Sir -- I admire the breadth of firepower you bring to the Gerson/Scully debacle -- oops! discussion -- and you are right to bring into play the rich fantasy life that has clearly figured in the White House speechwriting office since August 2001, when His Excellency decided that there were good stem cells -- those that were to all intent and purpose worthless -- and bad stem cells -- those pregnant with possibility.

And, yes, there is a strange "yarr-boo!" quality to Scully's petulance. It's not merely that Gerson hadn't been in the room when many of those twisted utterances were penned, but that this clown would collapse in a tortured pretzel of whining for not being recognized for his contributions to Bush's black-and-blue prose (it only looks purple from a distance).

As for Karl Rove's identification with Moby Dick -- sorry, Mrs. Rove, but only in his dreams...

A somewhat recent release from Gould's label was a kind of Gould Karoke version of the original Goldbergs. A software filter excluded Gould's humming along; another program entirely transformed Gould's piano performance into a MIDI file that could be recreated on something like a Yamaha Disklavier, which was then recorded and released on CD.

I suspect, however, that the real OCD of Gould was manifest in his approach to recording -- for every eight minutes of recording, or so the legend goes, Gould spent fifty-two minutes of each hour listening. In that sense, the instrument could have been this or that. Show me the freight bills transporting that piano from Toronto to the 30th Street studios in NYC, and I might relent. The truth is: Piano tuners are easy to transport, pianos a little tougher.

Gould's obsessiveness was itself the heart of his musicmaking. Check out his radio work at the CBC in the Solitude Trilogy; check out the reviews of his Mozart concertos with Bernstein where Gould conspicuously sat reading the newspaper between the soloist bits. Should we believe that that piano onstage with the NY Phil was the perfect piano cited in the book? I'm not sure.

I can almost see him now near the Harvard Business School intersection, where commuters roll up their car windows to avoid the pan-handlers securing supposed donations for the Gulf-War blind. No doubt Harvard Business School alumni relations will send fodder into the traffic to protect GWB's academic credentials, but why would they let it come to this? It looks like "intelligence failure" was happening long before the Delusionist decider ever set foot in oval office