The News Today

   Some days it's hard to figure out what's happening. Opening from a confusing front page, which reported a man arrested for attacking a statue, or at least removing it from its pedestal, to  Civil War re-enactors battling the weather amid pictures which could have represented either story, I read first the story of the Uncle Sam statue vandalism.  I tried to figure out  what happened---one of a group of men arrested for fleeing from the scene of an uprooted and headless statue.  The statues sound like a silly idea, commissioned to somehow represent the mythical Uncle Sam.  The creator of the statue was quoted as saying he thought the thief either wanted the statue for himself or for someone else, or else he was just intoxicated.  That would seem to cover all the bases.  Evidently, the statue supports the custom of adding graffiti, or  a sign and comment phase, and that's not considered tampering as long as it's not inappropriate.  He added that he wasn't surprised that the head fell off because it had fallen off in his very studio and he'd glued it back on.  He didn't say what color shirt he was wearing at the time.
     My gaze dropped down to the next story, Andrew Beam's account of a Niskayuna man tidying up the boulevard where he grew up.  He lived there, his mother lives there, he has bought an abandoned house there.  If the writer has left a few grammatical rules unviolated, he more than makes up for it in the blasphemy against writing style.  If unnecessary and superfluous constructions were eliminated, the article would be about one-third the length, but the point would be made.  But then no one would know what Joan Jensen's  neighbor Toni Dickinson had also done.  
   So I turn to the TV news just in time to hear none less than Charley Rose and Gayle King comment on Michael Douglas's announcement that he believes that his throat cancer was caused by oral sex, and it seems he may be interested in public service announcements similar to those of Angelina Jolie.  I couldn't change the channel fast enough, but switched back in time for Live with Kelly and Michael.  That should be safe, one might think.  But that safe spot was not to be:    Kelly was simulating the process of pooping in her pants.   Yes, she was.