Potter, Bush, Six-Word Memoirs, IFFERISMS - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 1 made back half its budget on the opening weekend -- and that's in the U.S. alone. So why do you need ME to tell you about a movie that clearly everybody knew was coming?

At our house, we had a Harry Potter marathon, watching all six movies from Friday evening to Saturday evening. And then we went to the midnight showing at the Carousel.

I was pleased with how well the huge crowd was handled. Tickets were presold, and as each theater filled up, they assigned people to the next one. They could only seat people in a theater after the last showing of the regularly scheduled movie ended, but they had plenty of things to look at, take part in, or buy.

Even when we were seated, the movie didn't start right at midnight. It was a little irritating to some in the audience that our showing didn't start until twenty-five after. The reason only became clear when the movie ended. Ours was the only showing that exited at that time -- and it was crowded enough, thanks! By staggering the starting times, they made it possible to get out of the parking lot in only a few minutes.

(But it would have been nice if they had told us what was going on. Or maybe they did, and I didn't hear them over the crowd noise.)

What about the movie itself? There were two strikes against it going in. First, it is based on the seventh and last book in the series. By this point, they just can't afford to spend time catching the audience up on what came before. Either you know or you don't. In other words, this isn't the place to start watching the series.

Second, they split the book in half to make two films. That means that this film has no ending.

The good news is that despite these drawbacks, it's a very good movie. There are just enough reminders that even if you haven't seen the other movies or read any of the books recently, you can still follow what's happening. The ending came at a very good spot -- as long as you don't expect it to REALLY end. The writing is still first rate and the acting has been getting better and better (unbelievably, the Weasley twins have learned how to act and be funny!).

In fact, the movie is markedly better than the book. J.K. Rowling's inexperience -- and the lack of editorial attention she was getting at the end -- showed in this seventh book, where she stops the action cold for a long, long time while she does "characterization." When I was reading it, I thought we'd never got finished with the endless camping trip as they hide from their enemies. But the movie makes every moment count.

You may have heard of the mini-firestorm (a candlestorm?) over the "nude scene." My first thought had been, Why would the producers add a nude scene to the story?

Then my daughter reminded me that the scene in question was in the book. It comes when Ron, under the evil influence of one of Voldemort's horcruxes, pictures Hermione, the love of his life, in the naked embrace of his best friend, Harry Potter.

Of course, naked in a book is not the same thing as naked in a movie. In the book, you can gloss over it as long as the writing is not explicit; but in a movie, the actors are really naked, and there they are on the screen, second after second.

Still, the filmmakers did a fairly tasteful job. There were no more body parts visible than you might see on primetime TV, and a lot less than in the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED swimsuit issue. There was nothing arousing about it -- the whole thing was just to show us why it was making Ron so crazy.

Could they have cut the scene or made it even less nude? Maybe, and if some viewers decided to stay away because it's there, I won't argue with them. But I was not offended or even made uncomfortable with it. No child is going to learn (or even guess!) the facts of life from the scene. But it's the parents' call.

Remember, though, that this IS the last book, and it's near the climax of a war. People die. People do bad things. Even people we like.

The eight movies of this franchise are going to make movie history. And, like the books, the movies have gotten better as they went along. Go see it now on the big screen. Then rewatch it on DVD or cable just before you see the second half of the last movie next July.

When you consider that Bush graduated from Andover, Yale, and Harvard, it's actually surprising that he didn't lose the accent, or soften it. Maybe it was a political decision to keep it, but I think it's a sign that Bush was never impressed with the intellectual culture of New England and had no interest in emulating it.

The book doesn't try to paper things over. He addresses all the issues that provided the insane Left (i.e., almost all Democrats) with their frothing points for eight years.

He forgoes the temptation to settle scores -- most of the attacks on him, he simply ignores. But every now and then, when a flat-out lie is still widely believed, he points out the truth -- without rancor.

For a man accused of loving war, he certainly did his best to avoid it. Despite the false charges of his critics, he did his best to avoid war, short of declaring defeat and letting our enemies kill Americans with impunity.

He also does an excellent job of explaining why, though he hated the whole idea of bailouts, he took the actions that were required to stave off economy-wrecking panics during the financial crisis of 2008. I ended up agreeing with his decisions, even when they offended my (and his!) philosophy of government.

