May 19, 2008. Nuevo Vallarta. Words,

We needed a Thesaurus. I ordered ice cream for dessert. Two spoons were brought along with the dessert, so of course Ken helped me. Ken commented that he did a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand he saved me from eating the whole bowl of ice cream. On the other hand, he ate half of it himself. Now this is the question posed by me. " What is the word that describes one action, but has opposite effects? Is it a paradox, or a conundrum or what? We needed a thesaurus, but as we were sitting at our favorite lunch spot at the end of the hotel, no book appeared. What is the answer? Where is my Mother when I need her?

Speaking of Roget... There is a new biography "The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget.s Thesaurus". I read the review in The Wilson Quarterly. Also in the same edition, a section on infrastructure for America's future. I have been waiting for someone to pay attention to our infrastructure, which has been neglected for about thirty years. Now we need to do something about it, and fix the bridges and roads and trains. We moved to Washington in 1970, and we looked at the roads that were on the map, once upon a time. But the roads were never built. Now everyone screams about the traffic. Where were they when the decisions were made to not build all those roads? Where was the political will to plan ahead, not just respond to crises? The real issue is, what we are leaving out do devil our children in 20 years?

Trying to figure out the future is impossible, but sometimes the future is totally wrong. " In 1876, Western Union decided that telephones would never replace telegram messengers. In 1971, AT&T turned down the opportunity to run the Internet as a monopoly. In 1980, Ma Bell concluded that cell phones would never replace landlines." This is the first paragraph in the Get Smart article in the Spring edition of The Wilson Quarterly. Oops!!