This isn't an original. My friend Marlene Goodman sent it. It's too good not to share! Don't know who wrote it:

A journalist heard about a very old Jewish man who had been going to the Western Wall (of the ancient temple in Jerusalem) to pray, twice a day, every day, for a long, long time. So she went to check it out, and there he was, walking slowly up to the holy site.

She watched him pray and after about 45 minutes, when he turned to leave, using a cane and moving very slowly, she approached him. "Pardon me, sir, I'm Rebecca Smith from CNN. What's your name?"

"Morris Feinberg," he replied.

"Sir, how long have you been coming to pray at the Western Wall?"

"For about 60 years."

"Sixty years! That's amazing! What do you pray for?"

"I pray for peace between the Christians, Jews, and the Muslims.

"I pray for all the wars and all the hatred to stop.

"I pray for our children to grow up safely as responsible adults and to love their fellow man.

"I pray that politicians tell us the truth and put the interests of the people ahead of their own interests."

He stopped talking. She looked into his wistful face a moment, then asked: "How do you feel after doing this twice a day for 60 years?"

"Like I'm talking to a wall."

Let's talk about some complaints first, even though complaining is counter to my usual sweet and agreeable nature.

You know about Google maps and Mapquest. I rely on them both from time to time, and usually find them very helpful. But when you need them most is when you're trying to find someplace like my country home, which is out where God left his shoes in Southwest Michigan. Mapquest gives more or less accurate directions, but then on its map indicates that my house is about a half mile away from the actual location. What's actually there is a single-wide mobile home. So far as I know the people who live there are respectable, decent folks, but it's not the 10-room 2-story home I tell visitors to look for.

Google maps also puts my house a half mile away, in the opposite direction. In their infinite wisdom, the people who create these things decided to extend the "street" (actually a gravel road) on which I live several miles beyond the point where it actually dead ends. In their imagination, they run it over some neighboring land, and then, miraculously, up the middle of the river for some distance.

Supposely you can report mistakes to both of these services. Yep. You sure can. You can pray to the ghost of Elvis Presley too. Continue...

Good news first.

Roller Derby today is great entertainment, a serious sport with serious rules, but it's a lot more. Most of the derby skaters today, and all the skaters on all the teams in the 98 leagues that are in the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) are, as the name suggests, women.

Simply stated, Roller Derby is a phenomenon of women's empowerment. It was women who loved skating that took a second look at the earlier version, born in Chicago during the depression and mostly gone after the 60s. It was women who revived and revised it, kept a lot of the spectacle, and literally wrote the book on how the game was to be played. Continue...

The first time I remember getting a "tingle" from a woman on the movie screen, she was Hedy Lamarr as Delilah. That shows how damned old I am! My Delilah is a delightful mixed breed dog, named in memory of that bit of self-disovery. In dog years, she's roughly as old as I am.

Like me, she has some age-related limitations. Unlike me, she does not appear to fret over them. Continue...

One of the worst kept secrets in diplomatic circles is the Cuban government's plan, beginning April First, to offer free healthcare to any American citizen who obtains permission to travel there and cannot afford treatment under what their health and welfare minister, Francisco Villa, called "the bloodsucking capitalist medical monopoly."

According to my anonymous sources, leading Democrats and Republicans have taken what appear to be totally paradoxical positions on the matter. Vice President Biden is reported to have said privately that he opposes the idea: "It's just grandstanding on their part, implying that we can't fix our own healthcare system. We're fixing it, and we don't need penny ante dictatorships telling us how to do it." Continue...

1: Any promises by pompous politicians to "get tough on crime"; we already pay around $500 per household to keep people behind bars. Let's try getting smart instead of getting tough for a change. 2: Related topic. Hysterical reports about ex-convicts committing nasty crimes. Yep, it happens. People who have no criminal records do nasty things also. I'd love to hear some reports about how many ex-cons are busy doing their jobs, paying their bills, and raising their children. 3: Any more poppycock claims that President Obama isn't an American citizen or that 90% of the people in prison are illegal aliens or climate change is a socialist hoax. 4: Detailed reports of the naughty bedroom frolics of politicians and preachers, followed by tearful proclamations of remorse. Persons of either gender who provide this fodder for unimaginative paparazzi should learn to say "none of your damned business!" or else keep their knees together or zippers up, as the case may be. The voyeurs among us can pay for their fix at the porn shop rather than relying on Fox News. Continue...

Regardless of how eloquently I write about earth-shaking topics, the most popular page on this site is almost always the free wallpapers, and the request I most often get is to add screensavers. Your wish is my command, or something like that. It's taken a while, but I'm starting with six, and intend to add more soon.

They're on my other website, Going-Straight.com. You can get to the right page by just clicking here on the link below, but please don't go just yet. Continue...

I don't mean to be rude, but frequently you people who think you speak Englisch are making me offpissed. The last time I drove a rented car from O'Hare Airport to visit Dr. Paul, I listened to the traffik report and heard distinktly that there was a big "prom on the kenny because of an earlier accent." It was true that there was a problem on the Kennedy Expressway because of an earlier accident, but I didn't see any bands playing or teenagers in tuxedos. Since you Amerikans can pronounce the name of the Iranian President Ahmadinajerk, why won't you say the name of the great J.F.K. properly?

