkopf Fan mail from some flounder: Putting a Times quote in context Earlier today I received the following email from an admirer: You are a disgusting pig. Do you like to read essays from your co-generationists? Do you yearn for a reading and writing community that shares the common bonds of age and history?

And if so, what should that community look like? Move the sandcastle, fortify it, or let the tide melt it away? You tell me. Artist and writer. Urban sketcher and diarist. Started Pandemic Diaries to record this bewildering, terrifying, and occasionally funny moment in history. Sign in. This is an email from Pandemic Diaries. Fan Mail From Some Flounder?

Debbie Galant Follow. Pandemic Diaries the new not normal, in words, drawings, photographs. Apologies to William Hughes Mearns not, as several helpful readers have pointed out, Ogden Nash , but that's how my mother recited it. Regarding my curious physical ailment, the jury is still out, tests so far proving inconclusive. Multiple Whatsis nudge nudge, wink wink, don't tell Google remains a leading possibility, but is notoriously hard to diagnose.

I still have numbness and weakness in my left leg and arm and sporadically on my right side , my foot still flops "Here comes Gimpy! At this point I'm just sick of it. Thanks to all the folks who have written in with advice. On a brighter note, June will see the release of the new version of Ubuntu linux , which I have been using since I completely dumped Windows a few months ago. If you are sick and you should be of the endless security holes and malware panics that constitute the "Windows Experience" today, give it a try.

You can download the Live CD from the Ubuntu site and run it on your pc -- without installing anything -- to get a taste of what linux is like. I've restored the fundraising screen you see when you click on "Current Columns" on our front page, and, as always, we appreciate contributions in the form of subscriptions. I sat down the other day to calculate the cost of actually feeding all these cats and almost didn't bother getting up again.

Lastly, we are trying an experiment this month. Rather than posting one long page of twelve columns as I usually do, I have broken this issue into three pages of four columns each, navigable by the arrows at the foot of each page. This will free more space for ads without, I hope, making them too obnoxious. More importantly, it will create some variation in the ads Google serves up. With one long page, whatever Google decides the page is "about," based on the first few paragraphs, becomes the theme for all the ads, and seeing an entire page full of ads devoted to my current travails and infirmities was becoming very depressing which is why I wrote "whatsis" above.

So we shall see As always, the circus rolls on at my blog. But then I did a search for it on the internet and found this phrase is still in use all over the place! What is the origin of this bizarre phrase? And what on earth does it mean? Well, believe it or not, your problem is that you evidently don't watch enough TV. Or maybe you do watch tons of TV, in which case you are simply watching the wrong things on TV. Many people turn to TV news shows to try to understand the world, for instance.

This is a terrible mistake. You're much better off watching cartoons. You'll learn more about life on this planet from one hour of The Simpsons than from six months of the festival of fear mongering and pharmaceutical ads that passes for national news shows in this country. The stars of the show were Rocket J.