Did I end up agreeing with everything he did? No. But I ended up understanding why he made the decisions he made; they were honorably arrived at. But then, we always knew that most of the repulsive attacks on him were simply his opponents revealing the kinds of motives THEY would have had for such decisions. Cynical, arrogant, and stupid (as they have shown in the two years since they came to the ascendancy), they assumed that Bush was, too.

I already thought he was a great president -- measured by what he did with the crises and events he was given to deal with -- but by the end of DECISION POINTS I realized that he was something much harder to find in politics: he is a good, kind, and patient man. He is not afraid to face his own mistakes and tell what he (and we) can learn from them. Nor does he toot his own horn. He was President; he made choices; some of them worked brilliantly, some of them were adequate, and some few of them were wrong. But history will judge, as I judge now, that his mistakes were astonishingly few, and his achievements large.

I get asked why, if I admire Bush so much, I'm still a Democrat. The reason is simple: I keep hearing Republicans condemn Bush for not being conservative enough. But after hearing his reminders of what he achieved and what he tried for, and how he managed to fight two wars and two recessions while shrinking the deficit and keeping taxes relatively low, I wonder what fairy godmother these Republicans think should have been President instead.

In the real world, Bush was that marvelous thing: A conservative with the sense to compromise and achieve the possible instead of insisting on the impossible and accomplishing nothing.

And if the Republicans don't come up with somebody as moderate as George W. Bush in 2012, so that independents and moderate Democrats like me have somebody to vote for, they're going to force us to reelect Obama against our will.

But what impressed her the most as that after all the glitzy, wonderfully entertaining secular Christmas numbers -- you know, reindeer, Santa, toy soldiers, and so on -- the final number of the show opened with three children sitting around a Christmas tree, reading from the Bible: the St. Luke account of the birth of Christ.

"As they read," my friend writes, "the curtain opened on scenes of, first, the shepherds (complete with live sheep), then the wise men (yep, live camels), and finally a beautiful, reverent Nativity scene with Mary, Joseph, the manger, the star above them, and all of the sheep, wise men and animals.

"It was very tastefully done. And as part of that portion of the show, they sang several religious Christmas songs, like "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing."

"And that was the portion of the show that got the biggest applause from the audience. Not Santa, not the kick lines, but the Nativity. It was very touching and refreshing -- a perfect way to launch the holidays."

Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that not EVERY show in New York is cynical and anti-religious.

You can't just say, "I know he likes Grisham," and buy him the newest Grisham novel -- because for all you know, he's already bought it and read it.

And tastes are so individual, and change with time. I've stopped reading Stephen King and John Grisham, for instance; but if we haven't talked lately, would you know that? If you gave me one of their books I'd look at it in consternation, wondering if now I have to read it out of duty to YOU.

In short, receiving a book as a gift can be a burden or a disappointment -- even if you know the person pretty well and choose the kind of gift you've seen them enjoy in the past!

But there ARE books that work very well as gifts, even if you know nothing about their taste in SERIOUS books. I'm talking about books of quotations, adages, or witticisms -- books that have no plot, no through line. When someone gives it to you as a gift, you don't have to commit to reading the whole thing. You just pop it open somewhere and read a quote or too and ... you're hooked, if the book is any good at all.

Dr. Mardy Grothe seems to have a nice career going, assembling such books. Not massive collections, but short ones, little cheap books that are so much fun you'll end up reading quotes aloud to whoever happens to be nearby.

Grothe's titles include I NEVER METAPHOR I DIDN'T LIKE, OXYMORONICA, VIVA LA REPARTEE, and IFFERISMS.

I NEVER METAPHOR is a collection of analogies, and often they require an explanation to be understood in context. For instance, there's the account of Daniel Webster's Senate speech in support of the Compromise of 1850, in which he argued for the rigorous enforcement of the fugitive slave laws.

His constituents in abolitionist Massachusetts were so outraged that Webster resigned his Senate seat, recognizing that his political career was over. But what brought him down most particularly was an analogy. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The word LIBERTY in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word LOVE in the mouth of a courtesan."

But since the word COURTESAN was almost as little understood then as now, Emerson's analogy was soon adapted to this: "The word LIBERTY in the mouth of Mr. Webster is like the word LOVE in the mouth of a whore."

It can fairly be said that no political career could withstand that line -- not when everyone who heard it agreed that it was true.

