But you should try, anyway

When they said, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink," they may as well have been talking about children. You can surround your daughter with books but you can't make her read. You can throw out your TV but your son will watch it with a vengeance elsewhere. You can talk about the evils of drugs and liquor but they will give it a try,  anyway. In sum, it is easier to teach a cat to jump through flaming hoops than to send your children in the direction you want them to go.

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Answer to Wednesday's puzzlement: Linguine means "little tongues."

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I once sold a Donald Duck anthology to a man named Donald Drake. It was his real name, too.

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Some paranoid people really are being persecuted. And, sadly, some people with inferiority complexes really have inferiorities.

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I do everything online: pay bills, order goods, read articles, send e-mails, blog, etc., etc. My wife says I am working toward never having to communicate with another human being in person. She may have a point.

When it came to being nice, he stood tall

He was a very little man and perhaps a little lonely. He would always stop to chat briefly with our neighborhood "gang" of kids, and to a 4-year-old me, he seemed like a very nice guy. I would find out just how nice when I once repeated to him what my mother had said in an attempt to get me to improve my diet: "My mother says you never grew very tall because you didn't eat your vegetables." The height-challenged man just smiled and nodded and said, "That's right. That's what happened. You should listen to your mother." A nice guy, indeed.

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In preparing for a yard sale, my wife is uncovering all kinds of treasures -- knicknacks, books, LPs, etc. -- that I had forgotten I even owned. I, of course, refuse to part with them.

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I love that Amstel TV ad that begins with a belllowing Dutchman.

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Answer to Tuesday's puzzlement: William Howard Taft is the other president buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

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The handful (fingerful?) of people who read this blog first thing in the morning may notice a few typographical or grammatical errors. Be assured that as the day goes on, these are corrected. Well, most of them anyway.

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Ray Bradbury is an American treasure.

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If the media had covered the buildup to the Iraq war the way they are covering the non-epidemic of swine flu in the United States, the Iraqi landscape might not have become littered with bodies.

Twirling and whirling into the past

One definition of masochism is taking your 5-year-old grandson to a children's museum during school vacation week. But take him we did, to the EcoTarium in Worcester, Mass., where he joined the multitudes in twirling dials, pressing buttons, dashing from exhibit to exhibit and ignoring whatever science lesson the display was attempting to teach. As he did so, I found myself thinking back three decades to when the place was known as the Worcester Science Center and we took our own three children there and they too twirled, whirled and ignored. They were about Max's age, with school, jobs and crucial life choices all ahead of them. Thinking about that, I shed a tiny tear. But just one.

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I remember when comic strips were actually comic.

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When I hear about Obama being criticized for shaking hands with the likes of Hugo Chavez, I recall the words of JFK: "Civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof." (In reality, those were probably speechwriter Ted Sorensen's words, but the point is the same.)

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My cold is keeping Kleenex in business.

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"The Dutchman" may be the greatest love song ever written. It's about a senile man whose wife remembers for him when he was young and strong. The lyrics are by Michael Smith and can be found at www.artistsofnote.com/michael/lyrics/dutchman.shtml (but hurry back here), and I think that Liam Clancy sings it best.

Happy feat

Because I was accompanied by my two sons, I came home from a southern Californis odyssey with blisters on my feet and joy in my heart.

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The steak at Morton's in Anaheim, where the waiters wear tuxedos and the customers wear T-shirts, was among the best I have ever had. I did have to take out a loan to pay for it, however.

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In today's geezer class, which was about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, it was noted that your children, even when they are in their 30s, 40s, or beyond, still seem like children to you. How true.

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Today's lesson in how to feel dumb: You complain to a bank officer that the ATM machine isn't working right because it won't accept your bank card. Then she examines that card and tells you your AAA membership card is stuck to the back of it.

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"When I was 17, Dwight Eisenhower was president, Elvis Presley was king, and James Dean was God." That's the opening sentence of a novel I was going to write. I never did get around to the second sentence.