I owe an apology to Sarah Palin. People get so used to the habits and conventions of their community that it makes anything different seem strange.

A lot of people, myself included, thought that a mother of small children with a shotgun shooting and skinning a moose was weird and discomforting. And for Washington, California or New York, it would be out of place.

I used to think that chopsticks were primitive implements left over from an antiquated traditional society. But when your main staple food is rice, the sticky grains are easier to pick up in a clump with two sticks pressed together than they are falling off a spoon or fork.

I also thought of acupuncture as a primitive superstitious ritual, even before I heard their theory of invisible channels of energies that are opened or blocked to balance the body. I've heard enough people with seemingly untreatable medical problems claim that acupuncture was the only thing that helped with their pain to believe that there may be some reason it has been used for 5000 years or so.

Chinese medicine talks about rivers in the body and the winds in what seems like a primitive representation of the human body, but if you think about it, there's no reason that diseases and parts of the body or specific plants or animals should be given names derived from an ancient unused language (Latin). It's just that we've grown used to that convention.

So actually, stopping at a fast food place for burgers for the family from cattle that have been raised on vast tracts of land in South America on bread made from flour grown in the Midwest would be a lot more inefficient and use more environmental resources than eating the flesh of a local herbivore.

Politically speaking, her silence in the media on efforts to repair the economy lead me to conclude there will be a Palin campaign for president in 2012. She is a very competitive person. If she wanted to maximize her chances, she would be spending every waking moment studying world politics and American history. I don't think she has that amount of drive, or feels that this would be necessary.

After the attack from Al Qaeda, George W. Bush was fuming and kept asking people to check to see if Saddam Hussein had anything to do with that. Even though someone on his staff said they checked and said no, I don't think he ever totally believed it. When speaking to the Alaska National Guard as they were preparing to deploy to Iraq, Gov. Palin said something about fighting against those who attacked us on 9/11! I had this image of her as the last believer.  ¶ 3:42 PM