OXYMORONICA is a collection of paradoxes and wise contradictions. For instance, here's a few about love:

"When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies" (Shakespeare).

"Now what I love in women is, they won't or can't do otherwise than lie, but do it so well, the very truth seems false" (Byron).

"It doesn't matter whether you decide to marry or stay single; either way you'll be sorry" (Socrates).

"Families with babies and families without babies are sorry for each other" (Edgar Watson Howe).

VIVA LA REPARTEE is a collection of snappy comebacks. For instance, when Woodrow Wilson was governor of New Jersey, it was his duty to appoint a replacement for Senator John Kean, who died in office. When Wilson received a phone call from a politician who said, "Governor, I would like to take the senator's place," Wilson replied, "Well, you may quote me as saying that's perfectly agreeable to me if it's agreeable to the undertaker."

One of my favorites is an exchange of telegrams between two of the great wits of the twentieth century, George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill. When Shaw's play PYGMALION (which became the basis of the musical MY FAIR LADY) was opening in London, Shaw sent Churchill a telegram:

Reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend -- if you have one.

Impossible to be present for first performance. Will attend the second -- if there is one.

My favorite of the collections, though, is IFFERISMS. This is a word of Grothe's own coinage, and it refers to aphorism that take the form of IF ... THEN propositions.

"If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life" (Thoreau).

"If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes" (Trotsky).

"If there's anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity" (Bill Vaughan).

"If I had my choice, I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast" (William Tecumseh Sherman).

"If Bret Harte ever repaid a loan, the incident failed to pass into history" (Mark Twain).

"If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization" (Harry Weinberger).

"If you have once thoroughly bored somebody it is next to impossible to unbore him" (Elizabeth von Arnim).

The first book was called NOT QUITE WHAT I WAS PLANNING: SIX-WORD MEMOIRS BY WRITERS FAMOUS & OBSCURE. Let me give you a few samples:

It's fascinating -- sometimes funny, sometimes moving, sometimes vaguely horrifying -- what people choose as a summary of who they are or what they've done.

But good as NOT QUITE WHAT I WAS PLANNING is -- and it is -- I found the teen-written sequel to be far more powerful and memorable. Probably because the people writing these six-word memoirs are so young that everything is still new to them, and they still have more passion than cynicism.

The title says it all: I CAN'T KEEP MY OWN SECRETS: SIX-WORD MEMOIRS BY TEENS FAMOUS & OBSCURE. Again, here's a sampling:

These are books that you will read, think about, talk about. Give them as gifts, and you can be sure they will be noticed and appreciated -- even by people who don't think of themselves as readers.

It's the first volume of a saga about a young man, Rigg, who discovers that he and his friend Umbo have the power to fiddle with time. He also learns that he's a member of the royal family, carried off as a baby and raised in a remote forest.

Unfortunately, the royal family are out of power, living in captivity -- and Rigg has to share that fate until he finds a way to get out of all the walls that have been keeping him in.

It is my solemn judgment that everybody needs to buy two copies of the book: One to give to a young person as a gift, and the other to keep and read for yourself. Any other course of action will leave somebody deeply disappointed.

And if you actually take my completely altruistic advice, I'll be happy to sign both books at Barnes and Noble on Friday, 10 December, at 7:00 p.m. (More information about PATHFINDER can be found at http://www.hatrack.com .)

Every Day Is Special

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.

Thursday, November 25 -- Thanksgiving

Today is Macy's 84th annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, starting at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time at Central Park West. It features floats, giant balloons, marching bands, famous stars, and musical numbers from Broadway shows. It's always amusing to see what weather they're having in Manhattan. Sometimes it's balmy and sometimes the performers's heads are completely concealed in the fog of their own breath.

But the biggest amusement, for me, is to watch the Broadway performers try to fool the rest of America into thinking that they're creating great shows that all of us will love. While they try to conceal it during the Tony Awards and the Parade, the New York theatrical community has almost universal contempt for the values of ordinary people in the rest of America, and it shows up in their plays all the time.

Meanwhile, isn't "Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade" quite a mouthful to say? Quick -- raise your hand if you've ever spoken aloud "Macy's Day Parade." I thought so. Me too. You've got to admit, that's nearly perfect brand-name identification.

Here in Greensboro, though, I don't think most of us will forget whom we're thanking. The danger, in a time of recession and war and struggle, is that we can forget to let our hearts be full of thanks.

