How about

"Why I shaved my beard"

"How I finally cleaned my refridgerator"

"It's true! I can't believe I want to buy a station wagon, but I do."

"I just don't like French Roast coffee. And no, it's not the French thing."

"People who frequent the coffee shop in the bookstore at the mall are bad tippers. And pretentious fuckers."

"I like tv commercials. But I have insufferably clever reasons for this."

Clearly I need to start submitting manuscripts if you buy and publish this stuff. Now I must use my mysterious voodoo powers to make you forget I wrote disparagingly about "Speedo Freaks", because

"I like money-- and attention."

if GWB wants to read a short book how about Terrorism- Ours and Theirs by Ahmad Eqbal? It's about the same length as the Camus, and it's available in English.

in Salon, Scherer discusses various possibilities of what "macaca" might mean, but settles on it being something obscure that Allen's audience is unlikely to grasp...

in Slate, John Dickerson also gives us an elaborate etymological detour through various possible meanings(I'm guessing you guys are paid by the word), but only after suggesting in the title that it's unlikely Allen is racist:

"Once a Boob, Always a Boob? George Allen's biggest problem isn't racial insensitivity."

(http://www.slate.com/id/2147786/nav/tap1/)

but BOTH of you identify exactly what Allen was going for, albeit indirectly:

Scherer, in the title: Stepping in "macaca"

and Dickerson, far more circuituously, not until the third paragraph:

"Immediately Allen, who has his eye on the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, found himself in the deep macaca of accusations of racial insensitivity."

Why the song and dance? It seems both of you understood exactly what Allen was doing, and I'm pretty sure he knows it too: even if Allen is as learned as the pedagogical trips down dictionary lane in both these articles speculate he might be(I seriously doubt he is), he knows it's far less likely his audience is, and he tried to connect with them more simply, by alluding to a children's word, basically saying that Sidarth was a fecal-like darkie.

To Scherer's credit, he doesn't let Allen off the hook the way Dickerson does. This was the most salient part of the Scherer piece for me:

It is not just a matter of what Allen says, but very much a matter of how he says it. He has singled out one member of the audience, a 20-year-old volunteer whose ethnicity already distinguishes him in a former bastion of the Confederacy. Allen is smiling. He is enjoying himself. It is exceedingly difficult to see Allen as doing anything other than connecting with the crowd by attempting to humiliate another human being -- to make him feel like an outsider, like he doesn't belong, like he will never belong. "Let's give a welcome to macaca, here," the senator crows. "Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

Poor Larry King-- why pick on him? Ok, he doesn't do hard-hitting journalism, but nobody really expects him to. Scowling Queen Nancy Grace demonstrates why Larry should stick around; if we have to have all these obnoxious talk-tv personalities and phoney journalism, at least King offers a gracious counterpoint.

I agree with the letter writer about the loathesomeness of reality tv. The logical end game of RTV is to give all the shows' contestants real weapons and have the shows attack each other.

"The 911 operators took thousands of calls and had no information to give. Police helicopter pilots, who had a clear view of the infernos and could see that the buildings were going to collapse, couldn't get word to fire chiefs on the ground, who, unable to see the fire, sent their men up the stairs to die. Official bungling cost those men their lives.

In the end, what we crave is reality. The woman crying on the 83rd floor was real."

Firstly, it occurs to me that Keillor sounds like he is saying the public's desire for a (lurid)sense of immediacy trumps other concerns. I hope this is not what he means, although it really isn't clear.

Secondly, there is a difference between respect for the dead, a real value, and the supposed "privacy rights" of the dead, a conceit manufactured by people who want to create a "right" to cover their asses. Keillor is correct to object to that. Someone's last words, if recorded, are potentially evidence illuminating the circumstances of how they died, no less so than forensic evidence obtained from an exhumation of somebody's remains.

I agree with Shapiro about the malignant effect of front-loading the primaries and demoting New Hampshire, but I don't think Nevada is the problem, per se. In 2004 I wanted to vote in the Texas primary, but by then the fix(for Kerry) was already in, even though Texas is held relatively early, in the 1st week in March. I imagine lots of democratic voters in all the so-called super-Tuesday states felt similarly put off by being meaningfully disenfranchised.

The more you front-load the primaries, the more you give a gift of the nomination to whoever has a huge money advantage before the actual voters get to participate. The democratic party is basically telling the actual rank-and-file primary voters to piss off, because their job is to just accept the candidate the big money donors choose for them, do what they're told, and quit grumbling.

I was trying to leave this comment a couple of minutes ago when my page mysteriously scrolled down. I know you are going to think this is foofaraw, but I suspect spectral nuns...

Personally, I do hope there's an afterlife, although it occurs to me that the universality of grief suggests that our shared longing for this is precisely why we should be skeptical. But it would give me a chance to catch up on my reading.