Dear Friends and Family,

I hope that you will spare me a few minutes of your time to tell you about something that I saw on Monday, October 27.

I had been attending a conference in Annapolis and was coming home on Sunday. As you may recall, Los Angeles International Airport was closed on Sunday, October 26, because of the fires that affected air traffic control. Accordingly, my flight, and many others, were canceled and I wound up spending a night in Baltimore.

My story begins the next day. When I went to check in at the United counter Monday morning I saw a lot of soldiers home from Iraq. Most were very young and all had on their desert camouflage uniforms. This was as change from earlier, when they had to buy civilian clothes in Kuwait to fly home. It was a visible reminder that we are in a war. It probably was pretty close to what train terminals were like in World War II.

Many people were stopping the troops to talk to them, asking them questions in the Starbucks line or just saying "Welcome Home." In addition to all the flights that had been canceled on Sunday, the weather was terrible in Baltimore and the flights were backed up. So, there were a lot of unhappy people in the terminal trying to get home, but nobody that I saw gave the soldiers a bad time.

By the afternoon, one plane to Denver had been delayed several hours. United personnel kept asking for volunteers to give up their seats and take another flight. They weren't getting many takers. Finally, a United spokeswoman got on the PA and said this, "Folks. As you can see, there are a lot of soldiers in the waiting area. They only have 14 days of leave and we're trying to get them where they need to go without spending any more time in an airport then they have to. We sold them all tickets, knowing we would oversell the flight. If we can, we want to get them all on this flight. We want all the soldiers to know that we respect what you're doing, we are here for you and we love you."

At that, the entire terminal of cranky, tired, travel-weary people, a cross-section of America, broke into sustained and heart-felt applause. The soldiers looked surprised and very modest. Most of them just looked at their boots. Many of us were wiping away tears.

And, yes, people lined up to take the later flight and all the soldiers went to Denver on that flight.

That little moment made me proud to be an American, and also told me why we will win this war.

If you want to send my little story on to your friends and family, feel free. This is not some urban legend. I was there, I was part of it, I saw it happen.

"Folks. As you can see, there are a lot of soldiers in the waiting area. They only have 14 days of leave and we're trying to get them where they need to go without spending any more time in an airport then they have to. We sold them all tickets, knowing we would oversell the flight. If we can, we want to get them all on this flight. We want all the soldiers to know that we respect what you're doing, we are here for you and we love you."

He [the judge] also said it was Davis' neighbors who were victimized - not Davis.

"What you've done, sir, in my judgment, has torn at the moral fiber of the community, of the state."

Stephenson held up 21 letters from neighbors, complaining about Davis.

"You have caused them psychological damage," the judge said.

Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia suggested that, instead, Mr. Moonves program a reality show that relocated network executives to "the sticks," where they would have to find a job. Mr. Moonves admitted the "phenomenal" opposition to the show left him "pretty surprised."

"This means municipalities can identify a space they want and force a landlord to lease it to them," said Mike Freret vice president of development for Orsett/Columbia Ltd. "It may mean that if the space they want already has a business owner in it, they could boot them out." Tom Irvine, who represented the county, said that's exactly what it means.

John,
I never thought I would read a hockey piece with a reference to Howard Roark. If you were to cast the Fountainhead of the late '40s with contemporary actors, whom would you choose? What current hockey player would you have to play Mr. Roark?

Howard Roark was tall, strong and uncompromising. Actor: Ben Kingsley, minus 20 years and plus five inches (He's 5-foot-8). There are no tall, strong, young, uncompromising actors today. Hockey player: Todd Bertuzzi. He plays like he doesn't care if anyone likes him. I love that.

Rio Rancho Public Schools issued a written statement: "On Monday a teacher observed Mason manipulating the soft drink machine at the school. The teacher advised Mason that getting two sodas for the price of one is the equivalent to stealing. When the teacher observed Mason doing the same thing again on Tuesday, she wrote him up."

The boy said the teacher called him a thief and accused him of trying to teach other students how to steal. He was written up, given a two-day in-school suspension and the incident will appear on his permanent school record.

"It makes me feel very sad that I'm going to be thought as a thief later on in my life," Mason Kisner said. "Heck, I might not get in a good college or get a good job because on my permanent record it will say that when I was a kid, I stole."

