Before I Return to the Salt Mines of Linear Algebra

In my Google quest for who the hell knows what I read a NYTimes article about Norman and Elsa Rush.  (I'd caught the tail end of an NPR interview with him and the hook was that he broke a promise to his wife.)  A good read; an enviable marriage.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, the mantra of all women writers:  I wish I had a wife.

And.  Too.  There's a great thumbnail description of the father-son mystery:

The youthful form that honoring took was a sort of graphomaniacal mirror image of his father’s former ambitions, actions Rush has called “filial-pietistic,” defined as “the carrying out of the perceived life-project of a dominant parent, the replication of it if the project has been successful or the completion of it if it has been thwarted.” Rush began to write “because my father didn’t or wouldn’t.” 

That (and Bill Clinton's inability to control his idiocy) was why George W. Bush was our president.  And because George W. Bush was our president, the US Congress and the public it so richly represents is throwing itself all over the floor about bombing Syria.

Ciao, ya'll.