Single-industry towns are almost always a bust.

I grew up in the middle of the dying Oregon timber industry, where propaganda would have you believe that if it weren't for those damn environmentalists, we could have cut down every last old growth tree and everyone would still have timber jobs. Money would grow on trees just like it always did.

Ain't so. What really "killed" the timber industry was and is the same thing that "killed" farming: automation. It just doesn't take as many people to run a sawmill now as it did forty years ago.

Yup, it stinks to lose a job. And it always hurts the little guy worst. But it's the way of the world. Just ask the miners next to played-out mines, the fishermen of overfished oceans, or the UAW workers in Detroit.

My son, specifically. OK, he's still in elementary school, and we've got a tutor to help with reading. He's getting better, slowly, and I'm coming around to understand that he may never read for entertainment, because it's just too damn hard. Reading for me is easy and always has been. For him, it's work. Not fun. Not even when he's interested. It's the equivalent to me of sitting down to digest an actuarial table.

He's an intelligent kid, loves audio books, loves documentary movies on any subject you can imagine, has both of our voracious loves of information, but plowing into a book is probably something that is not going to happen. It's been sad for me to realize this, but I need to be realistic.

I hope that some future mate won't judge an otherwise intelligent, well-educated, kind person by his media choices. Being an audio-only reader limits the available library by about 3/4.

Do we need to get over ourselves a mite?

I'm married. We read different stuff. We watch different stuff. We watch and read some of the same stuff too. I adore Jane Austen and re-read them like old friends. I don't know many men who do, my husband among them.

There's a difference between "compatible" and "lockstep."

And yes, if I had a significant other who was reading "Dianetics" and believing it, that would give me pause. But what's wrong with just reading it to see what's there? I've read a lot of things under the general heading of religion that I think are bunk, but I'm glad to have read them and decided that for myself. Should I deny my husband the same opportunity?

I like chick flicks. I watch them with my girlfriends. He likes movies with explosions and watches them with his guy friends. It's fun to find movies we both like, and books we both like. We're both voracious and omnivorous readers.

But there's a lot more to what makes a relationship tick than books.

Let's analyze the logic here.

Boys and girls in high school shouldn't have sex because it's immoral and the pope says not to.

If a girl gets pregnant, it's shameful. It doesn't really matter who the boy was, because the congregation can't see that. They can see the girl with the big belly and be disapproving.

Abortion is murder, and you should never, never have one.

A girl who is unfortunate enough to get pregnant out of wedlock should always give the baby up for adoption because that's the right thing to do.

Even if she does, we all still know what she did and she's a fallen woman.

If a girl or woman keeps the baby, it's better than an abortion, but not by much. She doesn't get a baby shower or any help, because she did the wrong thing.

But oh by the way, we're the culture of life.

I worked for a company that did IT work, which once had a contract with a large federal agency.

Large federal agencies, like ANY bureaucracy anywhere, are full of people. People do stupid things.

This agency had a TON of security in place, especially for outside contractors. Layers and levels of passwords (that changed all the time), on and on. I took all the requisite classes the agency required (seemed like once a month we had to waste two or three hours taking endless online classes on system security). I filled out the forms, stood in line, etc. But in the end, they had to give us access to the systems we needed, or we couldn't work. Too much controls and people end up wasting hours (and loads of taxpayer dollars) not being able to work because the security is too tight. The thing I need isn't here, it's there, and I can't go there. Gotta go track down someone, in some other office somewhere, to give me access. Two, three, four hours down the drain, at gov't contractor rates.

I could have done something stupid with the access I had. But I didn't. I got in, did my job, and left.

I would take away not that a security breach occurred, but that their systems could track it, and report on it. That's a good thing. If the state department hadn't set up their systems properly, they wouldn't have even tracked the breach.

Show me some SUBSTANTIVE events from her years as first lady, both in the White House and in Arkansas, that rival those of an elected official.

Hand-shaking, hand-waving, motorcade-riding, banquet-eating, poem-listening, camera-smiling, and so forth are all very useful skills, I am sure. Add in a dose of reporter-chatting, sound-bite-making, and perfect-hair-posing. But really. Tell me something REAL about those famous 35 years of experience. Please. I'm listening.

from a company that does IT for commercial construction companies. The first indicator is a lack of investment in internal infrastructure. They saw this coming a year ago.