Note: Cross-posted on my professional blog at the Marshall Independent.

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist who usually writes from a light humorous perspective.

Not surprising, she used to write for MAD Magazine back when it was still good, and is the author of “The Dysfunctional Family Christmas Songbook.”

She’s also “the worst mother in the world” according to quite a few people a few years back after she let her 9-year-old son go home alone from midtown Manhattan on the subway.

Aside from her column, which you can find over at creators.com under “liberal opinion” she has a blog “Free Range Kids.”

And Skenazy authored a book for parents, “Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry).”

Skenazy explained the origin of the Free Range Kids movement on her blog:

“Somehow, a whole lot of parents are just convinced that nothing outside the home is safe. At the same time, they’re also convinced that their children are helpless to fend for themselves. While most of these parents walked to school as kids, or hiked the woods — or even took public transportation — they can’t imagine their own offspring doing the same thing.

They have lost confidence in everything: Their neighborhood. Their kids. And their own ability to teach their children how to get by in the world. As a result, they batten down the hatches.”

I have to confess, I’ve shared these fears. I’m a single dad raising two kids. My son is eleven and a moose so I don’t worry two much about him. But my daughter is six and just entirely too bold for my peace of mind sometimes. She insists her brother does not need to walk her home from school (all of three blocks).

OK, I’m good with that. But the other day she went and crossed a busy street by herself…

I have to remind myself when I was six I walked to and from school every day in Castro Valley, California. There were two ways. I could either go down the street, round a corner and walk up the street, a distance that was probably at least a half-mile.

Or I could take a short cut up a hill and across a cow pasture.

I try to remind myself of that every time my heart starts pounding and my breathing gets rapid.

There’s a term for parents with unrealistic fears and uncontrollable anxiety about their children, “helicopter parent.” It goes waaaaay beyond a healthy concern for our kids’ welfare to the land of Phobia. And unfortunately it’s institutionalized in our schools due to our lawsuit culture, and yes a lot of sensationalist journalism.

Lenore has the cure, and one could do worse than have a look at her blog.

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Note: Cross-posted from my professional blog at The Marshall Independent.

This morning I saw something on Facebook that almost made me lose my breakfast.

It was under a label “Take Back Socialism” and posted by someone I’ve known for 30 years – who I know for a fact has never visited any of the countries he has held up as exemplars of socialism. Not a one. Nor has he ever visited any of the former Eastern Bloc countries – though I personally urged him to visit Poland as my guest.

Quoted in full.

“I love socialism.

I love socialism because I love having a post office that will deliver my mail.

I love socialism because I love having roads to drive on, bridges to drive over and sidewalks to walk on.

I love socialism because I love having national parks to visit.

I love socialism because I love having libraries where I can borrow books to learn about new topics.

I love socialism because I love having a fire department to call if my house is on fire (or to make sure my neighbor’s burning house is saved before it catches mine on fire).

I love socialism because I love having a police department that keeps the streets safe.

I love socialism because I love having a military that keeps the country safe.

I love socialism because I love having water that I can drink straight out of the faucet without worrying about ingesting poisons or parasites.

I love socialism because I love knowing that the food I eat is safe to eat.

I love socialism because I love knowing that the medicine I take has been tested and proven to be safe.

I love socialism because I love knowing that when I get old and retire, I will have Social Security to buy food and housing with and Medicare to pay for my medical expenses.

I love socialism because I love the environment and am glad there are regulations to protect it.

I love socialism because I love knowing that if I get hurt or sick or layed-off, I’ll be able to get assistance in buying food, paying medical bills and paying rent… and that’s why I’m happy to pay taxes towards those things.

I love socialism because I love knowing that there is a minimum wage, a weekend, sick days, holidays, a 40 hour work week and an 8 hour work day, overtime pay and all the other benefits that labor activists have fought and died for.

I love socialism because I love that there are public schools and universities where those who came before me, myself and future generations all will or have learned and I would be more than happy to pay a little extra in taxes if it meant funding them properly.

I love socialism because I love our space program and the thousands of advancements it has brought to everyday life from GPS to freeze-dried ice cream and everything in between.

But most of all:

I love socialism because I love my country and all the people in it and think that everyone deserves a FAIR shot at life, whether we agree on politics or not. The American people deserve better than dog-eat-dog capitalism.