It's so easy to think of losses, griefs, and fears and say in our hearts or to our friends and family, "What do I have to be grateful for?"

Believe me, I've had those feelings too, sometimes. But then time passes and I realize: Life goes on, and God is still good to us. With all its ups and downs, it's good to be alive, and it's God who gave us our ticket to get into this show. He also gave us our script, and if we just follow it, we can be happy in spite of all woes.

House foreclosed? Lost your job? Business failing? Moved into your in-laws' basement? IRS putting liens on you? People telling lies about you? Lonely? Nobody on your side? Or worse things: In pain? Bad health? Children causing you worry and grief? Or the worst: Your child crippled? Died?

That's not a complete list of all the awful things that can happen to a person, but it's a pretty good sampling, don't you think? I've lived through them all, and I'm here to tell you that as long as there is life in your body, if you just keep plugging away, giving thanks to God for the chance to keep on living, ALL these things recede and become bearable.

And you will discover (if you care to look) that happiness comes from what you do for and with the people whom God -- or the vicissitudes of life -- put into your path. Then you can come to Thanksgiving Day with a song of joy in your heart, saying, See what I've lost; but thank God I had it to lose.

Some of it that once seemed important I now realize was trivial -- all that stuff about money. And what really DOES matter, I still have, or will have again, thanks to God's love for his children.

Friday, November 26 -- Black Friday

The day after Thanksgiving is the traditional beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Some say it is called "Black Friday" because so many retailers depend on Christmas gift sales to get their ledgers out of the red ink and into the black.

But I suspect it actually arose because the Christmas shopping season is so frantic and busy in retail shops and stores, and many shoppers behave so greedily and rudely, that the salespeople started regarding it as the annual month in hell.

This year's Christmas shopping is going to be tough for a lot of families, because there's no money -- and in many cases, no credit. How do you get your kids everything they want?

Here's the truth: You can't do it. You never can. But you can give them what they need. And you can give them what they want MOST -- which is your time, your love, your respect.

If all you get for your kids this Christmas are the board games out of the closet, and hours spent on Monopoly and Life and Candyland and Apples to Apples and whatever other games they enjoy, I'll bet this year will be remembered as "the Christmas when Daddy was home and played games with us," or "the Christmas when Mommy taught us all to bake cookies and cakes" -- or, in other words, the Best Christmas Ever.

Broke ain't the worst thing to be.

And time and love aren't the poorest gifts to give. They're always remembered; they don't break. And they're always on sale, cheap.

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If you go to only one holiday market in the Greensboro Coliseum this year, make it the Craftsmen's Christmas Classic Arts and Crafts Festival, beginning today and continuing through the 28th. This year we made it a point to visit other such markets and we can assure you, this one is the best.

You can choose from the work of more than 450 talented artists and craftspeople, and while it has its share of holiday knick-knacks and decorations, the main thrust of the Craftsmen's Classic is useful things that can be given as gifts that will be appreciated for many years.

For instance, our daughter got years of use from the hammock chair that hangs from a ceiling joist in her bedroom. We have found a half dozen artists whose work now hangs on our walls (or sits on our tables); some of them no longer exhibit at the show, so we're glad we caught them when we did.

Of course, there has been attrition over the years. We would have given that wonderful two-handled gravy pitcher to practically everyone we know -- but apparently a divorce left the right to make the pitchers with the ex-husband, who does not come to the same shows as the ex-wife. Apparently she got Greensboro in the settlement. Can't we petition them to share custody so I can get more gravy pitchers?

By now it's such a family tradition that if we're home at Thanksgiving, it's simply unthinkable NOT to go to the Craftsmen's Christmas Classic. See you there!

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ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, by Lewis Carroll, was published in 1965.

Today in 1922 Charles Schulz, the creator of the PEANUTS comic strip, was born. For a time in the 1960s served as the bellwether of American culture, a role filled later by BLOOM COUNTY, CALVIN AND HOBBES, and THE FAR SIDE.

Saturday, November 27 -- Bailout Day

Bank Bailout Bill of 1991. Both houses of congress approved legislation authorizing $70 billion in additional borrowing authority for the FDIC because of the record number of savings and loan failures. Plug one hole in the American financial structure, and pretty soon some ambitious finagler will find another -- and, when he succeeds, be followed by a thousand others, so a pinprick becomes a hemorrhage.
Justified by the "promote the general welfare" language of the Constitution, such bailouts are only used to prevent financial panics (as in 2008) or devastating losses to consumers (as in 1991).

