A few thoughts about life in the age of the sound-bite. Why, when speaking to the nation that invented the t.v. dinner, would anyone use the phrase ?Global Warming"? Americans all secretly think it sounds like a dream come true. Not so with the phrase: ?Global Climate Destablization.? Likewise, ?Ozone Hole? doesn?t sound nearly ominous enough?most Americans secretly suspect ozone to be the problem. A better phrase: ?Punctured Oxygen Layer.? This is all so obvious that eight year olds should be laughing about it in Mad Magazine.

I sometimes think that the Left is losing the media war for the same reason nobody liked my film studies teacher in college. Whatever brilliant ideas he might have had were immediately disqualified by a humiliating nervous tic: He could never respond to his students without eventually relating everything back to ?the great poet Bob Dylan.?

On a lighter note, regarding the intelligence of the American public, two weeks ago I finally read an article that gave me hope. A study has shown that the average IQ in America has gone up dramatically among youngsters born in the last fifteen years. This was being attributed, of all things, to Harry Potter. (The people doing the study belonged to the less intelligent generation.) Funny. Just a few days earlier, I had read an article suggesting that, due to the phasing out of leaded gasoline in the seventies and eighties, the amount of lead in children has gone down by 8600 percent in the last fifteen years. Anyways, just surfing some food for thought.