-Seth Bailey

I replied:

“I lived from 1991 to 2004 in the former Eastern Bloc – none of this describes the socialism I experienced first hand. The post office was inefficient, and mail theft was rampant. Every bureaucrat down to the little old ladies that sold tickets at the railroad stations were petty-minded tyrants whose idea of relaxation was to ruin your day. Medical care was a nightmare.
As for “fair” the Party aristocracy enjoyed access to special shops full of western good ordinary folks could only see in movies. For only one example, a Party member could get a telephone installed reasonably quickly – the average wait for anyone else was 14 years!
I saw it get dramatically better, almost day by day, when this evil system was replaced by a freer market-oriented system.
Medical care in the newly privatized sector became so cheap, my first child was born in St. Sophia hospital, the one in Warsaw patronized by movie stars. The whole 9-month process cost about $1,000 equivalent – and our pediatrician made house calls!
Now tell me about your experience living under socialism.” (Said I dripping sarcasm.)

I could have multiplied examples point-by-point, but you get the point.

Some time back a writer coined the term “xenophilia” for this kind of phenomenon. The conviction among some Americans that it must be better somewhere else, in spite of all evidence that people everywhere else still want to come here, in spite of all our problems.

Twenty-four years after the most disastrous political experiment in the history of the world collapsed, there are still people who want to give it another try.

Sometimes I despair of the human race.

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Note: This is last week’s syndicated column.

Every now and again a term gets coined and comes into circulation that perfectly describes in shorthand a phenomenon you used to have to use whole sentences, paragraphs, pages or books to describe.

The late psychedelic guru Timothy Leary called these terms “neurologically exact.”

Do you remember the first time you ever heard someone say, “Hey, don’t get uptight”? You didn’t have to ask what they meant, did you?

Well recently I was exposed to a term which perfectly describes a phenomenon whole books have been written about. For example Diana West’s, “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization,” or David Mamet’s, “The Secret Knowledge.”

I encountered it in the online version of the humor magazine Cracked. I remember Cracked as a sort of poor relation to the much better-known and influential MAD Magazine of beloved memory, before “the usual gang of idiots” died off or retired and MAD was possessed by the Devil, a.k.a. AOL/Time-Warner.

It was in an article titled, “How the Karate Kid Ruined the Modern World” by David Wong. I’m not sure if Wong invented the term or not, but it’s a good one.

The essence of it was that movies like “The Karate Kid” show someone going from being bad at something to being good at it over the course of a two-minute musical montage, after a sudden enlightening attitude change.

Ever work that way for you?

Me neither. Like Daniel-san I was a skinny kid who got picked on. But I acquired my instructors credentials in two martial arts and intermediate/advanced level skill in a half-dozen others via thousands of dollars spent on lessons and reference materials, and tens of thousands of hours of practice.

I switched professions in mid-life when I was living and working in Eastern Europe in an exciting milieu of dramatic change, civil war, and international intrigue.

After getting some great stories as an amateur I went back to school. I then became an underpaid reporter at my first newspaper – one with less than 12,000 circulation. I’m on my second, somewhat larger paper now.

I cover local government, agriculture, small business etc. It’s called paying dues.

Success in most professions does not require genius. It requires a certain minimum of study, experience and a lot of paying dues.

The classic, reliable way of getting rich for those of us not in on the ground floor of the Next Big Thing, is not at all complicated. Get a job, any job. Gradually increase your earning power via skills training. Do a conspicuously good job. Put aside ten percent of your earnings, regular as clockwork, for years and years. Invest it according to the best advice you can find, which itself takes a lot of research. Get married, stay married, buy a house. By the time you’re ready to retire, barring disaster, you’ll be at least comfortably, maybe very well-off.

And yet, every year a multitude of college students graduate from our institutions of higher learning expecting to own the world, or a substantial piece of it, while they are still young and good-looking.

That’s when they run into effort shock.

Notice that formula for success is not complicated, merely very, very, difficult. It requires sustained patient effort, and delay of immediate gratification, over years. And years. Not to mention the fairly frequent bad luck, or bad judgment, that means you have to start all over again.

This applies to success in all things. How many people can’t stay married, not because of those “irreconcilable differences” but because staying married is hard?

Of course people have always encountered effort shock, but it does seem to be more pronounced these days.