Speaking of elected leaders, I hear a lot about meetings in the White House with the present. In my humble opinion someone who does not already live in the present has no business meeting the the president. You have a very nice nation even if most of your beer is terrible. Will it fall like the Roman Empire if you take the time to say the middle syllablitz? Those people in Washington whom you pay to say silly things are called senators, not sinners, although they may be. There are also three syllablitzes in terrorist. Osama bin Laden is not a terrist. By the way, the words flower and power do not rhyme with tar, and towel does not rhyme with pal.

Most Amerikans are confused about the words who and whom so you are confusing me also. Just think "who throws the ball to whom." You don't say "the person whom spoke to me," but you do say "the person to whom I spoke" or "the person whom I spoke to" if you are insisting on your right to make things forwardback, and you say "the person who spoke to me." Now you also may think you sound oh-so-smart when you say "between you and I" but to us genuinely smart people you are not sounding so smart. It's "between you and me," because between is a preposition, and it requires a dative form of the pronoun, not the nominative. That may sound very complicated, but if you spoke German, you'd have to know six ways to say "the." So be happy. Even Spanisch, which is supposed to be a simple language, has five ways to say "the." (Some Spanisch speakers are going to tell me there are only four, but I'll bet a case of Beck's against a Cabrito en Mole dinner that there's a fifth. Try me.)

I could talk for hours about this but people who are smarter than I say that Amerikans are hopefuless about language. (Yes, Dummkopf, "smarter than I" is correkt because "than" is a conjunction and the verb "am" is understood, so the nominative is correkt.) You get so outofshapebent if someone doesn't speak your language, then you take Berlitz in German or French for a year and think you're great linguists if you can ask where to go wee-wee. Also, before you protest, it is true that there are people who are smarter than I. It may be surprising, but it is true.

I must hurry now, as I have a plane to catch and there may be a tarebull accent on the kenny. Prof. W v U

No matter how explosive a topic I write about, and no matter how reasonably and balanced I write it, the most popular page on this site continues to be Free Wallpapers. And one of the most searched for subjects of wallpapers is Roller Derby, which to me, a certifiable derbynut, proves that the world is certainly not hopeless. What does seem to be hopeless is getting any Roller Derby league to give me pictures to include. Sort of amazing, because I've found the skaters to be really likable and accessible sportswomen, until you ask for a high-res copy of a picture from their collection and permission to give it away, with full credit to its source. Then you'd think I was asking them to eat their children in front of the audience.

But among the new wallpapers that will appear soon, there will be some with Roller Derby themes that I believe fans will find perfectly acceptable. There will be some other themes, of course, over the next couple of months, including some gorgeous fall colors I was fortunate to capture. In the near future I also expect to offer some interesting screensavers. "Loving Chicago" and "Loving New York" will be among the first.

If there are some types of wallpapers you'd like to find, please let me know. Just hit the "contact" button on the blue bar at the top of the page.

Also if you have any pictures you'd like to contribute, please let me know. No hardcore porn, please. If I use something you contribute, I'll give you credit for it. In offering a picture for my use here, you are declaring that you have legal rights to that picture.

To everyone who subscribes to this site, thanks. I'll do my best to make it worth your while.

As a hard-core Roller Derby fan, who also happens to like Drew Barrymore, I was delighted to know that she was directing her first movie and that it was going to be about the fastest sport on eight small wheels. It's frankly puzzling to me why modern Roller Derby is unknown to so many Americans, and doesn't get regular coverage in print or broadcast sports news. Maybe the movie would get more people into those venues ranging from 25,000-seat stadiums to small skating rinks, where hundreds of teams battle it out for local championships, and all-star teams from cities as diverse as Grand Rapids, MI and New York City compete for regional and national championships. I hope it does. But it will send some there with wrong impressions.

Admitted, it's a funny, exciting movie, with good acting, and in my opinion, it shows that Drew Barrymore has paid her dues and done her homework. It does capture some of the Roller Derby culture, and the kind of personal epiphany that becoming a "rollergirl" (some of them start in their 40s or 50s) represents. This guy tells that side of it very well http://news.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=35&a=420294 so I won't go into detail here.

On the plus side, the movie shows that Roller Derby is a sport, with real strategies, not just a race, and that it has lot of enthusiastic followers, that in its modern rebirth it's played mostly by women, that you can get close and know the players as human beings, and that it's LOTS of fun.

Now, here's what I think needs to be added. Most Roller Derby now is skated on flat tracks, not banked tracks. The most serious action is in the Women's Flat Track Derby Association, WFTDA. Just try Googling it and see how many thousands of sites come up. Rollergirls are more likely to be professional or business women than servers in fast food restaurants. I've met Roller Derby skaters who were lawyers, artists, psychologists, and physicians, but I can assure you that they would treat a derbygirl who happens to work in a fast food joint like a sister.

It's a rough sport, and injuries can occur, including, unfortunately, very serious ones occasionally, but rollergirls aren't allowed to trip, punch, or wrestle each other on the track. A lot of what you see happening as a routine part of play in Whip It would be stopped immediately with the perpetrators being sent to the penalty box or even thrown out of the game. Also, I can't imagine a league taking in a 17-year-old without knowing her true age and getting written permission from her parents. Oh, yeah, the rollergirls I've known don't depend on a male coach to do their thinking for them.

So here's my recommendation: Go see Whip It, then go see Roller Derby. Take in a couple of matches and learn a little bit about the rules and strategies of the game. (After all, if you knew nothing about baseball or football, the first game you see would make no sense to you at all.) Try to meet some of the skaters. Then if you want to see some of the best Roller Derby in the world, get yourself to Chicago and watch the Windy City Rollers in action. (OK, maybe I'm a LITTLE biased.)