Little Hawk: Thanks, mate -- best laugh I've had this week. Much needed -- I go back to work tomorrow! And I have forgotten all my buzz phrases!!

Tell ya what it is, byes -- Oi've had a surfeit of fookin' Disney on this mortal coil an' am not about to hire on for more hereafter, thanks very much. Now, Toto, you can pull all the curtains in the house down for all of me, but I'm convinced that 90% of the Technicolor posters we have been given as clues to the hereafter are pretty much about that -- as true to life as the "Gone With the Wind" posters on the Westport downtown movie theater entrance were true portrayals of life in Atlanta circa 1862-4. In other words, not very.

Look at it this way: there's an age when you find yourself in Disneyworld and you are absolutely thrilled to throw your arms around a towering plastic Goofy Dog or Minnie Mouse and hug the bejeezus out of 'em and are relatively sure that someone really lives in Cinderella's castle, that Davy Crockett is right over there in Frontier Land, still shooting bears or som'p'n.... and so on.

Somewhere along that line you go through a process -- after which you smile nicely and suspend disbelief and laugh at how cute it all is, but you understand it is a commercial, mechanico-electronic enterprise, not a "land" or a "world" and certainly not "The" world.

In other words you grow up! It is surely debatable whether you NEED a Santa, an Easter Bunny, a bogie man or a Mickey Mouse stirring up your immature mind in the first place -- I seriously doubt it. But if you have any drive to survive, you grow up, right? You rethink the scene and get a little bit more real about what is, what is not, who really makes things happen and why....

So let''s look around, since we're examining this process, and see if there are any OTHER plastic pseudo-entities that we have been handed whole cloth with little or no genuine bearing on reality, and up from which it is time for us to grow. See any? Icons, myths, synthetic super-beings of any sort, garden flamingos or back yard saviors, whatever you can find... Then p'raps, to apply the process correctly, we should start thinking about what growing up in this context might mean, and what sort of a more "real" context might explain the flocks of fabulous nincompoopery with which we have all been saddled to one or another degree. The details are left as an exercise for the...whatever.

And, Deda, I am NOT a KnowitAll. So there!! Am not!!

Maybe I used to be, but that was before I acquired Humility. That's the nasme of my large Lawn Flamingo.

;>)

Warm regards,

Amos