In Norway the sky must be blue, the grass must be green, and dirt must be brown. There is no room for subjectivity or interpretation in these precepts, lest ye threaten the delicate perceptual balance of the underaged.

I'm a little surprised to learn that this brand of stolidness doesn't seem to apply as readily to financial investment.

I was spanked, with no great regularity, for indiscretions up until I was about twelve. Both my mother and my father believed in its application when the situation warranted. Admittedly, they determined when it was warranted, with very little consultation with me or any of my siblings. Even so, it never went past a few good swats on the posterior with either hand or flyswatter.

The trouble with their disciplinary approach was that a spanking was only an aspect of the punishment. There was, in addition, being sent to one's room, lectures about what one did wrong, and often extra chores. And I do mean in addition, not as alternatives.

I didn't like the spanking, but I will say that, given a choice, I would have gladly dispensed with the lectures ahead of everything else. They were, by far, the most wretched, esteem-crushing part of the overall disciplinary package. And long after the spanking, room exiles, and chores dropped away, the lectures continued.

I don't know that spanking is a good way to discipline kids, but my own experiences leave me unable to ever give my stamp of approval to an aggressive verbal approach.

...since I think Leonard Nimoy has lent his skills and name to an area of photography that has been too long neglected, and the focus on that is entirely what this interview was and should be about, but...

...William Shatner has been skewering his "iconic" image to much better effect on ABC's "Boston Legal," which is in its fourth - albeit likely truncated - season, than in any Priceline commercials. And don't forget that Nimoy did a brief stint in Priceline promotion himself not too long ago.

The most amusing thing about LaHaye's fiction is its supposition that The Rapture would create global catastrophe. Truth is, such an event would very likely to go unnoticed by the world at large, as the number of people who might know and embrace the Really Only One True Salvation must, by definition, be vanishingly small.

Anyway, Jesus said he did not know the precise time of his return, only God the Father. If God the Father wasn't telling his own Son, then I think it's pretty safe to say he won't be clueing anyone else in. But in the meantime we can all, politicians and the body politic alike, have fun guessing when God's gonna spring his big Gotcha!

...but what price perfection? Do we turn over the judgment as to whether we are healthy or not to others? Others who don't have medical certification, and base their view of what is beautiful and healthy on what our various media channels forcefeed us?

If there is one indelible legacy of 9/11 and the subsequent events spawned by the absurdist US responses to same, it is that we are now very much acclimated to the idea of terrorists as part of the global socio-political ecosystem. They're there, like cockroaches and sewer rats, and there's really nothing anyone can do about them.

On the other hand, like cockroaches and sewer rats, the modern brand of terrorists - especially suicide bombers - have largely become just one more thing to be endured. The idea they may have, that they're actions and sacrifices will change things, is a pitiful illusion. They don't offer the people they affect any option other than to bury their dead, bind their wounds, and get back to the fundamental task of living.

The GOP contenders don't seem to understand this any better than the terrorists do. Perhaps there are still contingents in the heartland and elsewhere that can be spooked by explosions and dire warnings, but at some point even these will begin to tire of it. You can only jump out and shout "Boo!" so many times before your victims just stare at you and wonder why you can't seem to find anything better to do.

...were alive today, and made a woman pregnant, what would he do?

The above is, of course, silly on the face of it. Despite certain speculations arising (most recently) from modern textual criticism of the Bible, Jesus, when he was alive, was never involved with a woman in that way. Most Christians of a fundamentalist bent (and many not so bent) like to take this a step further and believe, with some Biblical validity, that Jesus never even thought about such things. New Testament positions concerning this area of human relations were left largely to the musings of St. Paul.

That's all fine as far as it goes, but what comfort can a bereaved would-be father really get from a figure like Jesus, who not only never went through such an experience but might well have never entertained a single thought on the subject?