One Sunday, a minister and his wife were driving home after worship. He was reflecting on how well the day had gone, in particular how well his sermon had gone. In a rather pensive moment, the minister asked his wife, “How many truly great preachers do you think there are in this country?”
Without hesitating, she coolly replied, “One less than you think.”

Most folks who know me know I am, shall we say, a political aficionado. In fact, most of them would say I am an election junkie. I actually like the stuff, the campaigning, voting, the whole nine yards. But this time even I got tired of it. A presidential campaign that ran nearly two years is simply too much. Way too much. And because of that, there are a number of other issues, subjects, whatever one might wish to call them that have begun to bug me as well. And I can’t think of any better way to cure my “low-down, irritatin’, aggravatin’, I’m-tired-of-it-all-and mad-as-well-you-know-what blues.” So, at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes, the sometimes news show, let’s say what we mean and mean what we say and clear my mind about some of this stuff.

Piney and She had an argument about writing. Was it better to plan what you were going to write, or to let your brain feed the story to you as it came out automatically?

My parents did not teach me to be prejudiced. I learned it on my own. I graduated from high school and college in Birmingham, Ala. The Magic City also had the claim to shame of being the most segregated city in the nation. The KKK brazenly stood at intersections collecting money in buckets from sympathetic motorists. They dressed in white with hoods, hiding their identities but not their maniacal purposes.

If we’re lucky, we know the name of the president-elect this morning.
If we’re unlucky, as we suspect as of this writing, we’re mired in a debate that will, if it hasn’t already, made the dangling, pregnant and other adjectival chad look like minor league stuff. In fact, lawsuits were filed before the first Virginia votes were even cast. The McCain team sued the state, saying all military absentee ballots should be counted even if it means extending the deadline. Lawyers argued that some servicemen and women in Iraq had received their absentee ballots less than a month ago, more than two months after they had been requested. 

Halloween 70 years ago was arguably the most frightening this nation ever faced. While radio stations exaggerated the numbers, apparently, people actually fled their homes for shelter on that day. For at least several hours, parts of the nation panicked in the face of imminent annihilation. Ironically, the whole affair was a Halloween hoax.

As usual, though this column is being written on Thursday, Oct. 30, it will be published (officially at least) on Saturday, Nov. 1. The date, Nov. 1, has seen its fair share of events which have been remembered, or at least should be, in history.

The press release says a “quiet decision by five officials in Washington, D.C., could silence millions of cell phones in rural America.”
All we can say is “Hallelujah.”

Socrates gave me a skull for Halloween. My very own memento mori!
“Why thank you so much!” I said with amazement to my toga-draped, laurel-wreathed philosophy student. “Nobody’s ever given me a skull before!”

The State Board of Elections wants you to know that it did not print up fliers outlining that Republicans should vote on Nov. 4 and Democrats on Nov. 5. The good folks working for that agency want you to know that everyone, Republicans, Democrats, even Green Party members and Libertarians, vote Nov. 4 from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. They so much want you to know they sent out a press release “busting” the aforementioned myth of segregated voting days.