Liz Smith, these are certainly nuggets to make one smile, in some instances, just to avoid the tears. I’ve long thought that none of us really gets out of high school, but Tom might have it right…kids maturin’ faster, doncha know(and it’s all about creatin’ jobs and readin’ everything in front of us, all of it. Makin sure Main Street and Wall Street are creatin’ jobs for each other AND Israel, oh shoot I forgot that paragraph). And I loved Paul Newman, the heart throb of my ‘group’s’ high school years. If anyone close enough to look into those blue eyes could possibly try to put a sentence together, ‘autograph’ would have been the best they could do.(Or those sounds Ralph Cramden made when he was caught in his own scheme: Ahmmmm) But people don’t really want autographs, they want to share a special moment with someone they’ve long respected and admired. The autograph is just a vehicle. And I am falling in love with Peggy Noonan, so gracious. I’m overlooking that Reagan thing. Pleace tell us about her book. ‘Political Grace’? seems like an oxymoron. And great article about your friend Holland Taylor in NYT yesterday. Looking forward to her one woman show. Peace and grace

I can’t decide whose was better - Jon Stewart or DOLLY! (What a hoot, she is.)

great mix today Liz! funny… ironic…. and smart…

Hysterical, Liz! Thanks, we needed that. I saw Carmen Dell’Orefice once standing next to the doorman of a hotel under the canopy waiting for a car as I was walking in. Absolutely drop-jaw gorgeous, stunning, very graceful, looked as lightly boned as an exotic bird. Perfection. http://multimedia.hola.com/biografias/carmen-dell-orefice/83451-01.jpg

This one’s my favorite: “Ever notice that ‘what the hell’ is always the right decision?” —Marilyn Monroe This one’s dead true: “Somebody seems to have switched the scripts. Conservative pundits who once disdained feminism are lauding Sarah Palin’s heroism in pursuing a demanding career while raising five kids. Liberal feminists, meanwhile, are suggesting that because of her unseemly ambition, Palin would be either an irresponsible absentee mom or a distracted vice president.” –editor of The Week, William Falk This one scares the crap out of me: “Western doctors were concerned about a growing demand for designer vaginas.” –Harper magazine’s “Findings” column Ewww!

…as the mind wanders…you always give mine delightful places to land. Thanks, Liz.

Liz dawling, you are so fabulous I can hardly stand it! :) I took it upon myself to place Heather Mallick’s article in The Guardian in its entirety right here, right now for all to admire. I have posted here about the weird choice of Sarah Palin before and that it speaks to who you are really considering as a next President. McCain is trying to hide behind her shiny black shantung designer skirt as McPalin. But he is just really McBush. Even Warren Buffet congratulated Sarah personally on winning the role of governor. I LOVE W B but doesn’t this tell you something? It tells me to immediately go out and buy Berkshire Hathaway stock at 137,900 per share on that cold day in hell that McPalin gets in if I can afford it. (Did I just say that out loud?) For the rest of the proletariat, uh, never mind. :) OK so here’s the article: The Alaskan who went ‘outside’ Sarah Palin’s Wasilla is beyond small-town. The woman who could be president is someone with no grasp of the wider world Heather Mallick Guardian Unlimited September 5, 2008 I was born in a northern Canadian settlement so small it was accessible most of the year only by a Bombardier, a sort of huge military tank built for passengers. It was like a transport plane, a big iron bulb with caterpillar tracks. I swear we had a paddle-steamer for supplies in the summer. Take that, Sarah Palin. The place was six times smaller than Wasilla, Alaska, the town that birthed John McCain’s strange vice-presidential “soulmate”, as weird as that disconnected eerie smile that floats on his face as he stands next to her. My credentials are solid; Palin cannot out-hick me. Until I fled at 18, I never lived in a northern town of more than 12,000 people. My towns were full of Sarah Palins. These types are fine, such as they are, until they leave town and turn fraudulent. They label themselves “the salt of the earth”. It’s when they try to make that a qualification for a greater glory that things turn unpleasant. I never claimed a higher moral standing for coming from a great big empty on the map. Small towns are places that smart people escape from, for privacy, for variety, for intellect, for survival. Palin should have stayed home. Canada has lots of hockey moms. They’re called Fran and Nancy. They have cruel haircuts and their voices shake the rafters of the rink as their rink-rats play. How can I translate the hearty, jollying-along Palin for British audiences? She’s a working class Joan Hunter Dunn. It’s those volleyball shoulders and field-hockey thighs, the energy, the bullying, and the utter self-confidence in every lie she tells. Salt-of-the-earthers don’t lie! But Palins do. I watched Palin last night, my mouth open, my eyeballs drying out, my hand making shaky notes. I read them aghast. Did she really joke, “You know the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick.”? Did she just blow kisses to the audience? Did she just say, “We need to produce more of our own oil and gas. Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope. We’ve got lots of both.”? Yes, she did lie about billion-gallon slurps of oil and gas available for Americans to blow, about her support of Alaska’s notorious pork-barrel “bridge to nowhere”, about which particular citizens will see tax increases under Obama (only the richest, and she knows that). She also lied when she slobbered over small-town folks (an American version of British farm life, except British farmers have a point). The granite honesty of hicks is a cliche, a fantasy, a meme of American life, as much as the working-class solidarity of Tony Blair was in 1997, and where did that get anyone? But most of all, she lied about the north and the virtues it supposedly confers on citizens. Canadians watch this with horror. To us, Alaska is the back of beyond. Americans feel the same way. Alaskans are a bunch of Ted Stevens, that enraged screaming old senator who explained that the internet was not a big truck, it was more like a “bunch of tubes”. He was arrested and charged with taking bribes, but handily won the August senatorial primary. We love our own north to the point of covering our eyes and humming as it melts (yesterday the BBC headlined the collapse of Canada’s ice shelves; Canadian papers and websites missed the story) but Alaska is different from our north. We share a 1,500-mile border with a frontier state full of drunks and crazy people, of the blight that cheap-built structures bring to a glorious landscape. Canadian firms invest billions in the place and mine its ores. One hundred thousand Canadians visit Alaska every year, and we like to pass by in cruise ships. But it never goes further than that. Alaska is our redneck cousin, our Yukon territory forms a blessed buffer zone, and thank God he never visits. Alaska is the end of the line. Palin got her first passport last year. (Americans didn’t need a passport to enter Canada until recently). She seems to have visited us precisely once, not surprisingly since Alaskans regularly refer to the rest of the world as “outside”. We are so foreign to her, this woman who might become US president. What is native to her is smugness, her certainty that what’s good for Wasilla is good for the world in all its infinite variety. It’s a variety that Palin will never begin to grasp.