Entry 8:

Hi Sweetie,

I fear we should not even joke about the exit poll numbers. It might get one of us fired, or sued, or otherwise embarrassed. So let's talk about the dead dog instead. The squashed bichon frise is truly a story for the ages. You're so right about our relative interest in pets and foster kids. (Pause to throw a stone: While your newspaper, the Post, has done a fine job covering foster care, it is also especially quick to run front-pagers about animals in trouble. Also about the weather. The ideal Post story: Rep. Tom Delay's dog fights for life after being hit by lightning.)

It is horrible even to imagine what will happen to Mr. Dog-Killer when they finally catch him. (And you know they will: This search is going to make the Unabomber investigation look like a Cabbage Patch picnic.) The canicidal madman is going to be drummed out of his community. He'll be more notorious than any child molester. If anyone has ready access to tar, he will be tarred and feathered. 

The other bizarre story today is the New York Times business piece about Hyundai's new North Korean resort complex. (I'm sure you saw the article: It's right next to the Nine West piece that made you so fretful this morning.) According to the Times, Hyundai, South Korea's biggest company, is spending $1 billion over the next few years to develop a hotel/spa/ski resort/golf complex in a particularly beautiful area of North Korea. Big Hyundai stockholders are griping that the resort is a huge waste of cash, but it is the private passion of Hyundai's chairman, a North Korean native. I find the piece strangely reassuring. Americans view North Korea as a vicious totalitarian nuthouse, and generally assume it will do something suicidally loony in the next decade or so (missile attack on Japan, nuke explosion in Seoul, etc.). But South Korea won't give up on its black-sheep brother. The North Koreans have wrecked Dad's car, gotten hooked on smack, murdered nice Uncle Joe, and stolen a c-note out of Mom's wallet. Even so, its older brother South Korea will keep trying to help it. In psychology they call this enabling. In politics, it is international aid.

I also love Hyundai's hope that golf can help save North Korea. This suggests a theory: Perhaps golf causes democracy. Remember the old saw that "No two countries with McDonald's have ever gone to war against each other." Well, I bet that no country obsessed with golf has ever made war against another golfing nation. Golf makes people bourgeois more quickly than any activity known to man. You can't get upset about politics when you're trying to reach a par 5 in 2.

Love
D

P.S. Gabriel Snyder be damned! The people--well, a few e-mail correspondents--demand a return of Rosin-Plotz domesticity. I say we oblige them. Thus, an update on the bug issue: The little ones seem greatly diminished after the vacuum cleaner incident, but the moths are irrepressible.