We know from talking to many of you that this is your "don't miss" place in the Digest, so we
endeavor to make it fun and informative for you every month. The college bowl games left a taste of cotton in my mouth, and the Super Bowl was won by a team our beloved Saints had beaten twice in this season. With a mature quarterback and a seasoned head coach the Saints could have been in that number. Instead we got rookie 3rd year jitters by Brooks and Haslett. Brooks who said he’d take himself out of the game if his playing hurt the team, stayed in and lost the last three games the team would have won with him resting his torn rotator cuff. Haslett who spent three hours with the sports media showing them film and telling them all the reasons why it wasn’t Brooks who cost them the victory. Seems like it took Jim Haslett three hours to say what Jim Mora said in three words, “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda.”
We had two graduations in one family in December: My daughter Maureen received her second Master’s Degree,
this one in Education Administration, which qualifies her for a principal or related job in administration with the Public School system of Jefferson Parish. The second graduation was her daughter, Tiffany, graduated from Blue Cliffs Massage School. We took them to Ruth’s Chris Steak House, the original location of Ruth Fertel’s chain of world famous steak houses on Broad and Orleans Sts in New Orleans. They loved it. In the Delacroix Artworks book I gave her I had inscribed a great quote by Alan Watts for a true artist, “Remember: the wake does not drive the boat.” I heard Wayne Dyer use that quote in his PBS special a day before. Which reminds me of the way he used the old nursery rhyme round, “Row, row, row your boat.”
Someone on an email list had used the phrase, “Life is but a dream,” crediting its source as “Lovin' Spoonful?”, without even hinting that they had ever heard the old song “Row, row, row your boat” (Author Unknown) from which the line came. I replied to the email:
[Saw Wayne Dyer use that song as a metaphor for life:
Row, row, row — apply your will
your boat — to your own boat, not others' boats
Gently down the stream — gently does it
Merrily — thrice merrily, why not?
Life is but a Dream. Yes, indeed, it is but a dream from which we awake to
spiritual realities every night and after death. ]
My friend Brian called me at 6:30 am one Sunday to remind me to watch The Hour of Power on the Discovery Channel. We had received a notice from the Robert Schuller ministry that it was being broadcast nationwide at 7 am Central Time, the whole hour program, but the first several times I attempted to watch it I caught only the second half. The second half is generally a homily and the first half is filled with great music, singing, and guest appearances. Our local TV Focus in the newspaper and the Cox scroller channel, which both give shows and times, have yet to post one for the Hour of Power even a couple of months after it started, so I’d given up on seeing the whole show. Turns out it gets shifted locally to 6:30 am instead of 7 am. I first read Schuller’s “The Power of Possibility Thinking” about 1967 and later when I moved to Anaheim, California I was watching a show one Sunday morning and recognized the building as being on the cover of a book. Sure enough, it was the Tower of Hope which was situated about five miles from where I was sitting up in bed, as was the Orange County Drive-in Theater where Schuller did his first drive-in church, preaching from the top of the concession building to the drive-in speakers hooked into the windows of the cars of the assembled congregation. 
The best thing for us in January was our long-awaited cruise on the Royal Carribean’s Grandeur of the Seas that sailed out of the port of New Orleans to Grand Cayman, Cozumel, and Progresso, Mexico.One of the things we learned from our first cruise is that once you’re aboard ship, it doesn’t matter where the ship is, the fun is on the ship. Till we discovered that, we wanted to avoid the 10 hour voyage up and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, so we drove 15 hours to Ft. Lauderdale. For this one we drove 15 minutes across the river.
We had the second seating in the Great Gatsby dining room, but our assigned table was missing two couples and we met an old friend of Del’s, Joseph Gambino, who invited us to fill the empty slot at table 79 upstairs. There we met Sheila and Neil Taylor from Mena, Arkansas and Ponce and Jessica from New Orleans. Our head waiter was from Turkey, our table waiter, Kush, was from Bombay, India and his helper was from Indonesia. All in the all there were 51 countries represented in the crew, who worked together better than the United Nations, the captain (from Greece) said, which some would say is not saying much. I asked Kush about Bombay and he got to telling us about his religious sect whose funeral custom is allow one’s body to be eaten out in the open by vultures. He explained that with the large population of Bombay, they were having to raise vultures in captivity to have enough to do the job.