The only thing missing from these bills in recent decades (to me, 1991 is recent) has been a provision that no employee of any affected company may receive any bonus or stock option for three years, and any provisions for bonuses or options in their contracts are voided. And if employees left such institutions, they should carry the taint with them until the three years are up.

Then we would not see the nasty sight of the people who ran their financial institutions into the ground getting rewarded at taxpayer expense.

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THE DINAH SHORE SHOW premiered today in 1951. I was three months and three days old at the time, and therefore didn't care; but I grew up with the irritating jingle "See the USA in your Chevrolet" ringing in my ears. (That was in the live TV era when one sponsor paid for a show, and the stars did the ads.)

Originally it was a 15-minute musical show, but in 1957 it became a one-hour variety show, and remained so until it went off the air in 1962. Dinah Shore was one of the few women to headline a variety show; besides Carol Burnett, I'm hard-pressed to think of another.

Sunday, November 28 -- Advent

Most "advent calendars" begin on the first day of December, and mark every day until Christmas, the 25th. But the official religious celebration of Advent actually consists of the four Sundays before Christmas, so that this year it begins today.

If you happen to be in the Netherlands, Advent is celebrated by daily blowing of the Midwinter Horn, starting with Advent and continuing until Epiphany (Jan. 6th); the horn announces the birth of Christ.

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From 28 November to 1 December, 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met in Tehran, Persia, to reassure Stalin that the U.S., Britain, and their allies would open another front against Hitler's Fortress Europe in France that spring. The result was "Operation Overlord," which commenced with the landing of American, British, and Canadian troops on the beaches of Normandy.

Churchill had led Britain in standing alone against Hitler for many long months after the fall of France, during which time Stalin was Hitler's ally in the division of Poland and Roosevelt gave such dribbles of material help as he could persuade an isolationist Congress to allow.

So it was galling to Churchill that in this conference and the one at Yalta, Stalin continually tried -- with growing success -- to get Roosevelt off by himself, cutting Churchill out of crucial aspects of the discussion. After all, if it hadn't been for Churchill, Stalin would have faced Hitler alone, for without Churchill's perseverance, America would have regarded Hitler's victory as a fait accompli, and we almost certainly would have watched from afar as he crushed the Communist state.

Still, it's no wonder Stalin wanted Roosevelt without Churchill. Churchill was tougher, smarter about foreign affairs, and more skeptical of Stalin's honesty than Roosevelt was; and Stalin had a highly placed spy, Alger Hiss, as one of Roosevelt's righthand men, so that Stalin knew everything that Roosevelt was talking about to his people and Hiss was there to encourage the ailing Roosevelt to agree to whatever Stalin wanted.

Monday, November 29 -- Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday emerged in the past decade as the start of the Online Christmas Shopping Season -- for this is the day that people return to work after the Thanksgiving holidays and go online on their office computers to order Christmas gifts.

However, now that most people who have computers at work also have computers at home, Cyber Monday is no longer the e-commerce onslaught that it used to be. Most folks have been shopping online continuously through the holiday.

Louisa May Alcott, author of the classics LITTLE WOMEN and LITTLE MEN, was born on this day in 1832 in Philadelphia. While she had worked for years writing potboilers -- adventures and romances that brought her little acclaim but did allow her to earn a living -- these idealized versions of her childhood struck the popular imagination and continued to sell and be read and then handed down, generation to generation, without the slightest help from or recognition by academia.

Feminists eventually noticed her and studied her -- but mostly to show how "stultified" she was by masculine oppression. But Alcott wrote scholar-proof books, rather as Jane Austen did, and they are a vital part of the REAL American culture, as opposed to the academic-literary one.

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Clive Staples Lewis, literary scholar, Christian apologist, and writer of speculative fiction, was born on this day in 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. Best works: THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, TILL WE HAVE FACES, and THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA.

Tuesday, November 30 -- Churchill Day

Winston Churchill was born on this day in 1874 to an American mother and an English politician who descended from Lord Marlborough. Churchill determined at an early age that he would be Prime Minister, and set his course accordingly.

