I guess I'm just a piker when it comes to reading since I was only able to get through 79 this year

Throughout his career, George Bush cultivated the image of the common man. Unlike Al Gore or John Kerry, he was a guy Americans would be happy to have a beer with - well, fruit juice maybe, as the president gave up the bottle long ago.

Now comes incontrovertible evidence that Bush's country bumpkin persona was a bit of a front. Karl Rove, in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, tells us that underneath that bluff exterior, Bush was, if not exactly an intellectual, an avid reader. According to Rove - often referred to as Bush's brain - the two competed for the last four years over who read the most books. By the end of 2006, Bush had read a highly respectable 95 books to Rove's 110. That works out at about two books a week - a fairly impressive feat for such real masters of the universe.

I like comedies. And within that genre of films, I particularly like parodies. The best ones are those that are based on clichés of particular genres or specific stories that are well known, since a successful parody depends crucially on the ability of the audience to immediately recognize allusions to the original

A parody idea is not hard to come up with. What is hard is to be able to sustain the conceit over the length of a film. Even in the written form, short article parodies are difficult (I know because I have tried and failed miserably) and only a skilled writer can pull it off. I often come across attempts at parodies that seemed to have started out as a single good idea but the writer could not sustain the conceit and it soon becomes painful to read. The ability to maintain a light tough and not to belabor the point is a skill that only a few seem to be able to master. Stephen Leacock and S. J. Perelman are two writers who were good at it. As a very young boy I read Perelman's Somewhere a Roscoe, a parody of the hard-boiled detective story, and I was hooked on parodies for life.

As a public figure, you're in trouble when the media are less interested in what you have to say than in how you say it. This is now the sad situation of Caroline Kennedy, whose filled pauses seem to be getting more press than any other aspect of her bid for Hillary Clinton's senate seat.

I'm in.