If I had to guess, I’d say modern civilization makes us a little too comfortable. Not many of us grow up on farms anymore where kids are part of the workforce from an early age. We don’t grow up working hard just to stay afloat.

I wouldn’t give up those civilized comforts. On a not-too-spectacular salary I still have a house full of stuff people used to pay fortunes for when I was a kid, if they existed at all.

But sometimes I wish I could make life a little harder for my children. And sometimes I wonder if that’s not going to happen anyway.

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Note: Cross-posted from my blog at The Marshall Independent.

Most of us try to get at least some physical exercise.

A great many studies have shown the health benefits of even moderate exercise. A 30 minute walk every day, or every other day, walking with a heel-to-toe roll strengthens the calf muscles enough to take a lot of wear and tear off your heart and flakes the rust out of your joints.

A little time spent at the Y during the winter months does a lot for quality of life, especially those of us who spend entirely too much time sitting down. Not trying to emulate the lifters, not going for weight, just moving.

But what about our brains?

Turns out there’s a whole science and a growing industry dedicated to brain exercise, and I’ve become an enthusiastic convert.

You buy a subscription and you get 5-10 minutes a day of games that help improve memory, speed, decision-making, calculations, pattern recognition, and helps get the brain started in the morning better than coffee.

For me personally it’s great for writer’s block, concentration, and articulation. If I’m stuck on a piece, a little break for training helps get the words flowing again. And it’s something productive to do in those frustrating times while waiting for someone to return a phone call!

The site lets you chart your progress in the areas you chose to work on, and compare your improvement to other users in your age group. There are said to be physical changes in the brain too. There’s neuron growth, just as physical exercise causes muscle growth.

It’s even supposed to make you a better driver!

There are several different companies, the one I use is called Lumosity.

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Note: Cross-posted on my newspaper blog at The Marshall Independent.

There is much talk on the Internet after Liza Long, an English teacher in a small college in Boise, Idaho, and mother of four, wrote a blog post that went viral.

Her post was originally titled “Thinking the Unthinkable.” Huffington Post and Gawker, changed the headline to “I am Adam Lanza’s mother.”

Long has a 13-year-old son, who from her description of his behavior, appears to be a psychopath. She wrote about her heart-rending decision to have him committed to a mental institution after he attacked her, and threatened to kill her and/or himself, more than once.

She’s been vilified by some, but there’ve also been a lot of people writing “That’s my brother!” or “That’s my son too!”

Me? I think she did the right thing. Actually I think she did the only thing. She’s a woman with three other children. She’s still able to physically restrain her 13-year-old, at the cost of some bruising, but probably won’t be able to in about another year.

Commitment of course, only delays the problem. Some people appear to be born… wrong somehow. Long’s son is of the highly intelligent kind, capable of being very charming when not enraged. When he’s older he may have learned to control himself to the point he can charm his way out of the institution and then we’ll have another predator unleashed on society – a very smart one.

I’m sorry if that sounds uncharitable, but you see I’ve known such. The brother of an old girlfriend was one. The wife of a cousin was another.

And by the way, I have a close male relative with Asberger’s Syndrome, the condition Adam Lanza has been identified as having, and he has never hurt anyone. His life has been made pretty miserable by his social awkwardness, and he’s pretty much unemployable because people are uncomfortable around him, but he is NOT a murderous psychopath!

Why are some, thankfully few, born that way? There are arguments over which psychiatric term is appropriate, but the English legal system used to use the term “morally insane,” which still seems a pretty good one to me.

Short answer, nobody knows.

Can they be cured?

Even shorter answer, no.

A cop who’d attended FBI courses on this type of personality said there is some indication they tend to grow a conscience around middle age. Unfortunately by that time they’re often doing hard time in prison. Which begs the question of whether they have actually developed a conscience – or they’ve learned how to fool the shrink.

This is the nightmare possibly worse than the families of the victims of Sandy Hook are experiencing now, and for the rest of their lives.

I remember years ago watching a documentary on serial killers, in the course of which they interviewed the mother of one of Ted Bundy’s victims.

I’ll always remember what she said when they asked her what she thought his parents might be going through.

“I’d rather have my daughter than their son,” she said.

P.S. I’ve written previously on over-diagnoses of “mental illness” here. Note also the cri de coeur from one reader.

