That crazy liberal rag, The New York Times... my god. All the things it covers. It's not simple huntin' and fishin' and simple politicks that god feerin' constitution loving people can really benefit from... but

But here is "Born, and Evolved, to Run," a conversation with Daniel Lieberman, professor of Evolutionary Biology at some place called Harvard. Here are some really sound answers as to why, maybe, it's not so good to sit at a desk all the time for the rest of our adult lives. The foot likes to land a certain way. The head, the human skull, which does, so much, floats happily when we run this way, and the rest of our physical system is happy as a clam.

And another sweet article. Finally, someone reminding us, Maria Callas, her gravitas, her presence, her 'charisma.' And there she was at the Met back in the year 1965, a year I happen to like for reasons of being born (in January, that year) as...

Finally! Someone got it. It is the charisma that makes a performance. And that is why one should honor Shane MacGowan, because he is built completely of atoms that have charisma, God Love hIm. It's not some fake guy singing... it's him. And that is where real stuff comes from.

The charisma, which comes of having experienced life, often the life one writes about, one way or another, applies to writers too, of course.

Let's hear it for mankind, for the natural biological creature, that two legged being that is not as genetically sophisticated as a botanical specimen, but, somehow through being a rude and clever animal, gets stuff done. (Maybe too much stuff.)