This week's series on pork reminds me of raising pigs on a farm in Minnesota. We fed them a mix containing a lot of oats, so their meat was lean and tender and delicious.

When we first moved to a farm, we didn't have any animals of our own, but we rented our barn to a neighbor for some sows that were about to farrow. When the first one started giving birth, my oldest son, who was about five, came running in and said to me, "Mommy, one of the pigs is having babies, hundreds of 'em."

This reminds me of when I was raising pigs, among other creatures, living on a farm in Minnesota, back in the 1970s. We butchered our own pigs, but never cured the bacon or hams; we sent them to a local charcutier. I wish I'd known how easy it is.

In any case, our own bacon was also delicious and wonderful. We fed our pigs a lot of oats instead of corn, so it was lean and marvelous. I don't remember what variety of pigs we had, but the article brought back the names of several kinds. Poland-China is one that crops up, along with the Berkshires and Hathaways.

You said, "since there hasn't been another attack we can be academic in judging this. if there were, we wouldn't be discussing. everyone knows this. what GG is saying (to my mind) is that, TILL such a massacre comes along, how about going along with the old understanding of the constitution? it seems to have been good for us."

Yes, it does seem to have been good for us. And if G.W. had been paying attention to the presidential briefings, we might have avoided the massacres of 9/11, all without trampling on the Constitution.

Just a fragment of your comment, "instead of Silicon Valley style entrepreneurs who know that success comes from changing the game, we have two oilmen at the helm who are devoted to the existing but-rapidly-becoming obsolete order of things." That is so excellent. Thank you for pointing it out.

"Give it a rest. I can see you don't get out often. You have been bombing us with this telecom crap for 6 months now and, quite frankly, nobody cares. Even Obama doesn't care. And that ought to be enough to just drop it. Reminds me of Whitewater or WhatWater. I can't even recall what Whatwater was even about, only that it never ended and became a "big yawn". Your arguments are so obscure that the political establishment's eyes glaze over, not to mention the 99.5% of the voting public who have no understanding of the historical role of FISA and the Church Committee."

Nobody cares? Haven't you read any of these comments? No, Glen's arguments are not at all obscure. Whitewater was a big yawn because it wasn't pursued in depth. Anyway, even though it may have been illegal but profitable for the Clintons (I don't know enough about it to make any judgment), it didn't affect 99.5% of the voting public.

FISA does.

This law-breaking government and big business are in this together. I used to scoff at conspiracy theories, but not anymore. I've seen too much of them in action.

Your comment, "you leftists changed the name from "global warming" to "climate change""

As I recall, the first time I heard the phrase "climate change," was in a speech by G.W. Bush. He just couldn't bring himself to say "global warming."

tv, you castigated me for saying that gays have a more difficult life than straights. You say you take such joy in the week leading up to the Gay Pride Parade.

Maybe it's my age. I remember when the word "gay" was not used to describe homosexuals. And I remember the days of the Stonewall Riots. It wasn't until after that that the first Gay Pride Parade took place. I also remember when that hypocritical queen, J. Edgar Hoover, was leading the FBI to arrest "queers."

Or maybe it's not just my age. A couple of nights ago, I saw a show on PBS about some gay young men and a couple of lesbians "coming out" (a term that was never used when virtually all homosexuals were "in the closet") to their parents. All the parents eventually came to accept the sexual orientation of their children, but they all had a hard time of it. Some of them were kicked out of their families. And virtually all of the young gays had a difficult time accepting their own sexuality.

So if you never had any difficulty with your sexual orientation, you are blessed.

I also saw a film on PBS about Emile Norman, a phenomenal artist who also happens to be gay. http://www.emilenorman.com/ He and his partner started the arts colony at Big Sur, their home for most of their 30 years together. The film is mostly about his art, but it also mentions the trials and tribulations of homosexual men back in the day of Hoover's persecution, and then the Stonewall Riots.

I still don't think the article was funny.

Even DOS wasn't original. My first PC ran on CP/M (Computer Program/Microprocessor); DOS even used some of the same commands. Of course, all commands had to go direct to the OS, involving a complex system of codes. The biggest deal about DOS, at the time, was that it ran 16-bit programs, in contrast to only eight bits. Of course, that was a really big deal then. Also, DOS allowed the ability to run other programs, such as word processors. Nothing on a computer was graphic then.