The Pantheon Outcast

As much as I’d like to keep my posts as impersonal as possible, I thought I might make a much-needed update by recounting a recent experience I had with Home Depot. About a month ago, I visited the DIY mecca intent on purchasing new carpeting for my home. As obsessive about most things as I am, when it comes to shopping for consumer products, I’m a pretty easygoing shopper; I see a product that I want to buy, I buy it. I don’t need 11 weeks to think it over – people who spend inordinate amounts of time hemming and hawing over which blender they should take home will ultimately be left with unresolved feelings of despair and frustration as they realize that Amazon.com alone offers 1,555 different models of blenders. Americans have far too many choices nowadays, and that’s probably one of the reasons everyone is sucking back pharmaceuticals like they were Skittles. But I digress. After spending about 20 minutes browsing through carpet samples, I picked the one I wanted and attempted to

Paris is burning , as it goes, erupting in a stunning display of barbaric behavior by some of the most uncivilized people on the planet. Cars, buildings, small lapdogs and other edifices are being torched by African Muslim immigrants in response to what the rest of the civilized world sees as a non-event. It all began on October 27th, when two teen-age Muslim boys -- a 17-year-old immigrant from Tunisia and a 15-year-old from Mauritania -- were electrocuted when they hid in a high-voltage power substation while trying to avoid a police checkpoint in the northeastern Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. Why they were running from the police is anybody's guess --mine being that they were actually guilty of some sort of crime. So after their deaths, the "community" of Muslim Africans in Paris decided to take action in the only way their backwards, stone-age culture can possibly respond: By burning and destroying other people's property. As of Sunday, 1,295 cars had been tor