Modernity is the transitory the fugitive the contingent which make up one half of art the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element which is constantly changing must not be despised or neglected.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

Yes 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose which he put on her bedside table. That's how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning there was no rose.

If either player abandon the game by quitting the table in anger or in an otherwise offensive manner or by momentarily resigning the game or refuses to abide by the decision of the Umpire the game must be scored against him.

The American people are smart. They've gotten sick of the predictable hyperpartisan talking points and canned anger.

All anger is not sinful because some degree of it and on some occasions is inevitable. But it becomes sinful and contradicts the rule of Scripture when it is conceived upon slight and inadequate provocation and when it continues long.