I’m also going to go out on a limb and recommend a book I haven’t read yet. (I have seen an interview with the author.)
“Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend” by Barbara Oakley.

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I’ve been neglecting this blog, not from disinterest but because I’ve been busy elsewhere, namely working on a self-syndication venture and movie reviews and my professional blog published at the newspaper whose vineyards I toil in. I have cross-posted some, but they involve different audiences and have different requirements. I’m somewhat more constrained in my professional blog for example.

However a newspaper group has offered to pick up my blog and I have accepted their kind offer to give my writing more exposure. I am of course hoping that exposure eventually translates into more money, and not merely notoriety.

I am going to do a lot more cross-posting, but I will label the source of each post with links to the original where appropriate.

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Note: Cross-posted from my newspaper blog at The Marshall Independent, which references an article “Deadly force decisions.”

Researching and writing the article “Deadly force decisions” for Monday’s paper was the most intense experience I’ve had at the Independent to date – and that includes donning harness and climbing a 70 foot ladder to the top of the MERIT Center wind tower simulator.

Though the article ran more than 900 words, I could easily have made it twice as long. Because what I didn’t include was, I got to try a few simulations myself.

Trainer Matt Loeslie let me try the LASERSHOT simulator out with a pistol during a break between officer trainings.

Let me explain, though I haven’t had much to do with firearms for some years, I’m passing familiar with them. I am not a stranger to interpersonal violence in odd parts of the world, and I have seen violent death.

Years ago I was within earshot of a deadly force encounter in Oklahoma and clearly remember the sequence of shots. And I remember many years ago a certain idiot youth and friend darn near did get shot doing something stupid that scared an officer near a crime scene under low-light conditions.

The police of course, are pros and have extensive training in these kinds of scenarios. The simulator is designed to bring an element of realism that gun ranges can’t have. I asked if the simulator induces stress. Some officers said it can sometimes. One joked that media presence was a great stress provider.

Then my turn came. I left shaken. I’m still a little shaken.

One scenario: a man in an apartment hallway holding a knife to a woman’s throat screaming he was going to kill her. There were bystanders in the narrow space.

After trying out the commands to drop the knife, just like I’d seen the officers do, I took the shot at the suspects head. Replay showed I got him. Very possibly grazed the victim but certainly saved her life.

Loeslie complimented my shooting, and asked gently if I could have taken the shot earlier.

Could have, and should have. The fact is I was caught up in it and did not want anyone to die.

Lesson learned: under American law an officer’s duty is to protect life, including the life of a suspect. But sometimes the choice is forced upon them of who is going to die.

The last scenario I tried was a prolonged horror. Answering a call to a high school where a “hit list” was found in a student’s locker. A pretty young girl is summoned out of class and asked to explain.

Everything went south from there, and I probably did pretty much everything wrong.

She goes to her locker ignoring all commands to stay where she was. She opened her locker, ignoring commands to show her hands, pulls out a cell phone. I shot.

The scenario should have ended there, but I think Loeslie had stepped out of the room and the scenario kept playing. (Fact is, I don’t know. It was that absorbing.)

Girl calls her mother and has a very disturbed conversation.

Then she puts the cell phone back, ignoring continued commands to be still, and this time pulls out a gun.

Ignoring commands to put it down she then put it to her head and finally pulled the trigger.

Startled by the sound of the shot, I shot her again as she fell. It couldn’t have made her any deader, but I was horrified.

Later with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight it occurred to me I should have had a Taser rather than a pistol. I didn’t have the Taser simulator but I could have said “Taser!” to indicate a transition from pistol to Taser. I should NEVER have let the girl open the locker, perhaps should have restrained her physically or even Tasered her.

Yes, I know how that would have looked in the press if a gun hadn’t been found in the locker.

I draw two conclusions from this experience.

One is that I am VERY glad the technology for this kind of training exists. This is not the kind of decision-making skill one wants officers to learn “on the job.”

The other is, I think every journalist who covers the police beat should try out this training.

And it wouldn’t hurt the general population to see some of these scenarios either. Especially those involving traffic stops, low-light conditions, etc.

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Note: This is one of my self-syndicated columns.

