The Fifth Element

The subject was horses' fannies.

Ah me. Victoria's Secret underwear (sorry; lingerie) model Rebecca Romijn-Stamos' publicist politely declined my request for an interview with her. An interview with the model, not the publicist. But you already knew that, and you are (best Claude Rains voice) shocked—shocked!

Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) is acknowledged as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. She is additionally accorded the rare (especially for a mystic) distinction of recognition as a "Doctor" of the Faith. On a somewhat less exalted level, but perhaps resonating even more clearly with the truth of common human experience, Teresa (who had Jewish ancestry; why is that not surprising?) is credited with coining the phrase "Be careful what you pray for, you might get it."

"The long tradition of professional connoisseurship has resulted in the development of a bewildering universe of specialist terminology. In certain cases, it must be admitted, there was self-indulgent proliferation of words relating to some minute feature....In fact, no clear distinction can be made between one term and its closest neighbor in meaning."—from the Introduction to Kanzan Sato's The Japanese Sword, A Comprehensive Guide, translated and with an introduction by Joe Earle (New York: Kodansha America, Inc., 1983)

If you've got a thousand dollars to spend, I think asking for advice in choosing between the Coriolis Effect Deluxe Rev.3.2 power cord and the Shamelessly Hosing Neither Balanced Nor Unbalanced Tofu-Filled Mystical interconnect (footnote 1) is usually asking the wrong question.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote that "The eye is the first circle; the horizon it forms is the second." A profound observation, indeed: The horizon exists only in being perceived. Kind of like music, in fact.