The first formal night was memorable in many ways. Del and I had the salmon mousse instead of the chef’s special, the filet mignon. 
The lobster bisque and Caesar’s salad rounded our my dinner with cherries jubilee for dessert. We left to go the Roger Baer show and sat in the first row — Del resisted at first, wanting to sit farther back. I said we were first and I liked sitting in the front row of a comedic show and hardly ever got a chance to so she acceded after lodging her objections. Well, the juggling act was superb. Never saw a juggler do a synchronized ballet with balls before. With four balls in the air, two from each hand, the balls went up and down in synchrony as if they were held together by invisible sticks. Amazing! To add to the fun, the juggler was visually comic, a cross between Stan Laurel and Emmet Kelly with his mannerisms. He dropped an orange off the stage and I threw it back to him. Later, he rolled a french bread baguet into the crack of the stage and had to replace it with the rubber skeleton spine he’d pulled out of his back earlier. Then, when it rolled off the stage, I retrieved it and he asked me to come up on the stage where I tossed it to him. Fun. Roger, the standup comic, came out and immediately began singing a love song directly to Del, even coming down from the stage to hold her hand for the final refrain. Del loved it.
Afterward, we walked to the midnight Chocolate Buffet. I’d never seen anything like it. Didn’t really know what to expect — never heard of such a thing. All chocolate desserts and confections of white and dark chocolate. While we stood in the long line to enter the buffet, I glimpsed Neil in his cowboy hat on the glass elevator and yelled to him. He gestured to me that they would be coming back. Sure enough, he and his wife returned about the same time as I returned with my CyberShot and I took photos of the two of them. Then Ponce and Jessica showed up. We had a great time in line and then selecting our chocolate treats from this huge array of chocolate covered or filled confections. Like a kid in a free candy store. Never ate so many chocolates at one time since I was eleven working my way through my Easter basket.
The six of us got a table and we ate and talked and ate and talked. Told jokes. When Sheila, Neil’s wife, talked about the problems of taking care of all the loose ends of home construction, the “oh-by-the-way” stuff that contractors get hit with just when they’re almost finished the job. I told them the story about Don Topping and the missing doorknob which he kept in his pocket until the very last so that Mrs. Smith kept complaining only about the doorknob until the last day when he presented her the bill and she said adamantly, “Don, I’m not going to pay you until that doorknob is put on.” At which time, Don took the knob from his pocket and screwed it onto the latch. That door knob was the only thing she complained about and it was the easiest thing to fix. He let her have something to complain about and they both ended up happy.
We had a marvelous time on the cruise. Del went ashore three times on tours, in Grand Cayman, Cozumel, and Progresso. I joined her for the Dzibichaltun ruins tour in Progresso, Mexico, which was very enlightening. Two pyramids that had been just mounds of dirt up until about 30 years ago. The Sun Temple, which told the Mayans when to plant and when to harvest by the rooms lighting up as the sun shone through to light up a room on the correct days, is shown at right. 
When we arrived home, I was amazed to find that a review had come out of the pack to have the most visitors ever on my website. It was my review of the spoof of modern Japanese culture known as The Way of the Urban Sumarai. Apparently some folks interested in Japanese life have been spreading the URL to this page by word of email. It is a week later and we’re stilling receiving over 400 visitors every six days to the review. Another thing waiting for us at home was something we brought home with us from the ship: a head cold.
One of the emails waiting for me at home was this one from Sandy Sellers, an Honored Reader this month, from Ontario, Canada. I had handcrafted two bound copies of A Reader’s Journal, Volume 1 for him shortly before we left on vacation. Here’s an excerpt from that email in which he talks about my reviews.
I've been visiting your website the last few days, creating an electronic version of The Reader's Treasury and ARJ2 for printing late here at home. [I hope this behavior is expected and welcome!] I am suitably cautioned by what you said in your review of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan
Bloom: “a reading of original texts allows one to form a vital understanding of issues that a reading of shallow rehashes of such texts does not."
