Kim C, as I said, saints may exclude themselves. My apologies, and please don't hear any of my stupid tone in that, really. I'm happy for you, and hope you can keep thinking the best of the rest of us. Pay no attention to that white man behind the curtain, don't go looking into it too far, we'll only break your heart.

Someone I knew grew up in an openly racist house, quite sheltered from the liberal media, but without a trace of it in him, it seemed. Who knows where that gift comes from, but he was a better person than me, in general. Once he told me that when he looked at human skulls the anglo ones looked noble and beautiful to him, the others like some old clay pot. That's all he said for a while.

The biggest factor in predicting a child's success in school seems to be the education level of the mother. Guess that sounds sexist, but what can you do? I suppose I am a sexist, because it especially disappoints me when women don't seem to see how coy, sly, cold, and unspoken real discrimination can be.

It's odd how most opponents of AA I know off-line will concede this, and grant you that--I don't know--that it probably helps for young minorities to see people like them going to college, in jobs, hanging out with Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Chandler, and the gang, just to make it imaginable, for instance. But here in E-ville our AA opponents grant nothing, hold the line, like they feel their position so inherently weak they can't give up a single inch.

   There used to be that riddle about the surgeon and his son who were in a car wreck, taken to the hospital, and a surgeon comes in and looks at the boy and says I can't operate on him, he's my son. Fifteen, twenty years ago nobody could figure that out.

You know, when they changed the questions on I.Q. tests to even women with men, that was blatant sexism, make no mistake. If gender wasn't supposed to matter, why did they make it matter?

Nicole C once again I must eat my words. The big thing in drawing isn't making a straight line--use a ruler if you want--but forgetting what you think about things, your ideas about things, and just looking at them. That's why in the old European schools they made you draw student pottery. If you drew it true and perfect they could tell you weren't really looking.