“It is a juvenile notion that a society needs a lofty purpose and a shining vision to achieve much. Both in the marketplace and on the battlefield men who set their hearts on toys have often displayed unequal initiative and drive. And one must be ignorant of the creative process to look for a close correspondence between motive and achievement in the world of thought and imagination.”
Eric Hoffer

Last Saturday I had the weekend rotation at the newspaper and covered a Polish festival in Ivanhoe and the Benton-Fremont Days in Hole-in-the-Mountain Park near Lake Benton.

The nice thing about the newspaper business for a reporter with a family is, when covering fairs, festivals, and events such as these I can take my children along. I’m a single father with a boy, 10, and a girl, 6. If I had any other job with an irregular schedule like this, I’d be in baby-sitter crisis mode almost constantly.

Covering Polish festivals in America is always kind of amusing for me. I almost always find I’m the only person who speaks Polish there, and I’m not Polish!

My children had fun though, and caused some comment with their Polish first names. My son found some boys his own age displaying their collection of Bionicle kits and my daughter wore herself out on the inflatable bounce houses.

There was a street full of classic cars, trucks, restored small engines, and the usual tables of miscellanea for sale.

When we headed to Benton-Fremont for photos my little girl was asleep n the back seat and my boy ravenously hungry.

Fortunately there was a pioneer with a tent restaurant serving beer cheese soup in a bread bowl. Kids loved it, (my son was excited by the idea of his first beer) and now I have to get the recipe.

Not far away was a couple with a genuine restored chuck wagon making lemon meringue pie.

All along one side of the campsite were men and women demonstrating the ancient art of flint knapping, to the banging of Indian drums and black powder rifles.

I only regret I missed a Civil War recreation group meeting in Pipestone that weekend.

In summer a reporter for a rural paper always covers a lot of these kinds of events. Historical recreation groups, local festivals, and lots of old technology restoration hobbyists.

Two weeks ago I covered an old-time threshing festival in Hanley Falls, featuring restored, fully-functional antique tractors and farm machinery. Before summer is over I’ll cover at least a few more local festivals.

Some reporters might consider this kind of assignment part of the routine-but-unexciting part of the newspaper biz that fills in the time between accidents, scandals, and elections. But to me it speaks of America in ways nothing else does.

The reason I love taking my kids to these is, they see people making their own entertainment rather than sitting in their living room with the screen, waiting for the entertainment to come to them.

They see how history is preserved outside of museums and galleries by amateurs who have make themselves experts in one particular historical subject that fascinates them. They see people with otherwise unremarkable lives doing remarkable things. They are exposed to some of the incredible reservoir of talent in the people of this country.

And they experience the fun, the joy, the sheer exuberance of life in this country that shines through even in the worst of times.

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For loyal readers who’ve wondered if I’ve been taken over by the brain-eating movie reviewer from Mars. I’m still alive. I’ve been busy with other projects and personal issues I won’t bore you with.

I’ve been posting the TV and movie reviews I do for the print-only edition of the newspaper I work for as kind of a place holder, and because I think they’re kind of good in a mostly-inconsequential way. At least they appear to be the stuff I get the most complimentary remarks about from readers and fellow-journalists.

But what I’ve been really busy with, and haven’t chosen to unveil until now, it trying to become a self-syndicated columnist.

Some know I had a weekly column at my last newspaper. Well, now I’m at a bigger paper with a bigger staff, and they say, “Blog.” I have posted some of my newspaper blog stuff and will probably do some more, but I’m kind of uneasy about putting up a lot of stuff on my site that I do on company time.

After having gotten polite brush-offs from major syndicates, I discovered Minnesota’s own Jill Pertler, who is a self-syndicated columnist.

Soooo, what I’ve been doing is cranking out a column every week. I have a source list of Minnesota newspapers with contact data. Every week I cut about 20 from that list, and send a column to each of them with a contact letter, addressed personally to the editor. Then I add each to my long list of Minnesota editors, and send each weeks submission to the whole list.

It’s a bit tedious to be sure. But, I’ve gotten one contract so far and several nibbles. Pretty good after a couple months. Pertler said try it for six!

I haven’t been posting my stuff yet, because of course you don’t want to give away for free what you’re trying to sell. Not until a decent interval has passed for sure. And besides, the blog format is a bit different from newspaper column style. However I’m going to start posting after that decent interval has passed, just to archive these and make them available to potential subscribers.

