State of the Marjorie Address

There was once a boy named Milo who didn't know what to do with himself -- not just sometimes, but always.

When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he'd bothered. Nothing really interested him -- least of all the things that should have.

"It seems to me that almost everything is a waste of time," he remarked one day as he walked dejectedly home from school. "I can't see the point in learning to solve useless problems, or subtracting turnips from turnips, or knowing where Ethiopia is or how to spell February." And, since no one bothered to explain otherwise, he regarded the process of seeking knowledge as the greatest waste of time of all.

As he and his unhappy thoughts hurried along (for while he was never anxious to be where he was going, he liked to get there as quickly as possible) it seemed a great wonder that the world, which was so large, could sometimes feel so small and empty.

"And worst of all," he continued sadly, "there's nothing for me to do, nowhere I'd care to go, and hardly anything worth seeing." He punctuated this last thought with such a deep sigh that a house sparrow singing nearby stopped and rushed home to be with his family.

-the opening of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

Piglet censored!

From a fellow blogger in Qatar: Disney's Piglet banned in Middle East!

It looks like censors (hypothesized Saudi) blacked out all appearances of Piglet from a Winnie-the-Pooh-themed children's encyclopedia. Because nothing defends Islam from infidels like erasing cartoon pigs from reference books.