Cracked Window

Touchy, touchy some people are, especially zealots on the way-out-there religious right. The American Family Association’s news web site has a filter that automatically changes words it doesn’t like. So an Associated Press story from Eugene, Oregon, about track star Tyson Gay was “corrected.”

The headline: “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.” The story:

Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

And on it went. Read more here, if you can stomach it. The AFA later changed the story, restoring Gay’s good name.

Maybe the AFA’s on to something. Imagine the possibilities with the name Bush.

I don’t believe in the Rapture, though the concept intrigues me spiritually and intellectually. Perhaps that’s why a man’s suit caught my eye yesterday, abandoned on the steps of a downtown Portland church. A fine-looking suit with a subtle glen-plaid pattern. I considered inquiring at the Portland Korean Church, SE 10th and Clay. But if I knocked, what would I ask when the door opened? Is the suit only a test, like those we hear on the radio about the emergency warning system? If this had been a real Rapture. . .

I looked around, wondering whether the suit owner had zipped off on a practice spin for the June 14th World Naked Bike Ride. No luck. Was there really a Superman, and Clark Kent couldn’t find a phone booth? Had I missed an alien abduction? Or missed the Rapture itself, and this lone empty suit signaled bad news for Portland — the select few here are very few indeed?

Two Austrian brothers marvel at the alien but wondrous world we take for granted. It was hidden from them. Until now their world was a cellar, a makeshift prison. The warden? Their father.

One of the boys, 5-year-old Felix Fritzl, asks upon seeing the moon for the first time:

Is that God up there?

How can the moon ever look the same to me again? This thought leads to a memory: when I was Felix’s age, my father read a bedtime nursery rhyme to my two brothers and me. We heard it many times, never tiring of the words. Even at that age, I could tell he relished reading them, delighting in their power to cast us adrift toward our nether worlds of sleep.