"I'm flabbergasted, bewildered, dumbfounded. I can't think of another word to describe how I feel about this incident," said Edward Kisner, the boy's father. "What kind of character is this showing Mason?"
. . . . "I'm very disappointed I haven't gotten a phone call from the school rescinding Mason's suspension at this point," said Edward Kisner. "You know, when you say you're wrong, it's not a sign of weakness."

• You complain about revisions to the cuts of cloth in Levi's 501 blue jeans.
  
  
• You cover this for a major metropolitan newspaper with all appropriate indignation for the rights of the common man.

• It's set in Wisconsin, my home state.
  
  
• Its plot involves a young woman coasting through her 23 years of life who must evaluate her life's direction when her high school and college sweetheart and bethrothed, with whom she's grown disenchanted but with whom she was coasting toward matrimony anyway, dives from the titular pier and ends up in a coma. Hey, I know what it's like to re-evaluate your life. I was twentysomething once, and I am about ten years shy of my mid-life crisis.
  
  
• I have tinkered with the beginnings of a literary novel with a similar theme and wanted to see what I could steal learn from this book.

1. The author's not from Wisconsin, nor does the author appreciate Wisconsin. The author lives in Northern California, and hence focuses her coastal lens on the quaint people in the Midwest. The main character talks to another former Wisconsin resident, and she calls them Wisconsonians. Damn it, we're not Wisconsinians, we're Wisconsinites. The author also uses the simile bland as Wisconsin. Listen, sister, you don't do that.
   
   I'll admit, I have a chip on my shoulder about the way some coastal types see the rest of the country. If I even catch a slight sniff of superiority from someone who assumes that the relevant country ends at one piedmont or another, I cross my arms and the person's lost me. Whether it's an author telling me that life doesn't begin until you move to New York City or a billionaire venture capitalist saying that offshore developers are as good as the developers in St. Louis--nay, even as good as the developers in SILICON VALLEY, I get the urge to curl the fingers and let fly. Maybe I'm just wound too tight, but I don't care for the theme.
   
   
2. So let's just elaborate on the plot, shall we? The main character doesn't deal with the aftermath of the aforementioned dive. She goes mechanically about her life, alienates her friends, and then when the boyfriend wakes up, kinda wanders into a breakup with him. Then, bam!, it's section two, wherein she drives to New York City and enjoys some liberation from her Midwestern lifestyle, if you can call "sleepwalks through a relationship with a mysterious and uncommunicative man and through an undirected life in New York" liberation. Just when she's getting into New York, bam!, she returns to Wisconsin and rediscovers friendships she's let go and whatnot so she can sleepwalk through them, too.
   
   Suffice to say, I didn't care much about the main character, nor did I think much of her "decisions." I thought the mysterious and uncommunicative man bit was cool, until he revealed his secret torment to her when she had returned to Wisconsin. Quite frankly, it was a rather simplistic and unbelievable revelation. I won't ruin it by divulging it here. At least they shared some rather vivid boom chokka wokka in the book, which helped keep my interest. Smuttier than Valley of the Dolls, believe you me.
   
   
3. Come on, the voice of the book, the first person narrator, annoys me. She sleepwalks through the entire thing. Personally, I've been told for over a decade that my female characters are lacking, werd, and I swear, if the main character of this bit represents an authentic feminine point-of-view, you can expect strictly male characters in my work from here on out. Genre fiction set on planets where men reproduce through fission, I kid you not.
   
   The main character's adrift too much for me to like the book, and I don't see any change in her. At all. So what's the point of the book? I mean, sometimes the point is the character learns something, but the main character doesn't indicate any change, other than she returns home to her "bland" state. Give me a break. The heroine crossing the return threshold? She's supposed to bring something back, darling.

"Soldiers are not development workers. There is industry skill, a body of knowledge that goes with it. You can't just say 'There's a pothole over there and get it filled' and fix a country," said Dominic Nutt, a spokesman for Christian Aid, a British humanitarian group.

Violent crime in the UK is about 4 times higher than in the US. The conclusion I have come to is that's because of guns (I really, really, kept an open mind about the good/bad things about guns). In the adult years I was in England, (18 to 27, a total of 9 years):

• my house was burgled 3 times (the third time, my room mate was severely beaten, because he was home)
• my car was broken into twice
• car stolen once
• and I was assaulted twice.