So without further ado, here’s one from a couple weeks ago>

Slim majorities
By Steve Browne

President Obama is currently being roasted for an apparent gaff about the Supreme Court.

In regards to the current case before the court concerning the constitutionality of Obamacare, the president said on April 2, “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Right wing pundits are having a field day bludgeoning Obama, a graduate of Harvard law school, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and one-time lecturer (not a professor) on constitutional law with Marbury v Madison, the 1803 case that established the principle of judicial review. Not to mention the fact Obamacare passed by seven votes, hardly a “strong majority.”

What is bothering me is less the president’s views on judicial review than those seven votes.

What occurred to me while thinking about this issue was Thomas Jefferson’s remark, “Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.”

Jefferson of course, could toss off more profound observations in an offhand remark than most of today’s political thinkers can in a book.

This is what is bothering me about an awful lot of issues these days: energy policy, foreign policy, healthcare, etc.

Everyone can see these issues split the country right down the middle – and that’s precisely why we should be treading carefully here.

These proposed policies tend to be of the top-down, one-size-fits-all, my-way-or-the-highway kind. There’s little room for significant decision-making on the state and local level – or individual choice for that matter. You pays your taxes, you get your marching orders.

Now some decisions by government necessarily have to be of this kind. If we’re going to war, you don’t get to say, “No thanks, not my war,” and continue to trade with, travel to, or even send letters to the enemy country. There’s a word for that – treason.

Or for that matter, try opting out of using the roads.

But the issues we’re dealing with today are a lot less pressing than eminent war. Sorry, you may believe the climate is causing the seas to rise and flood Miami, but it’s not happening on a time scale equal to the Pearl Harbor attack, nor is it quite so obvious to all that the threat is looming as rapidly as some passionately believe.

People are not dying en mass in the streets from lack of health insurance, whatever the proponents of nationalized single-payer insurance say.

Yes it is possible man-caused climate change may have serious consequences down the road. Yes there are many individual hardships caused by skyrocketing medical costs. But the point is, these are complex issues, with wide range for honest disagreement among honest men. We are not going to solve them with government-mandated policies crafted slap-dash in six months!

And we are not going to make the acrimony go away by half the population forcing the policy down the throats of the other half. If the differences of opinion on any significant issue amount to a few percentage points (and in fact, in the case of Obamacare, polls show it’s a lot more unpopular than that,) then heck, that’s the percentage of people who change their minds six times before breakfast!

Consider World War II, the last war we had a nearly universal consensus for, versus Vietnam. Ask why the British traitor Lord Haw-Haw was executed and Tokyo Rose imprisoned, while Jane Fonda returned from making propaganda tours in North Vietnam and nobody dared lay a finger on her?

Precisely because WWII had universal approval, while Vietnam was so deeply divisive.

One of the principles of constitutionally limited government is that all decisions which can be left to individual citizens – should be. And for precisely this reason. Deeply divisive issues wind up being decided on slender majorities, and those decisions rend our society and breed contempt for all authority and all law.

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Friday night I had a date – sort of.

Gal in the same boat as myself, separated, not yet formally divorced single parent.

Not quite ready to move on, but I thought there was a spark there. We got to moving to quickly, backed off a bit.

Then she texted me and said she’d missed my company and invited me to a movie. Hey great!

But beforehand, she texted and said a girlfriend was trying to invite herself along. Now this girlfriend is married, but my girlfriend-in-potentia says she keeps hitting on her.

She texted, “Ewww! She keeps hitting on me!”

Went to meet her at the movies, and was a little late. Got in, and there the two of them were sitting. Lady friend waved “Hi” I sat down, and the two of them put their heads together and got up giggling and left about 10 minutes into the movie!

What the heck was this, make fun of the straight guy?

Reminded me of what a bitter friend once told me about his dating experience, “About half the time when a woman shows an interest, she’s setting you up for humiliation.”

It wasn’t that bad actually. When she texted with a quasi-apology I just told her to buzz off.

So Monday noon I’m at the staff meeting at the paper and talking about my review for this week. I don’t really want to review “American Reunion,” and decided to take my son to the new “Three Stooges.”

Then a colleague came in from an assignment taking pictures at a circus.

She’d just gotten pissed on by a lion.

Damn, topped my story big time!

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