Writing to Cary was MUCH better than writing to his wife. If the responses here are not enough, you probably can contact somebody else, some friend of his, maybe. And you may find out a little more.

Spend some time thinking about somebody else you might contact, anybody other than his family.

But you never really will know why he did it. Nobody ever will. Not even his wife or the people he was with on the day he died. That is the way it is with suicide.

And at some time, you will move on and think about other things.

1. This season they have rehabilitated Little Carmine. Starting at that country club lunch, Carmine shows aome actual wisdom. They must have been doing this for a reason.

2. "Go to ground" is a hunting expression. "Go to the mattresses" is the Mob expression. I do not know why they emphasized this phrase.

3. Was it Zuzu who brought up the idea that the Brooklyns may expect Tony to be at Melfi's office next week, as the Cousin Assassins expected Phil to be at his goomar's place? Brilliant!

We have shown a great deal of concern for the widow's feelings here, BUT...

The widow may be a creep, somebody you would not want to deal with, somebody who would drag you down. You only have a fifty/fifty chance that this widow is nice or good or pitiable versus nasty or bad or worse.

One more reason NOT to contact her.

One of those little things that occurs to one:

Remember when Carm, Tony, Janice, and Bobby were at the lake? And the topic of a little kid drowning came up? That foreshadowed A.J.'s drowning attempt!

Duh. Why did I not think of that before?

Who is A.J.'s girl friend from the asylum? Is she his rich-girl girlfriend from a couple seasons ago?

I am pretty sure you guys are wrong about "No First Use." The USA never has committed to that policy, as far as I know. Since 1945, we have NOT used them first, but the official policy is that we keep all our options open. And that makes sense.

However, nuking Iran or any other place now does NOT make sense!

Apparently, some people believe Ade still is alive. They believe Sil only pretended to kill her in the woods, way back when.

Seems irrelevant now... Or does it?!

Here's my two lira-worth: If Silvio is the rat, as people here have suggested, he well may have sent Adrianna to Witness Protection rather than to hell.

We know Sil still is alive, and we have doubts about how badly he is hurt. My next mission: I will go back to that HBO web site, and try to find those posters' reasons for believing Ade still is above ground. May shed light on the Finale.

1. He only killed himself a few months ago. Not years ago.

2. I already tried Googling a bunch of combinations from this story, and I came up with nothing. Have any of you tried it?

How does Cleaver end? What happens to the Tony character? As I recall, the dead guy (Cwisstofuh character?) puts a cleaver into Tony's head.

Does Cleaver foretell the Finale? What else did we see of Cleaver? Anything there?

What Zoomie wrote is extremely interesting, and I believe it.

But it does not matter. Scooter baldly, repeatedly lied and obviously pretended he did not remember. The judge said his crime was obvious and serious.

We do not know exactly what he was trying to accomplish. But do not confuse that with innocence. Even if Valerie Plame had been the fully-public, out-in-the-open Director of the CIA, Scooter still lied to the court, and to the grand jury.

He is guilty. Now it will be extremely interesting to figure out what he was trying to accomplish. It probably involves Cheney and W. Bush. It has something to do with their inclination to conquer the world, to torture, and always to lie if at all possible.

If she were not covert, somebody from the Administration would have said so by now! Even though it is misdirection (moot in regard to Scooter's crime), one of the defense witnesses would have said it during Scooter's trial.

I rest my case.

...were the only things that ever made us better than Rome.

In practice, Americans have been brutal, very much like the Romans. Even while we wiped out Native Americans and oppressed African Americans we used to have the ideals of Liberty and Justice For All and Equal Opportunity. And we made progress toward these ideals, plus progress in improving the lives of American people.

Now, abruptly it seems, our leaders have given up on the ideals, rejecting basic rights such as habeas corpus, and embracing basic evils such as torture. And progress is in doubt. American optimism and hope are fading.

For an example, compare our Vietnam War (which ended thirty years ago) with our current Iraq War. Vietnam was a colossal, tragic mistake, but we got into it for idealistic reasons. And many of us believed we learned from the Vietnam mistake, and that we had made progress.

But Iraq, now, is nothing but a cynical, brutal, failed attempt at conquest. Nothing is idealistic about it except our leaders' phoney-baloney cynical lies. And it is the war many of us believed Vietnam had taught us not to fight.

We have become Rome fairly recently. But we will not last. The Romans were much better fighters than we are, but even the Romans lost when they went to Mesopotamia. If we try to set up an empire, we will fall much faster than Rome fell.