Catherine Price has been in the game long enough to know who the trolls are. They're annoying, sure, and maybe smell a bit (all that bile, y'know), but ultimately they they just go in the figurative round file.

Anyhoo, it may be that abortion does have a civil rights aspect. Poor black Americans have been forced to cope with life in these United States through avenues that even poor whites often disdain (or at least purport to), and it only follows that abortion may well be one of these avenues. It was even ventured not long after Roe vs Wade was established (and probably before) that abortion was a white conspiracy to reduce the black population in this country, so the civil rights angle is hardly new.

But it still boil down to this: no woman should be forced to endure a pregnancy she does not want. Religion, morality, father's feelings, civil rights...none of these can take primacy over that.

Fighter jet is indeed an anachronistic term, but so is jet airliner, a term classic rock radio will never let us forget so long as they continue to play Steve Miller.

"BusinessElite" is a trademark. Great, I'm happy for Delta. It's still crap English, and in a written sentence should at the very least be bracketed by quote marks to flag it as such. And frankly I'm all for publications like New Yorker sticking to the stylebook.

And I gotta get a ticket on one of your flights. Your landings sound like an experience!

In terms of a codified set of rules for social, cultural, and personal behavior, the Christian Bible, taken as a whole, is a mess. That's one reason that many Christian scholars, theologians, and apologists try to prioritize the Bible's myriad explicit and implicit edicts according to various criteria, some sounding more or less reasonable and having varying degrees of success based largely on social, cultural, personal and/or historical perspectives.

One of the few Biblical directives that manages to stay afloat throughout all the interpretive storms is the one that's probably most often recalled in this form: "Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself."

Quite simple, quite concise (even with the archaic pronouns), and quite tricky. No Christian, except perhaps the anointed Jew who was the start of it all, has ever been able to live by it 100%. I'd venture to say most are doing well to manage it 10% of the time. Yet the power of that edict to rise up again and again and remind us of perhaps the most essential thing to which we should aspire remains undimmed by time, tides, and politics.

If Huckabee cannot keep his grip on something this fundamental to his purported Christianity, if he cannot show that he stands for this above all other things in his run for the Presidency, then he has most assuredly failed as a Christian.

Here's an idea: how about a romantic/adventure comedy about a HAPPILY married couple running around getting into mischief? That setup has been so rarely pursued compared to the they're-married-but-one's-now-fed-up-and-wants-a-divorce trope that one would think it could be a gold mine of fresh ideas.

I realize it can tricky. Powell-Loy chemistry doesn't grow on trees. But you never know what you might get until you try, and I ain't seen anyone try in a loooooong time.

So flag lapel pins tell us if someone running for office is a true patriot or not, eh? Just like the IXOYEs dotting all those minivans tell us that only True Christians ride in those vehicles? It's that simple? Golly...

The utter vapidity of today's so-called erotic imagery is indeed sad and disillusioning. Nothing is real, or at least can be trusted to be real anymore, and if it isn't then what the hell's the point? With faces lifted and botox'd with increasingly obvious and soulless results, breasts enhanced within an inch of surreal, and waxing up the wazoo (and all that increasingly going for guys as well as gals), it's all a parade of designer bodies stamped out by an uber-fashionista consciousness that seems ready to delete all humanity from our visual experience.

For the rest of my life I'll always wonder what Ellison was getting at with the reference to the historial mystery of Croatoan Island in his story "Croatoan". And I'll always remember my introduction to post-apocalyptic sex in "A Boy and His Dog", which I read when I was ten years old. (That was forty years ago, in case anyone wants to get all "Call the cops! Protect the children!" on it.)

And I'll always remember the 1978 World Science Fiction Convention, dubbed IguanaCon, in Phoenix, AZ. Harlan was the Guest of Honor, and it was at the height of the controversy over the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment). Harlan was royally pissed that Arizona had not ratified it, but he'd already committed to being at this event so he lived in an RV stocked with everything he'd need for the duration in order not to spend a dime in that miscreant state. Oh yeah, and there was The Tent. Admirable, I suppose, but in the end a most pyrrhic gesture.