The 'advice' that Cary Tennis has provided LW must be nearabout the worst any columnist has rendered to anyone! LW, there are plenty of responses from readers that make far better sense than Cary's indulgence to that ex-con neighbor of yours. Check out your reality against what they suggest, and do the best you can.

In future, do not do ANY sizable jobs for anyone without providing a sound estimate first, getting approval, etc...

In regard to what you believe the ex-con owes you, kiss it goodbye and chalk it all up to 'valuable experience' gained.

Teach yourself how to conduct your business better than you have done in this instance - it's not impossible to do.

Call on the police next time the ex-con behaves threateningly, abusively, or is a bad neighbor.

If possible, get yourself out of that neighborhood.

Best wishes, GSC

What a marvelous review about what must be a marvelous film! Thank you, Ms Zacharek. I too shall be seeing this film when it gets here to India.

GSC

Dear Coochie (or Jack, or Jennie, or Dick or Nicola or whatever-the-hell-else-your-name-might-be):

You (and three hundred million others like you) have too damn much of every damn thing in the world. We US citizens are a veritable pox on the face of Planet Earth (as are most citizens of most other nations - except that we are probably more virulent than any other pox or illness known in the universe). We (US citizens and others) have through greed, arrogance and sheer thoughtlessness fouled up our world with our turds and our leavings and our toxic wastes; drained natural resources; cut down and burnt up the forests; laid waste like locusts to thw whole environment around us; driven a host of species to extinction; and now we are on the verge of causing irretrievable damage to the rest of world by way of global warming, ozone depletion, cancerous proliferation... you name it, we do it!

And you want a Christmas gift from me? Ho! Ho!! HO!!! Well, guess what, Coochie-pie: you are not going to get one, from me at least, this year - or any year, ever again!! Just get that thought clearly into your little empty mind - and lump it! Christman Gifts, forsooth!!

....

.......

..........

(I'm sure a US citizen will have a much better grip of the kind of words and idiom that would more properly express what I want to say, to write the kind of letter I really need to write - so I shall leave it here... for someone else to improve it as he/she wants).

GSC

G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney - the whole Bush administration - knowingly lied:

A: To US citizens, about 'WMD' (remember those?), when they decided to go to war against Iraq. Most US citizens, in a blue funk after 9/11, bought those lies.

B: To the US Congress when they sought funds to conduct their dirty war. Most of the members of the US Congress - including Hillary Clinton - bought those lies.

On available evidence, all leading members of the GW Bush Administration were already war criminals (long before the 'outing' of Valerie Plame). True, they had not yet been convicted.

GW Bush and Gang also tried to lie to the world outside the USA in the early days and later when they went to the UN to seek support for their war. Most of the world (except for that pitiful 'Coalition of the Willing') saw through their lies - though the world has not yet picked up the courage to to denounce them for War Criminals. I believe the only national leader who has refused to even meet with that war criminal GW Bush was Nelson Mandela.

So why are US citizens not yet rising up in disgust against the war criminals leading them? Why have they not thrown the war criminals out? Why have they not put them on trial for being war criminals?

Should US citizens be judged to be actually complicit in those war crimes of GW Bush and Gang? (Much as Germany citizens had been judged to complicit by way of their silence against the crimes of Hitler and Gang?)

-- GSC

1. GW Bush

2. Don Rumsfeld

3. Dick Cheney

4. Condoleeza Rice.

That ol' Gang of War Criminals ruling the YOUSA!

Yum-yum-yummy!

--- GSC

Not being a US citizen myself, I was wondering how any US citizen could be still laboring under the delusion that GW Bush is a worthy leader of theirs. Supposedly the US is one of the best-educated, best-informed nations in the world.

Elsewhere, a great many people made out that GW Bush was a war criminal quite early on - right from when he and his Gang lied to US citizens about the WMD; when they lied to your Congress so as to get the funding for the war...

So why is the movement to impeach GW Bush (and Cheney) not really taking off in the US?

[The above is, no doubt, rather a rhetorical question: in India I should be asking why MY government - representing ME - is even dealing with war criminals, and I should work to throw them out! (I have indeed tried to make my position clear to my government, but there has been no effect on its disgraceful behaviour). The only national leader I know of who treated GW Bush as he deserves to be treated - as a foul and filty pariah - was Nelson Mandela, who refused to even meet the war criminal when he visited South Africa].

--- GSC