LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Prosecutors on Thursday charged Oscar-nominated actor Haley Joel Osment, who famously saw dead people in 1999 hit movie “The Sixth Sense,” with drunken driving and marijuana possession.

Osment, 18, faces up to six months in jail if convicted on the charges that arose after a car crash in suburban Los Angeles on July 20.[Link]

I see sick people.

I was driving in my pickup a short time ago, listening to BBC news. They were discussing a UN resolution, I believe, and one of the reporters said this:

One simply cannot underestimate the importance of the international community coming together on this, and presenting a united front.

An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the end of a pole, which she carried across her neck.  One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.  

For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home only one and a half pots of water. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments.  But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do.  

After 2 years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, the imperfect pot spoke to the woman one day by the stream. "I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house."  

The old woman smiled, "Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other pot’s side?  That’s because I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you water them.  
 
For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table.  Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house. "Each of us has our own unique flaw. But it’s the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding.  You’ve just got to take each person for what they are and look for the good in them.  

Since its inception in 1923, the Turkish Republic has policed its writers fiercely. Its penal code, taken from Mussolini’s Italy, puts serious curbs on freedom of expression, but Turkey’s leading writers have never toed the line. The great modernist poet Nazim Hikmet spent much of his adult life in prison and died in exile. The novelist Yashar Kemal, for many decades Turkey’s most famous writer, has been serially harassed and prosecuted. During the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, so many writers, journalists and scholars were imprisoned for their views that a prosecution became a badge of honor: if you had not yet angered the state, then perhaps you hadn’t said anything of importance.  [ Link]

Money is power, more money for the government is more power for the government. More power for the government will allow it to, among many other things, amuse itself by putting its fingers in a million pies, and stop performing its essential functions well, and get dizzily distracted by nonessentials, and muck up everything. Which is more or less where we are.

 

– Peggy Noonan, Columnist
 

The Kansas City Star: An interview with the writer John Banville, whose book The Sea is presently washing me away.

You muse upon the beauty of Banville when you’ve stopped reading him for a moment and are attending to your wounds. You admire his account of a clump of trees as “monkey-brown with a tarry reek,” of a rising sea as “a vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam.”

I haven’t read the whole interview yet, so I’ll post it here to share, and remind me to finish it – and possibly comment – later.