Rex Smith

It’s the season of plenty for sports fans – which others view as exhausting excess: Before we’ve recuperated from the NCAA basketball hoopla and golf’s Masters tournament, we’re launched into the Major League Baseball season even as the NHL and the NBA are just beginning playoffs.

The cherry trees that line Washington’s Tidal Basin are not a species bred to yield tasty pies, jams and jellies. Washington’s cherry trees live mainly to display abundant clusters of delicate pinkish-white flowers. I was admiring them a couple of weeks ago, at the peak of what the Japanese call Sakura hanami — the season of viewing the cherry blossoms.

There’s an art to the put-down, but it seems to be vanishing. You know, if you say someone’s brain is the size of a pea, you get the point across, but it’s not as memorable as, say, the approach taken by Will Rogers, who once said of a politician that “if his brain was gunpowder, he wouldn’t have enough to blow the wax out of his ears.” That, folks is rhetorical art.

I spent a career in journalism, but I’m not above gossip. So here’s a juicy bit: Goofy is gay. Yes, that pal of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck? Gay.

Before we get to talking about the news of the day, let’s take a moment to discuss guilt – because, after all, the personal drives the political. And we’ve all done things that we consider cringe-worthy.

People have always learned important life lessons from theater. Take the plays of Shakespeare, for example. The moral of Romeo & Juliet is clearly that nothing good can come of hatred; Macbeth is chilling in its lesson that danger and darkness lie in deep ambition. Julius Caesar? Maybe it’s this: Be careful how you wield power (and who you choose as friends).

I’ve been redistricted again. I haven’t moved, but New York’s new congressional district boundaries have, and the new lines divide our little town between two districts – neither of them represented by our current member of Congress. And it makes me feel a bit, well, disempowered. It’s as though politicians chose whose constituent I will be, rather than me choosing the politician who will represent me.

A lot of things that people used to believe turned out not to be true: The earth is not flat, and it isn’t the center of the universe. Smoking will not aid digestion, as some doctors paid by tobacco companies asserted in the 1950s. And human sperm does not contain miniscule but completely pre-formed individuals, though what’s called “preformation” was the dominant theory of generation in the 18th century.

I don’t know about you, but I always feel better after the Imbolc. You know about the Imbolc, right? That’s the threshold between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox – the point when there’s finally enough daylight for plants to begin to grow. This year, it was February 1st.

There was a time, back when I was in my 20s, when what seemed to matter most to the American voters who lived around me was the apparent shortage of lids for canning jars. I was working for a Midwestern congressman then, and just about all people talked about across our rural district when they encountered their representative in Congress was – yep! – the canning lid shortage.