To become famous and popular, he served in the Army in India and South Africa, and repeatedly risked his life in combat, acting boldly when other men froze, and withstanding gunfire as if it never occurred to him that a bullet might actually hit him. He was simultaneously a war correspondent and modestly told of his own exploits along with other men's deeds, and had no scruples about criticizing his commanders. Throughout his life he supported himself as a writer and speaker.

After his war service he plunged into politics, where his career was astonishingly eccentric. Who else in English history could have survived changing parties TWICE, and then gone on to become Prime Minister? He was drawn to almost as many stupid ideas as clever ones, but the clever ones he backed to the hilt were SO right or effective that they saved his country and, arguably, the world.

A few Churchill quotes that I wish our current government would pay attention to:

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

It is no use saying, "We are doing our best." You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the name Mark Twain, was born on this day in 1835, making this his 175th birthday. Like Louisa May Alcott, he published his books to great popular acclaim and complete disdain from the litterati -- until the French, for some reason, decided he was the greatest living American writer (a category that the British regarded as an oxymoron) and began to tout him, making him respectable to read and discuss.
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Satirist Jonathan Swift was born on this day in 1667. He grew up to wield one of the sharpest pens ever to be dipped in ink, and his GULLIVER'S TRAVELS survives in the public imagination today, though few read far enough into the book (stopping, usually, with the Lilliputians) to realize just how savagely he lampooned the foibles of the human race.

Wednesday, December 1 -- Basketball Day

On this day in 1891, James Naismith, a teacher of PE at the International YMCA Training School at Springfield, Massachusetts, created an indoor sport that could be played during the winter months by nailing up a peach basket at each end of the gym and giving students soccer balls to toss into them. The rules have developed somewhat since then, as have the baskets -- for instance, putting a hole in the bottom of them was a great step forward.

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This is the first day of Cookie Cutter Week -- a special time for baking cookies with meaningful shapes, and collecting the cutters that produce those shapes. My only complaint about this most excellent celebration is that somehow, during my lifetime, the "cooky" has become a "cookie."

When I was a schoolchild I was taught that "cooky" was correct, and those who wrote "cookie" were illiterates who backformed that spelling from the plural. But now it seems that the "y" is more and more restricted to adjectives, while nouns take the "ie" ending -- except with girls' names, which more and more often take the decidedly non-English "i" -- as in Lili, Holli, Cindi, or Christi.

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This is National Tie Month -- as well it should be, since twenty percent of all ties sold are bought as Christmas gifts. If, like me, you carry a few extra pounds, you'll find that it takes an ever-longer tie to make it all the way around a thicker neck and over a larger belly to reach the beltline.

So if you're purchasing a gift for a person of somewhat extended girth -- that is, if their neck size is more than 18 (or 17, or even 16, if they're also tall), an off-the-rack tie will reach halfway down their shirtfront, as if someone had cut it off -- or the little end will look like an amputation gone wrong.

Instead, go to The Hub or Casual Male Big & Tall for excellent (but very different) selections of extra-long ties in every color and fabric.

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Rosa Parks Day. This is the 55th anniversary of the arrest (in 1955) of Rosa Parks, in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white person and stand in the back of a municipal bus. Her arrest triggered a year-long boycott of the city bus system and led to legal actions that ended racial segregation on municipal buses throughout the South.

The myth has arisen that she just happened to be tired that day, and therefore refused to get up, but in fact she knew exactly what she was doing -- and hurrah to her for doing it. Without the courage of people like her, nothing changes.

Unfortunately, in many countries those who are brave enough to be first to stick up for their rights -- or second, or fifth, or fiftieth -- can end up dead. That has certainly been the fate of anyone who stood up against Saddam or the Taliban or the Divine Kims of North Korea or the monster Mugabe who is devouring Zimbabwe.

It's not enough to have courage -- you must be sure your gesture is made so publicly that even if you die, you do not die unseen and unheard.

And let's not get confused, in making analogies with achievements like Rosa Parks's, to keep a clear head about who are the oppressors, and who are the brave people standing against illegitimate power.

It is a sad fact of history that oppressors often wrap themselves in the mantle of brave revolutionary heroes. The state religion of political correctness does it all the time these days, just as the Communists did for seven decades in the USSR. As a rule, it is the people who demand utter uniformity of thought and seek to ban discussion and silence all dissent through threats or shouting or censorship (at least) who are the oppressors.

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