Your work, of course, could never be considered a “shallow rehash”: it is of a different genre entirely, and seemingly all your own. It has a freshness and honesty born of the entry of your person into the essays. Kind of a "integrating participatory syntopic" style if I had to attach labels. It is a privilege and inspiration to witness and read these reviews-- outward and visible signs of what I daresay is an intimate spiritual practice. The reviews are simultaneously original creations and simulacrums of the original works. Borrowing upon your metaphor of books, [Books are Lighthouses Erected in the Sea of Time] I sometimes see the collected reviews as providing one mariner's chart of the lighthouses that have been left for us by the authors past and present.
While grazing through the website, I am struck by the extra care you have brought to the presentation of each review. I am thinking of the animation of the Burning Bush, the stained windows of the gospel writers, the awesome chart on the Two Jesus's with the review of Steiner’s St. Luke, and the like. Such things speak to me of a reverence you have for the work and the reader: it all adds a quality of warmth to this all-too-cold Internet.
That same day I received this heart-warming feedback on my essay, “Art Is The Process of Destruction”
“I read your essay and was moved to tears; an original thought does that to me.” Bonnie West.
If you haven’t read this essay, then click over now and see if you find an original thought in it.
We lost one of our buddies from Waterford-3 Nuclear Power Plant this month, Frank Lee died at the tender age of 53 after a long illness. May he live in Christ during this new phase of his life.
This has been a full month, but with ample time for rest and relaxation by poolside and in the library aboard the Grandeur of the Seas. They provided 16 carrels with PCs and Internet connection, but at $1 for every 2 minutes, often there was no one using the terminals, and two was the most I saw being used. If they lowered the price to $1 for 30 minutes, they’d probably keep all the terminals busy and make more money. Anyway, I managed to knock out three reviews for you, Good Readers, this month. Till next month when we meet again in these pages, all I can say is, Read On!
P. S. Hoaxes-Poaxes: Just received the latest virus hoax email message that was sent to everyone in somebody’s address book unfortunately. Why anyone would go through all that bother when a quick google search could tell them not to bother their friends with bogus hoaxes. What’s the name? “WTC Survivors”. The Subject Line for the email I received said, “Better be safe than sorry” which, rightly understood, is the theme of phobia mongers who jump at a chance to install their personal fears into other folks. That process is the real virus that is being spread by such virus hoaxes, up until now.
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For some reason, there are many more books on the art of writing written by women than by men. I haven’t done any statistical research, but from my own reading I can name one male writer, Peter Elbow, and several female writers without doing a google search: Dorothea Brande, Brenda Ueland, Eudora Welty, Annie Dillard, Christi Killien and Sheila Binder. So when I ordered a new book by Natalie Goldberg “Long Quiet Highway” said to be “filled insights into writing,” it brought back to my mind an earlier book I had read by the same author. A search of my library database turned up this book which I acquired and immediately read straight through in January, 1987. Filled with my marginalia and date glyphes, I sat down directly to write up a review for it. I wanted it to be finished before Goldberg’s new book arrives in my mailbox.
Judith Guest, who almost turned down the request to write the Foreword because she had never done one before, did a masterful job on her first attempt. Just as she did with her first novel, Ordinary People, which was a phenomenal success and was made into a movie with Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland. So much a success was her first novel that she says when she came to write her second novel, she tried to use what she had learned in the earlier one, but it didn’t apply to the second. This led her to understand that because she was writing a different novel, she was exploring a new path.
The best source at the best price is to order your copies on-line is from the publisher Random House/Xlibris's website above.
The utility company employs Scarers to jump out of bedroom doors to scare children into screaming in their bedrooms at night. Full of imaginative cartoon monsters with anywhere from one eye to 17 eyes in various configurations. The purple salamander who goes invisible at will is the bad guy and the big green teddy bear is the good guy (the eponymous John Goodman, who else) with his side kick, the green cue ball with one eye, Billy Crystal, who is a scream whenever he speaks or emotes. The little girl who invades the monster city is, I’m sure, played by my granddaughter, Molly, in all her four-year-old coyness, cuteness, playfulness, and precociousness. A delightful and fanciful romp for rompers of all ages. When they discovered that the amount of electricity they got from kids’ laughing was much more than from screaming, how they switched from making kids scream to make them laugh at the end of the movie.
Add sprinkle of onions to tell you when the oil is ready for rest of onions – you’ll hear a noise. Add rest of onions and bell peppers and sauté till translucent. Add eggplant and decant enough liquid to barely cover eggplants in pan. 
